Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

Schoolmaster Dehli had another, possibly even better, way of illustrating this. He positioned himself next to the map rack. ‘Just as maps are like masks of the world, so the world is merely a mask covering something else, something more real,’ he said. Sitting at his desk, Jonas thought of Karen Mohr’s flat, the grey hallway concealing a Provence in the middle of Grorud. Mr Dehli had pulled down all of the maps, about ten altogether. Then he sent them whipping up, one after another, tugging and releasing with superb precision, as if he had had a lot of practice at this. The maps snapped and cracked in a sort of chain reaction, pure pyrotechnics. It made Jonas think of roller-blinds shooting up to disclose an endless succession of different prospects, different worlds, until they, the pupils, were almost shaking in their shoes, half expecting something horrendous to stand revealed at the very back, Reality itself, in all its awfulness or beauty. But at the very back — and this Mr Dehli left as it was — hung an enormous map of the solar system, of the cosmos as it were, and of all the hovering jewels here displayed, the one on which Jonas fixed was the planet Uranus, a shimmering green eye. What a show — perfect, like a conjuring trick rounded off with one final mind-boggling sleight of hand.

There are too few teachers like Mr Dehli. There are too few teachers who pull such original, inventive educational stunts. Who charge their classrooms with electricity and the smell of chalk dust.

Such sessions were not easily forgotten. Not for nothing did three members of this class go on to become religious historians, while two became ministers of the church. And, even more noteworthy perhaps: five ended up in the Oslo Stock Exchange. As for Jonas, in the first instance they would result in the world coming tumbling about his ears.

The Hindu concept of māyā occupied a central place in Jonas’s memory. It instinctively sprang to mind, for example, when he was lying in a hotel room in London, zapping back and forth between the best television channels in the world. Occasionally he even had the notion that each new channel caused the previous one to disappear, like a map being pulled up — that he disclosed a new world each time he pressed the remote control.

To the question as to how he had learned the ropes of television production, Jonas Wergeland had been known to reply — as if to denote how difficult it had been: ‘I swam the English Channel.’ By rights he should have said ‘the English Channels’, because there were four of them; he arrived in London on the very day that Channel 4 was launched, a channel which aimed to be innovative and experimental and to win viewers by appealing to their good taste. So he was lucky enough to catch many of the exceptionally fine programmes scheduled for Channel 4’s first weeks on the air, productions which, regardless of genre — soap opera or science documentary, sit-com or arts magazine — oozed intelligence at all levels of production. Even the sports broadcasts were bearable, thanks largely to the civilised British commentators. Jonas felt like a guest in the TV equivalent of a gourmet restaurant.

But he could not stay in that room all the time — although if he had, he would have avoided a rather unpleasant confrontation which left him with a nasty bump on the back of his head and a black eye. Jonas followed the same routine every day. He slept till around twelve, then went out for breakfast, or rather, lunch. Within a very small radius, in the streets around South Kensington tube station, Jonas found restaurants serving food from every corner of the globe — the culinary equivalent, if you like, of the British television which he was studying: around the world in eight minutes. During his weeks there he could choose between French, Italian, Indian, Thai, Chinese and Japanese restaurants. His favourite, he eventually decided, was Daquise, a little Polish dive with dingy walls and oilcloth-covered tables, serving shashlyk and chlodnik soup, as well as eight different brands of vodka.

On the way back to the hotel he always picked up a good-sized stack of sandwiches from a shop in the arcade next to the station. He ordered a pot of coffee at reception and his working day could begin. He settled back on the bed, with an appetising tuna fish sandwich within easy reach, and switched on the television.

The aforementioned unpleasant incident was something of an intermezzo. It occurred on an evening when, for once, there happened to be a gap between two programmes he wanted to see. Instead of doing a bit of skipping, as he sometimes did, he went for a walk around the neighbourhood and on the way back he was tempted to pop into a pub, The Zetland Arms in Old Brompton Road. He had to stand for a minute just inside the door until his eyes adjusted to the gloom of the interior which, like most English pubs, was all dark mahogany and oriental-style fitted carpets — as if deep down every Briton longed for a return to Victorian times. Jonas meant just to have a quick whisky at the horseshoe bar, but he soon got chatting to an Englishman who invited him over to his table; he had ordered so many pints that Jonas had to help him carry them. Thus Jonas suddenly found himself in the midst of a vociferous group of men around his own age, and as the mood grew even livelier and the conversation turned, quite naturally, to television — as all conversations at that time eventually did — Jonas put in his three-ha’pence worth, commenting on aspects of everything from Coronation Street to The South Bank Show . His companions were impressed, wanted to know how come a Norwegian, a snowed-in Viking, was so well-informed on such matters. ‘I’m writing a thesis on the new British era of world supremacy,’ Jonas said. ‘Cheers!’

He did in fact feel rather like a researcher as he lay on the bed in his hotel room, combing the two weekly TV magazines. Each day he would find masses of programmes he wanted to see; the pages in both magazines gradually became covered in red circles; many a time there would be a clash between a couple of the delights on offer and he would have to choose; either that or he ended up switching back and forth between two, or even three, programmes — a documentary, a music broadcast, a film made for television — trying to catch the gist of each one.

And as he watched he made notes: a couple of words maybe, a sentence, or some hieroglyphics, a framework, an original idea. After close-down he would make other notes in the margins alongside those he had jotted down earlier in the evening, sketchy associated ideas scrawled in an Outside Left area, a fertile borderline in which the writing became more and more closely packed. Jonas had never written so much at one go. He would lie there, eating a corned-beef or turkey sandwich and writing, scribbling down words that only he could read, in those books with the marbled covers. They were the same as the ones in which Aunt Laura made her almost obscene erotic sketches — male members depicted as the most weird and wonderful creatures — on her travels in the Middle East and Central Asia in search of new rugs for her collection. Jonas believed that he filled his four books, collectively referred to by him as ‘the golden notebook’, with what might be called ‘bed art’. However that may be, he certainly regarded them, together with the eight copies of the TV Times and Radio Times from that month, covered in red circles and marginalia, as lecture notes from the greatest university he ever attended. Later in his career he would still take those fat notebooks out every now and again, looking for tips or inspiration. Those four books were for him what the little yellow notebook was for Bo Wang Lee.

Jonas was, in other words, well qualified to air his views on British television at that table in The Zetland Arms, raucously toasting with his effusive, open-handed drinking cronies, and as if to boost the spirit of camaraderie still further — after his fourth pint — he declared Not the Nine O’Clock News to be the funniest thing ever shown on a television screen. Several of the guys round the table began to clap, while others broke into a chorus of ‘We are the champions’, and it may have been this, or possibly a desire to pursue his winning line in witty repartee that prompted Jonas to declare, a little too loudly, that that wasn’t always the case, though, was it? That the English were the champions, that is. Well, nobody could say — he plucked an example out of thin air — that Captain Scott had done all that well; Jonas laughed, but this time he laughed alone, and conscious though he was of the sudden, not to say ominous, hush that had fallen over the table, still he continued to hold forth, all undaunted, on that prize idiot, Captain Robert Scott, who had actually gone so far as to take ponies, ponies God help us, to the South Pole, and not only that, but — would you believe it — motor-driven vehicles, I’m sorry guys, but I can’t see any good reason to sing ‘We are the champions’ for Robert Scott. Here’s to Roald Amundsen!”