Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Jonas sat there, staring up at the huge round scoop lamp, which was casting a special kind of light over him. Why should he defend himself? Was this a court of law?

‘So tell us: according to your programme, what is the truth about Hamsun? Was he a Nazi or not?’ It was Veronika’s voice, insistent.

Jonas heard the question. Recognized it. And knew that he was close to giving up. Because if there was one thing that the programme on Hamsun, the whole series, had taken issue with, it was this: the Norwegian’s demand for Great Simplicity. Light had to be either waves or particles. No Norwegian would accept that it could be both. The third option.

Again, Jonas was struck by a wave of nausea, because he was being forced to rise high in the air, to a point where all detail is lost and only the clear lines are discernible, because they were forcing him, in front of two million viewers, to give a simple answer, compelling him to conform to a pattern they could recognize.

And do not forget, either, the story which is bound up with, and indeed, lies at the root of this torment in a television studio, even if it did take place at an earlier point in time and on another continent, but which began with that same ominous feeling of nausea, mixed with a generous helping of dizziness. He had been sitting, lost in his own thoughts, over a notebook, when he heard a cry from outside. Although he was sure that his ears must have been deceiving him, Jonas went to open the window. On a narrow ledge outside the corresponding window of the next-door apartment stood a man. Ten storeys above the ground. Jonas was instantly struck by how appallingly simplified the whole situation was, so pressing that it made his stomach sink, and Jonas knew, as his limbs began to tremble, that this called for a swift and, above all, a simple response.

‘I’m gonna jump,’ the man said.

Jonas’s first thought was that this was a quite impossible situation, wrapped in such grotesque banality that it tipped over into unreality. He shut his eyes for a second and offered up a silent prayer to the Great Planner, that he might be spared this, but when he opened his eyes the man was still there, and he looked, what is more, as if he were gathering himself, was about to jump. All at once, Jonas found this confrontation quite comical; it had an age-old familiarity about it, there was something so hopelessly hackneyed about the whole scene — the combination of a desperate man on a narrow ledge and his potentially imploring helper — that the words ‘like a movie’ inevitably sprang to mind. The whole scenario was like some obligatory nightmare, a test, something to which every human being was subjected, to some extent, at some time in their lives.

Jonas glanced about. No one else had opened their windows. No crowd was gathering on the street below. Looking one way he could just make out the river, and when he turned the other way he saw a corner of the Chrysler building rearing up between the other buildings. He fixed on this, on the way the building’s distinctive spire sat directly behind the would-be suicide’s head, like a sort of crown or a jester’s cap.

‘I’m gonna jump,’ the man repeated, more firmly this time, turning his head towards Jonas for the first time as he did so. There was something about that face, a look there that he could not interpret, which cut through all talk of banality and made Jonas see that he had to do something, although he had no idea what .

‘Don’t jump,’ Jonas heard himself say; words that seemed to have been engendered by some genetically determined impulse, a moral instinct. But he could tell how hollow it sounded, wondered whether it might not, after all, be better to let the guy jump, so he could prove that he had the courage and could perhaps die a happy man.

‘Give me one reason, just one good reason, not to jump,’ the man on the ledge said, thereby indicating that his decision was not — Jonas found himself involuntarily thinking: unfortunately — altogether inflexible, and that this was going to be tricky. Into Jonas’s memory flashed something that Alva had once said, or maybe it was one of the other Nomads: There is only one really serious philosophical dilemma: suicide.

I am not going to trouble you with the details of the man’s full name or the reason for his profound despair, his wish to die. I will simply say that, as far as that goes, he had as plausible, which is to say ‘as good’, a reason to jump as any other suicide.

Jonas had been about to say something but thought better of it, because even as an unspoken thought he could tell it was a no-go, a ludicrous platitude. After all, what was this man asking? He was asking, quite simply and with horrible directness, for an answer to the meaning of life. He stood out there on a narrow ledge, ten storeys above the ground, asking for a reason to live, and Jonas Wergeland did not know, had not the foggiest notion, what to say. There had been times in his life when he could, with reasonable conviction, have come out with some relatively fine words on the meaning of life but sadly not now, ten storeys above the ground, in such an extreme, unbelievably unlikely situation — a real B-movie cliché! — at a time when he also had to think fast, and find something straightforward and simple. Some indisputable value. A turtle that was solid enough, a ground that would not shake, not too much at any rate, when you set your foot on it.

And yet he realized that he had to say something, his whole body was telling him so; something that would stop the man from jumping. He at least had to try to give this man an idea, a hope. Jonas hated the situation, found it hard to believe that it was actually happening, but there was a man out there on the ledge, with his face turned to him, and he, Jonas Wergeland, was the only person to be making any contact with the man, to see that face, and he had to say something, if nothing else he had to try. But what? What do you say to a man — a desperate man, robbed of his last fragile hope — to prevent him from jumping to his death?

Jonas Wergeland was in New York to make a programme for NRK TV about the Norwegian artist Per Krohg’s large mural in the Security Council chamber at the United Nations, a programme about art. Jonas had always wondered whether in some way Per Krohg might have had an influence on the political decisions made by the Security Council, due to its members having gazed at his mural during their deliberations.

Once they had finished shooting the programme Jonas had, however, stayed on in New York. He was totally burned out; he needed a break. Jonas Wergeland had made something of an impact at NRK — the so-called cognoscenti had taken a particular liking to his programmes — but the major breakthrough and ditto viewing figures had so far evaded him. The way Jonas Wergeland himself saw it, he still had not come up with a truly earth-shattering idea, one that would change everything, send him off down a new track. Up to that point, his programmes had mainly taken a negative slant, whereby he demolished, criticized, poured scorn on his subjects, but in the long run something in him reacted against this as if he knew in his heart of hearts that these were shoddy and, not least, unsatisfactory, tactics.

Earlier that day, he had stood on the deck of a ferry bound for Battery Park, after visiting Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty. It was almost as if he thought that the sight of the copper lady, that colossus, might jolt him into a state that would trigger the great idea. Instead, he fell into conversation with a man, a history teacher from London, who was also leaning on the rail, gazing across at the financial district, which was slowly coming towards them, like a barge loaded to the gunwales with rectangular boxes. As soon as he learned that Jonas was Norwegian, he asked: ‘Do you know who the greatest Viking of them all was?’