The Discoverer (31 page)

So when he destroyed the whole lot, every last sheet of it, I was struck by a sense of responsibility. I had read it. I remembered a lot of it. Certain details word-perfect even. And I knew that many of these stories deserved to be made public.
Ought
to be made public. I also had something of an
advantage
. I knew a lot from before. In my more presumptuous moments I actually felt as though I knew everything. I had once drawn pictures with him. I had sat up in a tree with him and asked him why the sky was blue. I had been a child in his arms. And a child sees a great deal. I did not know him from the television, I knew him face to face; I knew him with my fingers and my cheek and my nose. Not only that but, particularly during the years when my brain was at its most malleable, he had been the person to whom I talked the most. I loved him more than anyone in the world. If the young Jonas was right, if the whole point of life was to save lives, then I had a job to do: to save him, metaphorically speaking, from drowning in lies.

What held me back was not my inevitable sympathy for him – I
considered
this a strength, not a weakness – but the thought of having to write a book, of actually putting words on paper. Because I realised that no other medium would do. If I was to get my message across. If I was to succeed in driving a wedge of doubt into the fossilised myths surrounding him. If I was ever to be able to say something about his genius, the origins of his creativity, the motives behind that peerless work of art
Thinking Big
– arguably
Norway
’s
greatest cultural contribution to the world in the twentieth century. I
would of course have preferred to use my own form, my own medium, but that was still in its infancy, it was nowhere near being fully developed. And few people understood it. Few people were
willing
to understand it. I had to make a compromise, take up again a tool I had abandoned in favour of something better. I was also forced to resort to a genre, the biography, which was akin to an antiquated, all but obsolete – though still popular – fictional form. It scared me. To have so much to say, to know so much – and to have to employ such an imperfect, passé mode of expression. To risk being dismissed for being too conventional, for sticking to the set rules for how to render
characters
vivid and believable; notions based on simple, recognisable elements, a set of ‘valid’ devices born of centuries of literature. I felt as though I was setting to work with a hammer and chisel.

I knew, of course, that in undertaking this task, I was stepping out into a whole industry – or perhaps I should say: onto a battlefield. And the
merchandise
to be fought over was Jonas Wergeland, his life and reputation. Not least the latter. At the point when I started writing, eleven books about him – not to mention countless news reports and articles – had already been
published
. Of the eight which appeared after his conviction and imprisonment, six would have to be described as extremely negative, almost derisive, with their hindsightful, moralistic tone. The two exceptions were Kamala Varma’s book and the curious biography, penned by another it is true, but at Rakel W. Hansen’s behest. I soon realised that my own writing style had been coloured by these two last-named works – possibly because in them I discerned
something
I could use, an approach which I recognised from my proper work.

The writing of Jonas Wergeland’s story should have been a laudable project. He was a figure from a period of change, in many ways the last
representative
of a bygone age, a television age – dare I say: an uncomplicated age. And yet, despite my good intentions I could not rid myself of an underlying scepticism. Or doubt. As I wrote, as I attempted to recapitulate some of the stories Jonas himself had grappled with in his manuscript, I kept wondering whether it was possible, in this limited and dauntingly simple form, to gain some clue to the one question which occupied me more and more and which rapidly became my deepest motive for writing: Why did he do it?

Throughout the sail down Aurlandsfjord he sat up on deck, making notes quite openly. He kept looking up, looking around him, as if he could not get enough of this landscape, could hardly believe it was real. Now and again he would catch my eye, smile, then drop his gaze as if suddenly feeling shy. Although in truth he
was
shy. I always had the feeling that his eyes were the key. Sometimes they would glow so fiercely that it was almost frightening. It was so ardent, that look; he seemed to have to make a conscious effort to
tone it down. I have heard women describe those eyes as ‘penetrating’. They felt that he saw all the way in to their innermost recesses. Or
beyond
them, as Kamala said. But it was not that simple. The real reason for the look in his eyes was shyness. The fact of being strong, but embarrassed by his strength. It was, as I have already suggested, this that set him apart from other television personalities. Such a focused gaze, such an intense presence, combined with a sort of bashfulness, as if he really did not want to be there at all. Was
constantly
questioning, felt uncomfortable with his own part in things. When you saw his face on the TV screen you had the impression that he was doing his best to hide something, some piquant secret. The effect was astonishing. A bit like seeing a good actor underplaying a part. Television viewers could scarcely believe their eyes: here, at last, was someone – a baffling exception to the hordes of exhibitionist, publicity-mad NRK personalities – who held something back, a man who could have ruled the world, but chose to appear on Norwegian television. That was why they loved him.

I was glad that he had hit it off so well with the crew of the
Voyager
,
especially
with Martin. I could hear them down in the galley, discussing how to make
pasta al burro
. ‘Don’t argue with me,’ Jonas was saying. ‘I learned to cook from an Italian chef in Grorud. A chef by the name of Leonardo, no less.’ With Hanna he tended to talk mostly about music; he was impressed by the string quartet collection she had brought along with her, although he could not understand how anyone could prefer Bartók to Haydn.

At this point I became aware of a problem. I was finding it more and more difficult to work on two projects at once, even though one of them, the book about him, was simply stewing away at the back of my mind. I realised that I was observing him as much as our surroundings – which ought to have had my complete and undivided attention. While studiously mapping out folk museums, farm museums and galleries in Aurland and Flåm, I was just as busy studying him. I observed him as if seeing him in the flesh could show me whether what I had written, what I was thinking of writing, was correct. True.

I began to suspect that his presence was, to an ever-greater extent,
colouring
my ideas concerning the OAK Quartet’s product, the groundwork for which we were laying on this sail along the fjord. Or that, in my mind, he had taken charge of the project. Or that these two were one and the same. As I wandered around Aurlandsvangen, looking at the shoe factory, the remarkable church – Sogne Cathedral – and the old Abelheim guesthouse, he was constantly in my thoughts. One day when I had gone for a walk on my own to consider whether we ought to link the writer Per Sivle with Flåm or with Stalheim and whether we should include anything at all on humanist
Absalon Pedersøn Beyer – who hailed from Skjerdal, just north of Aurland – I suddenly stopped to look at Jonas Wergeland. He was sitting by the fence surrounding the playing fields alongside the river, up next to the school and the community centre, watching some boys practising the long jump. All at once I remembered why he should be so interested in seeing how far the boys could jump. I got distracted, forgot all about Per Sivle.

In everything he did or said I saw or heard stories, or connections with stories. The evening before we left Lærdal I happened to open a document and read something I had written about his programme on Thor Heyerdahl. He could not have known this, but when we cast off the next morning he said, with a sly glint in his eye: ‘This boat is another
Kon-Tiki
. A vessel which will prove whether it is possible to sail from the continent of the past to that of the future. From an old life to a new.’ He was talking, of course, about himself, but still.

Deep inside Aurlandsfjord Jonas stood gazing up at the steep slopes and high mountains rising on either side. ‘What is Samarkand compared to this?’ I heard him murmur. Although, did he actually say that? Or was it only a voice inside my head? At one point, after staring open-mouthed at my first sight of the tiny church at Undredal, the snow-covered peaks rearing up out of the valley beyond, I happened to glance round, to look up at Stigen, the little hill farm perched on its ledge – had people really lived there, and managed to scrape a living from it – and saw Jonas staring at a power line running across the fjord just ahead of us, strung with those spherical orange markers that look like basketballs; I heard later that a Dutch fighter plane had had a near miss there. Jonas stood there, utterly mesmerised, gripping the main shroud and peering up at the high-voltage cable. ‘Are you thinking of Lauritz, your uncle?’ I asked gently. He nodded, somewhat surprised that I should be able to guess this. I was not alone in seeing stories in the landscape. When Carl arrived with the car – he had driven through the new tunnel and was full of ideas for ways in which we could present the most spectacular stretches of road around the fjord – and we prepared to carry on down to Flåm, to see what we could possibly make of the railway line there, which had already been done to death, Jonas chose instead to go and take a look at a dam built as part of the hydro-electric development in the Aurland region. He ordered a taxi, asked to be taken to Låvisdalen. He wanted to find the spot where Olav Knutzen had taken that famous photograph of Leonard. ‘You understand, don’t you?’ he said to me. I understood.

Leonard’s father was, as I have said, not just anybody. Some people may recognise the name Olav Knutzen, since he was at one time a well-known photographer with the working-class press. And if the last part of his
surname evokes associations with a Zen master then that is not really so
surprising
, since Leonard’s father could almost have scored a bull’s eye blindfold. He had such an eye for things, as well as a set of values so solid that he could make a picture of a granite quarry in Grorud seem as fascinating as the rock tombs in Egypt’s Valley of Kings.

The basement room in which Jonas and Leonard nursed their youthful wrath was not only painted red – an ideological prerequisite, you might say; the walls were also covered with framed photographs calling to mind the growth and the triumphs of modern Norway. Because Olav Knutzen was a staff photographer with
Aktuell
weekly; he called himself ‘a reporter with a camera’.
Aktuell
was the sort of publication in which the pictures were as important as the words. The international flagship of such publications was
Life
magazine. These days, when the full media circus seems to be on hand for every occurrence, it is easy to forget that there was a time when a single photograph could be the cause of an event becoming known worldwide. As Thor Heyerdahl discovered when he sold the photographs from the
Kon-Tiki
expedition to
Life
: pictures which captured the imagination of the people in a way that written reports of the expedition could not do.

It is to be hoped that many do still remember
Aktuell
, that admirable weekly, which had its foundations in the labour movement and its roots in the old ideal of popular education. Younger generations may well find it hard to imagine that such a thing ever existed in Norway. And if anyone should wonder whether we have lost sight in Norway of certain ideals and values, all you have to do is lay some copies of the old
Aktuell
alongside its modern-day equivalent: the tabloid
Se og Hør
. Jonas was, of course, familiar with
Aktuell
before he and Leonard became best friends, not least thanks to the pile of old copies in the attic of his grandfather’s house on Hvaler. Jonas never tired of reading those dusty magazines. Which is to say: he looked at the pictures – photographs of reindeer races at Kautokeino, or from a revival meeting in Skien, or from a farm halfway up a mountainside run by two sisters, little old ladies in their eighties, or from Mandal where – Jonas stared in disbelief – Arnardo’s elephants could be seen lumbering through the streets. I think it is safe to say that during the first couple of decades after the war this magazine represented the contemporary equivalent of television. Like an earlier day’s
Round Norway
it presented the country to the people.

While waiting for Leonard to finish his dinner meatballs Jonas would sit in the Knutzens’ red-painted basement, leafing through the back numbers of
Aktuell
ranged proudly on the shelf alongside the Workers’ Encyclopedia – as if this were all the learning one needed. He studied picture spreads depicting the building, step-by-step, of a tanker, or the life at the huge steelworks in
Mo i Rana. Some of the street scenes in the older numbers were especially fascinating, not least if the subjects were familiar to him. Had the Eastern station really looked like that? And the bus stop by the gasworks? Such
photographs
were clear proof of how time flew. Only fifteen years ago, and yet things seemed unrecognisable. For Jonas,
Aktuell
was rather like an
Illustrated
Classics version of an ideology. Jonas Wergeland never read up on the theoreticians of the labour movement, but he always felt that he had some knowledge of the subject, just as he knew a bit about Joseph Conrad’s
Lord Jim
after reading the comic-strip version.

Aktuell
presented articles from all over the world, but what Jonas liked best were the features and series on Norway. From the Red Room’s somewhat dilapidated sofa he could accompany the fishermen to the fishing fields,
lumberjacks
into the forest, construction workers into tunnels;
Aktuell
described a day in the life of a checkout lady, it followed the course of rubbish men through the city and depicted the world inhabited by the potato peelers at the Rainbow Restaurant. Below many of his favourite photographs Jonas could read the name of Leonard’s father, Olav Knutzen. Sometimes all it said was OK, as if this were a stamp indicating that these pictures or – why not? – the reality they portrayed had been approved. ‘In a basement room in Grorud I got to know Norway,’ he was to say later. When Jonas Wergeland thought back on the golden age of the Norwegian Labour Party he always thought of
Aktuell
magazine.