Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

All at once he was overcome by a terrible fit of shyness. In his mind he was already on his way to the airport, having failed in his mission. But he managed to control his frantic breathing. He reminded himself of what was at stake here: everything. A whole life project.

He pulled out a yellow notebook and began to sketch the fountain. With its distinctive statues and jets of water spraying in two directions it was certainly worth looking at. He was standing directly across from her, on the other side of the street. He sketched assiduously, making sure to stand in profile every now and again. If she looked up she was bound to notice him, a man apart, standing there sketching the fountain. At long last he heard her call out and turned round. Affecting bewilderment. Who did he know here? In Lisbon?

She waved to him. Eagerly. And happily. Or was he mistaken? He crossed the street without closing the notebook. ‘What in the world are you doing here?’ she asked, genuinely surprised. He felt a flutter of panic, glanced down at the notebook as if at a script. ‘I’m making a study of Brazilian soap operas,’ he said. It could have been a wisecrack. It could have been true. If anyone in Norway were likely to travel to Portugal simply to watch endless telenovelas , then that person was Jonas Wergeland.

She motioned to him to take a seat. ‘So tell me,’ she said. ‘Is it true what they say about you camping out in a hotel room in New York for three months, learning all about American television?’

He dismissed the question with a laugh, wondering as he did so why she had never asked him before — if she really wanted to know. He took stock of her. Her long legs were concealed from view by the yellow tablecloth. The ample breasts and flashing eyes were much in evidence though. An unassailable woman. An unmarried workaholic. Other than that he did not know much about her. No one knew much about her. Some people said she drank too much.

‘How did the shoot in England go?’ she asked, suddenly all business. ‘What was it you were working on there, the Harald Hardråde piece?’ She kept an eye on the production schedules then. An eagle eye, most likely.

‘I got rid of all the extras,’ he said. ‘Saved a lot of money that way.’ A little hint. She did not rise to it, kept her eyes fixed on a nearby shoeshine boy. She was drinking beer. On her plate lay the tail fins of some grilled prawns. She had been reading a book, Os Lusíadas . About voyages of discovery — it had to be: on the blue jacket was a picture of an old map of the world. It was no secret that Marie H. was interested in literature. To say the least. As a young girl, after moving from Nordland to the capital she had published two collections of poems in rapid succession. They had been exceptionally well received and not only because of her raven beauty. But she was no longer writing. This had won her a high and somewhat mythical status in NRK circles.

People streamed past. A good many Africans, or Brazilians maybe. A few cripples. ‘You know this square was the scene of the Inquisition’s bonfires,’ he remarked casually, nodding at her book as if this was what had made him think of it. ‘Both people and books were burned here.’

‘I know what you’re driving at,’ she said with a hint of hostility in her voice. And disappointment perhaps. ‘You couldn’t stand the rejection, could you? But it’s a far cry from that to the Inquisition, you know. This is about finance, not heresy.’ Still she did not look at him, instead she lifted her eyes to the castle on the hill opposite. Jonas felt his diffidence threatening to immobilise his self-confidence. He thought: she’s invincible. A battleship. It’s no use.

Who was Marie H.? Marie H. was head of programming and financial controller of the three-ring circus that was NRK TV. She had more say than anyone else within NRK, apart from the Director General. Some people even went so far as to say that she carried more clout than the man at the top.

Jonas felt unnaturally detached from the whole situation, felt as if he were sitting on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon. He wondered what to do, had the urge to buy a lottery ticket from the seller stationed just across from them. His future career would be decided in these seconds. The Thinking Big series was half completed, but they had run over budget to a record-breaking degree — the word scandal was being whispered in the corridors — and Jonas’s boss, the head of department, had put his foot down. They had already spent more than the projected budget for the whole series. Jonas had protested as best he could, he had tried reasoning, he had tried yelling, but this man had simply gone to his boss, the head of programming — which is to say, Marie H. — who upheld his decision. She ordered Jonas to cease production right away — or at least after filming the footage needed in order to finish those programmes which were more or less in the can.

Only someone familiar with the essential concept behind the series, its very mainstay in formal terms could understand — if only in a small way — what a disaster, what a death blow , this was for Jonas. This concept was a part of his being, so to speak, part of his way of thinking; it dated from a discovery he had made back in the summer when he met Bo Wang Lee or, to put it another way, an imaginative force in full bloom.

Naive though children can be, from the very start Jonas knew there was something special about Bo Wang Lee, apart from the fact that he looked like a Chinese, or a handsome Prince Valiant with his glossy, black pageboy haircut; but he never really had the time to speculate on this. And he received no clues from anyone else, since he was always alone with Bo. Only very occasionally did he catch a glimpse of Bo’s mother walking off in the morning with a big bundle of papers under her arm, on her way to the yellow Citröen 2CV and the host of things she had to get done for her university course. Each time an unconscious suspicion began to smoulder inside him Bo was right there with a fresh plan. ‘I know what we can do,’ he would announce at the first hint of a crease in Jonas’s brow. ‘Let’s go diving for the Titanic in Badedammen!’ That summer passed in such a whirl, the days filled with sundials and windmills and rockets with parachutes that opened automatically. Or sometimes Bo would simply roll away a rock to reveal a microscopic zoo that would keep them occupied for hours. Experiences and bright ideas accumulated, piling up on top of one another. Suddenly life was overflowing with peanut-butter sandwiches and intrepid cave explorations and hazardous rock climbs with clothes-ropes as their only lifeline and stories of maharajahs who killed themselves by swallowing crushed diamonds. Jonas barely had time to gather his thoughts. Whenever he showed the slightest sign of uncertainty Bo would become a proper firecracker, bursting with ideas. His little yellow notebook was a constant fount of suggestions and sketches for the most amazing activities.

‘Bo, I was wondering …’ Jonas might start. And before he could say any more Bo would be rooting like a badger in one of the numerous boxes scattered around the flat which he and his mother were borrowing from Bo’s aunt and which, because of all the suitcases, not to mention the beguiling pictures of the MS Bergensfjord and MS Oslofjord in the toilet, made Jonas feel that these weeks of summer were one long and eventful cruise on an Atlantic liner. ‘Look,’ Bo would cry triumphantly, waving a huge hand in the air, ‘I brought my catcher’s mitt with me. Want to try it?’

Another time he took the best crystal wine glasses out of his aunt’s cabinet, set them on the table and filled them, swiftly but surely, with different amounts of water. All at once he was the leader of an orchestra, playing ‘Frère Jacques’ by moistening his finger and rubbing the rims of the glasses. Bo’s ingenuity never waned. After Jonas had examined the odd-looking oval ball which his chum claimed was used in a weird sport called American football, Bo showed him how to fix a silver ashtray to the bottom of it with some sticky tape and hey presto, they had a brilliant zeppelin with which they could have hours of fun. When, that is, Bo did not spend the morning showing Jonas how Chuck Berry hopped across the stage with his guitar. ‘Here, use this carpet-beater as a guitar. It’s called the “duck-walk”. That’s it, well done, bend your knees a bit more!’ Or they would go off into the woods and make a campfire. Bo had an inexhaustible supply of marshmallows, soft and sweet, which they threaded onto sticks and held over the hot coals until the outside of the velvety cushion had gone all golden and runny. In Jonas’s memory that whole summer with Bo smelled of marshmallows.