The Discoverer

Neptune

The most important story has not yet been told. That of the emergence of a genius. How could one man enthral so many thousands, almost inspire an entire nation to change direction. How could anyone come up with an idea as exceptional as that conceived by Jonas Wergeland.

That seminal work of art Thinking Big, a feat unparalleled in the history of modern Norwegian thought, has faded from the minds of the Norwegian people. It is a puzzle, and more than a little depressing, but it is nonetheless a fact. Not that the programmes have been forgotten — clips from them are still doing the rounds. There is always a chance, in any gathering, of someone mentioning a scene in which Henrik Ibsen wanders around inside his own brain; or, while out skiing with friends, referring to a programme in which Fridtjof Nansen stood and wept. Jonas Wergeland had a gift for creating scenes as unforgettable as a riff, a phrase you simply cannot get out of your head — but people no longer remember the import of that series, that voyage of discovery, if you like. The great majority have forgotten how much his programmes affected them, inspired them, you might say; how, when they switched off the television, they had a powerful urge to talk to someone about what they had seen. A great many of them said the same thing: they felt like doing something. It is no exaggeration to say that, for a whole year, a couple of million Norwegians were on the verge of changing their outlook on life. Changing themselves.

Why did he do it? Or how?

A lot happened to Norwegian television during Jonas Wergeland’s time in prison. On the plus side possibly just one thing: the appearance of the first Negro television host. ‘Negro’ has to be the correct term here, since, even though they believed themselves to be living in a multicultural society, people said to themselves: Gosh, a Negro on NRK — much as the sight of an African in Oslo in the fifties made people turn their heads with a: Gosh, a Negro on Karl Johans gate. Other than that, it was the decline in standards which struck one, the increasingly desperate attempts to win viewers. And the monotony of it, a so-called diversity which, in actual fact, meant almost identical programmes on hundreds of channels, a diversity the essence of which was repetition. In the battle for viewers — read: money — all the television companies were offering the same product.

Jonas Wergeland foresaw this development even before the advent of his own glory days. On his return from Montevideo in the mid-eighties he gave a lecture at the NRK studios. Hardly anyone attended it. The organisers of the evening seminar — all honour to their names — wrote it off as a total flop. But since then that meeting has acquired a legendary status equal to that of the inaugural meetings of political parties which altered the course of history. And if everyone who boasts of having been in attendance truly had been there, the NRK headquarters would not have been big enough to hold them all.

What did he talk about? After a complete, and somewhat sardonic, rundown of the previous week’s broadcasts on NRK TV, he concluded by saying: ‘Television is a marvellous invention. Is this really the best we can do with it?’ The remainder of the lecture was devoted to a ruthless critique of his own work, as good as a confession, some said. Wergeland confined himself strictly to his own productions when it came to citing examples of unoriginality. From the platform he made a vow that from now on he was going to make programmes unlike anything ever made before. It might not be going too far to say that Jonas Wergeland wished to be a Negro on the Norwegian television scene; he wanted to come from the outside and show Norwegians strange things about their own country which they had never noticed. He wanted to turn the viewers into see-ers.

What happened in Montevideo?

In Montevideo Jonas Wergeland was down for the count. An observer would have doubted whether he was capable of conceiving any ideas at all. Because in Montevideo, in the far-off country of Uruguay, Jonas Wergeland spent most of his time slumped in a deckchair, all alone on a vast, deserted beach, staring out to sea, or rather the Rio de la Plata. On the other hand, it should come as no surprise to anyone that a Norwegian should have had the great revelation of his life while lounging in a deckchair, considering that Norwegians have grown up, so to speak, in chairs designed to allow one to recline at one’s ease. That deckchair was, for Jonas, what the bathtub had been for Archimedes.

This was in October. Behind him Jonas had several years as a programme-maker. Fired by his unorthodox studies in London he had produced shows which, while they may have had a certain zest and were technically superb — his colleagues were full of praise for him — lacked the magic ingredient which could pin a large proportion of the population to their seats as well as making them think, feel, that they had seen something unique and hence important, something which concerned them personally. Jonas himself knew exactly what was missing: an original idea. Not little ideas for single programmes, but a vision, a unifying concept. He needed a rest. And so it was that in that most burnt-out phase of his life he went out into the world, going pretty much wherever the wind took him, and eventually ended up in Uruguay, in Montevideo. It may have been something about the name — a combination of letters containing the verb ‘to see’ — which drew him. He needed a lookout point. And yet he could never have imagined that this point would turn out to be a person. That it would be a woman, and that her name would be Ana.

He booked in to the Hotel Carrasco, an old and somewhat dilapidated establishment near the road running along the waterfront, the Rambla Naciones Unidas, a palm-lined avenue which wound its way along the coast, past seven white beaches, into the centre of the city. Surrounded by well-tended gardens and pine trees, the hotel still retained traces of the grandeur it had enjoyed in a not too distant past thanks to its casino. Jonas felt at home there right away, he liked the faint air of decadence: the flaking Baroque exterior, the sleepy ballrooms, the cracked marble tiles in the bathroom. It suited his mood. I’m not a tourist, he told himself, I’m a patient in a sanatorium.

In Montevideo the summer season ran from December to the middle of March. Out of season you had the beach to yourself, even though the weather was as warm as a Norwegian summer. It suited Jonas perfectly: a city where you could lounge in a red deckchair, under a blue-striped parasol, on a beach that went on for miles. Just him and the wind, just him and the sun, just him and the waves. He relished this solitude. He did not so much as read a newspaper, simply lay there, lay there with a vague ache in his chest. For Jonas, difficulty in thinking had always been associated with the feeling of having something wrong with his lungs, of not being able to breathe properly. Had he not known better, he would have thought he had TB. I ought to go for an X-ray, he thought listlessly. Just to be on the safe side.

He sat motionless in a deckchair, gazing out across the water, thinking about what he should take with him, or thinking without being conscious of thinking. He may not even have been thinking at all. He may have been almost in a state of coma, not unlike that inhabited by Viktor Harlem. When Jonas visited Viktor at the institution, he would catch himself staring in fascination at the face of his friend as he sat there in a Stressless chair angled towards the television whether it was on or not. Jonas had always, even after the accident, regarded Viktor as a kindred spirit.

Day after day, Jonas lay in a comfortable deckchair thinking, or dozing, on a long white beach. Maybe this was the Norwegian’s lot: to be a holiday-maker in the world. An observer by the sea. Nevertheless, it must have been this enervating passivity which at one point caused him to remember another time, a time of activism, a period when he had actually been a rebel. Truth to tell, when Jonas Wergeland was taken into police custody in the wake of Margrete’s death, it was not his first run-in with the powers that be; he had also been carted off to the police station once before — the old headquarters at Møllergata 19 on that occasion — and even though this happened at the beginning of a decade characterised by manifold forms of rebellious unrest, I think it is safe to say that this was the first and last time on which a court ever fined a teenager clad in a Nehru jacket and brandishing a placard inscribed with a fiery slogan in Marathi, a language spoken a fairly long way away from Oslo, namely in the Bombay region.

Not all that many demonstrations from Norway’s idyllic post-war period will be remembered. The Mardøla protest is one. And the campaign against the hydro-electric power station at Alta, of course, not least for the Lapps who pitched their tents and staged a hunger strike outside the Norwegian Parliament, and still more for the occupation by outraged Lapp women of Prime Minister — and former Minister for the Environment — Gro Harlem Brundtland’s office. Another incident which is sure to stand the test of time is the demonstration staged by Jonas Wergeland and his two friends from high school. This also marked Jonas’s first appearance on television: a brief clip which has fortunately been preserved, and deservedly so; this was an event of great symbolic value, one which said a lot about modern Norway.

The brains behind it was, as always, Viktor Harlem. If he had had to choose between his two chums, Jonas would probably have come down in favour of the restless Pound devotee who had drawn inspiration from the lush, green Hedmark countryside around the Løiten distillery until his parents divorced. Viktor — with his eternal black polo necks, eager baby face and fine hair — was a born rebel and freethinker. Jonas always felt a little distanced from Axel Stranger, who came from a well-to-do home on the west side of Oslo and was more of a silk-tie, patent-leather shoe sort of rebel, a rather arrogant revolutionary with a Frogner drawl, a managing-director father, three dinner suits in his wardrobe and a maid who presented him every morning with the world’s most elaborate and delectable packed lunch, complete with parsley sprig. In a way, that in itself was an act of rebellion, to even dare to open it at school, in front of his gawping classmates.

The chums — non-conformists to the core — called themselves The Three Heretics, and they met regularly in a flat in Grunerløkka which Viktor had more or less to himself. Here, in a room lined with shelves laden with books about and by Ezra Pound, they could sit undisturbed, finding fault with everything and everyone and boosting their energy levels every so often with swigs of a lethal, greenish variant of absinthe, obtained through Viktor’s boyhood friends from the more anarchic corners of Hedmark. The Three Heretics cherished the principles of marginalism — or, in Jonas’s parlance: the outside left. According to Viktor, one should never look for a centre or a core, in people or in life. ‘Out on the edge, that’s where life is,’ he declared, raising his glass. ‘In the centre there’s nothing but red-hot chaos. Look at the Earth!’

In everyone’s life there is a time like this, a glorious phase — rather like a long recess — when God is dead and everything is allowed. During their high-school years The Three Heretics were almost always to be found in Viktor’s flat in Seilduksgata, dismantling — or, to use a word that would later come into vogue: deconstructing — all of the prevailing schools of thought and leaving the pieces scattered about in all their pathetic absurdity. And now and again they even got off their backsides and went out to put their heretical theories into practice. These acts were invariably memorable; all their woolly ramblings seemed to give the trio added incentive, a barricade-storming urgency — or maybe one should say a bad conscience. On one occasion, though, they bit off more than they could chew: when they tried to break down an invention which was definitely here to stay; or, to put it more plainly: when they set out to reconstruct the traffic system.

Viktor’s arch-enemy was the car. ‘The automobile is the number one false god of our day,’ he said, ‘the golden calf that everybody dances around.’ It really pained Viktor to observe the devotion with which people washed their vehicles, as if it were some sort of liturgy; or the way in which Norwegians meekly accepted the fact of the several hundred souls sacrificed each year on the altar of the car — on a world scale road accidents cost twice as many lives each year as war. If one wanted to point to something that was quite clearly all wrong, but which no one seemed able, or cared, to do anything about, then the car was the perfect example. Everyone was well aware of the enormous damage done by the motor car to the environment as well as to life and limb, everyone agreed that public transport was better, but no one drove less or took the tram more often. The war against the motor car was, it goes without saying, the most hopeless of all causes in the latter half of the twentieth century, but Viktor seemed to thrive on it; it was, in many ways, an exemplary act of iconoclasm. This was how Jonas remembered Viktor best: a shining baby face chanting the refrain ‘Car-free city centres!’, unfazed by the ill-concealed yawns this always drew from those listening.

From the moment they met, Jonas knew that Viktor was girding himself for a decisive strike against the automobile and above all against what he called road traffic’s ‑ of the cities. Their target was chosen with care. Was there one spot in Oslo which illustrated the whole society’s lack of resolve and want of co-ordinated planning and also told an outsider pretty much everything about the Norwegian cultural mentality? Yes, there was: Rådhusplassen — the Town Hall Square — not for nothing the natural last stop on the Norwegian version of the Monopoly board, as well as the most expensive property.

Since a lot of people have already forgotten, I’m sure, that there was a time when all Norwegian shops closed at five p.m. and there were no newspapers on Sundays, it seems necessary to remind readers of how Oslo’s Town Hall Square looked at the time when Viktor Harlem planned to put a spoke in as many wheels as possible. Some have most likely forgotten the dominant presence of a huge and fully operational shipyard right next door to the Town Hall, and the minor, cartoon-style detail of the never-ending goods train escorted by a man with a red flag and a whistle, which caused traffic jams every single day as it chugged slowly across the square. A few may even have managed to suppress the worst memory of all: that for decades the fjord was separated from the town by a six-lane carriageway cutting right across this charming part of the city. To Viktor Harlem, the Town Hall Square epitomised the very worst of all civic stupidity. What, he demanded to know, was the absolute height of lunacy? They build the city’s finest building on the city’s finest site. And then what do they do? After filling the mid-section of the area between the harbour and the Town Hall with splendid fountains and lovely sculptures, they filled the remaining space with cars. They built a grand square, then dumped a whole load of rubbish in it.

Right from the start the authorities had, of course, been considering plans to channel traffic through a tunnel running under the square. And did anything come of it? The way Viktor saw it, this said everything about Norway. After all, how was it that in a country where bridges were built to just about any island with more than ten people living on it, though with little or no economic benefit, and where tunnels of record-breaking length were blown through mountains here, there and everywhere in next to no time, and to hell with the cost — how was it that such a country was incapable of building something as glaringly essential as a tunnel to bypass this magnificent square, Norway’s face to the world. We said no to Europe, but for thirty years we allowed a European E-road, the main artery from the south carrying tens of thousands of cars every day, to run right through the capital’s front room.

Like hurricanes, demonstrations ought to be given a name, and the heretical triumvirate called their protest against Norwegian inertia after the artist responsible for the sculptures in the exhaust-choked middle of the square. The ‘Emil Lie Demonstration’ got under way in the middle of the rush hour one September evening in the early seventies, and created an unheard-of commotion. And who knows, perhaps Jonas Wergeland had a premonition of his future as the creator of the television series Thinking Big — a man who endeavoured to take as distanced a view as possible of his native land — as he screamed furiously in Anglo-Indian, while being sternly marched off by the police, that they had no bloody right to lay hands on a māyā shaman like Vinoo Sabarmati, the world-famous film director from Bombay.

Jonas ought possibly to have had an even earlier premonition of his future career in television, thanks to something he experienced with his grandmother when he was eight, an incident which might also explain why Jonas Wergeland did not think twice about laying his life on the line in the defence of a mere square in the city centre.

Until that day, Jonas had always regarded his maternal grandmother as a pretty ordinary granny. There were aspects to her character which were a mystery to him, it’s true, like the fact that she was quite liable to pay a lot of money for paintings which nobody wanted, or that she was sometimes wont to mumble incomprehensible sentences in English while making the V-sign with her fingers, but for the most part, as far as Jonas was concerned, she was an indomitable farmer’s wife who had moved from Gardermoen to the city, where she now sat in a throne-like armchair, attending to her main occupation: being a grandmother. To Jonas, Jørgine Wergeland was like a fireplace, a source of warmth, a person whom he liked being around. It was enough just to be with her. When he stepped through the door of the cigar-scented flat in Oscars gate he also slipped into a particular mood; it was like entering another world, another century, a sensation which was reinforced by the glitter and the faint tinkling of the fabulous crystal chandelier.

It was a Saturday evening, late on. Jonas was spending the night at his grandmother’s, and one of the great fringe benefits of staying at Granny’s was that you were allowed to stay up outrageously late. He had been supping bananas with cream and sugar when he happened, just by the way really, to ask his grandmother whether she didn’t get a bit bored in the evenings when she was on her own. Why didn’t she get a television? This was just around the time when television-viewing was becoming an everyday thing.

His grandmother’s response surprised him. She disappeared into the hall as if she were deeply offended. Jonas heard the murmur of her talking on the telephone, thought maybe she was sending for his parents. Then she reappeared and ordered him to put on his outdoor things. She was already wearing a hat which made Jonas think of something live, an animal or a bird. ‘I’m going to show you something better than television,’ was all she said. At moments like this Jonas could see that his mother was right. Once, when there had been a picture of Winston Churchill in the newspaper she had laughingly pointed out to him that it could easily have been a picture of his Granny’s face.

How could anyone have missed seeing it? Over the past couple of decades, few lives have been subjected to as much scrutiny as Jonas Wergeland’s and yet no one has ever mentioned the occurrence which represents the foundation stone, as it were, of this edifice of stories.

It was the tail end of April, the sort of spring night that made you lift your chin and sniff the air like an animal. Granny cut through the palace gardens and down towards the city centre. Jonas had no idea where they were going, a state of ignorance which he took a moment to savour just before they reached the junction of Karl Johans gate and Universitetsgaten, a crossroads which, for him, had always been the very best spot in all Oslo. He had never forgotten the first time he had stood there, as a five-year-old, on the corner next to the Studenten ice-cream parlour with his grandmother; how she had pointed up the street towards the University and the Palace, then across to the National Theatre, while telling him, the child, what he was looking at, what these buildings contained, before letting her eager finger travel down to Fridtjof Nansens plass, then the Parliament building and finally, still patiently describing and explaining, turning his face the other way, back towards the National Gallery, thus completing the circle. From this spot, with one sweep of the eye one could take in the finest and most eminent buildings in Oslo, this was the capital’s bull’s eye. Every child should have the chance to stand with a grandmother at the junction of two main streets and have pointed out to them the central axes of their city as well, you might say, as the central axes of their lives. For Jonas this was as fundamental a lesson as learning the points of the compass — or looking down four arms of a fjord at the same time.

Jonas did not know what to think though, when his grandmother skirted the little bandstand where in summer they listened to bands from Sagene or Kampen, and headed down towards Fridtjof Nansens plass, was even more puzzled when they crossed the square and climbed the slope leading to the Town Hall itself, which loomed over them like a red-brick mountain. The way the two towers slanted away from one another when he gazed up at them from ground level at such close quarters, made Jonas feel that he was about to enter a giant W. It was dark, late, not a soul in sight. Granny rang the bell next to the main door and a moment later it swung open as if by magic. A burly figure in a pale-blue shirt and navy-blue serge trousers was striding down the hall towards them. His face was stern, like that of a strict teacher, but his expression changed when he saw Jørgine Wergeland. ‘Welcome to the Hall of the Mountain King,’ he said in a deep voice, signalling to the night watchman in his booth that he would take care of these visitors personally.

‘Everyone gone?’ Granny asked. The man nodded, sneaking a glance at Jørgine’s hat. ‘Did you forget it’s Saturday evening, or night rather,’ he said. ‘Even the mayor has gone home.’ His tone of voice, his smile, told Jonas that it was not the first time this man had met his grandmother. Nonetheless Jonas realised that he was experiencing something very special. He did not understand why they had been allowed in, still less why this man had greeted his grandmother so respectfully, not to say warmly. So, let it be said — since Jørgine Wergeland’s reputation as a sort of war hero in Town Hall circles does not fully explain it — that this took place in a soon distant past and in another Norway. Because one thing is for sure: no one, not even an extraordinary grandmother and her grandchild, would be allowed inside Oslo Town Hall late at night today, however magically beautiful the spring evening.

‘This is Einar Moe,’ Jonas’s grandmother told him. ‘He’s the head warden here, he has his own flat on the premises.’

‘What are we doing here?’ Jonas whispered, casting anxious, sidelong glances at the head warden’s bushy eyebrows. If Moe had been wearing a string vest he would have looked exactly like Mr Bastesen, Solhaug’s formidable caretaker.

‘Patience, patience,’ his grandmother said. ‘Shall we start the tour?’ she asked Einar Moe.

And so it was that on an April night in the early sixties, Jonas Wergeland got to see the inside of Oslo Town Hall. Or at least, he did not see it all at once, he saw it a little bit at a time. You see, they did not switch on the lights — Jonas thought it was because the head warden did not want to break the rules, but it might also have been because Granny wanted it that way. However that may be, when they stepped into the central hall — that high, wide space — it was in total darkness, although a little of the glare from the spotlights outside filtered through the windows at the bottom end overlooking the fjord. Jonas could only just make out pictures on the walls. And it was evidently these which his grandmother wished to show him, because Mr Moe pulled out a torch and proceeded to shine it on sections of the paintings; and while Mr Moe wielded his torch like a pointer of light, the two adults took it in turns to tell Jonas what he was seeing. They started with the long picture running under the balcony on the eastern wall, a fresco teeming with life, painted by someone called Alf Rolfsen and depicting the years of the German occupation; Granny described each scene, Mr Moe’s circle of light moving in time with her dramatic commentary. Jonas actually felt a little scared and had to hold his grandmother’s hand, but at the same time he was quite carried away by the show: it was rather like looking at a darkened stage, with a spotlight illuminating one patch after another. Or perhaps he was thinking of the game he played at Aunt Laura’s flat in Tøyen, when he shone a torch on the oriental rugs on the wall and pretended that he was the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid going out to see how things stood in his kingdom — a comparison which was not too far-fetched since if anything were capable of revealing the secrets of the kingdom of Norway it would surely be the decorations in Oslo’s Town Hall.

Einar Moe shifted the spotlight to Henrik Sørensen’s massive picture on the end wall. This was painted in a different style from the previous one, with gold smouldering in the parts submerged in the gloom. Mr Moe, the head warden, shone the torch on a boy in the bottom right-hand corner while Granny explained how this lad was setting out on a journey which could be followed all the way through the painting, right up to the top left-hand corner where he presented his fairy-tale princess with a crown. Jonas stood with his head thrown back and his eyes glued to the beam of light as it travelled slowly over the gigantic, richly-detailed picture, revealing more and more figures and scenes. All of a sudden he realised what, more than anything else, it reminded him of. It reminded him of what it had been like to leaf through his first ABC book, seeing the letters which he would, in time, learn to put together to form words, a language. Or, even more perhaps: of a reading book.

A thought occurred to Einar Moe, he popped back to the night watchman’s booth and returned with another torch for Jonas. The effect was even better. To begin with they both shone their torches on the same part, so that they were able to see more at one time, but after a while Jonas began to aim his beam at different areas from Moe’s. While his grandmother talked about the images caught in the head warden’s beam, Jonas could light up a detail some way off, so that it presented a kind of parallel illustration, a wordless, amplifying comment. This frequently proved most effective, as when Moe and his grandmother were peering at a figure in Sørensen’s massive picture, and Jonas shone his light on the ornamental design which Alf Rolfsen had painted in muted al secco on the side wall over the stairway. This provided an excellent complement, and counterpoint, to Henrik Sørensen’s vivid painting, almost like a necessary veil hanging over it.

They ascended the broad, imposing staircase, with Jonas sweeping the torch beam over the wall behind him as they went. Suddenly he caught sight of a sailor stepping ashore with a present in his hands, a string of pearls. A proud and extremely knowledgeable Mr Moe treated them to a little lecture on the different sorts of stone used for the building’s floors and walls. To Jonas the Town Hall seemed like a monument constructed out of species of rock from all over Norway. In the Festival Gallery they spent a lot of time perusing, or illuminating, the frescoes by Axel Revold at either end of the room. Many of the fragments which Jonas caught in his torchbeam that night — scenes from the shipping and manufacturing industries, fishing and agriculture, popped into his mind years later in Leonard Knutzen’s basement, as he flicked through old issues of Aktuell magazine. These were images from a pioneering era, a time of cloth caps and an entire nation working together to build a country; to drag it, one might say, from the Middle Ages into modern society within only a few decades.

People who chanced to walk past along the waterfront at Pipervika may have wondered at the beams of light dancing behind the Town Hall windows. They could not know that inside a small boy was being shown a great big ABC of Norway, that he was being told the history of his forefathers through pictures, being ushered around the city’s front room by an extraordinary grandmother and a hospitable head warden. Later, when Jonas visited the Vatican, he was to some extent prepared. For although Oslo Town Hall could not boast of Michelangelos or Raphaels it did, nonetheless, have Sørensen and Rolfsen, and if that was not Heaven, it was certainly Earth, Life — it was, in short, a good place to start. As a grown man it occurred to Jonas that some day it would be possible — particularly if the ideas which won their first victory at Anders Lange’s meeting in the Saga cinema managed to permeate the whole of Norwegian society — to convert the Town Hall into a mausoleum in which the finest ideals of social democracy would lie buried.

On this tour of the Town Hall, with two torchbeams criss-crossing in the air like huge, bright blades, he was also introduced to people. Some names, like Fridtjof Nansen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, he already knew, others, such as Nordahl Rolfsen and Paal Berg, he had never heard of. Head warden Moe called them ‘Norwegian heroes’ and Jonas was given to understand that from time to time people came along who would be of crucial significance to the progress of their country. It was a lesson he would always remember, even — later — in a day and age when it became popular to maintain that individual people could no longer influence history. It struck Jonas, as he walked along between his grandmother and Mr Moe, that he might never do anything quite as wonderful as this again: to wander through darkened rooms in a vast building, sweeping a circle of light over evocative pictures on walls and ceiling — suddenly spotting an enchanted princess or jumping at the sight of a three-headed troll with a trio of snarling faces. Saturday night entertainment did not come any better than this; he caught himself missing the bar of milk chocolate he was usually allowed when watching Children’s Hour.

Best of all he remembered their visit to one of the rooms adjoining the council chamber. There, in the East Gallery, he found Per Krogh’s frescoes, one long painting covering three walls and the ceiling. It was like walking right into, becoming part of a picture. Jonas paused in front of a jumble of housing blocks on one wall; he shone the beam on one window after another so it almost looked as if he was lighting up the rooms behind them. In one, an old man was playing the flute. In another a bride was adjusting her finery. All at once he came upon himself. In a room in the Town Hall, in a room in a fresco, he discovered an exact replica of himself. Behind one of the windows he illuminated a small boy was doing his homework, a globe of the world at his elbow.

His grandmother registered his reaction and gave his hand an extra little squeeze. ‘I’m in one of these pictures too,’ she said, with a slight quiver in her voice. Little did Jonas know that this was absolutely true and that, due to a highly unconventional contribution to the war effort, Jørgine Wergeland genuinely had earned the right to be there.

Some years later, when Jonas gained admission to the Town Hall again, during opening hours this time, in broad daylight, and was able to take in the main hall at one glance, the initial impact almost blew him away. He stood in the middle of the marble floor, in the middle of that huge hall and stared round about him until his neck ached, marvelling at Henrik Sørensen’s bright-hued oil painting on the end wall and Alf Rolfsen’s vibrant patterns of light and shade on the side walls. After a while, however, he became conscious of a vague sense of disappointment. Nothing could compare with the experience of that spring night when he had gone round the Town Hall with his grandmother and Einar Moe, when he had brought the rooms, the pictures, to light a bit at a time; built them up into a whole by himself — images and associations which in many cases were possibly more fascinating than what he now beheld.

It says something about the strength of this memory that many years later, even beneath a parasol on a deserted beach in Montevideo, he could still call to mind some of those imaginative mosaics. After a long, dreamlike tour of his memory — it might have lasted hours, it might have lasted twenty seconds — it was as if, sitting in that deckchair with his eyes fixed on the waves, he suddenly woke up. He understood what it was, above all, that had been implanted in him that night: an appreciation of a project bordering on the impossible. Even as a boy, equipped only with a torch, he had grasped the magnificence of the concept, the power of the vision behind the decorations in Oslo Town Hall. Was there an idea for television here? To create just such circles of light? Present fragments of a greater whole? Pick out, shed light on, people in a crowd?

His thoughts went to his grandmother. He could have done with a dose of her rabble-rousing spirit as he lounged there in that deckchair on the silver sands, gazing out across the Rio de la Plata as if waiting for an idea to come drifting ashore, in the form of a message in a bottle, without him having to lift a finger. Once, his grandmother had looked deep into his eyes and said: ‘Jonas, there’s too much Hansen in you and not enough Wergeland. You’re going to have to find the rebel within you.’ She would have been appalled if she could have seen him now, lying flat out on a deserted beach in far-off Uruguay. Or maybe she would have understood: he lay there remembering Bo Wang Lee, he lay there looking for something to take with him. A key concept. Material which could be turned into television programmes. Television that was different. Not Hansen programmes, but Wergeland programmes. Dangerous programmes.

Jonas’s grandmother was certainly qualified to talk about rebellion; she had always been something of a disruptive element. When Jonas staged his protest in the Town Hall Square, dared to shake his fist at a superior opponent, he thought not only of those nocturnal childhood wanderings among edifying frescoes, but also, and to as great an extent, of his grandmother — and of another inspiring episode in which she played a leading role.

Thanks to Winston Churchill, Jørgine Wergeland had early on acquired a taste for all things British. She had, therefore, one favourite spot in Oslo, a place she would often take a walk around during the war, to bolster her spirits: the English Quarter on Drammensveien, overlooking Solli plass. This exceedingly tasteful residential area — a jewel in the city’s crown — consisted of one long, two-storey building with a three-storey corner building to either side of it. It derived its ‘English’ epithet from the internal layout of the buildings, mansion flats occupying several floors, and not from its outward appearance which, with its domes and pitched roofs, was more reminiscent of the French neo-Renaissance style. But as far as Jørgine Wergeland was concerned the place was as English as N0.10 Downing Street.

Then, in the early sixties, the most outrageous, not to say unbelievable thing happened. What the bombers did not succeed in doing during the war, Oslo District Council decided to do. They proposed to tear down the English Quarter. Now, although Jørgine Wergeland took a murderously dim view of property developers — for reasons which will later become clear — she was not opposed to every form of urban renewal. But this lovely group of buildings was not only laden with personal memories of wartime, it was in itself utterly unique, an architectural gem. The English Quarter was quite simply part of the capital’s memory. ‘This provincial little town will be left even more devoid of history and bereft of atmosphere if we don’t preserve the best from every age,’ Jørgine muttered under her breath.

It is astonishing to note, today, how few people protested and how little stir this barbaric and incredibly short-sighted decision caused. When the impercipient members of the city council swanned into the Town Hall in June 1961 they completely overlooked the elderly, cigar-smoking lady who had made her stand outside and who, besides being absolutely furious that such a decision should be taken in this of all buildings, was holding aloft a placard inscribed with an injunction which every schoolchild had been taught to heed: ‘Do not erase!’ But the city fathers flouted all the rules of good behaviour and passed the planning bill, thereby also passing sentence of death on the English Quarter.

Some people may, however, recall a photograph published in the one vigilant Oslo newspaper, a picture which they had to smile at over their morning coffee. It was a picture of an elderly lady facing up to a massive demolition crane with her handbag raised, as if she were being subjected to a brutal robbery in broad daylight. Which is not, in fact, too far from the truth. That fateful year — which would also see both the Cuban Missile Crisis and a mining explosion in Nye Ålesund on Svalbard which led, some months later, to the downfall of the Gerhardsen government — also got off to a bad start. On one of the very first afternoons in January a twenty-eight ton, motorised monster rumbled across the pavements on Drammensveien, heading straight for the English Quarter’s gracious, but oh, so impermanent façades, and the aforementioned photograph was taken during the half hour when Jørgine Wergeland and her raised handbag managed to prevent the one-ton, cast-iron ball on that mobile crane from smashing into something that was as dear and precious to her as a loved one’s face. To her this was a living building, a personal reminder of Winston Churchill, but it did no good. Nor did her words: ‘Shoo!’ she cried — as if she were addressing some mangy old mutt. ‘Shoo! Away with you!’ In the course of that afternoon and evening, the greater part of the English Quarter’s irreplaceable façades overlooking Drammensveien were reduced to a heap of smoking rubble.

Jonas had cut out and saved this photograph of his grandmother. Although in world terms its significance may have been minimal — this illustration of a righteous, but hopeless struggle, an urban patriot waving her handbag at a giant crane — for him personally it had as much symbolic value as the later picture of the lone student with the shopping bags trying to stop the tanks on Tiananmen Square in Beijing — he, too, seeming to be saying: ‘Shoo! Away with you!’ It is also worth noting that with this doughty demonstration Jørgine Wergeland pretty much gave the starting signal for all the protest marches which, later in the decade, would pass along this very street, Drammensveien, on their way to the American and Soviet Union embassies.

Even before she found out about the civic vandals and their plans, Jonas’s grandmother had proudly shown him round the English Quarter, frequently in connection with a visit to Sol Cigar’s aromatic premises further down the street. Jonas thought the façades looked rather like the casing of an organ — greater compliment could no building receive. Each time they stood there on Solli plass and Granny described to him the mansion-style apartments behind the red-brick facing, with library and dining room, butler’s pantry, maid’s room, study and dressing room, she would finish by saying: ‘Remember this.’ After it was torn down, Jonas and his grandmother would, therefore, sometimes take a walk over to Lapsetorget, stand with their backs to the West Side Baths and take it in turns to describe those richly adorned buildings which they pictured rising up before them, with all their balconies and cornices, doorways and towers, as if the new Industry and Export House in its seventeen-storey tower block simply did not exist.

Jonas reaped the benefits of this powerful memory when he applied for a place at the College of Architecture. In the so-called home project which constituted the first round in the selection process and determined whether one would go on to the two-day entrance exam at the college, applicants were asked to take a well-known place and produce something which expressed their feelings about it. What Jonas Wergeland did was this: inside a box from which he had removed the two long sides he hung three panels of thin fabric, like gauze. On the first panel he painted the grey façade of the Ind-Ex building. On the fabric in the middle he painted the English Quarter, those matchless, now demolished buildings, reproducing them in minute detail, in a glowing red with yellow cornices and cornerstones. The viewer saw it as a ghostly form showing through the transparent fabric façade of the Ind-Ex building, so luminously clear and distinct that it seemed more real than the drab tower block in front of it. And on the third gauze panel, at the very back, he painted a very small, shimmering white building out of his own head, a house unlike any other. It was only just discernible through the two stretches of fabric in front of it, like a tiny, shining organ deep inside a transparent body. The funny thing was — Jonas himself would notice this eighteen years later — that this imaginary building prefigured, with uncanny exactitude, the façade of Oslo’s elegant new courthouse.

Later, one of the college professors would say that it was Jonas’s home project he had fallen for. ‘It looked almost like an X-ray photograph,’ he said. Jonas, for his part, gave his grandmother the credit. Had it not been for her rebellious spirit he would never have got into the College of Architecture.

The foundations of Jørgine Wergeland’s heroic concern for the city had, however, been laid long before her attempt to stop a monster with a demolition ball from attacking the English Quarter. Her civic mindedness, not to say passion, reached its peak immediately after the Second World War, when she suddenly came into a fair bit of money, a proper fortune, in fact.

Jørgine Wergeland was, in her own eyes, one of the victors of the war and when she unlocked the door of the flat in Oscars gate again, after a period of involuntary exile in Inkognitogaten, it was with a clear conscience that she lit a cigar and raised her fingers in a V-sign. Unlike Churchill, though, she was not only a wartime leader, but also a person capable of coping with peace. As soon as she acquired the money she instituted a conscientious search for a worthy peacetime project, a venture in which to invest it. Although she never thought of it as ‘her’ fortune. ‘It belongs to the people of Norway, and that’s that,’ she announced to a somewhat worried Åse Hansen, Jonas’s mother.

It did not take Jørgine long to see that she might have had one particular aim in mind all along, and that this might also have been the underlying motivation behind a war effort which almost surprised even Jørgine herself. The fact is, you see, that she had conceived an interest at a very early stage for the new Town Hall in Oslo — right from the time when the proposal was first put forward and an Architecture and Planning competition announced towards the end of the First World War. She followed the successive alterations to Arnstein Arneberg’s and Magnus Poulsson’s winning design as if they were episodes in a thrilling serial, the ending of which no one could predict. She enjoyed — nay, nigh on adored — monitoring the gradual metamorphosis from medieval-inspired fortress, by way of the Gothic style, National Romanticism and Neo-Classicism to four-square Functionalism. She positively cheered when she saw the final drawings, the clean lines of the main form also embodying certain historical elements. What she applauded most of all were the two block-shaped towers which gave the building a Janus-like countenance. Something inside her said: Yes, that’s just how it should be. Afterwards it would also occur to her that it made a fine, frank heraldic device for a country which had rendered such equivocal resistance during the war.

When Jørgine travelled into town from the family smallholding at Gardermoen on some errand or other, she always made a point of popping down to Pipervika to see how work on the building was progressing, especially once things speeded up in the mid-thirties and the solid mass of reinforced concrete began to rear upwards in pyramidic majesty. And many’s the time during the war when she derived encouragement and comfort from a walk down to the harbour to inspect the Town Hall, which Norway expected would be completed as soon as the bloody Germans had been run into the sea.

So when the war was over it seemed only natural that she should decide to invest her money in this. Or at least: the building was finished, but the artistic decoration of it, an uncommonly grandiose project — certainly for Norway — was far from completion. The war had not only delayed the work, it had also prompted several of the artists to make changes to their original sketches. Henrik Sørensen was now painting the return of the royal family into his vast picture on the end wall, and over at the mural in the East Gallery Per Krohg was in the midst of adding a section depicting Grini prison camp, guarded by huge, armour-plated earwigs.

In the early summer of the year after the war ended, Jørgine attended an exhibition at the Art Society in which Alf Rolfsen, a painter who had already come to her attention and who had, what is more, lost a son in the war, was showing a fresco depicting the occupation. This work was so warmly received and spawned so many letters to the newspapers that Rolfsen was asked to reproduce it as a mural for the east wall of the Town Hall’s central hall. What is not commonly known is that Jørgine Wergeland also had a large hand in this. In a letter to the people in charge of the Town Hall decorations she offered to cover the costs of Rolfsen’s long picture. Jonas’s grandmother understood something which would be lost on Norwegian politicians of the future, even at a time when the country was virtually swimming in capital: that nothing pays off better than investment in the arts. Good art creates lasting meaning, an asset which, in due course, becomes so great that it can no longer be measured in terms of money.

Although she did not know it, Jørgine’s offer could not have come at a better time. Because at that very moment a number of the artists working on the largest decorations for the Town Hall happened to be asking for additional funds, due to the increased cost of materials. And this was a problem, since the estimated budget for the project had already been exceeded. Consequently, when Jonas’s grandmother was invited up to the office of the person in charge, it was with great pleasure that he accepted her generous gift. Jørgine Wergeland’s contribution went into a common fund, but she received a verbal assurance that the lion’s share of the money would be earmarked for Alf Rolfsen’s large, and as yet uncompleted, painting. So although there are no official documents in which it states in black and white that Jørgine Wergeland paid for this mural — on the donations list issued for the inauguration of the Town Hall in 1950 only her name and the tidy sum she contributed are given — she knew, as did the people in charge of the finances and, not least, Alf Rolfsen himself, that she was the one who had paid for the occupation frieze. This was Jørgine Wergeland’s gift to the Norwegian people. The way she saw it, it was also reparation for an act of betrayal, made with German money so to speak.

Staff at the Town Hall soon got used to having an elderly woman with a countenance remarkably similar to that of Winston Churchill popping in to see how the work was coming on and have a chat with the artists, who looked like so many workmen, hard at it on their scaffolding and ladders in hats and spattered overalls, applying paint to the wet plaster. But her keenest interest was reserved, of course, for Alf Rolfsen’s thirty-metre long picture of the occupation years and the way it progressed in a mesmerising zig-zag fashion: men hiding in the forest, the air raid in April, the Gestapo forcing entry to houses, the execution of resistance fighters, underground activities, the men of Milorg, the secret military organisation. Life in the prisoner-of-war camps, liberation. Standing there, looking at the fresco, surrounded by the smell of paint and damp plaster, she remembered the war again, almost every single day of it, and in her mind she quoted the words of her favourite statesman: I was all for war. Now I am all for peace.

As often as possible Jørgine took the opportunity to have elevenses with Alf Rolfsen and his friend Aage Storstein. The latter had just been forced to chip off and repaint the whole of the end wall in the Western gallery because the colours were too pale — painting al fresco was no joke. They usually had their snack in the Festival Gallery, from where they could look down on the Royal Wharf and the Nesodden ferries and across to the Akers Mek shipyard, which Axel Revold had captured, in somewhat abstract fashion, in the now completed fresco on the end wall of the room in which they sat. They were great times, those, also for the two artists, whose discussions on the pitfalls of painting were all the livelier and wittier for having an audience; they frequently ended up sitting there half-an-hour longer than they ought, Rolfsen with his pipe and Jørgine with a Romeo y Julieta, Winston Churchill’s favourite cigar. Alf Rolfsen did most of the talking. Jørgine quickly took a liking to this burly character with the strong face. He was also a wonderful storyteller. Sometimes when they were alone, while he was painting the wall, he would start to tell her, quite unprompted, about his travels: to Athens and the Acropolis, or to Paris where he had met, among others, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera, soon to deck what seemed like acres of his homeland’s wall space with vivid colour. ‘But there’s nothing to beat Rome,’ he confided to Jørgine as she stood there savouring the smells of plaster and pipe tobacco. ‘I saw the frescos of Michelangelo and Raphael at the Vatican. They gave me a whole new conception of the relationship between images and space.’ He climbed down and stepped back a couple of paces. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you should make that building in the background look more like Victoria Terrasse,’ she said.

It was during these years, on those mid-morning breaks and meanderings among zinc buckets and stepladders, bowls and dishes in these huge studios, that Jørgine Wergeland became an art connoisseur. She was not afraid to put in her own three ha’pence worth now and again either — not only to Rolfson, for whom she felt a particular responsibility, but even to a gentleman as strong-minded as Henrik Sørensen. ‘There’s something wrong with that figure,’ she was liable to shout, motioning with her cigar as she passed underneath the high scaffolding on which he perched like a skyscraper construction worker, working on an oil painting which at that time was reckoned to be the biggest in the world. And sure enough, Sørensen altered that figure.

Jonas’s grandmother was proud of the Town Hall and the works of art it contained, even though they were not, of course, perfect and had, in some cases, an inevitable air of national self-congratulation about them. To her, the Town Hall was not only the city’s indisputable defining symbol, but also a monument to freedom. Just as the Statue of Liberty was the first thing to greet you when you sailed into New York so, at the head of Oslo fjord, you were greeted by the Town Hall. The building and its decorations marked the culmination of an era. The Town Hall in Oslo contained Norway up until the middle of the twentieth century. The very best of the country was reflected in this building, both inside and out, in terms of materials, art and symbols. If the whole of Norway were to be destroyed, bombed, but this building were miraculously to be left standing, it would be possible to reconstruct much of the land’s history right up to the post-war years. Not for nothing did Jonas, influenced as he was by his grandmother, compare the Town Hall, on one occasion, to the information disc about the Earth carried on board the Voyager space probes.

As a way of repaying her, but also because he liked her, Alf Rolfsen used Jørgine Wergeland as the model for a figure in his occupation frieze. She is one of the four women at the pump in the far left of the picture. This was his tribute to her. And no greater tribute could anyone receive: to figure in, for one’s life to be made a part of, a fresco in the country’s most magnificent building. Visitors to the Town Hall today should possibly take a second look at that picture and spare a thought for Jørgine Wergeland. There are, sadly, too few people of her cast.

‘How did you come by all that money?’ Alf Rolfsen once asked her.

‘It’s a secret,’ said Jørgine.

And even to Jonas, her grandchild, this was for a long time a well-kept mystery. He sat alone with his eyes closed, under a blue and white parasol in Montevideo and let the memories wash over him as he listened to the waves breaking on the shore. His thoughts stayed with his grandmother. She might be a vital clue in his search for material, for a kind of television which no one before had dared to imagine. And now and again, perhaps precisely because of the memory of his grandmother’s resolute actions, he was seized by such an acute need to soak up life that he got out of his deckchair and took the bus that ran past the six other white beaches and all the way into the centre of the city, there to stroll, hands behind his back, down the long main street, the Avenida 18 de Julio; taking in the long string of pavement stalls, taking in the countless squares, taking in curious buildings and bombastic statues of dead generals, taking in the people with maté cups and metal straws in their hands and thermoses of hot water under their arms. Montevideo soothed his nerves. In other capitals he constantly felt guilty about all the things he ought to be doing. Montevideo had no famous sights. And what few museums it had were quite liable to be closed, without any explanation. That was fine by Jonas. This city tuned him into a rare, unknown channel. He sauntered along under the indigo veil formed by flowering jacaranda trees, surveying the life on the street, listening, smelling, waiting. An idea, he would give anything for an idea that would provide outlet for the talent he knew he possessed, a flash of inspiration which would also cure this ache in his chest. Later, Jonas would laugh at his own lack of imagination. He kept waiting for a thought to strike him. Instead he met someone.

He also roamed the higgledy-piggledy maze of narrow lanes and alleys in the old town, behind the cathedral, stopping here and there, and more than once outside the same second-hand bookshop near the Plaza Zabala, possibly because of the Spanish edition of Kristin Lavransdatter in the window: a fat, worn and yet somehow distinguished book spine. Jonas found it odd — coming across a fellow countrywoman in such a way. Like spying the back of someone you knew through the window of a restaurant in a strange city. Or, yes: it smacked of the Middle Ages. That was Montevideo, modern, but at the same time old-fashioned in a unique, almost wistful way. In Montevideo he could still come upon horses and carts in the streets, and there were mothballs on sale everywhere — Montevideo reeked of mothballs. On his strolls, Jonas spotted just about every make of car he had grown up with and the sight of the trolleybuses made him almost sob with nostalgia. It was the gently rusting boats in the harbour, however, which brought back the strongest memories of the fifties. He was back in his childhood. He was in a sort of forgotten, or better still: hidden backwater. Anything could happen here, he thought to himself. Here I can start afresh.

Time. He was conscious, as he sat there day after day in his deckchair in the shade of a blue-striped parasol, with a gentle breeze caressing his face while he gazed out across the water — grey, but with the silvery sheen from which the river took its name, La Plata — of how little he knew about time. Time could stand still, or it could fly by. It could also disappear completely, as if through a hole. As Jonas dozed in the deckchair a memory from 1970 drifted into his mind. He had been paying a quick visit to his grandmother, just dropping off something from home, when she had asked him to do her a favour, or rather, she ordered him to nip down to her regular supplier of cigars. ‘Proper Suez Crisis,’ she said with her most mournful Churchill expression. ‘Stock’s run out.’ He was commissioned to purchase a box of Karel I — she had been forced to switch to Dutch cigars when the Cuban brands were no longer to be had.

Jonas enjoyed running errands like this, especially to Sol Cigar on Drammensveien, where the air was pervaded with the scent of tobacco and the after-shave lotion of distinguished clients. It was a warm Saturday morning in June. As usual he took the path through the Palace Gardens since a stroll through that soft, rolling landscape, under a green veil of maple and lime, elm and chestnut always seemed to affect his way of thinking. He told himself it was the excess of chlorophyll that rendered him even more reflective. It made him curse his shilly-shallying, his indecisiveness when it came to finding a sphere in which to utilise his baffling gifts. He glowered at the black silhouette, a dwarf running at his heels along the path, an illustration of the fate he dreaded more than any other: to end up as a shadow of himself. Never to have used what he had within him. Maybe it was because he was surrounded by such luxuriant vegetation or because he was on his way to buy cigars, that the thought of Che Guevara suddenly came into his mind. A guerrilla. He was filled with a longing to rebel.

As if his frustration had sharpened his eye, he spotted Pernille S., a girl from his class in junior high. He had not seen her in a year. She was sitting on one of the benches next to the pond. It may also have been something about the way she was dressed, her frock, that had caught his eye. Her clothes were always rather unusual, not the sort of things the other girls wore. She was sitting with a large pad on her lap, sketching, totally absorbed. Her rectangular hippie-style glasses with their red lenses made him feel that she must see the world in a charmed light. As he drew closer, he noticed that irresistible neck of hers, which Leonard had always let the camera linger on when they were filming. ‘That is the neck of a woman who can go to great lengths,’ he always said.

Jonas sat down next to her, whereupon she closed her sketch pad without a word and laid her head on his shoulder as if in greeting, an affectionate way of saying she was pleased to see him again. She was like that. Subtle and yet spontaneous. He drank in the scent of her long, dark hair. They chatted, caught up on each other’s lives. She had not gone to high school, had chosen instead to go to Paris for a while, she had only been back a few weeks. Jonas listened to her soft voice while he watched the ducks swimming on the quiet pond, or rested his eyes on the green cascade of the willow on the island in the middle of the pond. ‘It’s nice here,’ she said, ‘almost like paradise.’ He thought at first that she was referring to Norway in general, but soon realised that she was talking about the Palace Gardens.

He had seen her in a Garden of Eden once before. While in elementary school she had helped out at the nursery up on Bergensveien on Saturdays, wrapping flowers in old newspapers. He had always liked going there with his mother, it was like entering another climatic zone, a lush, humid, jungle-like atmosphere. One winter’s day he and a couple of other lads had gone up there to spy on her. The greenhouse was in itself a sight to see, an ice palace — particularly when a milder spell was followed by a cold snap. As small boys they had broken off the long icicles that hung from the eaves and fenced their way right up to the round table in King Arthur’s Camelot. But they were older now, with different interests, lay there with their eyes just peeking over the top of a snowbank, peering through the glass to where, when there were no customers, Pernille danced ballet in the greenhouse: she had one of the little new, portable Tandberg tape recorders in there, the kind in which the reels lay on top of one another — how sexy was that! She played classical music, practised graceful positions and steps amid the tulips which the gardeners managed, by some miracle, to cultivate even in winter: row upon row of budding tulips, like serried ranks of hard-ons. It was a real culture shock to see a girl like Pernille doing ballet. Shortly after this they heard that she had actually had a walk-on part in a production of Swan Lake at the Royal Norwegian Opera with Rudolf Nureyev as guest soloist. They lay there with their eyes peeping over the bank of snow, not feeling the cold; lay there so long that they almost froze their undercarriages off.

And now here she was, in Paradise again, sitting on a park bench with her ballerina neck inclined towards him as they talked, on and on, as if intent on making up for all the wordless scenes in Leonard’s films. When he asked to see what she had been drawing it was only with reluctance that she handed him the pad. Inside were sketches. Of people caught in passing. Rendered in just a few strokes, except for their clothes, which were more carefully drawn, or suggested by a detail here and there, as if she were trying to capture the essence of a person through what they were wearing. Or as if a belt, the cut of a jacket, the pattern of a shirt, could say all there was to be said. ‘I’m going to apply to the College of Art and Design,’ she said. ‘I’m practising.’ And Jonas thought: I don’t practise enough. I’m not practising anything at all. I’m going to be one of those Norwegians who simply squanders their abundant talent. ‘It’s kind of strange,’ she said with a shy smile. ‘I got the urge to work in fashion, with fabric, after Mr Dehli told us about māyā. Do you remember? Do you remember Mr Dehli?’ He remembered Mr Dehli. Who could forget Mr Dehli? She was wearing a long, cotton summer frock which she had made herself, the fabric had a pattern of alternating open and closed tulips. Even though she was sitting down he could tell how unusual it was, how it accentuated — not her figure, but her personality, her innate elegance. It was as if she had succeeded in transferring the lines of her irresistible neck to the garment. Jonas had always counted himself among those men who believe a woman is infinitely more interesting clothed than unclothed, and he had noticed right away, from a hundred metres off, how sexy, how attractive she looked, in that dress.

They sat for hours on that bench in the heat of the day, until she suggested that they go back to her place, she was living in the city now. He did not know whether it was something to do with the red lenses of her sunglasses, but he felt that she was eyeing him differently, with more interest than before.

They strolled slowly across the grass in the lovely light under the great, green treetops. He found himself admiring her slender, leggy figure, the grace with which she moved, accentuated by the fact that she was barefoot. She had done a bit of modelling work in Paris, but most of the time she had studied, learned, visited people in the fashion business. He had been right about the frock. Even without a low-cut neckline, without long slits up the sides, it made her look sexy, even more attractive. There was something about the way the fabric fell over her form. The tulips, the pattern of the fabric prompted him to wonder again about his future, whether he was going to open up or close in. Some people never opened up. She strode barefoot across the grass towards Kunstnernes Hus and her scooter. She had kept the red Vespa. Pernille’s style might not have been altogether in accord with the dawning feminist movement, but in her own way she was as much of a rebel as anyone.

On the way up to Majorstuen they stopped at a café and stayed there so long that by the time they got to her place it was late in the evening. There was no one else home. She got them something to drink. They talked, played music: the Mamas and the Papas, the Lovin’ Spoonful. She showed him her new sewing machine, some heavily embroidered fabrics and a portfolio of drawings in which she had copied patterns from paintings by Gustav Klimt. None of this could have told him, though, that ten years later she would be Norway’s answer to Laura Ashley, designing both clothes and furnishings in a romantic, floral style which was, nonetheless, surprisingly modern, urban. At that particular moment, though, he was just a bit puzzled by the searching looks she was giving him; so he asked, more to distract her really, whether they might not have some supper. ‘Wait right here,’ she said, put on Jefferson Airplane and left the room. A good fifteen minutes later she reappeared carrying a small case. ‘We’re going out,’ was all she said, and gave him another funny look.

‘Isn’t it a bit late for this,’ he yelled, when he was seated once more on the pillion of the red scooter with his nose buried in her hair and her neck. ‘It’s summer,’ she yelled back. ‘It’s never too late in the summer,’ she said as she parked the Vespa outside Kunstnernes Hus and handed him the case. The sky was still light. The air tropically warm. The Oslo night smelled of lilac. She was still barefoot. He took off his shoes too, left them under the scooter seat. They strolled across the warm tarmac. She took his hand. Why had they never gone out together in junior high? She did not lead him through the Palace Gardens, headed instead down Parkveien towards Drammensveien. The air was so heavily scented it was like being in some foreign city. Opposite the prime minister’s official residence she stopped and glanced round about. ‘Give me a hand,’ she said and proceeded to climb over the fence into the Queen’s Gardens. The park was closed at night. ‘This is against the law, we’ll get caught,’ he said. She turned and gave him a long, hard look, as if trying to get inside his head, discover what could have possessed him to make such a stupid remark. Again he was thrown into confusion. ‘Only if someone sees us,’ she said. ‘And why should anyone see us?’ He shot a glance at the Palace, jokingly muttered something about offences against the Crown as he helped her over, making sure that her dress did not snag on the lance-tipped railings of the cast-iron fence. He passed the case to her before hopping over himself. I’ve finally made it into the Queen’s Chambers, he thought. They stole between the trunks of tall hardwood trees, over grass that felt cool and soft under their feet. Here and there they caught the yellow glimmer of creeping buttercups. She made a beeline for a pond with a fountain splashing in it rather forlornly and pointlessly. Or for them alone. She led the way to the end nearest the Palace, bundled up her skirts and waded into the water, across the narrow channel. He followed, feeling the little round pebbles on the bottom. There was an island in the middle of the pond. An island overgrown with trees and dense vegetation, grass as high as a meadow, a miniature jungle, a place in which to play the guerrilla. They settled themselves under the dominant weeping ash. Its branches hung all the way to the ground, hiding them like a parasol from the guardsmen on sentry duty outside the Palace and down by the stables. Jonas was reminded of the deliciously prickly hidey-holes of his childhood. She spread a travelling rug out on the grass. ‘Welcome to the Garden of Eden,’ she whispered.

She arranged the contents of the case on the rug: cured ham and melon, a highly seasoned pâté, slices of tomato over which she had sprinkled freshly chopped basil. ‘Dig in then,’ she said, pouring white wine into two simple kitchen tumblers. ‘You said you were hungry, didn’t you?’ She handed him bread and a bowl of black olives. He ate, drank, noticed that she helped herself to some soft, white cheese and a stick of celery. Never, not even in the Red Room, in Leonard’s basement, had food tasted so good. So erotic. He lay there enveloped in the scent of earth and growing things, surrounded by lilies and Solomon’s seal, munching honeydew melon, and watched as this girl draped in a fabric decorated with open and closed tulips poured a few drops of Tabasco sauce onto a piece of chicken, as if to demonstrate her singularity, her audacious taste. Her boldness in general. Directly across from them, on the top of a small hill they could make out a gazebo. The Palace rose up behind large, flowering shrubs; they might have been in another country, another time, at the Versailles of the Sun King. He felt — he groped for the word — reckless. As if, merely by lying there, enjoying all of this, he was defying the run-of-the-mill. Committing an act of sabotage even.

He was lying listening to the splashing of the fountain when, right out of the blue, she gave him a kiss, quick and hot, that left behind a taste of red pepper, salt, vinegar, a breathtakingly sharp tang on his lips. A violent fluttering in his breast. And an unsated hunger, replete though he was. Hunger for a body. She drew him down onto the rug, among the little dishes. It was such a relief, an almost vampiric sensation, to at long last be able to press his lips against that long neck of hers, run his tongue along the hairline at the nape of her neck, kiss the skin below her ears for so long that her toes splayed and little moans issued from her throat. One of his hands slipped underneath her skirt, worked its way up to her knees, while he went on kissing her, while she went on emitting barely audible sighs. He slid his hand further up, under the fabric of her frock, under the pattern of tulips opened and closed, with a sense of performing a kind of covert unveiling; he stroked the soft, smooth skin on the inside of her thighs, and this in turn made him feel as though he was almost suffocating with desire. No fabric in the world could compare with this texture, not even silk; if anyone ever managed to manufacture a synthetic material that came anywhere close to this they could make millions. He reached her panties, gently pulled them down, still without lifting up her skirt. He ran sensitive fingertips over the grooves left by the knicker elastic on the soft skin below her waist, as if it were a legible script, a vital prophecy. As he slid his fingers down and into her crotch, not knowing whether it was the scent of sexual juices or the aroma of flowers and Tabasco sauce that drifted past his nose, he noticed that her hand had stiffened into a stagey pose while her toes were pointed, her ankles extended as in a dance, even though she was lying on the ground.

With his middle finger he explored the folds of her vagina, as if she were clothed here, too, and he needed to undress her in order to discover her true nature. She writhed about, moaned so uninhibitedly that he was afraid one of the guards might hear. As his finger opened up a path for itself, working from the back forwards, he had the sensation of leafing through a book, so much so that that he could actually read, on page after page, of what the future might hold for them; and when his finger at last glided further up and lighted on the clitoris — a scaled down reflection, a tiny island in a queen’s garden — and he concentrated on this branching of the ways, he could tell — also from her reaction, the sudden gasp at the very moment that a light went on in one of the Palace windows — that he had found an answer of sorts, something which seemed to be confirmed by the abrupt and violent shudders that were now running through her, radiating as it were from her vagina to every part of her body. Her balletic pose had to give way to the uncontrolled twitching of her fingers and toes, and her writhing limbs set the plates and glasses tinkling; but these convulsions also seemed to cause a veil, or a last item of clothing to fall away from her, enabling him to see quite plainly that she was not the one — to perceive this as clearly, and with as great a shock, as if, at his wedding, he had lifted up his bride’s veil to find that she was not who he expected. With a touch of sadness he was forced to conclude that this girl, Pernille, too was a red herring, designed to distract him from a woman as yet unknown to him.

And so he hesitated. And so he refrained from pulling up her skirt and throwing himself on top of her, even when he felt the gentle press of her hands on his back, like an invitation. He tried to excuse himself to her; he wasn’t ready, he said, whispered breathlessly. Used just such a high-flown, rather archaic expression. And for this very reason — because she was a romantic, because she was a different sort of feminist — Pernille understood. Still, though, he was afraid — afraid of this lust, afraid that one day, instead of life, a desire to do the right thing, he would make do with a sex life. It was always there, just under the surface: the fear of suffering the same fate as Melankton. Precisely by not falling upon her he would prove his exceptional character, his rebellious will.

Later Jonas would contemplate the choice he had made in this and in similar situations. Because what if sex was life? And what if the life in which he might attain the ‘lofty’ goals towards which he strove was the life of the nether regions?

They slept, closely entwined. And they did not wake until late in the morning. If anyone had seen them they certainly had not reported it. They were hardly visible anyway, surrounded as they were by the tall vegetation and screened by the weeping ash’s tracery of low branches. Jonas woke up brimful of energy, woke up with a feeling of having been recreating on that tiny island for a year. They waded back across to the Queen’s Gardens and carried on out of the gate, which was now open. Jonas said goodbye and ran all the way up to Oscars gate, partly in order to burn off some of his excess energy, but also because he thought his grandmother must be worried sick about him. And annoyed, since it was now Sunday and he would not be able to pick up the desired supply of cigars.

She looked up from her newspaper when he walked in and asked what had taken him so long. ‘You’ve been away more than half an hour,’ she said.

‘Half an hour?’ he repeated.

‘Yes. And where are my cigars, young man?’

‘What day is it?’ Jonas asked.

‘Saturday,’ his grandmother replied. ‘Have you lost your wits completely? Now hurry up and get back down there before the shop closes.’

Time. He lay all alone on a broad expanse of beach in Montevideo. Seen from above, the deckchair and parasol must have looked like a small, stranded vessel. Or a target in the middle of a white desert. He merely lay there staring into space while the days passed; after a while he could not have said whether he had been sitting in that deckchair and hanging around the run-down hotel with the sleepy ballrooms for two years or two weeks. Late one afternoon he got up, however, and took the bus into the city centre where he proceeded to wander aimlessly around the old town. Again he had that strong sense of being on the trail of things past, an age of spurs and stirrups, gaucho knives and ancient pistols. He came to a grimy church, or a chapel more like, sandwiched in between some other buildings. Outside it a couple of bent old women in black shawls were standing talking. Although he could not have said why, he went inside. The church was totally empty. Hushed. Candles burned here and there. He sank down onto a pew, soaked up the atmosphere, savoured the pleasant coolness which eased the pressure he still felt in his chest. A murmuring sound reached his ears, only a murmur, but still it echoed faintly around the cavelike room. He became aware that something was going on behind a curtain in one of the neat, dark little stalls — cabinets of a sort — along one wall. Someone was acknowledging their sins in a confessional. Jonas thought he caught a vague whiff of mothballs. On their knees, confessing. He thought about this. Unconsciously shaking his head because he found it so bafflingly antiquated. Baffling altogether, in fact.

A woman pulled back the black curtain and stepped out. His eyes almost started out of his head. She wore jeans and a college sweatshirt, trainers on her feet. Attractive. Dark, the way women here were. Twenty-ish. Jonas’s eyes lingered on her. She stood for a moment, hunting for something in a small leather bag before making for the door. He had been struck by her face. He did not get it: a young woman, on her knees in this dusty church. What had she confessed? He felt like following her, but did not. An old priest emerged from the confessional. Jonas caught a glimpse of the grille through which you spoke, noticed that it showed signs of wear at lip level. All of a sudden he had a powerful urge to call out to the old priest, confess, bend the knee inside that stall, at that grille, divulge everything that was in his heart, pour it all out. ‘Father, I’m hiding my light under a bushel.’

He left the church and went back to roaming around, restlessly, aimlessly, and yet on the alert. He wandered along lost in thought, though with no idea what he was thinking about. When he looked up, he found himself in front of the antiquarian bookshop outside which he had stopped several times before, the one with Kristin Lavransdatter in the window. Inside he saw the girl from the church. Without stopping to think he opened the door and entered premises which summoned up once more the feeling he had had in the church. He found himself in a blessedly peaceful room. Of another order. A place in which an age-old, almost Ptolemaic view of things prevailed.

With the young woman was an elderly man. Both of them stared blankly at him. By way of explanation, or apology, Jonas pointed to the bulky novel by Sigrid Undset in the window, went so far as to pick it up, flick through it — an edition printed in Barcelona, part of a series of Nobel prize-winners. ‘Undset,’ he said. And then, in halting Spanish ‘I am from the same country.’ For some reason it sounded to him as if he was confessing. As if a whole story were contained within those few words. Something happened. The faces of the two others broke, as one, into big smiles. They both started talking, very fast. When they realised that he did not understand they switched to English, or rather: the young woman did the talking. He had to answer a great many eager questions — he could not help but smile at such avid curiosity — and in return he learned that the old man was the owner of the bookshop and the woman, Ana, was his granddaughter. Close to, she was even more attractive, or appealing. She wore amethysts in her ears, bluish-violet like the flowers on the jacaranda trees. Her name sounded like a vow. A sort of prefix. He did not know that she also embodied a golden opportunity — that she could be what Mr Dehli had called a catalyst. She had only popped in to pick up a book, was just leaving. In the doorway she paused, thought for a moment. Had Jonas eaten? Would he like to have lunch with her? Jonas glanced uncertainly at her grandfather, thinking to himself that the people here were a bit old-fashioned, Catholics, such a thing might be frowned upon, but the old man merely nodded, waved his arms at them: Go, go!

As they strolled through the streets of the old town, from the Plaza Zabala down to the harbour, she told him more about herself. She had lived in Europe for many years. Her father had gone into exile with his family for the twelve years of the dictatorship, a time full of fear and terrible brutality. Thousands had been imprisoned, many were tortured, many more simply vanished. But now the country had a new government, only recently elected. Ana had returned home to study sociology. She lived with her grandparents.

When she stopped to point out an enormous bank building to him they heard the clatter of pots coming from an open window. Unnaturally loud, as if someone was pretty mad about something. This prompted a laughing Ana to tell him about an unusual form of protest practised during the dictatorship. At a prearranged time — or quite spontaneously, following a speech on the radio — crowds of women would pour out into the streets, banging on pots and pans, making an ear-splitting din, as a demonstration against the ruling power. Ana explained proudly how, by refusing to be silent, refusing to cooperate, or quite simply by gossiping, by relaying stories, her grandmother and other women, ordinary housewives, had made the most effective, and indeed the only possible protest against the regime. Jonas could see it in his mind’s eye, hear it. Very funny, was his first thought, but then he thought again: to tell tales, to go out into the streets and bang on saucepans, that had to be just about the diametric opposite of lazing in a deckchair.

As Ana led him closer and closer to the harbour, towards one of the most crucial — catalytic — incidents in his life, Jonas realised that this was a story he had heard before. Of strong women and weak, corrupt men. He thought of his own grandmother and the German occupation. As with most Norwegians, Jørgine’s feelings about the war were somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand it had been her finest hour. On the other, those five years had left their traumatic mark. Once, when Jonas accidentally used the word ‘Buchtel’ of one of the prisms on the chandelier, he almost got his ears boxed. ‘No German in this house!’ his grandmother had admonished fiercely.

Had Jørgine Wergeland told her grandchild a little more, he might have learned an important lesson about human beings. She could have taught him that there’s no telling how your life will turn out, even though you might already be, let’s say, sixty. You might look like a pretty ordinary character, a failure even, with a career that was well and truly over, only for some external circumstance to suddenly turn you into a person of paramount importance to an entire nation, possibly even mark you out as the saviour of civilisation. Seen in that light, one person’s long, commonplace life might sometimes simply be a preparation for the momentous deeds of their latter years, once he or she had discovered their true mission.

Up until the Second World War, Jørgine Wergeland had led a normal, happy life with her Oscar, Jonas’s grandfather, in a smallholding out at Gardermoen, the old drill ground. When the war came to Norway one of the occupying force’s first moves was to extend the airfield at Gardermoen. Jørgine and Oscar lost their farm and Jonas’s grandfather dropped dead — he did not get much pleasure out of the compensation paid to them by the Germans. Granny always said that he ‘exploded with rage’. And apropos that destiny the outlines of which she was beginning to discern, inspired by a British statesman she added: ‘Losing the farm was my Dardanelles, my life’s lowest point.’

Jørgine moved into Oslo, and in honour of her husband she took possession of a spacious flat in Oscars gate, behind the Palace. But only a year later, in 1943, to everyone’s surprise — and consternation — she married an elderly, childless man and moved into his palatial residence in nearby Inkognitogata. No one could have suspected that Jørgine Wergeland had embarked upon a cunning sabotage operation, an operation she was determined to carry out even if it meant selling her soul to the devil.

Then, in the early autumn of the year the war ended, her second husband died. It was to all appearances a natural death — if a coronary can be considered a natural death. ‘It’s hardly surprising his heart failed him,’ Jørgine remarked conspiratorially to Jonas’s mother, ‘when you think how black and treacherous it was.’ It should perhaps be added that Jørgine had known full well that this man had a bad heart. The last thing she had wanted was to have to spend the rest of her life with him.

The fact was that her new husband was a building contractor. And in the self-same war which had caused Jonas’s grandfather to ‘explode with rage’ this other man had made a mint. Jonas’s grandmother had not been idle during the year in which she lived alone in Oscars gate. Like a spy she had infiltrated certain circles and, with great care and a surprising degree of cynicism, selected a person who had made money primarily by building airfields for the Germans. There is no point in naming this man or in listing the airfields in question — the country was swarming with such types, and there were airfields all over the place. But for Jørgine Wergeland, who had lost both smallholding and husband because the Germans decided to cover more of Gardermoen with concrete, it was essential that the man of her choice had been contracted to lay runways. Had she lived, Jørgine Wergeland would, I’m sure, have appreciated the irony of it when the time came to build a new main airport in Norway and Gardermoen once more became a goldmine for building contractors.

Another important vital condition in her choice of husband, or victim, was that he had to be an entrepreneur who had ceased his business activities — bluntly described by Jørgine as his treasonous activities — in good time and had seen the wisdom of one of the rules of mountain safety which everyone in Norway would later know by heart: there’s no shame in turning back — although in his case it was more a matter of turning his coat back. And to be on the safe side he had even become involved, half-heartedly and very circumspectly, in some underground work. The minute she met him Jørgine noticed that his eyes were set abnormally far apart. He looked a bit like a hammerhead shark. This sinister feature became more marked as the war progressed, as if it took its toll to keep looking two ways at once. Be that as it may, he neatly avoided being arrested or punished when peace was declared, despite government investigations and a bloodthirsty public hue-and-cry against collaborators.

It is tempting, even though it lies outside the scope of this story, to take a closer look at the boom in certain sectors during the war. Disturbingly many Norwegians made a lot of money, just as the whole of Norway today grows richer with every war waged, due to the attendant rise in the price of oil. Much has been written about the astonishingly cooperative line taken by the Norwegian authorities, with the exception of the King and the government, towards the occupying force, more or less from day one. ‘The wheels have to be kept turning in the interests of the working people,’ was how it was phrased. This cooperation also included tasks of such military importance as the repair and extension of airfields. In the spring and summer of 1940, not one class, not one organisation, not one political party advocated an open policy of sabotage, and so it continued, with surprisingly few exceptions, for some time. This says a lot about Norway. Other countries lost millions of people, to famine, in battle; the citizens of the Soviet Union, not least, fought and died — also for Norway’s benefit. And what did Norway do? The somewhat less than heroic answer would be: ‘We trod softly.’ Poland lost about twenty per cent of its population, Norway three per mil. Not counting the sinking of the Blücher, the fight put up by certain divisions in the very earliest phase of the war, not least at Narvik, a few dozen genuine heroes and, of course, the navy, the Norwegian resistance campaign could be said to have been one of the least heroic ever. All military operations were terminated in June 1940, after eight weeks. Later, it also came out that every fifth Norwegian officer had been a member of Quisling’s National Unity party. Within just about every branch of trade and industry hands were extended to the Germans. And the gains could on occasion be prodigious. Which makes it all the harder to understand — for a foreigner particularly — how Norway, a country which was subjected to a relatively mild period of occupation, could have carried out such an unreasonably relentless series of judicial purges after the war — as if all the hostility and outrage could finally be vented, five years too late. Despite everything so far written about Norway and the Second World War, it would not be too bold a prediction to state that our contribution to the war effort, our spirit of resistance, will be shown to be even more frayed and pathetic when still more researchers have delved into the events of those five years. Such a statement might be hard for a few people to swallow, but Jørgine Wergeland for one would have declared herself heartily in agreement. ‘Our military honour was lost when the dreadnought Norge was sunk at the Battle of Narvik,’ she said once to Jonas. ‘With the battleship Eidsvold our ideals too went down.’

In other words, by the time the Germans left the country, Jørgine’s second husband had made himself a nice packet. Which no one knew anything about. And better still: he had been shrewd and foresightful enough to stash away his money in an obscure network of bank accounts. It had, in other words, been nicely laundered.

Right from the day when he effected his carefully calculated about-turn, at a time when everyone could see that the Germans’ luck was also turning, he was convinced that he would get away with it. He had not, however, reckoned with his wife-to-be; how was he to know that behind a smiling, friendly and indeed apparently loving mask, Jørgine Wergeland viewed him quite simply as another Hitler, a man whom she had resolved to bring down. If he had not suspected anything before, then he should have done when she turned to him as they walked out of the registrar’s office, looked him straight in his hammerhead face and uttered her first words as a newly-wed: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’

Jørgine Wergeland declared war on her husband, she commenced a campaign of resistance of which no one was ever aware, conducted as it was within the four walls of their home. And she resorted to tactics which were much more ruthless than the clattering of pots and frying pans.

I do not know whether Jonas Wergeland associated Høyanger with demonstrations, with women and saucepans, but I noticed the rapt expression on his face one day when we were strolling along the steamship wharf and he spotted the old Høyang emblem on the door of the metalworks. He was clearly moved by the sight of that name, which had been stamped into the aluminium of so many of his boyhood’s saucepans, including the ones on which he had done some cacophonic drumming of his own.

Whitsun was just around the corner. We were tied up at a pontoon dock out by the breakwater, under the southern face of Gråberget, with a great view of the town and Hålandsnipa forming a wall behind it, and of Øyrelva, its foaming white stream snaking down the mountainside on the other side of the fjord. The chimneys at the metalworks no longer spewed out black smoke as they did in the old photographs taken by Olav Knutzen; fluoride-laced smoke that had, in the past, done so much visible damage to the environment. No one now could call the works at Høyanger a ‘black cathedral’ or a ‘dark, satanic mill’. And yet, as we sailed up the fjord I had the strong impression of a meeting between a new age and an old. At first glance the sight of the vast metalworks, the production halls and the towering silos in which the raw material, oxide, was stored, was impressive. But when I thought about it I realised that the Voyager, our modest little craft, housed an industry every bit as great. It had struck me before that our boat, with its enormous capacity for storing information and its possibilities for wireless communication with the whole world, represented something bigger, mightier, than all the Hydro Aluminium buildings in this mountain-encircled basin. In terms of potential the Voyager was, in fact, an aircraft carrier; theoretically we could sit here, out on the fjord, and generate assets as great as Hydro earned by selling the aluminium made at Høyanger. Sailing there on the fjord, we provided the perfect illustration of the new Norway and the old. A small mobile object approaching something massive and steadfast. And vulnerable. No one, least of all the townsfolk, could tell when the owners of Høyanger’s cornerstone industry might see fit to shut down the plant, possibly set up production elsewhere.

Sogn. Again and again I was struck by how extraordinary, how unique, this area was. In many ways it was Norway in a nutshell. Until well into the nineties there was not a single state wine monopoly outlet in the Sogn and Fjordane region. And in the whole district there was but one set of traffic lights. Sogn was like a little Switzerland smack in the middle of Norway. Often, when we sailed round a point and one of those little towns hove into view, tucked away at the head of an inlet or the arm of a fjord and ringed by high mountains, I would find myself thinking that there was something unreal about it, that it was a bit like the valley of Tralla La in Carl Barks’s story about Uncle Scrooge; a place where everyone was happy. And people in Sogn were happy. A host of surveys confirmed, time and again, that the inhabitants of this region were the most content in the whole country. In every set of statistics they came out on top where what mattered was to be top, and came bottom where that was best. They lived longest and were least sick, if you like.

I had wondered whether this might have something to do with the contrasts found around Sognefjord. Did they generate a tension, a salubrious force field which in turn made the people expand? Here in Høyanger, with all its clear reminders of aluminium, that attractive light metal, my thoughts often turned — as if running down an opposite track — to all of the fruit-growing which we had also seen in Sogn. I will never forget the view as we sailed past Leikanger. The whole place, the slopes running up to the heights, shimmered with the pale-pink blossom on tens of thousands of apple trees, shot here and there with sunlight glinting off the sprinkler jets. The climate at Leikanger was so favourable that you could plant an apricot tree against a south-facing wall or even grow grapes. We anchored close enough to shore to be able to enjoy the sight of the gigantic walnut tree in the vicarage garden, standing between the main house and the water. Did the key to Sognefjord perhaps lie hidden here? In the tension between plants and minerals, fruit and aluminium? Amanlis, Summer Red and d’Oullins on the one side, cables, ceiling panels and railway wagons on the other. I would not argue with anyone who dared to say that the healthiness and contentment of the local inhabitants stemmed from a kind of visual alchemy — the blossom-covered branches of an apple tree against a backdrop of silvery aluminium cylinder blocks.

In Høyanger Jonas could easily have passed for a local, by which I mean that he seemed even more content than usual. Possibly because he came upon so many unexpected links with his own life. As when, for example, someone told him about the slug factory which had closed down just before the turn of the millennium and he realised that the material for the tubes containing his favourite sandwich spreads had been made there. At another factory, Fundo’s, they produced the wheel rims for the car which he himself drove. Høyanger helped one to understand the world of today. In a small town at the head of a narrow fjord, walled in by steep mountainsides, they manufactured a car part for a factory in another country which also received parts from a dozen other countries. You lived in Høyanger, but were part of a global network.

But there was another reason for Jonas Wergeland’s happiness, and that reason was Kamala. I have nothing against that — I least of all. It was the best thing about the whole trip: to see those two, Kamala Varma and Jonas Wergeland, together; to observe how devoted they were to one another. ‘How’s my secretary getting on?’ Kamala might say, wrapping her arms around him. And he would not answer, merely allow himself to be hugged. Even when he was sitting alone on deck, possibly writing something in his big notebook or simply staring up at the rigging, her effect on him was clear to see. His name appeared in print at the very beginning of a love story. Whenever I saw him I could not help thinking: there’s a man who is loved. Who simply laps up love. So he can learn to love. Become a lover. That may sound easy, but for Jonas Wergeland it was anything but. It had taken him a lifetime to reach this stage.

I think it must also have been this love which enabled him to view his country in a new and unprejudiced light. ‘You have the Ganges,’ I heard him say to Kamala — in jest, I grant you — on the way to Høyanger, as we were leaning on the rail, gazing incredulously at Ortnevik across the water, ‘but we have Sognefjord. This is our sacred river. And the farms clinging to the mountainsides are our temples.’

With similar pride he showed us the church at Høyanger, designed by no less a person than Arnstein Arneberg, one of the architects behind Oslo Rådhus. The old town gate offered a perfect view of it, in its lovely setting on the other side of the river, on a low hill at the foot of Gråberget’s steep rock face. Jonas talked Kamala and I into posing on the bridge, so he could take our picture with the church in the background. It might have had something to do with his closeness to Kamala, but sometimes I had the impression that he was starting to look like an Indian, even in his colouring, that soon he really would look like a film director from Bombay — just as his grandmother’s features had, over the years, grown more and more Churchillian. He took a long time over it, snapping picture after picture, until eventually Kamala got fed up, went up to him, took the camera and ordered him to go and stand next to me. That was so like her. Kamala Varma is a woman who prefers to take photographs herself.

This same attitude, or mindset, lay at the root of Wergeland’s programme on Liv Ullmann. Jonas’s heroes and heroines were not only discoverers, they were to just as great an extent rebels. Few have discerned the salute to the spirit of resistance and defiance which underpins the whole series.

At the heart of the Ullmann programme lay an incident which many Norwegians recall with ambivalent wonder: the actress’s dinner with Henry Kissinger in March 1973; a banquet which was duly covered by a couple of Norwegian dailies. Jonas Wergeland concentrated, however, on their brief meeting before the dinner, which was by no means an intimate affair, but a huge party in honour of film director John Ford, held at the Grand Ballroom of the Beverley Hilton Hotel; a function also attended by President Nixon. A lot of Norwegians felt very proud, flattered even, on Liv Ullmann’s behalf, that Henry Kissinger himself, long-time professor of political science at Harvard University, now the presidential advisor on national security and soon to become the American Secretary of State — not to mention something of a womaniser and one of the world’s most written-about men — had personally asked the Norwegian actress to be his dinner companion. But a lot of Norwegians were also rather shocked, and possibly disappointed, that an artist of Liv Ullmann’s weighty calibre should allow herself to be dazzled by something as basic, not to say primitive, as power, and such a dubious sort of power at that; they did not like the thought that she might fall for a man who, while famed for his brilliant analyses of foreign affairs and inspired diplomacy, was equally well-known for his cynical, almost sinister internal intrigues, and was even quoted as having said — the nerve of it! — that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Many people found it hard to equate the couple’s little tête-à-tête with their image of Liv Ullmann as a demure woman with a natural Nordic allure. She was accused of being naive. The possibility that she might have accepted the invitation with her eyes wide open, that she might be a mature woman with masses of self-confidence and great inner strength was almost automatically discounted. This was the politicised Norway of the seventies, readily inclined to think in terms of headlines such as: ‘Sweet, innocent woman seduced by nasty, conservative man.’

As an actress, Liv Ullmann was at the very peak of her career, nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Emigrants. But despite her international success, despite all the prizes and honorary degrees bestowed on her from all quarters, despite being the subject of a lead story in Time the year before, with her picture on the cover and all, Liv Ullmann’s acting was not particularly well appreciated in Norway. In people’s minds she was always associated with a certain type of ‘heavy’, doleful role, with a tremulous expression and a voice which was all too easily parodied.

Jonas Wergeland wanted to shatter the stereotype ‘Ullmann myth’ which prevailed in Norway. In the programme’s key scene the couple, Liv Ullmann and Henry Kissinger, were seen having a glass of white wine in Ullmann’s Hollywood hotel suite — there was no sign of the secret service people, nor of the friend who was visiting Liv Ullmann at the time. It was Kissinger, ever the diplomat, who had requested this brief meeting, so that they could have a little chat, just the two of them, before leaving for the society dinner in honour of John Ford. Jonas Wergeland portrayed them as actors in a film. He had Ullmann, or rather: Ella Strand who played Ullmann, dressed, not in the white gown which the actress had actually been wearing, but in a red number with a plunging neckline, the one which she had worn in the unforgettable mirror scene, an almost two-minute long close-up — what a piece of acting, what presence, it was enough to make a cameraman forget all about his camera — from the film Cries and Whispers — a film in which, incidentally, Liv Ullmann’s radiance and beauty were presented in such timeless and touching fashion that not only Henry Kissinger, but even your ordinary Norwegian had to take his hat off to her.

Then something occurred in this half-unreal film scenario, in which a Norwegian woman, a Norwegian maiden — people forgot that she already had two long-term relationships behind her — sat face to face with the worldspirit, to use a rather Hegelian turn of phrase. What followed, though quiet and undramatic, was in fact, a variation on the final scene from A Doll’s House — it was no coincidence that Nora was one of Liv Ullmann’s great roles — and in order to get this across Wergeland played Ullmann’s strongest cards: her face, her sensitive mouth and, above all, her eyes, that look, the secret of which lay not in their blueness, but in the strength of will that shone in them. Liv Ullmann would later write a book entitled Changing, an international bestseller and a life-changing read for many people. Jonas Wergeland set out to capture just such a moment of change. A moment marked by the urge to object, to do something other than what is expected. In an earlier version — of which he even did a trial cut — at the turning point of the Kissinger tableau he inserted Ullmann’s primal scream from Ingmar Bergman’s film Face to Face, as a cry of realisation or protest; a brief clip from the scene in which, in the part of Jenny, she stands with her back to a wall and screams, really howls. Instead, though, he opted for the quieter transition, partly because he wanted to break with the unfair Ullmann cliché of a face contorted by psychotic angst and pain. Suddenly, while sitting there in that hotel suite with Kissinger, she lifted her eyes, that expressive face, and looked out of the ‘fiction’, out of the scene, straight at the cameraman, as if she had caught sight of something extremely important, then she abruptly stood up and walked towards the viewers, giving them to understand that she was taking over the camera, the direction, herself; her voice was heard, giving instructions, as another actress entered the scene, dressed in the same red dress and sat down in her, Liv Ullmann’s, place, across from Henry Kissinger. With this switching of roles, Jonas Wergeland also wished to show how detached Ullmann actually was from the whole carry-on — and from the gossip and the ridiculous rumours to which she knew it would give rise. She took, as it happens, the same rather blithe approach to a later dinner held to mark the end of the SALT negotiations, at which she was seated between Kissinger and the Soviet ambassador to Washington. For Ullmann, this function had about it the inescapable air of a superficial, inconsequential party game or a first-night shindig. The way she saw it, Kissinger would have made the perfect tragic figure in a Bergman film. And so at this pivotal moment, in this fictional situation, when Ullmann got to her feet and stepped out of Kissinger’s dazzling aura, it was with a cool, little smile for which Jonas found justification in her little known sense of humour and self-irony. And by some inexplicable metamorphosis, the woman on the screen, the slightly younger actress who had taken Ullmann’s place, now called to mind Kristin Lavransdatter, while Kissinger suddenly looked like Erlend. A note of defiance had crept into the scene, a sense of a secret rendezvous between a woman going against her parents’ wishes and an excommunicated man. Viewers were witness to a provocative flouting of convention. A passionate woman who stayed true to her convictions, had faith in her own judgement of right and wrong. A woman who was no longer just a good little girl who listened to what everyone else told her she should do. A woman who was also — no small point this — stronger than the man sitting opposite her.

Jonas Wergeland’s aim was to show how, at a certain point in her life, Liv Ullmann chose to become a woman, a person, who created reality — who was no longer content to be a ‘fiction’, a dream. One might say that she turned her back on worldly splendour. All the glamour of film stardom. She went from being out in front, to being behind. From being written about to writing herself. From acting to action. Liv Ullmann did not deny her past, what she did was to broaden her scope. She was an actress, but now she also became a writer and a human rights activist. It says something for Jonas Wergeland’s powers of intuition, that he also — unintentionally it’s true — anticipated her next step: her decision to become a film director.

The most laudable aspect of the programme was the way it focused so firmly on Liv Ullmann’s intelligence — which was also her biggest handicap as a so-called star, not least in Hollywood. What to do with such an actor, one with such rare gifts, such magical power? There were simply no scripts capable of embracing her, of allowing her to give of her best. As an individual she had too much breadth for the standard, formulaic American film roles.

In Jonas Wergeland’s version of events, when she got up and walked away from Henry Kissinger and round to the other side of the camera, Liv Ullmann was choosing to write her own part. To quite literally live up to her name which, in Norwegian, means ‘life’. The actress gave way to Liv, the woman. Fiction gave way to Life.

Thanks in large part to Jonas Wergeland, from an early age I regarded Liv Ullmann as an ideal. His programme about her was much in my mind when I left the world of television and made the leap from being seen to seeing. Creating. But right now, in Høyanger, I was going through a frustrated phase, I almost felt like rebelling against our own project. One evening, when Martin was doing his best to console me with one of his sumptuous club sandwiches, I began to delete stuff. Did we really have to say that Trotsky had once stayed at a hotel in Vadheim? What about all the foreign submarines that people claimed to have spotted in the fjord? In Sogndal I had paid a visit to a man who worked in a slaughterhouse. He had shown me a collection of things he had found in cows’ stomachs — not just nails and rocks, but an old Norwegian coin, the inner tube from a bike tyre and a gold wristwatch. It was funny, but was it relevant?

More and more often my thoughts returned to that disc which I had heard so much about, and which Jonas Wergeland told us even more about: the disc attached to the Voyager probes which, inconceivably many years from now, might pass other stars and planets. Some day — who knew — it might even be opened and played, analyzed, by beings from some distant galaxy. What would they think, if think was the right word, when they saw the picture of a snail’s shell, or the leaf of a strawberry plant? Of a dolphin or a banquet in China? What would they think when they heard, on this disc, the sound of wind and rain, of grasshoppers and frogs? Footsteps, heartbeats, laughter? Or, what could they possibly make of this: the sound of a kiss? I tried to imagine the reaction of an extra-terrestrial being on hearing a voice say in the Indian language Gujarati: ‘Greetings from a human being of the Earth. Please contact.’

At night, when darkness eventually fell, I would sometimes go up on deck to look at the sky. I liked to think of those two space probes bound for a utopian destination, of the fact that the message they carried, a gold-plated copper disc, was encased in a protective aluminium cover. Wherever you looked there were connections. Even between Høyanger and a space probe. The first object ever to be sent in the other direction, out of our solar system, took aluminium with it.

A couple of nights ago Jonas Wergeland told us, with a look on his face I remembered from the treetop conversations of my childhood, about all the new discoveries which Voyager 2 had made for us — it had, for example, found seven hitherto unknown moons circling the planet Neptune. I could not help wondering, the other morning, as I watched him from a distance, sitting with his arm round Kamala: might I be able to discover new ‘moons’ circling Jonas Wergeland, a man who has been so minutely charted?

There were lots of signs in Høyanger of the halcyon days of the labour movement. Not for nothing was the main street named after the political activist Marcus Thrane. I noticed the keen interest with which Jonas took in the ‘Own Home’ district and later the Park area or ‘garden city’, just down from the old hospital: possibly Høyanger’s most unique feature. For all I know it was the architect in him waking up. On Kloumann’s allé he ran a close eye over the fine residences built for the town’s captains of industry, with their privileged location overlooking the fjord. Suddenly, as if inspired by Arnberg’s church and the unexpected link with Oslo Town Hall, he decided he wanted to chart the decoration of public buildings in Høyanger and only a couple of phone calls later we found ourselves inside Valhalla, the old red-brick Youth Club building behind the school, the walls of which were covered with pictures of Viking kings and the homes of New Norwegian poet-chiefs. All at once Jonas Wergeland was a bundle of energy, leading the way to the Town Hall, to the community centre and the bank where, almost hidden away, we found pictures and other works by famous Norwegian artists. In a conference room on the fourth floor of the Town Hall we even managed to track down reproductions of the murals which had once adorned the old People’s Palace. Jonas spent a long time poring over these lost paintings of men carrying out different sorts of work in and around Høyanger. ‘How could they not preserve that lovely building?’ he asked.

My guess is that it was these decorations, along perhaps with some memory of his grandmother, that prompted him to ask me what we had thought of doing as regards Sogn and World War II, Sogn and the Germans. Because Kaiser Wilhelm had not been the only German to visit Sognefjord. There were still plenty of traces of their presence, whether as small bunkers, or as vast fortresses like the one at Lammetun. We had discussed this, of course, particularly in connection with another town very similar to Høyanger — Årdal at the very head of Sognefjord — since there too water-power was used to produce aluminium. Årdal could almost be said to have been a gift from the Germans. The liberated Norwegians got the whole thing on a plate. We had considered various angles, but eventually came to the conclusion that it was not within our remit to criticise Norwegian shortcomings during the Second World War or to discuss how beneficial the war had been for the growth of Norwegian industry. We had to draw the line somewhere.

Jørgine Wergeland, on the other hand, was not one for drawing lines. During the war she organised the home front in the truest sense of that term, although hers was a far more ruthless and dogged campaign of resistance than that waged by that other Home Front, the Norwegian underground movement. On her wedding night, when she locked her hammerhead of a husband out of the bedroom it was with an icy paraphrasing of Churchill’s words in response to Britain’s signing of the Munich agreement: ‘You had the choice between shame and war. You chose shame, but you shall have war.’

Having married her unsuspecting building contractor, Jørgine Wergeland took, as they say, the law into her own hands, and funnily enough her main weapon derived from his underground activities. Shrewd entrepreneur that he was, he had contrived to conceal a radio in a rather unlikely, but practical, place: the lavatory. So Jonas Wergeland was not the only one who owed a debt to British broadcasting. Jørgine spent a lot of time in the toilet — or the English Quarter as she called it — on the pretext of chronic constipation, listening to the BBC’s edifying transmissions from London. ‘I’m a graduate of the WC school of resistance,’ she would tell people, who would have no idea what she was talking about. It became something of a code. ‘I’m always running in to listen to WC,’ she said to Jonas’s mother. Everyone, including her husband, thought she was going off her rocker.

By listening to Winston Churchill’s stirring speeches, as well as all the references to them and quotations from them in other broadcasts, Jørgine built up a deadly arsenal for use in her clandestine guerrilla war — although it might perhaps be fairer to call it a private judicial purge, since she knew her husband would never be convicted of financial treason. In addition to a store of pithy Churchillian sayings she was armed most appropriately with several boxes of expensive Romeo y Julieta cigars — a gift, ironically enough, to her non-smoker of a husband from certain affluent business contacts. The man was as dull as they come — despite his hammerhead appearance. Jørgine would later use the same words of him as Churchill had used of Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister: ‘I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot.’ During one of the first breakfasts they shared, she lit one of her big Cuban cigars and declared, with a slightly revised version of a quote she had heard many times: ‘I shall fight you to the last; I shall fight in the hall, I shall fight in the parlour, I shall fight in the kitchen, I shall fight in the bedroom; I shall never surrender.’ A statement which actually brought a frown to the brow of this man, whose sole concern in life up to this point had been to find the shortest way to making a fast buck.

It may sound callous, but as far as Jørgine was concerned it was very simple. She was faced here with the same phenomenon which Churchill had labelled, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, ‘a crime beyond description’. She had lost her Oscar because the Germans came to Gardermoen, and she was going to see to it that someone paid for that; she had no pity for a man who had helped the Germans to extend airfields and made a packet in the process. A man, who, by some obscure moral logic, regarded himself as innocent, blameless. During her vengeful hunt for suitable candidates, she had not only made sure that the chosen contractor had a bad heart, but that he was in fact heartless. Nonetheless, he was subjected not to bloody confrontations, but to strategic manoeuvres. Early on, Jørgine had committed another of Churchill’s sayings to memory: ‘Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter.’ In addition to a two-year long policy of evasive action in the bedroom, Jørgine’s campaign consisted primarily of dropping sly little hints, day in, day out, as to her husband’s crimes, while at the same time inundating him with camouflaged Churchill quotes memorised in that room, the WC, behind whose locked door she was to be found more and more often, puffing on a fat cigar. She quite simply wore him down, mentally; she made life unbearable for him — or rather: for his heart. He did not recognise the charming, considerate woman he had first met, not even to look at. And it was true: during those years Jørgine Wergeland’s face would actually start to resemble Churchill’s round, plump, but exceedingly strong-willed countenance.

Her husband gave up eventually, or gave up the ghost, the year the war ended; and all of those who were present in the Western crematorium believed that they saw, in Jørgine, a genuinely grieving widow. But what was runnin through Jørgine’s mind were Churchill’s words when Britain declared war against Japan: ‘When you have to kill a man it costs nothing to be polite.’ In any case she was too taken up with Alf Rolfsen’s impressive paintings in the chapel. These beautiful frescoes reminded her of the fortune she had inherited, because even after the post-war currency stabilisation she had been left with what was, all things considered, a considerable sum of money. And there in the crematorium, as she ran her eyes over Alf Rolfsen’s pictures, it came to her, an idea that had been at the back of her mind for some time: she had to use this blood money for something positive, uplifting; it had to be invested in a building. And she did not have to look far: ‘I found Norway’s biggest piggy bank,’ she would later tell the aforementioned Alf Rolfsen as they sat in the Town Hall’s Festival Gallery one day, having their elevenses.

Jørgine moved back to her old home in Oscars gate, as if she were once more together with her first husband, or as if her life during the years in Inkognitogaten had been a top-secret affair, a mission performed incognito. When she left the building contractor’s flat which had, for her, been more of a battlefield than a home, she took with her just one thing apart from her husband’s bankbook: the magnificent crystal chandelier. Had Jonas known the story behind it, he might better have understood why, when they were cleaning the chandelier, his grandmother so often put on records by Vera Lynn, with songs which Jørgine knew from wartime: hits such as ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘Yours’ and ‘Wishing’. Like Jonas, his grandmother too gazed up at the chandelier, into the crystal droplets, as if they were screens on which she saw scenes being enacted. But unlike Jonas, Jørgine did not see pictures from the Queen’s Chambers, she thought about the war, and about Oscar, Jonas’s grandfather. Jonas observed how her eyes filled with tears and she became lost in her own thoughts when Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’ was revolving on the turntable. To Jonas these songs were just boring old evergreens, but to her they clearly represented a link with other universes, a portal to infinite inner landscapes. And later he would come to understand that this music must have had the same sort of sentimental associations for his grandmother as Rubber Soul had for him. Simple though they were, those tunes could turn some organ inside you to jelly, to soft rubber. So flexible were Jørgine’s thought processes that at such times she was not only capable of calling the Town Hall Oslo’s Statue of Liberty, she was just as likely to think of it as her Oscar statuette.

Given all this, it should come as no surprise to anyone that Jonas was willing to risk life and limb in defence of the Town Hall. So when Viktor, the leading light of The Three Heretics, came up with the idea for his ‘Emil Lie Demonstration’ on, or for, the Town Hall Square, expressly to save this splendid Statue of Liberty or ‘piggy bank’, from a new dictatorship, that of the automobile, he was all for it. The Three Heretics recognised something that should have been obvious to everyone, not least the city fathers: the square in front of the Town Hall was an organic part of the building itself. Defile the square and you defiled the Town Hall too.

One suitably beautiful day in September at the very beginning of the seventies, they went to work, which is to say: out into Rådhusgaten, more or less as the gold hands on the clock tower announced that the time was four p.m. and the bells struck up a folk tune — on this occasion ‘The Food Song’ from Sunnmøre. A lot of people were going to be hopelessly late for dinner, though, because thousands of cars were soon stuck fast in the centre of Oslo due to a demonstration the aim of which was as simple as it was impossible: ‘Dancing on the Town Hall Square!’

If one did not know better one could be forgiven for thinking that this event was the forerunner of the somewhat incongruous carnivals which would be arranged a decade or so later. Viktor had succeeded in mobilising about forty students from the Cathedral School as well as some from the Experimental Grammar School — an even better breeding ground for radicalism and iconoclasm than the Cath., if that were possible, and these now proceeded to march round in a circle extending across the four lanes closest to the Town Hall. They were all dressed and made up to look like caricatures of tourists: Frenchmen in berets, Nigerians in gaily coloured robes, Arabs in long djellabahs, Americans in cowboy hats and Hawaiian shirts, Austrians in lederhosen and Tyrolean hats. Those students posing as Japanese carried cameras and snapped non-stop, their jaws dropping in shock — although, if one were being mean, one could say that they focused on the car number-plates, as if their owners were kerb-crawlers. Some carried placards. ‘A disgrace to Norway!’ and ‘Is this the city’s finest plaza?’ a couple said in German and English. And in Italian: ‘Would anyone run a four-lane expressway over the Piazza Navona?’ Jonas was guised as an Indian, in a white, high-collared Nehru jacket and Ghandi cap — an outfit which Pernille had helped him with — and he was conscious of feeling not quite so shy in this unfamiliar attire. ‘I am a film director from Bombay and I am here to find locations in Oslo for a film about māyā,’ he announced fearlessly in his best curry-and-rice English to one irate motorist who was yelling that there would be hell to pay if he wasn’t there to pick his wife up from the hairdresser’s.

The aim of the demonstration was not the same as at Mardøla: to protect something. The Three Heretics set out to dam the heavy and apparently unstoppable stream of painted bodywork flowing past the Town Hall. And the elliptic circle of flabbergasted tourists, or students rather, in the middle of the road actually did succeed in stopping the cars and causing a massive traffic jam around the square. Despite threatening overtures from a few angry drivers and some incipient scuffling, the demonstrators were reassured each time they glanced up at the façade of the Town Hall, where St Hallvard, the patron saint of the city, stood with his arms raised, blessing their venture for all to see.

Viktor had given a lot of thought to what they could possibly hand out to the nearest cars, something which — in the spirit of Ghandi — would illustrate the demonstration’s positive aims, but it was Jonas who came up with the idea. He remembered a picture taken around 1950 by OK — Olav Knutzen, Leonard’s father — of an open-air dance, or ‘cobblestone ball’ as they were called, with people tripping the light fantastic, happy and proud, on the Town Hall Square. Jonas called the Aktuell photographer, who instantly allied himself with their cause and ran off a couple of hundred copies of the photograph at his own expense. It is never easy to get those affected by it to understand the point of a demonstration. Several of the first motorists got very hot under the collar and kept tooting their horns aggressively, but others thought it was fun — even more so when they were handed the long forgotten photograph, inscribed with the words: ‘The heart of the city needs dancing, not lead.’ They realised that they were part of something momentous, that they were making history, so to speak. One or two would also save this picture and frame it in fond memory of that day. They might have been late getting home, but they could see that it truly was a disgrace that the Town Hall Square, of all places, this public space laid out so beautifully in front of the city’s foremost landmark, should be overrun by cars. On Pipervika, people had welcomed Fridtjof Hansen back from his inspiring expeditions. Here those same people had hailed their dauntless king after the war. Albert Schweitzer himself had addressed a large crowd on this very spot. The Town Hall Square was the heart of the city, but it was also its lungs, a corner designed to give us a breathing space, oxygen. And the politicians and town planners had turned it into the city’s colon.

After a while — though not soon enough to prevent total chaos, with a tailback stretching all the way to Malmøya, several kilometres to the south — the law did of course arrive, four squad cars plus mounted police, to disperse the demonstrators. A number had to be carried away, but Jonas and Viktor were the only ones to put up a fight — Jonas was almost happy to feel an old rage stir inside him again. Both were taken to the police station. In a brief item on the Evening News Jonas was seen being carted off, still holding aloft the placard bearing his message written, thanks to the kind offices of the Indo-Iranian Institute, in Marathi: ‘Destroy not the Gateway of Norway!’ — with a clear allusion to the Gateway of India, Bombay’s most famous landmark. The irony of it was not lost on Jonas: the first time he managed to achieve his goal in life, to make his name publicly known, it was in the form of an alias, as Vinoo Sabarmati, a famous film director from Bombay. In due course a newspaper photograph was even said to have reached India, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that people there really did take Jonas for a film-maker from Bombay who had accidentally strayed into an unknown corner of the world called Norway, a place overrun by police and cars.

Life is full of mysterious coincidences. Jonas had earlier seen how rings could meet and intersect, and not only in water. Still, though, he was startled to read, in prison, that the Town Hall Square — at long last free of cars again — had been paved with flagstones from India. You could almost be said to be walking on the bedrock of India right in the centre of Oslo. This news brought back rather painful memories of his valiant youthful protest, and also revived a thought which had come to him as he was being led down to the harbour area in Montevideo, in far-off Uruguay, by a young, politically-aware woman called Ana: there has been too little iconoclasm and too much orthodoxy in my life. I need to be more of a rebel.

Together with Ana, whom he had got talking to thanks to a copy of Kristin Lavransdatter displayed in a window, Jonas reached the main gathering point in the old town. Here, in the shadow of the Customs House, lay the Mercado del Puerto: no longer a market, but a bustling, noisy collection of restaurants, a score or more under one roof, in something resembling an old railway shed; a ferment of barbecue fumes, accordion music and newspaper vendors with grotesque, piercing voices. It was like a cross between an infernal snack bar and a dark, poky pub with long, long bars. With the ease of familiarity Ana led him around open fires, casting a critical eye over the dripping cuts of meat laid out on sloping grill racks. She found a place, ordered food and drinks for them both. ‘This is on me,’ she said.

Maybe it had something to do with the atmosphere in the bar, Jonas did not know, but Ana started talking again about Sigrid Undset and Kristin Lavransdatter, in fact Jonas had the feeling that this was why she had invited him to lunch. She had read the three books as a teenager, she said, and had been absolutely fascinated by Kristin, or Kristina as she was called in the Spanish translation. Jonas simply could not understand it: how could this dusky beauty with amethysts in her ears, a modern woman, a student of sociology who had actually lived in political exile, be so besotted with what was, as far as he was concerned, a stodgy Norwegian novel about a woman in the Middle Ages. And as if to explain, she began alluding, wide-eyed and animated, to different episodes from these books about Kristin Lavransdatter — keen, or so it seemed to Jonas, to share them with him, to revive a pleasure they had both had. She mentioned the part when the child Kristin meets the elf-maid, and the incident when her poor little sister, Ulvhild, has her back broken by a falling log, and what did Jonas think of Bentein trying to rape Kristin, and Arne being stabbed and killed, wasn’t that awful? Jonas, who had not read one word by Undset, found it all pretty hard to follow, but at the same time he could not help being intrigued by the young woman’s anecdotes which tended, because she got so caught up in them, to become little stories in themselves.

Eventually he felt compelled to admit that he did not know the story at all. She clapped her hands in disbelief, then burst into ripples of laughter. Fortunately their lunch appeared just at that moment: a bottle of wine and chivitos: a thin slice of steak together with bacon, cheese, tomato, egg and a salad of sliced peppers and onions, all served between two huge chunks of bread and held together by toothpicks. She carried on laughing as they ate, could not help it; she seemed to find it hard to believe: a Norwegian who had not read Kristin Lavransdatter. And for this very reason, perhaps, she started once again, with redoubled enthusiasm, to relate episodes from the book, as if anxious to show him what he was missing; there she sat, Jonas thought in amusement, pleading a Norwegian writer’s case to a Norwegian. Or maybe she simply got so carried away that once she started she could not stop. In any case, she tried to describe to him how wrapped up she had been in the passionate first meetings between Kristin and Erlend, with what trepidation she had read about them dancing together, about Kristin sleeping in his arms, and of how Erlend had kissed her above the knee, thus ‘disarming’ her, and could then lay her down in the hay. Jonas listened with interest, in suspense in fact, and although he did have to interrupt now and again to inquire about some detail, and once to protest at Kristin’s wilful behaviour, for the most part he remained silent throughout the rest of the young woman’s very elaborate narration of everything from the lightning that struck St Olav’s Church at Jørundgård and set it on fire to Kristin on her deathbed acknowledging God’s plan for her. Jonas sat there like a priest in the confessional, one big, hearkening ear, and saw these scenes form a long fresco in his mind’s eye. He found it hard to believe, that he could be here in a foreign country, wreathed in the fumes from barbecue coals and grilled meat, with the sound of an accordion in his ears, listening to a young woman recounting extracts from a book by a Norwegian author with such feeling that from time to time she actually blushed.

‘And now,’ Jonas asked when she was done, with the last sliver of olive on his fork, ‘how do you feel about those books now?’

She smiled almost apologetically. ‘Well, obviously I feel differently about them today,’ she said. ‘I find the sombre, rather humourless, view of life which underlies the whole novel hard to take now.’ Ana raised her glass and looked at him, the amethysts in her ears flashing a strange purplish-blue in the glow of the nearby fire. ‘But I won’t let that spoil what they meant to me when I was young,’ she said. ‘The experience of reading a story which told me love is a primal force that breaks all laws.’

He was back on the white sands, slumped in his deckchair under the blue-striped parasol, listening to the roar of the breakers. He raised his eyes to the horizon. Suddenly he saw things more clearly. It all came down to a woman. To his relationship with a woman. It was possibly Ana who had given him the clue. As he lay there in his chair, thinking, he realised that in searching for a unifying theme for a groundbreaking television series, he had also been trying to discover the driving force behind this ambition. And this driving force — he flushed with shame, his cheeks burning even though he was alone, even though it was only a thought — was love. All he wanted, deep down, was to come up with the makings of a work of art which would show Margrete just a fraction of what she had meant to him. It was not a matter of performing some great feat in order to prove himself worthy of her love, as he had once rather childishly imagined; it was a matter of a gift, an unreserved tribute, a way of saying thank you for reawakening a half-dead aspiration and thereby also his neglected creativity. He wanted to show her what she had made of him. ‘Look,’ he wanted to say one day, placing the cassettes containing the programmes before her, ‘I could never have done this without you.’ Yet again, it was her he had been thinking about when he did not know what he was thinking about.

Why did he do it? Where did he get the idea?

Jonas was no longer thinking of nothing. He had come to Montevideo in search of not one viewpoint, but many. He needed to garner different perspectives. He sat in a deckchair, thinking several thoughts at once. First and last and under everything else he was thinking of Margrete, but he also thought about his visit to Oslo Town Hall, about a night when he was taught to think big, when he caught Fridtjof Nansen in the beam of a torch, or Harald Hardråde in a tapestry depicting the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Keeping this thought in mind and, beneath it, the thought of Margrete, he continued also to reflect on his grandmother and the war, her strange, secret insurrection, while at the same pursuing a parallel train of thought along the branch leading to the Town Hall Square and the demonstration staged by The Three Heretics, a demonstration in which he had endeavoured to view a Norwegian phenomenon from the outside, as a foreigner; and this last made him see that he would have to view television in the same way, as if he were a Hindu, an Indian, a film director from Bombay. Jonas Wergeland sat in a deckchair in Montevideo and thought of Margrete and of all those other things and, finally, of his meeting with Ana and how they had got talking merely because he happened to mention the name of a Norwegian writer, and in the midst of this welter of thoughts, in the midst of a scene in which he saw himself sitting in an ever-increasing succession of deckchairs stretching out along the beach, Jonas sensed that he ought to concentrate hardest on that last one, on Sigrid Undset, who could actually be regarded as a word in an international vocabulary. A lot of people in Uruguay had never heard of Norway. But some there knew of Undset. Undset, a Norwegian word you might say, was also a word in Spanish. Instead of saying you came from Norway, you could say you came from Undset.

He had had a sudden, catalytic thought and for one long, intense moment he had the whole of that later so renowned television series clear in his head, in astonishing detail. It all came to him in a flash, unfolding as beautifully as a pack of cards fanning out under a conjuror’s hand. In his mind he pictured himself meeting Ana again as he was packing to leave for home. She would ask: ‘What are you taking with you?’ And he would reply: ‘A bunch of stories.’

It was as simple as that. None of the countless intellectual and, in some cases, extremely sophisticated analyses of Thinking Big can mask the fundamental flash of insight which gave rise to the series, this milestone in television history: in Montevideo, thanks largely to a young woman named Ana, Jonas Wergeland discovered that he wanted to be a storyteller, someone who gathered his people around a gigantic campfire in the shape of millions of switched-on television sets. ‘Look,’ he wanted to say. ‘Listen. Once upon a time there was …’ He would seek out stories, find a couple of dozen Norwegian men and women whose tales were worth telling. And that is what he did. When the series was finally in the can, Jonas Wergeland had not only presented Margrete — in secret — with a gift, he had also erected a public edifice full of frescoes, created an ABC for the nation. He felt genuinely proud and pleased the day he discovered that stills from some of his programmes had been used as illustrations in a school reading book.

Jonas gave himself a push, heaved himself out of the deckchair. The canvas billowed like a sail in the soft breeze. He folded the chair without any bother and carried it back to the hotel. Each step told him that he was a well man. He could tell right away: his lungs felt healed.

The worry about his lungs would resurface one last time, though. In prison. And this time it was really serious. During his first year inside he was constantly aware of an inexplicable pressure inside him, an alarming sensation which tended to intensify just before one of Kamala Varma’s visits. One evening in late winter a tightness localised in his chest area prompted him to strip to the waist and stand in front of the mirror in his cell. For a second he had the distinct impression — although it may have been a trick of the light — that his chest had become transparent, stood revealed as a web of tissue. He caught a glimpse of colourful, glistening, criss-crossing threads: it looked as if he was wearing a filigree waistcoat. The next day he had himself examined by the prison doctor. He could find nothing. ‘Maybe we should get your lungs checked, just to be on the safe side,’ he said and gave Jonas a referral slip. A week later, accompanied by two prison officers, Jonas Wergeland made the journey along slush-covered roads to an X-ray clinic in town.

He realised, as he sat in the waiting room, that he was not at all apprehensive. Instead he felt expectant. Like someone who had spent years at sea and was hoping at long last to sight land. The lady at the reception desk had given him a folder. He sneaked a peek at the form inside, read the words ‘Thorax front and side.’ Had to be something to do with the chest cavity, he guessed.

An assistant in a white coat showed him to a changing cubicle, then to the X-ray room where he was asked to stand with his chest and shoulders pressed against the image plate. He almost felt a little solemn. He thought of the Voyager probes, which were even now zooming out across the cosmos. Among all the information designed to tell extra-terrestrial beings something about the human race was a picture showing an X-ray of a hand — as if to say: we are so clever that we can see through our own bodies. Out of the corner of his eye, Jonas followed the movements behind the screen, in the control room. The radiologist gave him instructions over a loudspeaker, told him how to stand, told him how to breathe. Jonas had no difficulty in holding his breath. He had always been good at holding his breath. Yet again his thoughts returned to life-saving. Or rather, the thought occurred to him that they were going to take photographs of his spirit. And maybe in a way that is what they were doing. What they were actually saying was: ‘Hold your spirit!’

Afterwards, as he stood with the X-ray pictures and the letter for the prison doctor in his hand, he was suddenly filled with curiosity. Ungovernable curiosity. The officers who had brought him here seemed to be in no hurry. One of them was reading a newspaper. The other, who was standing by the door, shot Jonas an inquiring glance. Jonas motioned to them to wait a moment. He hefted the large, brown envelope in his hands, as if he thought the weight of it could tell him something about his future. He took out one of the pictures and held it up to the light, remembering Olav Knutzen, remembering the Red Room, that basement in Grorud. He was staring at his own lungs, a dark and yet transparent image. Did this photograph merit an OK stamp? His ribs looked like a sort of cage. It was almost as if prison life had forged bars inside him too. He recognised all he saw. Apart from one thing — something in his lungs, inside the cage, a very small, pale patch, shaped rather like a butterfly. He felt a chill in the pit of his stomach, soon his whole body was caught in an icy grip.

He was in prison, convicted of murder. One little misdemeanour couldn’t hurt. He tore open the letter to the doctor and read the radiologist’s notes. The conclusion was given at the bottom in block letters: HILUM-MILD FULLNESS. FURTHER EVALUATION RECOMMENDED.

He went back to the woman behind the glass in reception, said he wished to speak to whoever had written the note about his X-ray. ‘I have to talk to him,’ Jonas said. ‘Right away.’ The lady at the window was not at all sure. It was against all the rules, Jonas knew. Don’t you realise who I am, he almost shouted at her, but bit it back. She would have taken this as a reference, not to his erstwhile television celebrity, but to his notoriety as a murderer. Somewhat startled, she picked up the phone, asked him to take a seat, wait.

The doctor came out. The radiologist. It was a woman. She said it was okay, she could make an exception. She did not say why. She took him into the viewing room. The prison officers waited outside. The walls were lined with light-boxes. On one hung some X-rays. There was a Dictaphone on the table. Jonas caught the scent of a discreet, distinctive, but good perfume. He had the feeling that he could trust, could talk to, a doctor who wore such a perfume. The badge on her coat said that her name was Dr Higgs. Her blonde hair was nonchalantly pinned up. When she hung his X-rays on a light-box he noticed her bracelet, an unusual, broad band of gold, decorated with hieroglyphics of some sort. ‘I have to be honest,’ she said, looking at a picture of his chest viewed from the front, at the vague suggestion of a shadow with a scalloped outline that reminded Jonas of a butterfly. ‘I don’t know what that is.’

‘Don’t doctors always know what things are?’ he asked.

He could not understand why she suddenly glanced at him in surprise, while at the same time permitting herself a little smile. Was she thinking of his television programmes or — he had to turn this over in his mind a couple of times before daring to pursue it all the way to its conclusion — was she thinking of Margrete, of the fact that he had been married to a doctor? Had she known Margrete?

‘Don’t tell me you believe that,’ she said. And yet, when she raised her hand and pointed to the paler patch in his lung, the sight of that broad bracelet decorated with obscure symbols made him feel that she must possess a rare brand of knowledge, the wisdom of another civilisation.

Interpreting an X-ray was not always easy, she went on. No matter how experienced you were, sometimes you were faced with something you could not explain. Jonas could not help thinking of the College of Architecture entrance exam, the box with the gauze panels, the little, imaginary building barely discernible at the very back. She had never seen anything like it, she said. With her nail she traced an outline in his lungs. It could be a cyst, a tumour, or something to do with the lymph nodes. She didn’t think so, though. To Jonas her bracelet, the gold, seemed to hover in thin air. Whatever the case, it was impossible for her to say right here and now whether it was normal or abnormal.

The room seemed supernaturally white due to all the light-boxes. Jonas studied the photographs of his own chest cavity. There was something about the exquisite, almost topographical, structure of the lung tissue that put him in mind of a map. Of an unknown continent. Maybe it was still possible to discover new countries. Inside oneself. He peered intently at the light-box, at these images which, though flat, had a depth to them. A warm, tremulous thrill ran through him. Chill dread was replaced by impatient suspense. Was there any chance of examining it more closely right away? Dr Higgs said yes, that was possible. Jonas liked her even more for that. She’s just as curious as I am, he thought.

He went through the same procedure as before, the only difference being that this time the X-rays were taken in the CT lab, after they had injected a contrast dye into his arm. He had a strong impression of being in the hands of Fate as the CT bed was slowly passed through the hole in the gantry and he positively felt the rays slicing through him. Or no: he was a galaxy. Someone was looking at him through a telescope, searching for an unknown planet.

Dr Higgs took him back to the viewing room. In the light-box, next to the first pictures, there now hung forty different sections of his lungs. It was odd to stand there in those bright surroundings and see his innards exposed in this way, spread out like a transparent fresco on the walls. He knew you would have to be very well-versed in anatomy, in the architecture of the human body, to know what you were looking at. The only thing he could make out in each slice was his spine. He could not help thinking of cuts of meat. It’s like seeing yourself carved up, he thought.

He looked back at the first X-rays. Again his eye was drawn to the white, butterfly-shaped patch, just above the heart. Now, though, the sight of those wings or whatever they were, seemed to reassure him. He realised that the tightness in his chest could just as easily be a sign of something good — a feeling of well-being so unfamiliar and so confusing that it had actually caused a panic in his breast.

‘I had thought it might be sarcoidosis,’ Dr Higgs said, her gold bracelet flashing across the pictures as she explained what they showed, something about lymph nodes, something about connective tissue. ‘But not according to the CT pictures.’ She showed him the same section of the lungs in a number of the CT pictures. In these the patch was darker, but still transparent. ‘It almost looks like a little cavity within the cavity of the lung,’ she said.

He considered this thought: a chamber within a chamber. A tiny lung inside his lung. He relaxed even more. Maybe, he thought excitedly, the body also had a guarde-roba, like the ones in the Renaissance palaces that Aunt Laura had told him about: a secret room full of mysterious objects. Dr Higgs was right: there were many things which medical science had not yet discovered — like the gland that caused your head to reel when your girlfriend came walking towards you. Descartes might well have been on the right track when he located the interaction between body and soul, the source of the spark which rendered man more than a machine, in the so-called pineal gland.

‘I don’t know what it is,’ Dr Higgs said again. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It might not be anything serious. No two lungs are exactly alike.’ She handed him an envelope. ‘Give this report to your doctor. It’s up to you to decide, in consultation with him, whether you want to have more tests done.’

Jonas thanked her. Thanked her most sincerely. Even shook her hand. Again his eye was caught by her bracelet. He was about to ask about it, but she beat him to it. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she said. ‘I bought it from your aunt. The finest goldsmith in the country.’

Rings in water, spreading outward, touching other rings, far, far out.

He had already made up his mind. He would not be pursuing the matter. The radiologist might not know what it was, but Jonas did. A new organ. Or the rudiments of a new organ. Inside his body, inside the chest cavity, a third lung was starting to develop. The way he saw it, it might even have been this new, little lung that had saved him when he had come close to dying, committing suicide, in the early days of his imprisonment. Later he was also inclined to give this organ the credit for the fact that he had been open to a new and overwhelming acquaintance: Kamala Varma.

He viewed his life in another light. He had become aware at an early age of his rare gift — the ability to think several thoughts in parallel. Which made it all the more frustrating not to be able to put these skills into practice. Because the extraordinary, the truly amazing things of which he felt himself capable were of a quite different order to the highly acclaimed television series which he had eventually managed to produce. As far as he was concerned all his projects had been failures. Like producing scrap iron when he possessed the formula for making gold. Now, though, he saw that there had been a purpose to these fiascos. All his mental powers, the talent he feared he had abused, had been converted into something physical, corporeal. His incessant cerebral exertions, all his grandiose, unrealised plans had prepared the ground for the growth of this new organ.

During his years in prison, his cell would become many things to Jonas. But if it is true that every person has their Samarkand, a place in which they find the essence of life, a place where one can see what lies beyond everything else — then yes, that prison cell was Jonas Wergeland’s Samarkand.

Jonas was allowed to take one of the X-ray pictures — the one showing his chest cavity from the front — for his cell. He hung it at the window and would lie gazing at it morning and evening. In a way he had always known it: that inside every person there was an Organ X, or at any rate the potential to form such an organ. We could never stand far enough back from ourselves in time. Even though we knew that mankind was constantly evolving. Time was when we had had gills. There in his cell, Jonas saw his youthful conviction confirmed: there is more life in us than we think. We are unfinished.

One spring evening, with the light fading outside and an all too familiar scent wafting into the room through the open window inside the bars, he lay in bed with his eyes fixed on the large, blue-sheened X-ray of his lungs. Before his eyes it turned into a face, a familiar face, Margrete’s face. It may have been a mirage, he did not know, nor did he feel like speculating on it; instead he let his mind wander to a concept which had intrigued him when he was studying architecture, a phenomenon known as a room’s ‘fifth dimension’ that occurred when the external surroundings — adjoining rooms or the natural environment — were brought into the room itself. It must be the same with people, he thought, as he beheld the woman’s face delineated on the X-ray photograph. A person’s true depth lay not in them, but within someone else. He recalled Karen Mohr’s words when, as a boy, he had found the door leading to her bedroom and library and she had spoken of secret doors in more personal terms: ‘Our secret chambers lie not within us, but outside of us.’ When he saw Margrete’s face in that picture of his lungs, he knew that she was his ‘fifth dimension’. His centre, his core, lay in Margrete. He ought to have realised this when he found her dead, in his dressing gown. His deepest story dealt not with Jonas Wergeland, but with Margrete Boeck.

He lay in bed, in a prison cell, savouring the spring air wafting through the open window, air which brought with it the scent of her. He looked at the X-ray, at the tiny white, butterfly-shaped patch right next to his heart, at the rudiments of the organ which he would dub the love lung. Because he had felt that pressure in his chest for the first time when Margrete died. She had been the catalyst, it was her who had caused this possible organ to develop. And when he finally understood how much she had loved him it began to grow.

He lay in bed in his cell, gazing at the X-ray picture, in which his lungs seemed to shimmer, or gleam gold, in the waning light from outside. He thought: for the first time in my life I may have discovered something important.