Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Jonas Wergeland’s aim was to show how, at a certain point in her life, Liv Ullmann chose to become a woman, a person, who created reality — who was no longer content to be a ‘fiction’, a dream. One might say that she turned her back on worldly splendour. All the glamour of film stardom. She went from being out in front, to being behind. From being written about to writing herself. From acting to action. Liv Ullmann did not deny her past, what she did was to broaden her scope. She was an actress, but now she also became a writer and a human rights activist. It says something for Jonas Wergeland’s powers of intuition, that he also — unintentionally it’s true — anticipated her next step: her decision to become a film director.

The most laudable aspect of the programme was the way it focused so firmly on Liv Ullmann’s intelligence — which was also her biggest handicap as a so-called star, not least in Hollywood. What to do with such an actor, one with such rare gifts, such magical power? There were simply no scripts capable of embracing her, of allowing her to give of her best. As an individual she had too much breadth for the standard, formulaic American film roles.

In Jonas Wergeland’s version of events, when she got up and walked away from Henry Kissinger and round to the other side of the camera, Liv Ullmann was choosing to write her own part. To quite literally live up to her name which, in Norwegian, means ‘life’. The actress gave way to Liv, the woman. Fiction gave way to Life.

Thanks in large part to Jonas Wergeland, from an early age I regarded Liv Ullmann as an ideal. His programme about her was much in my mind when I left the world of television and made the leap from being seen to seeing. Creating. But right now, in Høyanger, I was going through a frustrated phase, I almost felt like rebelling against our own project. One evening, when Martin was doing his best to console me with one of his sumptuous club sandwiches, I began to delete stuff. Did we really have to say that Trotsky had once stayed at a hotel in Vadheim? What about all the foreign submarines that people claimed to have spotted in the fjord? In Sogndal I had paid a visit to a man who worked in a slaughterhouse. He had shown me a collection of things he had found in cows’ stomachs — not just nails and rocks, but an old Norwegian coin, the inner tube from a bike tyre and a gold wristwatch. It was funny, but was it relevant?

More and more often my thoughts returned to that disc which I had heard so much about, and which Jonas Wergeland told us even more about: the disc attached to the Voyager probes which, inconceivably many years from now, might pass other stars and planets. Some day — who knew — it might even be opened and played, analyzed, by beings from some distant galaxy. What would they think, if think was the right word, when they saw the picture of a snail’s shell, or the leaf of a strawberry plant? Of a dolphin or a banquet in China? What would they think when they heard, on this disc, the sound of wind and rain, of grasshoppers and frogs? Footsteps, heartbeats, laughter? Or, what could they possibly make of this: the sound of a kiss? I tried to imagine the reaction of an extra-terrestrial being on hearing a voice say in the Indian language Gujarati: ‘Greetings from a human being of the Earth. Please contact.’

At night, when darkness eventually fell, I would sometimes go up on deck to look at the sky. I liked to think of those two space probes bound for a utopian destination, of the fact that the message they carried, a gold-plated copper disc, was encased in a protective aluminium cover. Wherever you looked there were connections. Even between Høyanger and a space probe. The first object ever to be sent in the other direction, out of our solar system, took aluminium with it.

A couple of nights ago Jonas Wergeland told us, with a look on his face I remembered from the treetop conversations of my childhood, about all the new discoveries which Voyager 2 had made for us — it had, for example, found seven hitherto unknown moons circling the planet Neptune. I could not help wondering, the other morning, as I watched him from a distance, sitting with his arm round Kamala: might I be able to discover new ‘moons’ circling Jonas Wergeland, a man who has been so minutely charted?

There were lots of signs in Høyanger of the halcyon days of the labour movement. Not for nothing was the main street named after the political activist Marcus Thrane. I noticed the keen interest with which Jonas took in the ‘Own Home’ district and later the Park area or ‘garden city’, just down from the old hospital: possibly Høyanger’s most unique feature. For all I know it was the architect in him waking up. On Kloumann’s allé he ran a close eye over the fine residences built for the town’s captains of industry, with their privileged location overlooking the fjord. Suddenly, as if inspired by Arnberg’s church and the unexpected link with Oslo Town Hall, he decided he wanted to chart the decoration of public buildings in Høyanger and only a couple of phone calls later we found ourselves inside Valhalla, the old red-brick Youth Club building behind the school, the walls of which were covered with pictures of Viking kings and the homes of New Norwegian poet-chiefs. All at once Jonas Wergeland was a bundle of energy, leading the way to the Town Hall, to the community centre and the bank where, almost hidden away, we found pictures and other works by famous Norwegian artists. In a conference room on the fourth floor of the Town Hall we even managed to track down reproductions of the murals which had once adorned the old People’s Palace. Jonas spent a long time poring over these lost paintings of men carrying out different sorts of work in and around Høyanger. ‘How could they not preserve that lovely building?’ he asked.

My guess is that it was these decorations, along perhaps with some memory of his grandmother, that prompted him to ask me what we had thought of doing as regards Sogn and World War II, Sogn and the Germans. Because Kaiser Wilhelm had not been the only German to visit Sognefjord. There were still plenty of traces of their presence, whether as small bunkers, or as vast fortresses like the one at Lammetun. We had discussed this, of course, particularly in connection with another town very similar to Høyanger — Årdal at the very head of Sognefjord — since there too water-power was used to produce aluminium. Årdal could almost be said to have been a gift from the Germans. The liberated Norwegians got the whole thing on a plate. We had considered various angles, but eventually came to the conclusion that it was not within our remit to criticise Norwegian shortcomings during the Second World War or to discuss how beneficial the war had been for the growth of Norwegian industry. We had to draw the line somewhere.

Jørgine Wergeland, on the other hand, was not one for drawing lines. During the war she organised the home front in the truest sense of that term, although hers was a far more ruthless and dogged campaign of resistance than that waged by that other Home Front, the Norwegian underground movement. On her wedding night, when she locked her hammerhead of a husband out of the bedroom it was with an icy paraphrasing of Churchill’s words in response to Britain’s signing of the Munich agreement: ‘You had the choice between shame and war. You chose shame, but you shall have war.’

Having married her unsuspecting building contractor, Jørgine Wergeland took, as they say, the law into her own hands, and funnily enough her main weapon derived from his underground activities. Shrewd entrepreneur that he was, he had contrived to conceal a radio in a rather unlikely, but practical, place: the lavatory. So Jonas Wergeland was not the only one who owed a debt to British broadcasting. Jørgine spent a lot of time in the toilet — or the English Quarter as she called it — on the pretext of chronic constipation, listening to the BBC’s edifying transmissions from London. ‘I’m a graduate of the WC school of resistance,’ she would tell people, who would have no idea what she was talking about. It became something of a code. ‘I’m always running in to listen to WC,’ she said to Jonas’s mother. Everyone, including her husband, thought she was going off her rocker.