Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Viktor Harlem was one of those who died young. During the spring term of his third year at high school, as he was poised, so to speak, on the last step of the school stairway, all set to stride out onto what everyone predicted would be a gilt-edged path, Viktor was hit on the head by a block of ice — as improbable as it was heavy — which fell off a roof as he was walking along a street in Lillehammer arm in arm with Jonas and Axel, at about the same moment as, amid gales of laughter, they were pronouncing him outright winner of the contest to see who could sing ‘I was Born Under A Wandering Star’ in the deepest voice. Viktor was in a coma for a week, but when he regained consciousness he was still not really there. With the minimum of help he was capable of dressing himself, eating or walking about a bit, all in a mechanical, abstracted fashion, but he was, nonetheless, quite helpless. Jonas was afraid that Viktor had finally succeeded in doing what he had striven to do all through high school: to deconstruct everything — the only problem was that he had done it to himself. All of Viktor’s individual components were intact, but they weren’t connecting, they weren’t working as a whole. There was nothing for it but to put him in an institution.

Jonas visited him regularly, even though there seemed little point. Viktor never so much as noticed him. Jonas could not get through to him. His friend seemed to have retreated into himself. It occurred to Jonas — talking of blocks of ice — that Viktor might be the counterpart of certain animals who went into hibernation in order to survive periods of severe cold. Jonas sometimes felt like going up to him and knocking on his skull, asking if there was anyone home. Viktor’s case confirmed the truth of a statement with which Jonas would be confronted many times in the course of his life: there are a lot of things for which medical science cannot account. No one could explain, for example, why Viktor did not seem to get any older. Days, years, passed, while Viktor reclined in his armchair, looking as if he was still in his final year at Oslo Cathedral School. Although actually, with his abnormally babyish features he looked even younger.

Every time Jonas visited Viktor at the institution, he would read aloud to him from Ezra Pound’s poem, for one thing because there was nothing else to do. He read from an edition of The Cantos , the title page of which was inscribed with an all but illegible dedication from the author himself — after some years Jonas succeeded in deciphering the words ‘Roaring madness’ above Pound’s wavery signature. When he eventually closed the book, having decided that he had read enough or because he could not take any more of those unfathomable, lyrical passages, he usually sat for a while quietly staring at the TV screen along with Viktor. The television was always on — Jonas simply turned down the sound when he took out The Cantos — and even when Jonas was reading, Viktor would sit there in his Stressless Royal, the flagship of all armchairs, with his eyes riveted on the screen, as if on it he saw illustrated in minutest detail whatever part of Ezra Pound’s endless poem Jonas was reading.

To Jonas, Viktor gradually came to represent the average Norwegian, a person who sat unfailingly, day after day, in front of the box. When Jonas started making his own television programmes he told himself that it was these people, countrymen like Viktor, he wanted to reach. Like Henrik Ibsen he did not merely want to make them think big, he wanted to waken them. Once his acclaimed television series was finished he had a video recorder installed in Viktor’s room and arranged for all the programmes to be taped for his friend. Jonas gave one of the permanent members of staff instructions to play the tapes regularly. ‘We have to see to it that he gets some good, solid Norwegian fare, and not just American fast food,’ Jonas told the nurse.

This notion of television images as nourishment of a sort had not been plucked entirely out of thin air. Whenever Jonas walked into the room and saw Viktor staring fixedly at the screen he had the feeling that the television set, or possibly the rays from it were keeping Viktor alive. Or that his friend was actually in a large incubator, an idea which Viktor’s babyish looks — his fine, blonde locks and big, heavy head — seemed to bear out. And yet Jonas also believed he detected signs of mental activity. It sometimes seemed to Jonas’s mind as if, his vegetative appearance notwithstanding, Viktor was staring at the screen in search of help, in search of someone who could save him. As more channels came along and Viktor’s only exercise consisted of finger-hopping on the remote control and a bit of wriggling to adjust his Stressless Royal from one comfortable position to another, Jonas noted that Viktor clearly liked some programmes better than others. One could really have been forgiven for thinking that he was looking for, waiting for, a revelation. This observation left Jonas with the disturbing suspicion that Viktor’s mind was perfectly sound, but that he did not feel like letting anyone know this. That it was all an act. Or that Viktor was leading a normal life in a parallel world, a perfectly decent life. Jonas was quite prepared to believe that in this other life his friend, who looked so much like a chrysalis sitting there in his Stressless chair, might be a butterfly. However that may be, Jonas continued to visit Viktor regularly — until, that is, he ended up in an institution himself or, to be more exact: in prison.

And this last circumstance would prove to be a turning point. At first Jonas thought it must have been the shot on Bergensveien in Grorud that had roused Viktor, but he was woken, or rather: brought to his senses, some time later by another shot. Jonas only heard about it. One day, when the nurse who made sure that Viktor got to see Jonas Wergeland’s programmes regularly looked in to check on him, she found Viktor pointing excitedly at the television screen and uttering the first words anyone had heard him say in more than twenty years: ‘Jeeze, who fired that shot?’

What was on the TV? The aforementioned nurse was able to reveal that she had popped in forty-five minutes earlier to put on a video and that, because she remembered it so well herself, she had chosen the episode dealing with Harald Hardråde. She had even stayed to watch a bit of it before having to tear herself away and continue her rounds.

The programme which resulted in Viktor’s miraculous shout, opened with a boy shooting with a bow and arrow in a clearing beside a river, and the scene had been composed in a way which told viewers this was an art, that it took years of training to become such a fine archer. The boy moved as if in a dance, with everything — from the moment he drew the arrow out of the quiver until it left the bowstring and the bow was lowered — executed in one smooth, fluid action; it made viewers think of the moves performed in tai chi , or the katas in karate. Jonas realised later, partly because he had made the sound of the bowstring so pronounced, that he must have been thinking not so much about the glorious games of bows and arrows from his own boyhood — which he had also been fortunate enough to be able to relive with Benjamin — as the Indian epic The Mahabharata and the marvellous tales from it told to him by Margrete: of Drona who trained the Pandava brothers in the use of arms; of Arjuna and his bow Gandiva which was so formidable that it was recognisable to his enemies by its sound alone. The whole of that mesmerising opening sequence, indeed the sound of the bowstring alone — part music, part dangerous threat — spoke of a programme about a heroic warrior. And a brutal death.

At the close of the scene one saw what the boy, Harald Sigurdsson, had been shooting at: a huge sheepskin stretched out on a log wall. Drawn on this golden fleece was a rough map of Europe, with each arrow marking a different place, like a guide to one of the most wide-roving and warlike of all wide-roving, warlike Viking lives. The fifteen-year-long voyage which began after the Battle of Stiklestad, would take Harald, half-brother of Olav II, to places known to us today as Novgorod, Jerusalem, Sicily and, above all, Istanbul. One arrow, embedded at York in England, was broken: a token of the prophecy which says that he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. But also of an ambition unparalleled in the history of Norway.