Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

This was in October. Behind him Jonas had several years as a programme-maker. Fired by his unorthodox studies in London he had produced shows which, while they may have had a certain zest and were technically superb — his colleagues were full of praise for him — lacked the magic ingredient which could pin a large proportion of the population to their seats as well as making them think, feel, that they had seen something unique and hence important, something which concerned them personally. Jonas himself knew exactly what was missing: an original idea. Not little ideas for single programmes, but a vision, a unifying concept. He needed a rest. And so it was that in that most burnt-out phase of his life he went out into the world, going pretty much wherever the wind took him, and eventually ended up in Uruguay, in Montevideo. It may have been something about the name — a combination of letters containing the verb ‘to see’ — which drew him. He needed a lookout point. And yet he could never have imagined that this point would turn out to be a person. That it would be a woman, and that her name would be Ana.

He booked in to the Hotel Carrasco, an old and somewhat dilapidated establishment near the road running along the waterfront, the Rambla Naciones Unidas, a palm-lined avenue which wound its way along the coast, past seven white beaches, into the centre of the city. Surrounded by well-tended gardens and pine trees, the hotel still retained traces of the grandeur it had enjoyed in a not too distant past thanks to its casino. Jonas felt at home there right away, he liked the faint air of decadence: the flaking Baroque exterior, the sleepy ballrooms, the cracked marble tiles in the bathroom. It suited his mood. I’m not a tourist, he told himself, I’m a patient in a sanatorium.

In Montevideo the summer season ran from December to the middle of March. Out of season you had the beach to yourself, even though the weather was as warm as a Norwegian summer. It suited Jonas perfectly: a city where you could lounge in a red deckchair, under a blue-striped parasol, on a beach that went on for miles. Just him and the wind, just him and the sun, just him and the waves. He relished this solitude. He did not so much as read a newspaper, simply lay there, lay there with a vague ache in his chest. For Jonas, difficulty in thinking had always been associated with the feeling of having something wrong with his lungs, of not being able to breathe properly. Had he not known better, he would have thought he had TB. I ought to go for an X-ray, he thought listlessly. Just to be on the safe side.

He sat motionless in a deckchair, gazing out across the water, thinking about what he should take with him, or thinking without being conscious of thinking. He may not even have been thinking at all. He may have been almost in a state of coma, not unlike that inhabited by Viktor Harlem. When Jonas visited Viktor at the institution, he would catch himself staring in fascination at the face of his friend as he sat there in a Stressless chair angled towards the television whether it was on or not. Jonas had always, even after the accident, regarded Viktor as a kindred spirit.

Day after day, Jonas lay in a comfortable deckchair thinking, or dozing, on a long white beach. Maybe this was the Norwegian’s lot: to be a holiday-maker in the world. An observer by the sea. Nevertheless, it must have been this enervating passivity which at one point caused him to remember another time, a time of activism, a period when he had actually been a rebel. Truth to tell, when Jonas Wergeland was taken into police custody in the wake of Margrete’s death, it was not his first run-in with the powers that be; he had also been carted off to the police station once before — the old headquarters at Møllergata 19 on that occasion — and even though this happened at the beginning of a decade characterised by manifold forms of rebellious unrest, I think it is safe to say that this was the first and last time on which a court ever fined a teenager clad in a Nehru jacket and brandishing a placard inscribed with a fiery slogan in Marathi, a language spoken a fairly long way away from Oslo, namely in the Bombay region.

Not all that many demonstrations from Norway’s idyllic post-war period will be remembered. The Mardøla protest is one. And the campaign against the hydro-electric power station at Alta, of course, not least for the Lapps who pitched their tents and staged a hunger strike outside the Norwegian Parliament, and still more for the occupation by outraged Lapp women of Prime Minister — and former Minister for the Environment — Gro Harlem Brundtland’s office. Another incident which is sure to stand the test of time is the demonstration staged by Jonas Wergeland and his two friends from high school. This also marked Jonas’s first appearance on television: a brief clip which has fortunately been preserved, and deservedly so; this was an event of great symbolic value, one which said a lot about modern Norway.

The brains behind it was, as always, Viktor Harlem. If he had had to choose between his two chums, Jonas would probably have come down in favour of the restless Pound devotee who had drawn inspiration from the lush, green Hedmark countryside around the Løiten distillery until his parents divorced. Viktor — with his eternal black polo necks, eager baby face and fine hair — was a born rebel and freethinker. Jonas always felt a little distanced from Axel Stranger, who came from a well-to-do home on the west side of Oslo and was more of a silk-tie, patent-leather shoe sort of rebel, a rather arrogant revolutionary with a Frogner drawl, a managing-director father, three dinner suits in his wardrobe and a maid who presented him every morning with the world’s most elaborate and delectable packed lunch, complete with parsley sprig. In a way, that in itself was an act of rebellion, to even dare to open it at school, in front of his gawping classmates.

The chums — non-conformists to the core — called themselves The Three Heretics, and they met regularly in a flat in Grunerløkka which Viktor had more or less to himself. Here, in a room lined with shelves laden with books about and by Ezra Pound, they could sit undisturbed, finding fault with everything and everyone and boosting their energy levels every so often with swigs of a lethal, greenish variant of absinthe, obtained through Viktor’s boyhood friends from the more anarchic corners of Hedmark. The Three Heretics cherished the principles of marginalism — or, in Jonas’s parlance: the outside left. According to Viktor, one should never look for a centre or a core, in people or in life. ‘Out on the edge, that’s where life is,’ he declared, raising his glass. ‘In the centre there’s nothing but red-hot chaos. Look at the Earth!’

In everyone’s life there is a time like this, a glorious phase — rather like a long recess — when God is dead and everything is allowed. During their high-school years The Three Heretics were almost always to be found in Viktor’s flat in Seilduksgata, dismantling — or, to use a word that would later come into vogue: deconstructing — all of the prevailing schools of thought and leaving the pieces scattered about in all their pathetic absurdity. And now and again they even got off their backsides and went out to put their heretical theories into practice. These acts were invariably memorable; all their woolly ramblings seemed to give the trio added incentive, a barricade-storming urgency — or maybe one should say a bad conscience. On one occasion, though, they bit off more than they could chew: when they tried to break down an invention which was definitely here to stay; or, to put it more plainly: when they set out to reconstruct the traffic system.

Viktor’s arch-enemy was the car. ‘The automobile is the number one false god of our day,’ he said, ‘the golden calf that everybody dances around.’ It really pained Viktor to observe the devotion with which people washed their vehicles, as if it were some sort of liturgy; or the way in which Norwegians meekly accepted the fact of the several hundred souls sacrificed each year on the altar of the car — on a world scale road accidents cost twice as many lives each year as war. If one wanted to point to something that was quite clearly all wrong, but which no one seemed able, or cared, to do anything about, then the car was the perfect example. Everyone was well aware of the enormous damage done by the motor car to the environment as well as to life and limb, everyone agreed that public transport was better, but no one drove less or took the tram more often. The war against the motor car was, it goes without saying, the most hopeless of all causes in the latter half of the twentieth century, but Viktor seemed to thrive on it; it was, in many ways, an exemplary act of iconoclasm. This was how Jonas remembered Viktor best: a shining baby face chanting the refrain ‘Car-free city centres!’, unfazed by the ill-concealed yawns this always drew from those listening.