Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Three minutes to go, and a lady came down from the control room, where she had been inspecting them on the monitor. ‘Your forehead hasn’t been done,’ she said, fixing his makeup, while Gunnhild set their glasses on the table. Jonas had asked for apple juice, the other two for water, as if to indicate that they were in this together, two white against one tawny, two clear against one golden. And who was in the chair next to Audun Tangen? Will it surprise anyone to know that it was Veronika Roed, Jonas Wergeland’s fateful cousin, the ace reporter — that it should be her, of all people, who had set her mind on slating the Thinking Big television series, on really tearing it to shreds? Jonas eyed her as she sat there, so attractive that she was almost too attractive, but he knew that she would look quite fabulous to the viewers; with her long, glossy black hair, her perfectly made-up face and a neat little suit in neutral tones, she looked both sexy and serious, a combination which would be a sure-fire winner, with the male viewers anyway. She looked calm and collected, she was calm and collected; she was looking forward to doing away with the expression ‘Wergeland’s genius’ once and for all. She had her arguments off pat, knew them inside and out; she had it all worked out, she had teamed up with a bunch of top experts, she had it all down on tape, ready to roll, up in the control room. As far as she was concerned her cousin did not stand a chance.

Two minutes to go, and Jonas sat there, feeling slightly sick, shivers running through his body, wondering yet again just why , why in heaven’s name Veronika was doing this, what possible motive could she have? The only answer he could come up with was ‘pure spite’. She saw it, quite simply, as her mission in life to destroy him by any and all means. Oddly enough, he had never regretted rescuing her from the Zambezi rapids. And now she was using him, her cousin, to further her own career. In other words, she was a parasite, exactly like her father, Sir William, a member of the Rattus Norvegicus clan, someone who was constantly dependent on eating from the plates of others in order to survive, to get ahead. But did that make it right for Jonas to take part in what was in many ways such a primitive programme? To wage war against his own cousin, possibly drag her name through the mud, drag his own family’s name through the mud? For quite some time he had actually been all set to pull out, until Axel Stranger told him that it was his plain duty to show his face. ‘And I’m appealing not to your courage,’ he said, ‘but to your wisdom.’

Gunnhild gave them the word: one minute to go. Jonas knew that small-town Norway was out there at the other end of the camera lens, and he knew it was having second thoughts about its enthusiasm for his television series, that the battle was already half-won for Veronika Røed, and yet: nothing is for certain. That was television for you. Jonas knew that he could turn it around, turn a whole nation around in five minutes. That was television for you. So banal, so powerful. And Jonas also knew that despite the more or less dispassionate nature of the duel in which they were about to engage, the people’s verdict would be made on the basis of just one thing: their faces. So Jonas knew what it would come down to: whose face was the stronger, his or his cousin’s. The utter paradox of this was not lost on Jonas. He had made a television series unlike anything ever seen in Norway before, one which had reached far beyond the bounds of that country, and now, thanks to a woman who had made an entire nation doubt its own initial assessment, everything was to be decided in the course of one hour, and on just one thing: two faces.

The programme was off and running. After the vignette, the Colonel ran an opening sequence showing highlights from Thinking Big , and Jonas could not help but watch the monitor with pride while at the same time, out of the corner of his eye, following Gunnhild, standing next to the middle camera, as she cued Audun Tangen, and then they were on the air, at prime viewing time, on Friday evening, going out to almost one and half million Norwegian homes, in which people were lying back, comfortably ensconced on their sofas and Stress-Less chairs, with crisps and cola within easy reach. Audun Tangen, looking, in his conservative dark suit, as severe and impartial as any judge, bade them all welcome, and after a brief and witty introduction which made it quite clear that he was in exceptionally good form, almost like his old self, he handed over to Veronika Røed, who promptly fired off a broadside, as they say, a pithy, demagogically brilliant — and, not least, populist — résumé of all the criticism levelled at Jonas Wergeland and his much-vaunted television series.

Jonas felt the pit of his stomach contract with nausea, he felt as though he were being shut up in an icy cold snow cave — no, more, that the whole of Norway was one cold snow cave, enclosing him within walls of ice — and he knew that the Colonel was up there in the control room, rubbing his hands with glee, and that he had long since caught all of his, Jonas’s little twitches, not to mention his shivers, in an all-revealing close-up. Veronika talked on and on, but Jonas knew that for the most part the Colonel kept the camera on him, the listener, the butt of this searing, and worse, persuasive, critique.

Then it was his turn. With an ironic little comment, Audun Tangen gave the floor to Jonas, it was up to him to respond. Out of habit he fixed his eye on the camera with the red light showing, but caught himself in the act and turned instead to Veronika, conscious, as he did so, of the Colonel’s voice in the headset of one of the cameramen, giving instructions for one of the cameras not in use to move in closer, with the result that off to one side he had a vision of a Scania-Vabis coming at him and was gripped by panic at the thought of being run over just as he was about to start talking — an ambush, sneaky — and perhaps that was why he suddenly had a mental block, could not remember even the half of what Veronika had said, but he knew that over a million TV screens throughout Norway were showing him in close-up, and that at that very moment millions of Norwegians had caught a whiff of a sensation, the chance that one of the biggest celebrities in Norway was about to break down, live on TV, and Jonas Wergeland did indeed feel rather weak, he knew that he had to find the angle that would crack this paralysis, break this strain, but he felt totally frozen, numb from head to toe, as if he were battling against a headwind, a headwind so stiff and chill that all he wanted to do was to lie down. ‘What do you have to say to these not exactly flattering words of criticism, Jonas Wergeland?’ Audun Tangen repeated in the same importunate, arrogant manner that had once won him such fame as Audun the Tongs, accompanying his words with a malicious smirk that said he knew Jonas Wergeland would never be able to parry this onslaught.

So do not forget the story that starts, or continues, at the moment when he realized just what a risk he was taking; that he should, of course, have done as the stupid safety regulations said, and turned back the minute they came out into the hollow in the hills and he saw his companion raising her eyes to the huge mountain straight ahead of them. They were heading south, towards the sun which only occasionally showed itself behind the clouds, in what would normally be described as heavy going: swirling snow and several degrees below freezing. The girl ahead of him on the track turned and grinned: ‘How’re you doing?’ He tried to smile back, feeling a cold sweat breaking out the length of his spine; he had been struck, after only the first few strides, by how deeply and sincerely he still hated this invention: skis, fibreglass now, and how terribly unfit he was; each time they stopped he had the urge to cough, his lungs seemed too small, and every inch of him pulsated with his heartbeat. They were making for a place she called Heddersvann: ‘a reasonable point to make for in such bad weather’, and let me just say right away that in writing the following I am treading with extreme care, because it deals with one of the few spheres in which Norwegians actually can boast greater expertise than any other nation: skiing.