Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Naturally, all sorts of rumours circulated about what lay hidden within this white patch on the housing estate’s carefully mapped-out world. Nilla, who actually lived in the same building, firmly maintained that her flat was full of snakes and lizards and that she got food for them from an acquaintance who worked as a rat catcher. Others swore they had seen a blue light shimmering behind her curtains at night, and took this as a sign that she held seances in there. She also smelled funny. Of spices. Or alcohol. ‘Poor little soul, she’s a secret drinker,’ Mrs Agdestein whispered at the sewing bee. But most people simply thought she could not be very well off — judging, at least, by the drab, grey outfits she always wore, and the glimpses she occasionally vouchsafed of an exceptionally spartan hallway. Her sunbronzed skin notwithstanding, she was nicknamed the Grey Eminence. Jonas had always felt that the greyness was necessary camouflage, that this woman dealt in something secret and dangerous. He knew what it was too: precious gems. ‘It’s the sparkle from all those jewels that gives her skin that healthy glow,’ he whispered to Daniel.

There was one thing, however, on which several of Solhaug’s mothers had remarked. On one Saturday in the month, the Grey Eminence left the block dressed up and made up beyond all recognition and took the bus into town. More than one had, from behind their curtains, seen her come home at an indecently late hour. This behaviour gave rise to the categorical assertion that she had ‘a bit on the side’, an expression which to Jonas’s ears sounded as mysterious as ‘hocus-pocus’, with the same magical associations.

There came a day in early December when Jonas found himself standing outside her front door. He was out selling raffle tickets, having lost a bet with Daniel. Jonas could usually guess how generous people were likely to be just by doing a quick scan of their nameplates — what they were made of, the lettering — before ringing the doorbell. As he eyed up the Grey Eminence’s anonymous sign: clear plastic with ‘Karen Mohr’ in a blue script, he suddenly realised that he was less interested in whether she would buy a raffle ticket than in whether he would get a peek inside her flat. He stood at the entrance to King Solomon’s Mines. Inside — he could feel it in his bones — lay mounds of glittering sapphires and rubies.

Jonas barely heard the doorbell ring, it might almost have been muffled, or waking from age-long slumber. But she immediately answered the door, opened it a little way. He glimpsed the corner of a small, grey-carpeted hall. Proper grey. With not a single thing on the walls, not even a three-year-old calendar. But he could smell something. Something unusual, something good. ‘Will you support Grorud scout troop by buying a ticket for the Christmas raffle? First prize is a side of pork.’

She frowned, possibly at the thought of having to carve up a side of pork on her kitchen table, all the mess, all the packing, the bother of having to rent a freezer down at the Centre. Then the unexpected happened. Instead of saying yes or no, she invited him in. The thought of Hansel and Gretel flashed through Jonas’s mind, but he did not hesitate for a moment, he understood that he was being shown a rare trust. Once he was inside the grey hallway she smiled. ‘I like your eyes,’ she said. ‘They’re so big. And so brown. You remind me of someone. Are you a good observer? Do you draw?’ She stood for a while simply considering him, even ran a finger over the scar on his forehead, as if trying to guess at the story behind it.

This close to her Jonas could see that she was good-looking, very good-looking. Not only her skin, but her face as well. Her features. She had a face which — what was it about it, he wondered — yes, in that face were many faces. He should perhaps have been on his guard, but it was a pleasure to be admired by Karen Mohr. To be the object of her regard. He liked the fact that she saw something which no one else could see.

All people are special, but Jonas knew that he was more than special. He was unique. He was an exception. From the day when he had learned to tie his shoelaces — not that there is necessarily any connection — every now and again he had been aware of a hidden power welling up inside him. He could not have said what it was. Only that something, something of sterling worth lay pulsating in there. Some rare gift. When the American Marvel comics appeared on newsstands in Norway, Jonas instantly identified with several of their superhero characters, although obviously he did not possess any of their powers. No, it was the certainty that there was more to him. Jonas had no trouble believing that a person could walk up walls, have X-ray vision or fly fast as lightning: all of these were really just variations on, or a slight exaggeration of, this thing he felt slumbering inside him. What it was he was soon to discover.

Years later, when he was working on his programme on Svend Foyn, a colleague happened to notice Jonas Wergeland late one night alone in a conference room at Television House in Marienlyst. There was nothing so surprising about that, apart from the fact that Wergeland was skipping, and that he was doing it in the dark. ‘It was actually quite spooky,’ his colleague had said. ‘He wasn’t jumping so much as flying. Anyone would have thought he had supernatural powers.’

The woman who uttered these words was working with Jonas on the Thinking Big series. She knew that as far as Svend Foyn was concerned he was stuck, well and truly stuck. After all, how were they supposed to produce a programme, a heroic epic, saluting a man who so strongly personified a whaling industry which by then had almost virtually destroyed Norway’s international reputation. Whaling had once given rise to the first oil age, an industrial adventure which had filled the Norwegian people with confidence; now it was an extremely embarrassing business altogether. For various reasons, some more logical than others, many people felt that killing a whale was somehow different from killing a pig or a cow — or a cod, come to that. It was like shooting a brother, a distant relative. Some regarded the whale as the one creature on earth best able to communicate with possible extra-terrestrial beings. Svend Foyn had long since been demoted from national hero to national villain. No one wanted to be confronted with all that gory documentary footage of the flaying and cutting up of a whale carcase, no one wanted to be told that the growing prosperity experienced by Norway at the end of the nineteenth century was founded on a mindless slaughter which almost wiped out an entire species. No one wished to be reminded that their Stressless armchairs were covered, so to speak, in whaleskin.

Jonas Wergeland refused, however, to duck the issue; he wanted, he said, to make a programme in which the killing of a whale formed the key scene. But how to do it?

Much has been said and written about the television series Thinking Big . Younger generations may find it difficult to imagine that anyone could have taken a television programme so seriously, that it could have gained such control over people’s minds, taken up so many column inches in the press. And yet all those articles and critiques went only a small way towards explaining the exceptional nature of the phenomenon that was Jonas Wergeland. Take, for example, the reasons for his remarkable viewing appeal — Jonas Wergeland himself was a standard feature, the presenter, of every programme. Not one expert had wit enough to see that his inimitable, charismatic screen presence was actually born of shyness. Simply by always appearing so wary and diffident, Wergeland excited as much attention and interest as a stranger in a place where everybody knows everybody else.