Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

The writing of Jonas Wergeland’s story should have been a laudable project. He was a figure from a period of change, in many ways the last representative of a bygone age, a television age — dare I say: an uncomplicated age. And yet, despite my good intentions I could not rid myself of an underlying scepticism. Or doubt. As I wrote, as I attempted to recapitulate some of the stories Jonas himself had grappled with in his manuscript, I kept wondering whether it was possible, in this limited and dauntingly simple form, to gain some clue to the one question which occupied me more and more and which rapidly became my deepest motive for writing: Why did he do it?

Throughout the sail down Aurlandsfjord he sat up on deck, making notes quite openly. He kept looking up, looking around him, as if he could not get enough of this landscape, could hardly believe it was real. Now and again he would catch my eye, smile, then drop his gaze as if suddenly feeling shy. Although in truth he was shy. I always had the feeling that his eyes were the key. Sometimes they would glow so fiercely that it was almost frightening. It was so ardent, that look; he seemed to have to make a conscious effort to tone it down. I have heard women describe those eyes as ‘penetrating’. They felt that he saw all the way in to their innermost recesses. Or beyond them, as Kamala said. But it was not that simple. The real reason for the look in his eyes was shyness. The fact of being strong, but embarrassed by his strength. It was, as I have already suggested, this that set him apart from other television personalities. Such a focused gaze, such an intense presence, combined with a sort of bashfulness, as if he really did not want to be there at all. Was constantly questioning, felt uncomfortable with his own part in things. When you saw his face on the TV screen you had the impression that he was doing his best to hide something, some piquant secret. The effect was astonishing. A bit like seeing a good actor underplaying a part. Television viewers could scarcely believe their eyes: here, at last, was someone — a baffling exception to the hordes of exhibitionist, publicity-mad NRK personalities — who held something back, a man who could have ruled the world, but chose to appear on Norwegian television. That was why they loved him.

I was glad that he had hit it off so well with the crew of the Voyager , especially with Martin. I could hear them down in the galley, discussing how to make pasta al burro . ‘Don’t argue with me,’ Jonas was saying. ‘I learned to cook from an Italian chef in Grorud. A chef by the name of Leonardo, no less.’ With Hanna he tended to talk mostly about music; he was impressed by the string quartet collection she had brought along with her, although he could not understand how anyone could prefer Bartók to Haydn.

At this point I became aware of a problem. I was finding it more and more difficult to work on two projects at once, even though one of them, the book about him, was simply stewing away at the back of my mind. I realised that I was observing him as much as our surroundings — which ought to have had my complete and undivided attention. While studiously mapping out folk museums, farm museums and galleries in Aurland and Flåm, I was just as busy studying him. I observed him as if seeing him in the flesh could show me whether what I had written, what I was thinking of writing, was correct. True.

I began to suspect that his presence was, to an ever-greater extent, colouring my ideas concerning the OAK Quartet’s product, the groundwork for which we were laying on this sail along the fjord. Or that, in my mind, he had taken charge of the project. Or that these two were one and the same. As I wandered around Aurlandsvangen, looking at the shoe factory, the remarkable church — Sogne Cathedral — and the old Abelheim guesthouse, he was constantly in my thoughts. One day when I had gone for a walk on my own to consider whether we ought to link the writer Per Sivle with Flåm or with Stalheim and whether we should include anything at all on humanist Absalon Pedersøn Beyer — who hailed from Skjerdal, just north of Aurland — I suddenly stopped to look at Jonas Wergeland. He was sitting by the fence surrounding the playing fields alongside the river, up next to the school and the community centre, watching some boys practising the long jump. All at once I remembered why he should be so interested in seeing how far the boys could jump. I got distracted, forgot all about Per Sivle.

In everything he did or said I saw or heard stories, or connections with stories. The evening before we left Lærdal I happened to open a document and read something I had written about his programme on Thor Heyerdahl. He could not have known this, but when we cast off the next morning he said, with a sly glint in his eye: ‘This boat is another Kon-Tiki . A vessel which will prove whether it is possible to sail from the continent of the past to that of the future. From an old life to a new.’ He was talking, of course, about himself, but still.

Deep inside Aurlandsfjord Jonas stood gazing up at the steep slopes and high mountains rising on either side. ‘What is Samarkand compared to this?’ I heard him murmur. Although, did he actually say that? Or was it only a voice inside my head? At one point, after staring open-mouthed at my first sight of the tiny church at Undredal, the snow-covered peaks rearing up out of the valley beyond, I happened to glance round, to look up at Stigen, the little hill farm perched on its ledge — had people really lived there, and managed to scrape a living from it — and saw Jonas staring at a power line running across the fjord just ahead of us, strung with those spherical orange markers that look like basketballs; I heard later that a Dutch fighter plane had had a near miss there. Jonas stood there, utterly mesmerised, gripping the main shroud and peering up at the high-voltage cable. ‘Are you thinking of Lauritz, your uncle?’ I asked gently. He nodded, somewhat surprised that I should be able to guess this. I was not alone in seeing stories in the landscape. When Carl arrived with the car — he had driven through the new tunnel and was full of ideas for ways in which we could present the most spectacular stretches of road around the fjord — and we prepared to carry on down to Flåm, to see what we could possibly make of the railway line there, which had already been done to death, Jonas chose instead to go and take a look at a dam built as part of the hydro-electric development in the Aurland region. He ordered a taxi, asked to be taken to Låvisdalen. He wanted to find the spot where Olav Knutzen had taken that famous photograph of Leonard. ‘You understand, don’t you?’ he said to me. I understood.

Leonard’s father was, as I have said, not just anybody. Some people may recognise the name Olav Knutzen, since he was at one time a well-known photographer with the working-class press. And if the last part of his surname evokes associations with a Zen master then that is not really so surprising, since Leonard’s father could almost have scored a bull’s eye blindfold. He had such an eye for things, as well as a set of values so solid that he could make a picture of a granite quarry in Grorud seem as fascinating as the rock tombs in Egypt’s Valley of Kings.

The basement room in which Jonas and Leonard nursed their youthful wrath was not only painted red — an ideological prerequisite, you might say; the walls were also covered with framed photographs calling to mind the growth and the triumphs of modern Norway. Because Olav Knutzen was a staff photographer with Aktuell weekly; he called himself ‘a reporter with a camera’. Aktuell was the sort of publication in which the pictures were as important as the words. The international flagship of such publications was Life magazine. These days, when the full media circus seems to be on hand for every occurrence, it is easy to forget that there was a time when a single photograph could be the cause of an event becoming known worldwide. As Thor Heyerdahl discovered when he sold the photographs from the Kon-Tiki expedition to Life : pictures which captured the imagination of the people in a way that written reports of the expedition could not do.