Jan Kjærstad - The Conqueror

What was Jonas Wergeland saying with this? He was saying that Sonja Henie’s exercises on the ice, what she did, was just as childlike, just as lovely, just as mischievous and bold as Joan Miró’s paintings. And I’m sure you have already observed, Professor, how this closing scene puts one in mind of Jonas Wergeland’s experience in the forest as a little boy, the sight of a living brooch in the ground. It might not be going too far to regard the whole of the programme on Sonja Henie as a silvery tracery of ‘S’s and figures of eight on an enormous brooch of ice — that, at any rate, is how one critic summed it up: ‘A real gem.’ And if you were to ask anyone what they remember from that programme, this is the first thing they would mention, this shot of Sonja on the Miró painting; it has become a kind of national ornament, imprinted on the consciousness of the viewers.

Even those viewers — a fair number of older people — who had been negative to start with were delighted with Jonas Wergeland’s slant on Sonja Henie’s character. They realized what her unique talent had been when she was at her peak: to skate like no one else in the world. Sonja Henie elevated figure skating to an art form. She paired the essence of all things Norwegian, winter sport, with a global spirit. As a human being, and a Norwegian at that, Sonja Henie truly was one in a million.

Are you tired, Professor? Just one more story, then we’ll call it a night.

At the end of the eighties, after the last programme in the Thinking Big series had been screened, the plaudits rained down on Jonas Wergeland from all quarters. Advertisers felt that he had helped to colour the nation’s image of itself in that rare way in which only a troubadour can do with his simple yet unforgettable ballads. Teachers testified to the positive effect the series had had in terms of filling in the gaps in young people’s knowledge of history. Another outcome, more interesting within our own context, was all the interviews which Jonas Wergeland gave at that time, and in which he repeatedly used the same expression in describing his first years in television: ‘A life of luxury.’ Time and again too, he compared the chance he was given to make his earliest programmes with that of a trainee chef suddenly being given the run of a huge kitchen complete with every mod-con and all the world’s freshest raw ingredients, where his imagination alone set the limits for what he could serve up. The descriptions of Jonas Wergeland’s early days in television were positively aromatic, people said.

How does one become a conqueror?

The kitchen metaphor was not something Jonas had simply plucked out of thin air. The father of Jonas’s best friend, Little Eagle, was in fact a chef. He didn’t work just anywhere either, but at the imposing Grand Hotel in the very heart of Oslo. And not only that, but also at the very heart of the hotel, in a kitchen which, among other things, provided the sumptuous fare for one of the city’s most distinguished restaurants, the Mirror Room. Everyone who was anyone at that time had, at least once, to have trod the red carpet under the crystal chandeliers of the ‘Mirror’, as it was popularly called.

It was not uncommon for Little Eagle and Jonas to take the bus from Grorud to the city centre along with Mrs Larsen, and while Mrs Larsen did her secret errands in the department stores or met a woman friend at Halvorsen’s cake shop, she left the boys with her husband in the kitchen of the Grand Hotel, if he was on the early shift, that is — the Mirror opened at noon — and only with the blessing of the Italian chef de cuisine, naturally; he, like everyone else, had a bit of a soft spot for Mrs Larsen. ‘Madam,’ he would say, kissing her hand gallantly. ‘Your name should not be Larsen, it should be Lollobrigida.’

The kitchen was an enormous open space with white-tiled walls and two massive stoves, each standing under its own extractor hood. One stove was for the café and the Grand Basement, the other, at which Eagle’s dad worked, was where the food for the Mirror and the function rooms was prepared. If there was one thing Jonas never tired of, it was this: to sit on a chair on the fringes of a bustling kitchen chock-full of pots, pans, ladles, sauce-boats and gleaming silver platters; to sit there and watch as many as forty chefs dashing back and forth between spotless shelves and cabinets, between all manner of raw ingredients and spices with names that were a fairytale in themselves; to watch and listen to how they chopped and sliced, whisked and stirred, how orders were called across the room, peppered with splendid French words, to result in mysterious dishes such as Fillet of Plaice Tout Paris, Tournedos Chasseur or Lobster Thermidore, usually after the work had been split into stages, with one chef doing the frying, one making the sauce and one arranging the garnish, while a forth made a final, critical inspection of the plate before it was grabbed by one of the kitchen assistants and taken upstairs to the waiters. Almost like clockwork, Jonas thought.

Above this sizzling, seething world, with its odours to set the nostrils quivering and the stomach rumbling, in a glass-fronted booth, sat the chef de cuisine himself — first Hans Loose, and later the master chef Nicola Castracane — surveying the proceedings, as if from the bridge of a ship. Occasionally he might tap the glass with his pen and point to someone or other, for instance the trainee in charge of the sauce, whereupon the person concerned would immediately rush over with a bowl and hand this up to the booth so that the chef de cuisine could sample its contents and possibly issue an order in broken, but perfectly understandable, Norwegian: ‘You’ll never learn, Syversen — a little more salt, I said!’ It was like Father Christmas’s workshop, Jonas would think as he sat there, engrossed in the hectic activity around hobs and ovens, the pounding and chopping, all the steam and the sputtering mingled with the shouts, not least from waiters fuming with impatience: ‘Get a bloomin’ move on with that cod, will you, Anni!’

From where they sat, Little Eagle and Jonas could also keep an eye on the cold kitchen and pâtisserie section. Often they would sneak across to the counter in front of the latter — the main attraction here being the creation of the Grand’s most celebrated cake. ‘Aha, a couple of spies,’ Mr Metz, the pastry cook, would say. ‘Trying to steal the recipe for the best Napoleon cake in the world, eh? Well, well, then watch closely.’ Mr Metz would give them a sly look and whisper in his Danish-accented Norwegian: ‘The secret is to make the cake on the spot.’ As if to demonstrate, he would then place a cake base on the worktop. ‘The bases must, of course, be baked that same morning, so that they have that very special crispness. And there has to be plenty of rum in the cream filling.’ Drooling at the mouth, Jonas and Little Eagle observed how elegantly Mr Metz shaped the cream into a flat-topped cylinder in the centre of the circular base almost like a bricklayer with his trowel. ‘And the icing should be added only just before it’s served, so the base doesn’t go all soggy. Like so. Here you are, boys, try one.’ Jonas stuck the fork with the first bite into his mouth, feeling like an invincible commander-in-chief — like Napoleon before the battle of Austerlitz.

What Jonas liked best of all was the feeling of having gone behind the scenes, as it were, to the place where the real action was. It was like being granted a peek into the innards of Norway. Or like visiting a factory: seeing where the values were formed. For this seething, reeking, hissing room here below, fraught with screaming and yelling, was just as much the reality as the mirror-clad restaurant and the smartly dressed diners upstairs. Jonas realized that, as with a coin, there were two sides to reality. And he didn’t know which side he liked best. There was also something a bit scary about the kitchen, like the time when they were taken on a quick trip into the meat larder, where whole carcases hung in rows and people in heavy clothing were jointing the meat. This sight confirmed Jonas’s impression of the kitchen as a kind of underworld, a hell as much as a paradise.