Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Right or wrong as this may be — I prefer, as I pointed out earlier, to say as little as possible about Veronika Røed — she hid her ulterior motives well, sitting there in that television studio, quivering with aggression, attacking Jonas Wergeland for having confused an important discussion; Veronika was so het up that she was starting to contradict her own statements regarding television’s limited potential: ‘Alright, so you were telling a story,’ she said. ‘But that still only presents one snippet of a life, you still have not explained how all of these fragments are supposed to build up into the truth about a person? Because that’s what it all comes down to, Jonas Wergeland, and you can’t get away from it: the truth!’

Audun Tangen was all set to move on, even though he, the Grand Inquisitor himself, felt that all this labouring on about the truth was going over the score, but Jonas put his hands in the air, stopped him, indicated that he wished to answer, but that he just needed time to consider, and so there was this pause, ten seconds maybe, an eternity on television, with Audun Tangen constantly on the point of breaking in even though he could see how effective it was, how it created a sort of tension: Jonas Wergeland sitting as if frozen stiff, with his hands in the air; ten vital seconds for Jonas, those were, when suddenly he found himself recalling details he had seen in his life, a fir tree growing out of the rock-face on the banks of the Zambezi, the bicycle wheel trimmed with Monte Carlo cigarette packs, the rivets in a ship’s side slipping past only inches away, other such things, and the sum of all these details seemed to be telling him a story of a tangent, something else entirely, a way to shoot out of a wicked circle, out of the constant repetition, because all at once he was taking a critical view of his own success, and he realized that this room, that all Marienlyst, could not possibly be the hub for which he had always been searching, and of course it was Veronika’s question about the truth that was boring into him; Jonas would have liked to have stopped the world, stopped time, because suddenly the studio was acting like a thinking cap, charging him up, the whole of that tense situation, sitting there in front of three cameras, with his face being broadcast to one and a half million television screens, and his hands raised to a studio firmament filled with dazzling lights as if he were praying or having a vision — indeed people had later said that his face had shone with an inner light during those ten seconds, which is not so surprising since, during those moments it was revealed to Jonas Wergeland that this situation in which he now found himself need not determine anything: that this, which to others must have seemed to be the most decisive moment in his career, might just as easily be of no consequence whatsoever. After all, who was to say that it was in television that he was to do the work against which his life would one day be measured? Or, to put it another way: Jonas Wergeland realized that he had not stopped growing, that those ten years at NRK might well be no more than an insignificant parenthesis in his life; from this point onwards he could do anything at all, become something completely different , and yet again he felt a finger describing circles on his brow and then, abruptly, a straight line shooting out from it, a leap.

Ten seconds — an eternity — pass before he replies to Veronika’s question: ‘Again you’re forgetting what it all comes down to: fantasy. Stimulating our creative faculty. You’re doing what we Norwegians always do: Underestimate. You’re underestimating the viewing public. You’re forgetting that a viewer can easily create a whole picture out of fragments.’

Now, here, Jonas was back in his proper element, in front of television cameras that brought him straight through the screen and into millions of homes, and I mean through , because he almost seemed to be there in their living rooms. ‘You’re right,’ he said, knowing he could afford to indulge in an argument verging on the banal, knowing that his audience would consider it to be absolutely spot-on anyway: ‘I’ve left a lot up to the viewers’ imagination. You could say that I created a caterpillar, but only because I believe that a generous viewer has the ability to metamorphose it into a butterfly.’

Veronika could feel her victory slipping away from her. ‘A lot of very seductive talk,’ she said, fuming. ‘But you still haven’t answered my question as to what becomes of the truth.’

‘I’m not a minister,’ Jonas said, ‘I’m a storyteller.’ And from that moment on Jonas took over the show completely, because he had the idea of telling a story, to show what he meant, and to provide the only adequate response to these accusations, and he had many stories to choose from. He could tell them about a man playing opera music among the glaciers on Greenland, or he could tell them about an actor who sustained a cut to the eye, or he could tell them about an old lady who went around buying up fine works of art. Or why not the story of Hjallis’s fall or, even more incredible — not to say, improbable — the story of Norway’s expansion, how Norway multiplied its geographical area several-fold in the early sixties without anyone, not a single Norwegian, although they were normally such avid protesters, saying so much as a word? Instead, speaking straight to the camera, straight into people’s living rooms, he said that he was going to tell them the story — no more and no less — that had prompted him to make a television series about twenty-odd Norwegian men and women whose names have become part of the international vocabulary. So he told this story, he told it succinctly and well; it was the story of the beetle, and he told them, the viewers, just what a challenge, what an inspiration this story of the beetle was to the imagination and how it had given him the urge to make a series about a clutch of Norwegians who had not done what Norwegians are better at than anything else, namely, tearing down, moaning, criticizing, but who had, instead, done their part to build up, had helped the world to grow; people who showed that even Norwegians could think big. And he concluded with an appeal of sorts, to the effect that the entire future of Norway — a nation of only four million frozen souls — should ‘not be dependent on German interest rates, but solely on how we, the people of Norway, every single inhabitant, use our imaginations.’

It was one of the most extraordinary programmes in the history of NRK. It stuck in people’s memories in much the same way as Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream …’ speech; they were genuinely moved, sat there with lumps in their throats, and all because of a man who said, quite simply: ‘All I have done is to tell a story about thinking big.’

Then, just before the end, seeing that she was not going to get her answer anyway, Veronika leapt out of her seat and lunged at Jonas, ripping the ‘mic’ off her lapel in the process, and dealt him a clout round the ear, a resounding slap, right there, on camera.

Up in the control room, the Colonel was working frantically, hardly able to believe his luck, firing off orders simultaneously to the vision switcher and the cameramen. He had obtained some wonderful close-ups of Jonas Wergeland’s reaction, as it passed from a glare to a smile — possibly because he, Jonas, had guessed that Veronika had a motive known to few others: the front page of her newspaper — and a beautiful total in which Audun Tangen was seen trying to call Veronika Røed back as she stomped off the set, livid and lovely; after which the Colonel switched to the overhead camera up on the ceiling, to give an illusion of drifting away. And then, the trump card, the real stroke of genius; they showed the clout round the ear again, in slow motion, for two million Norwegians who were still rubbing their eyes in disbelief. The Colonel had borrowed a slow-motion controller — the sort used mainly for live coverage of athletics events — on the chance that something dramatic might happen. ‘Have you got it?’ he called. ‘Okay, run it slow!’ The sequence was shown over and over again while the credits rolled, and I hardly need say that that clip was to become a classic, regularly featured in programmes dealing with high points in the history of NRK.