Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Not surprisingly, this programme proved to be one of actor Normann Vaage’s greatest triumphs. He was never better than here, playing Trygve Lie as if he himself, Normann Vaage personally, would rather die than see the world plunged into another war. People who had met Trygve Lie could hardly believe their eyes, declared that Normann Vaage was Trygve Lie, completely and utterly, down to the smallest gesture, and strangest of all: Normann Vaage so immersed himself in the part that many viewers could have sworn that his ears actually grew as large and prominent as Lie’s own — a feature which seemed to emphasize the man’s ability to be a good listener. Such empathy was symptomatic of the series as a whole. The subject matter itself seemed to bring out the best in the actors. Ella Strand, who played all of the female subjects, also became immensely popular during the year in which the series was televised. Together with Normann Vaage, she made guest appearances in all sorts of other programmes and her face and name cropped up everywhere: in advertisements, newspaper profiles, women’s magazines, at trade fairs up and down the country. People fought for a glimpse of them, as if they were the actual incarnation of those Norwegians in whom the public were suddenly taking a totally new interest.

In many ways these actors confirmed Jonas Wergeland’s theory that each individual embodies a host of different personas. That all Norwegians carried these heroes within themselves, as it were, one might almost say like a set of genes.

While going through all the material on Trygve Lie, Jonas Wergeland stumbled upon a side of the man’s character of which he had been unaware: Trygve Lie had been a keen tennis player, and a pretty fair tennis player at that. As late as 1938 he had become area champion in the over-forty class, and two years prior to that he had won an international tournament held at the Jordal Stadium in Oslo. This provided Jonas with a fresh angle on Trygve Lie. Not only did they both hail from Grorud, both were also fine tennis players.

And so Jonas Wergeland now stood there with the ball in his left hand, totally devoid of any peaceful intentions, bounced it a couple of times, fixed his eye on a point in the court on the other side of the net, bounced the ball once more before throwing it into the air, mind focussed, and hit it as hard as he could and then some, as if he were hurling a javelin and not a felt covered ball at Gjermund Boeck’s cocky, smirking features. He hit it beautifully, with his body at full stretch, ensuring that the ball landed exactly where it was supposed to in the ambassador’s service court, with enough power behind it that even though Gjermund Boeck did manage to get to the ball, it slammed into the net as the screech of a sliding rubber sole mingled with the hiss of a less than diplomatic curse.

Jonas’s future father-in-law had won the first set 6–1. That one game had been an obvious consolation prize, a fact that rankled all the more with Jonas. And, what was worse, he had forgotten to put everything he had into that one detail.

Jonas served again, tossing the ball into the air with such a practised air that anyone with any knowledge of tennis would have taken him for a seasoned player, him, Jonas Wergeland, Grorud lad and anti-snob, who had never touched a tennis racket as a boy. Again his serve was powerful, well-placed, he was conscious of the delightful sensation that ran through him every time he hit the ball just right, faultlessly , the glorious sound, the rush it gave; he repeated his success twice more to win his service game outright. The ambassador, for once not wearing one of his garish Hawaiian shirts but the traditional whites, which conspired with his old-fashioned flat cap to lend him a rather tropical colonial air, clapped his racket with the flat of his hand cheerily, but Jonas could tell that he was nonplussed, so nonplussed that his serve became a little less sure, and Jonas managed to make a number of good returns, even against the ambassador’s backhand, which he knew to be slow, with an under-spin that allowed him ample time to run in to the net and enjoy the luxury of a volley. Boeck won the game, but he really had to work for it and, what is more: he was shaken, he saw now that humiliating Jonas was not going be as easy as he had thought — not easy at all.

Jonas served again, even harder this time and, by his own lights, nigh-on flawlessly, and won this game, too, outright, with three aces and a ball that his prospective father-in-law could do no more than tap with his racket, a return so bad that a neatly placed forehand from Jonas nearly sent the ambassador — bearing a passing facial resemblance to Trygve Lie — flying headlong onto the court as he strained vainly, and comically, to reach Jonas’s ball. Gjermund Boeck was no longer clapping.

So what had happened? How could an amateur — a complete novice, basically — hold his own against a seasoned tennis player, albeit an elderly man, corpulent and fairly slow, but still an experienced and, above all, wily player who would normally have had no problem in wiping the floor with such a greenhorn, as he had done in the first set, without having to stretch to more than a gloating grin? Tennis is not one of my favourite sports, but I believe that this episode affords an insight into an important aspect of Jonas Wergeland’s nature: not only his almost uncanny strength of will but also, and just as importantly, his keen eye for the crucial angle of attack, the one detail that makes all things possible, including the crushing of a smug and rather nasty ambassador.

Immediately after the fateful lobster dinner the previous autumn, two things had happened. Jonas had moved in with Margrete, who was living in her parents’ flat in Ullevål Garden City while they were abroad, and he had started to take tennis lessons with her on an indoor court; or rather, first she had packed him off to Johan Hannes’s shop on Parkveien, where he had bought a wooden Donnay ‘Borg pro’ racket, one which had come warmly recommended by Hannes — not surprisingly, seeing that he happened to be the local agent for the Belgian firm. Margrete played a decent, if not a great, game of tennis, thanks to a cosmopolitan upbringing within diplomatic circles where playing tennis was an inherent part of the whole way of life, every bit as essential as being able to handle a telex machine or a cocktail glass, or knowing on which occasions one was supposed to fly a flag on the car. Although she had not played for ages, she still had her sure serve and her solid ground stroke, they seemed to be ingrained in her, like her swimming stroke. But Margrete was a hopeless teacher. She laughed at Jonas, she roared with laughter at Jonas’s ineptitude and ungainly antics on the tennis court; if anything, he was even more ham-fisted with a racket than he was with a lobster fork. After only a couple of sessions on the indoor court, during which Jonas had hardly managed to land a single ball inside the lines of the court, she told him — good-humouredly, but in no uncertain terms — that he was hopeless. He was a great guy, but he had no gift for tennis. ‘Why don’t you call off this stupid duel with Dad,’ she said. ‘I’m begging you, please.’

But Jonas had to beat Gjermund Boeck, and in this lies the very crux of the story: to swear to do something which you do not know the first thing about, in which you are possibly not even all that interested; which, quite frankly, you think is just plain daft — to do it because of an innate, pigheaded determination, and perhaps even a longing, at least once in your life, to win a battle against all, absolutely all, the odds. So, in the final analysis, Jonas was not competing against the ambassador — even though he deeply and sincerely disliked his future father-in-law. What he was fighting was his own doubt, his doubt as to whether he really could do the impossible, make the improbable a reality. It could have been anything at all. In Jonas Wergeland’s case it happened to be tennis. He knew that if he could succeed in beating the ambassador at tennis, then there was nothing he could not do. Hence this silly little duel, this typically macho set-up, with its even more absurd trophy, a trophy of which Jonas felt almost ashamed, but which at the same time he coveted with all his heart: a polar-bear skin, a momentous milestone in Jonas Wergeland’s career. Walking off the court with or without that skin would quite simply represent the difference between two different lives.