Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

They continued their walk; they must have walked for miles — if they had not been going in circles, that is. Jonas suddenly found himself wishing that they could go on like that all night, noticed that he was unconsciously slipping Spanish phrases into his remarks; Eduardo began to introduce the odd Scandinavian word, expressions he must have picked up from the film: ‘ Nej, låt bli !’, that sort of thing. More than once he murmured ‘ Ingenting, ingenting, ingenting ’ — ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’— looking at Jonas and smiling. They came past a café, a tobacconist’s, several shops selling leather jackets, a little square planted with leafy trees, giving way to a row of houses. The door of one stood open and they caught a glimpse of a long passageway, its floor inlaid with a labyrinthine mosaic, a couple of chairs, some pot-plants and a niche containing a figurine of an animal, possibly a tiger, dreamlike in the dim light.

Just as Jonas was thinking that they must be well and truly lost or that they must be right out on the outskirts of the city, suddenly there they were, in the middle of the Avenida de Mayo where, earlier in the week, he had stumbled about with his eyes out on stalks, hardly able to believe what he was seeing, his head tilted back to take in the staggering conglomeration of buildings of every style, a street which — for the benefit of anyone who did not know this already — was to change his life, moving him to drop astronomy for architecture, a magical street embodying the streets of all the great metropolises.

Eduardo flung out an arm disdainfully. ‘I’d give you all of this, to have the chance, just once, of meeting Liv Ullman,’ he said. And then, the next moment, as he gazed pensively along the street: ‘ Ingenting, ingenting, ingenting .’ ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing.’

And so Jonas Wergeland’s moment of truth came on a day like any other, without him having given any thought to it, just like the old folktale of the boy who leaves home to look for his father’s donkeys and returns home a king.

Jonas had lunched with Margrete at the University, where she was attending a seminar, and was on his way to Chateau Neuf, the student rec, at Majorstua, when he became aware that his feet were carrying him, quite of their own accord, in another direction, perhaps because it was pouring with rain, and he had had to hop over a huge muddy puddle; and as his umbrella was buffeted by the wind he saw where they were leading him, namely, straight towards the white building on the hillside, headquarters of NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. And before he knew it, as it says in all the best fairytales, he found himself in the personnel department, whence he was directed to an office where he asked, again without having planned it and with no idea what made him say it, whether they were looking for any new television announcers; and by sheer coincidence — let’s just call it that, far be it from me to spoil anything — that was exactly what they were looking for, new faces, as they put it, and he was asked to send in an application.

In our day and age, as we are repeatedly being told, everybody gets their chance to be famous for fifteen minutes. As Rakel, Jonas’s Wergeland’s sister, discovered during the oil crisis in 1973, when she was on her way to visit her cousin Veronika Røed in Gråkammen, up on Holmenkoll — Heights, and had to take the electric train. And what happened? She climbed onto the train and took a seat, all unwitting. And who should be sitting next to her but His Majesty the King himself, Olav V, with that well-known profile from the coin of the realm, right beside her, large as life, in his skiing gear, dog and all. And before she had time to collect herself, the cameras started flashing. The next day she was inundated with phone calls from people she had not heard from in years, but who had seen her picture in the paper.

Jonas Wergeland’s fame was of a more lasting sort, but that too had its beginnings in front of a camera.

Some weeks after submitting his application, Jonas was back at Television House in Marienlyst, sitting in a little room that put him in mind of a dentist’s waiting room, mainly because he was feeling so nervous. There were two others in the room: both girls, attractive, very attractive, although Jonas did not feel any tingle running up his spine. They too had been provided with some sheets of paper which they were studying, a list of disconnected phrases to be read out. ‘Announcer Audition’ it said at the top. Over a hundred people had applied for the job. Rudeng, the director, had decided to screen test twenty.

So only now, and still with no idea what he was doing there — he was, after all, still attending the College of Architecture — did Jonas Wergeland find himself standing on the threshold of NRK, ten years after Gabriel Sand’s earnest advice to make television his career. He had not followed this advice, had never felt drawn to that flickering box. On the contrary: he had regarded it as an asset not to watch TV. He loved being on the outside, particularly enjoyed being able to interrupt passionate discussions with some shocking remark: ‘The Ashtons? Who’re they when they’re at home?’ or ‘Who is this guy Odd Grythe?’ Only now, possibly because it had been raining and he had had to sidestep, was he, as Gabriel had urged, venturing to make the big leap.

It was his turn. Jonas Wergeland was escorted to one of the announcing studios by a veteran female announcer. The room was actually painted dark-blue, but it gave an impression of total blackness, almost frightening, cave-like. And it had a smell about it, sweetish: makeup perhaps. It was a tiny untidy room, with a welter of cables on the floor and littered with all sorts of paraphernalia. For Jonas, it was worth the visit for this alone: to discover that what to the viewers appeared to be a warm, bright, cosy and, above all, spotlessly clean, room was actually a filthy black cupboard with only just enough room for the announcer to squeeze in between the desk and the back wall, a cyclorama coloured by light. Jonas sat down at the desk, which was covered with a black molton cloth, squinting in the glare of the lights aimed at him from all angles: spots and soft lights, backlights. What about makeup? No, no makeup. The veteran female announcer gave him a few practical tips and went out. He was alone. In front of him, a little to one side, were three monitors. In one of them he could see himself. For a split-second — although what made him think of it he could not have said — he felt as if he were back inside the organ chest, at the heart of some ineffably complex mechanism. He was nervous, terribly nervous.

‘Let’s hear your voice,’ someone said over a loudspeaker.

Jonas felt like saying ‘Yoo-hoo! There’s a hole in the loo-oo!’ the way they used to do as kids, shouting it into mysterious cracks and holes or places with a good echo, but he managed to restrain himself and instead, since it seemed appropriate in that room, in that situation, he said: ‘The mind is incapable of grasping the full significance of a time-span of hundreds of millions of years.’ Pause for effect. ‘Charles Darwin.’

No response. A bad sign. Nerves rippled through his body like the northern lights.

‘Look at the camera, so we can get a proper shot of you.’ A voice over the loudspeaker. ‘That’s it, good.’

There was no one behind the camera; the instant he focussed his gaze on the lens his nerves steadied. He had the overwhelming feeling that this little circle was what he had been searching for all along, and his surroundings were forgotten completely in his effort to remember what it was: a hub. Here it was, at last, the hub.