Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

For his own part, Jonas Wergeland was happiest with the ending — perhaps because they had been the first foreign television crew for many years to be granted permission, without bribing anyone, to film at the top of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, which says much for Jonas Wergeland’s rare gift for seducing people. They had gone so far over the top in this scene that it teetered on the very brink of pure parody. Norman Vaage, clad in a copy of Ole Bull’s concert dress, looked magnificent standing on the top of the pyramid in the sunset next to a fluttering Norwegian flag, overlooking Cairo and the Nile and the desert, playing, or supposedly playing ‘The Saeter Girl’s Sunday’ with such a passionate expression on his face and such theatrical gestures and such power that anyone would have thought he was trying to bring down the Great Pyramid the way the Hebrews had done farther east with the walls of Jericho. The diamonds set in to the tip of the bow, sparkled in the light and the music, that melancholy Norwegian melody, was so irredeemably unctuous, going as far as it decently could without slipping over into an unadulterated gypsy serenade, while Ole Bull, alias Normann Vaage, finished off — or so it seemed to the viewers — by releasing a white dove from the violin case. In addition, the Bedouin extras had been encouraged to act even more awestruck than the story would have it, if that were possible, which is to say that they fell to their knees as if bewitched, exclaiming ‘Allah, Allah!’ In Jonas Wergeland’s version even the camels knelt before him.

Jonas realized, of course, that Ole Bull had to be viewed in the light of the nineteenth-century concert tradition, whereby the performer was very much an improviser, creating the music as he went along; nonetheless Jonas wanted also to leave some room for those critical voices which hold that Ole Bull was more of a buffoon and a conjuror than a musician, not to say composer, of real standing and maintain that Bull had to resort to cheap tricks and bravura displays for want of genuine virtuosity. And here Wergeland was alluding to a particularly Norwegian syndrome: that in Norway one can at best be a virtuoso but never creative and certainly never innovative — as exemplified by Ole Bull, who could have been one of the truly great musicians but who possibly let this opportunity slip by not taking lessons, so that one cannot but agree with Franz Liszt when that temperamental gentleman declared in the midst of a private contretemps that the name of Ole Bull would have been forgotten by Europe when the world was still paying homage to his, Liszt’s, memory. Nevertheless Jonas Wergeland succeeded in highlighting Bull’s greatest gift to the Norwegian people, both in his own day and today: his innate ability to kindle excitement in others. There were many viewers who felt that Ole Bull not only conquered Cheops but also the heart of the Norwegian people. Ole Bull’s was a fine, uplifting story, a fairy tale to his contemporaries, the first and greatest red-letter day of their lives, as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson — for once — so aptly put it, a Norwegian who played a whole night long in the Colosseum in the moonlight and proved that even an insignificant little country such as Norway could make its mark in the big wide world: a fact which to this very day the nation finds it hard to comprehend, with the result that they have to go to the length of creating advertising campaigns costing millions of kroner, taking out full pages in the newspapers to persuade more Norwegians that they are as good as the rest of the world.

Although Jonas Wergeland had long since become used to the power of television, he could still be surprised by its unforeseen consequences. After the programme on Ole Bull people rushed out in droves to buy the soundtrack from it, which included ‘ Polacca guerriera ’, the relatively unknown piece by Bull that had run like a deep, irresistible undercurrent throughout the programme. It was also gratifying to note that this record had been made by a young Norwegian musician — the same violinist whom Jonas Wergeland had used in the programme — so this was just one of many examples of the way in which, through his television series, Jonas Wergeland played his part in promoting many talented artists, thus triggering a wave of creativity within many areas of the Norwegian arts scene.

And now, not to something before or after this, but above it all. I mentioned an old injury to Jonas Wergeland’s knee. One of life’s paradoxes is that things happen and yet we refuse to accept that they do just happen, by which I mean that we go around brooding over how and why this or that could happen, someone falling into a river, someone having to jump in, even years after the actual event when life has long since moved on, and on this score we would appear to have inexhaustible reserves of energy, so much so that generation after generation will sit down and brood, for example, over what might have happened had it not rained on the day before the battle of Waterloo. And it is every bit as pointless to go around wondering how Jonas Wergeland’s story would have turned out if only he had been paying more attention to where he was going or at any rate if he had not fallen head over heels for Margrete’s nose.

It was their wheels which brought them together. This was in fifth grade, a first encounter which was to give rise to quite a little local legend, there having been so many witnesses. It was springtime, with coltsfoot growing on all the banks and a strong whiff of bonfires in the air, a sign, if you like, that this was a season when things could easily be set aflame. Jonas came wheeling down from Bergensveien, from the housing estate of the new middle-class; Margrete was riding over from Teppabakken, Grorud’s answer to Holmenkoll — Heights, if one can refer to that area of fine old houses in such terms. As I say, there they were, riding along at a fair lick, coming from opposite directions and both set to turn in through the same, relatively narrow, school gate. It was bound to end in disaster.

It suddenly occurs to me, my theme here being that of collision, that it may have been a little thoughtless of me just to set this wheel of stories, all that has gone before, spinning without any sort of a preface or explanation. I ought to have introduced myself, I know, but I am very much afraid that this would only lead to misunderstanding. For some, this tale would thus be lent too much authority; it would lose all credibility in the eyes of others. My own popularity is, after all, plummeting, and — this much I can say — I am now so much persona non grata that a lot of people have declared me to be dead. I must, therefore, choose my words with care. I am who I am. More than that I cannot say.

I could of course have gone about this in some other way, but eager as I am to get my views across, I have no choice but to settle for a level — adopt a genre, style, call it what you will — which is totally alien to me and which cannot help but make the story as a whole seem somewhat unsatisfactory, not to say slapdash, something which is not helped by the fact that I happen to be putting this in writing, a medium so far removed from that over which Jonas Wergeland exercised such supreme command, and using the Roman alphabet to boot. Not only that, but I originally wrote it in Norwegian, a language spoken — in some cases better than others — by around four or five million people. Here I would like to take the opportunity to apologize for those linguistic errors and idiosyncrasies which were bound to crop up in the original and just as inevitably be carried over into this rendering, not to mention all of the — doubtless unwarranted — analytical passages. I would be the first to admit that I can in no way be said to have mastered all the stylistic levels of the Norwegian language. Nonetheless, I have — this, too, I confess — regarded the writing of this manuscript as a challenging experiment.