Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

And despite all that was said about Wergeland’s innovative style, no one saw fit to mention the most amazing thing of all: here was a television series that came close to transcending its own boundaries. The best thing Jonas Wergeland ever did was to realise, very early on, what an inadequate medium television was, that its days were numbered, that he was working with an outmoded and hopelessly limited art form. In his programmes he clearly endeavoured to discover or to anticipate new — possibly even hybrid — forms. There was, for instance, something about the camera-work in the Foyn programme, the filming, the composition of the shots, the different, but evenly balanced aspects which prompted people to use the term ‘virtual reality’ in connection with television for the first time — even though anybody could turn round and say that the screen itself was still only two-dimensional. In juggling so radically with opposing elements, Jonas Wergeland was working towards another medium. And in point of fact this had nothing to do with technique, it had to do with a new way of looking at things, or better: of thinking about things, a different form of awareness.

The woman who accidentally witnessed Jonas Wergeland’s weird skipping session became so intrigued, or so worried rather, that she returned to the conference room almost an hour later and through the open door saw Jonas still skipping in the dark, barely visible in the faint light falling through the windows from the street outside, skipping at breakneck speed, this woman reported. ‘I’m almost sure he was hovering in mid-air,’ she declared. ‘And there was a kind of aura about him.’

Then he had suddenly stopped and raced out of the room. His colleague had observed him later, in his office, engrossed in a mass of papers, with different coloured felt-tips in either hand. It was on this night that the programme on Svend Foyn was conceived, a programme in which apparently unrelated elements were united within the framework of an explosive and deadly cannon shot.

Skipping was a method which Jonas Wergeland had sworn by for years, although what really mattered was not the skipping itself, but what it sparked off. You see, at a certain point in his boyhood, Jonas had discovered what his hidden talent was: a much more important gift than that of being able to hold one’s breath: the ability to think. And again one has to ask: how could anyone have failed to see it? Hundreds of individuals have commented on Jonas Wergeland’s story, but not one of them has ever mentioned his attitude towards the most elementary of all things: the relationship of one thought to the next. And to a third. And a fourth.

This may sound surprising, but there are not many people who can really think, who are conscious of the process of thinking, and certainly not in the way that Jonas Wergeland could. He wasn’t all that good at it at first either, he had a particularly poor mastery of the mental discipline which involved imagining what lay behind closed doors. When, for example, he was invited into Karen Mohr’s flat, he felt sure — since he had already been there lots of times in his thoughts — that he was soon to behold her well-guarded and brilliantly camouflaged secret: her diamond-cutting workshop. But when she opened the living-room door he realised how wrong he had been. He stepped into another world. A world within the world, he was later to think. Although it was snowing outside and quite dark, he felt as if suddenly it was summer, in fact he almost caught a distant whiff of salt water, the sound of waves washing the shore. It was as if he had been looking at a map of the Sahara and someone had pulled it up to reveal a map of the French Riviera underneath. Here, in the middle of Grorud, deep in the suburban desert of Grorud, he had stepped into Provence.

The living room had a warm, an intimate, a — yes, that was it — a French feel to it. The floor was tiled in black and white, like a café. On the white walls hung a couple of plants with bright red blossoms, some photographs in woven raffia frames and an unusual and very striking picture. All along one wall, under the window, grew tall, green plants, miniature palm trees. After a while he thought he heard sounds coming from this jungle and when he looked more closely — wonder of wonders — what did he find but a little fountain. On the stippled glass top of the coffee table stood a vase of fresh flowers and, next to it: an elegant glass containing a milky-white liquid. On either side of the French windows onto the veranda hung blue, slatted wooden shutters which — Jonas later learned — could be pulled across the windows to shut out the realities of Norway. There was a faint odour of what might have been liquorice in the room. For this he soon received an explanation: ‘Every evening, after work and before dinner, I have a glass of Pernod,’ Karen Mohr told him. ‘Here, have a sniff, doesn’t it smell wonderful?’

Who would ever have guessed that in the heart of the estate, in the midst of all those square, solid blocks of flats through whose doors filtered the smells of stewed lamb with cabbage and fish balls in white sauce, there was a room like this — Pernod-scented, and with shutters on the insides of the windows? If I look out of the window, Jonas thought, in the distance I will see, not Trondheimsveien, but the Mediterranean.

Considered from a broader perspective, however, maybe all of this was not so strange after all. You have to remember that this was in the days when lots of flats were being radically transformed: fashions were changing, people were better off. Suddenly they were chucking out all their old junk and opting instead for living rooms decorated with Japanese minimalism; either that or they were turning doorways into white Spanish arches and converting spare corners into Costa del Sol-type bars with seating for ten. Especially where wallpaper was concerned, your average Norwegian lost all inhibition; some covered their walls with designs that gave you the impression of being surrounded on all sides by rough-hewn logs, others went the whole hog and transformed their walls into gigantic landscape scenes which made you feel as if you were living in a tent, right out in the wilds.

‘Would you like a bite to eat,’ Karen Mohr asked. ‘I was just about to make an omelette, it won’t take a minute.’

Jonas took a seat. The living-room furniture was of light, bright rattan with floral cushions. In one corner was a large cage containing two white doves. Jonas never told anyone about this visit or his subsequent visits. As far as he could tell, no one else knew what the inside of Karen Mohr’s flat looked like. He came to think of this as a secret discovery; he had found a source — not of the Nile, but of a spate of rumours. But it was also something of a mystery: after all, how could this woman have such a living room without anyone in the sixty other flats knowing a thing about it? Or, to put it another way: how could so many people be so wrong?

The plate on which his omelette came was a memorable experience in itself, with a pattern of vine leaves running round the rim. This was the first time Jonas had ever tasted an omelette, eggs folded into a surprise package. It was also softer and creamier than any omelette he would be served later in life. If the truth be told, Karen Mohr set a standard for omelettes to which no future omelette could hope to aspire. ‘Did you enjoy that?’ she asked, raising her wine glass. ‘Could you tell that I had added a dash of nutmeg and cardamom?’ Along with it they had a baguette: a long, thin loaf of bread which she had baked herself. She took a chunk from the basket: ‘You simply break off a piece, like this,’ she said brightly.

Behind all this there was, of course, a story — and not just any story; a story which Jonas was soon to hear, becoming, as he did, a regular visitor to Karen Mohr’s flat, especially over that first winter. But long before she told it to him, Jonas’s mind had been occupied with trying to guess what sort of story it might be. And even he, child that he was, knew that it had to be a love story. Whenever she disappeared into the kitchen to make omelettes and he was left sipping a glass of real lemonade and fingering the bamboo of a rattan chair, he would try to spin his own stories, inspired, for example, by the ceramic figurines on the bookshelf or the full-length mirror which dominated the wall opposite the window, the kind of mirror which opened onto another, dimmer, room — a mirror which might even have been capable of making time stand still. At such moments, when that mirror also opened his mind, Jonas used to wish that it would be a while yet before his omelette was served.