The Conqueror

Napoleon

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.

Ørn’s dad was one of the kitchen’s head chefs — ‘Three-Star Larsen’ they called him — and Little Eagle was manifestly proud of his father, garbed in his chef’s hat and jacket and, not least, his gingham-check trousers, bawling out orders to right and left: ‘For God’s sake, don’t scorch that sauce, Berg, it’s for Mr Mustad’s fish.’ Or: ‘A Porterhouse steak for James Lorentzen the ship-owner. Remember, he wants it rare and with a good rim of fat.’ Sometimes he would come over to the boys, point to a mouth-watering plate: ‘That’s for Wenche Foss, the famous actress,’ he would say with a wink.

On one occasion they were allowed to leaf through the menu. Jonas had no idea what all these things were: turtle soup Lady Curzon, Sole Colbert, Crêpes Suzette, Caviar Mallasol served on crushed ice. But what impressed him most were the prices. He had never thought about it before, how anyone could afford to eat here — that Norwegians like themselves actually entered these premises and sat down to eat under the crystal chandeliers. His parents had never been here, nor anyone else from the estate, as far as he knew. The Mirror, the Grand, was another world, like some dazzling Hollywood film set, a totally unimaginable realm — the exclusive province of the very rich or certainly the well-to-do.

And this, Professor, is one of the points of this story: how, when he grew up, Jonas Wergeland forgot this: how he thought nothing of frequenting the finest restaurants in Norway, in the world for that matter, and stuffing himself unconstrainedly with all manner of delights, without pausing for a moment to consider what a miracle it was, that he — only one generation removed from a breed of thrifty folk, scrimpers and savers — dined in restaurants as often as he ate at home; in the blink of an eye he had been transformed from a spectator, with his nose pressed against the restaurant’s windowpane so to speak, to a gluttonous, gastronomic participant — now that is a story about Norway today, and it’s something to think about.

Sometimes Jonas and Little Eagle went up to visit the waiters who held sway, in their dark-blue mess jackets, in the serving pantry. If there wasn’t too much to do Mr Gundersen would make the boys that exotic beverage, an iced tea, or he would explain how to use the mysterious cash register, when he wasn’t over at the warming counter, teaching them a real fakir’s trick: how to balance two scalding-hot plates on one hand.

What surprised Jonas most, on these visits, was all the fuss when somebody famous sat down at one of the tables. The shout would suddenly go up: ‘Sonja Henie’s here’, and everybody knew that a glass of champagne rosé would shortly be carried out to the lithe lady in the white fur, who sat with her gold champagne whisk at the ready. Occasionally, the waiters would also cluster behind the automatic swing doors into the restaurant, the opening mechanism of which could be overridden to allow them to peer discreetly at the diners through the two narrow panes of glass. Sometimes Mr Gunderson would lift up Jonas and Little Eagle in turn and point out a particularly famous patron. ‘That rather starchy-looking gent over there is Francis Bull,’ he would say. ‘And the handsome, curly-headed chap over by the dance floor is Toralv Maurstad.’ Another day a lanky-looking character caught Jonas’s eye. ‘That’s Leif Juster,’ Mr Gundersen said. ‘He’s got his dog underneath the table — don’t tell anybody!’

One such moment was to have a certain bearing on Jonas Wergeland’s life. More folk than usual had flocked excitedly around the door into the Mirror, including the ladies from the coffee kitchen half a flight down, and when the boys asked Mr Gunderson what all the fuss was about — was it a government minister, a shipping magnate? — he told them, beaming with pride, that none other than so-and-so himself was sitting there in the restaurant, eating black grouse in a cream sauce. Neither Jonas nor Little Eagle recognized the name. Mr Gundersen snorted. They must be joking! Did they really not know who that was? He was a presenter on the Evening News. ‘He’s on the TV,’ Gundersen intoned respectfully, as if these words put paid to all questions, all doubt.

And eventually the boys were lifted up to the glass and Jonas saw this person, a newsreader whose name need not be cited here, since he has been completely forgotten, as a name that is, because he no longer appears on television, although he still works for NRK and now fulfils, it must be said, a far more important role. Let me remind you that this was in the infancy of television, when the Evening News wasn’t even broadcast every evening. Some people may perhaps remember the opening credits: a globe with the programme’s title swirling around it in a streamer, accompanied by a fanfare of trumpets. This was a time when people regarded these NRK employees, these perfectly ordinary journalists, almost as being the voice of God Himself.

Jonas did not, however, react with the same awe as the waiters and the others. He did remark on the lovely light that fell on the newsreader, partly from the window and partly from the mirrors and the crystal, in such a way that a special aura seemed to hang about him; but what Jonas notices above all else is that in front of him, at this very moment, this personage has his dessert, has one of the Grand’s celebrated Napoleon cakes, as if — through his choice of dessert — wishing to underline his status as a modern-day conqueror.

Only later was the significance of this episode brought home to Jonas. He realized that television did something to people. Or, more importantly: it had never occurred to Jonas that a person could sit quite still in a chair, yet still be out there conquering. You hardly had to do a thing. All you had to do was to read from a sheet of paper, all you had to do was show your face. Your power stemmed not from wealth or knowledge but from being seen. Could there be any cheaper form of fame? Unbeknown to himself, once he had comprehended this Jonas felt an unutterable sense of relief.

This lesson did not sink in, however, until much later. In the first instance, it was remarkable that Jonas, despite having seen the restaurant and these famous people, did not for a moment cherish a dream of one day sitting there himself, or think that some day there might even be a couple of lads sitting in that kitchen who, when someone said: ‘This chateaubriand is for Jonas Hansen’, would cry out: ‘Wow! Jonas Hansen!’ No, after these visits, Jonas had only one thought: he wanted to be a chef.

After Jonas, his surname long since changed to Wergeland, had made his first appearance on television, as an announcer, when he had in other words taken the first step towards a degree of celebrity the like of which has rarely been seen in Norway, one of the first things he treated himself to was, however, a meal at one of the capital’s finest restaurants. One could, therefore, ask oneself whether Jonas Wergeland perhaps denied his own boyish instinct, which said that a skilled chef was much more to be admired than a face that simply read from a sheet of paper. It might look as though his aim was not to serve but to be served. Or, to put it another way: as though he chose the side of reality’s coin which showed the golden surface, rather than the clamorous, steaming, value-forming chaos on the reverse.

Maybe I’m being unfair. Because, in the studio, Jonas Wergeland never quite rid himself of the feeling that he actually found himself in a vast kitchen, that in making programmes, his ideal was to dish up tasty, aromatic food for the people of Norway — they were, so to speak, patrons in his restaurant, a chamber full of light and magic mirrors.