The Seducer

To Be or Not To Be

The night was overcast and quite, quite dark, with no moon. Gabriel was so drunk that his eyes kept falling shut. Jonas glanced from the barometer with its pointer stuck on ‘fair weather’ to an inclinometer, also broken. He was just about to get up and take Peer Gynt down from the bookshelf to check whether Ibsen, Norway’s national poet, really had been so misguided as to speak of the ‘kernel’ of an onion when he realized that something was wrong, something was very wrong.

It may seem hard to believe, in the normal way of looking at things, I mean, but I beg you please to believe me when I say that Jonas Wergeland received a warning in the form of a stanza of organ music, a little phrase from ‘Leid milde ljos’ which seemed to Jonas to be carried across the water and resonate off the hull of the boat.

Jonas raced up onto the deck to find himself confronted by the Skipper Clement, although of course he did not know the vessel’s name, only that it was huge, an absolutely colossal ship — there are those who may remember this elegant Danish ferry with its characteristic elongated funnel and its name in white letters amidships — and not only that, but that it was headed straight for them. Jonas’s first, albeit irrational, thought was that here was another vessel called the Norge about to go down, like that last one during the war, as if history were repeating itself; another circle; he hated circles, and yet he stayed put, held spellbound by the sight, which was indeed a beautiful one, indescribably beautiful, this ship that was almost on top of them, too big, too bright, too close, he had not the faintest idea what was going on here, this was not a boat but a swirling circle, it was an opera, a floating organ, it was Improbability itself once more taking probable form.

‘Light the lamps!’ he screamed to Gabriel down below. No reply from the saloon. ‘Where the hell’s the switch?’ yelled Jonas. He leapt down onto the well-deck, fumbled about, panic-stricken, looking for a switch.

No, he heard Gabriel saying down in the saloon, he only had paraffin lanterns, and they’d have to be prepared first. Why’d he ask? Were they going for a sail? Jonas peered down through the hatch and caught a glimpse of Gabriel standing in the glow of the paraffin lamp, pouring himself some more whisky then peering at the fob watch which he had pulled out of his waistcoat pocket as if wishing to confirm that the collision would take place at exactly the right moment.

The danger was, to say the least of it, overhanging. Jonas could almost see the bow towering above him like the posters one saw in so many Norwegian homes, picturing ships head-on. Jonas dashed across to the foghorn and cranked the handle like mad — that, too, was out of order. ‘Bloody hell, Gabriel, when did you last sail this thing?’ he had the presence of mind to say, or mutter to himself, as if even there, even then, he had come up with another angle that shed light on unknown sides of the character of the Norge’s owner. Jonas noted the life buoy hanging on the mizzen shroud; another second and the bow would be rushing down on, or rather slicing through, them. Then he remembered a lamp, just at the bottom of the hatchway, outside the toilet. He slid down the ladder, found it, up onto the deck, batteries were bound to be dead, or the bulb gone, but no, it worked and even gave off a good strong light. He aimed the beam at the ship, remembering something from his childhood, the joy of a new torch, the thrill when the light hit a wall a long way off, a sense of power, but here, a torch against a colossal steel plough; he felt a right fool, managed to angle the beam upwards at the Skipper Clement at the very moment that the bridge disappeared from view, and the ship was transformed into pure hull, pure bow, pure steel, pure death.

Jonas saw the bow of the ship veer slowly, so infinitely slowly and only very slightly but just enough to prevent it from cleaving the Norge in two, and as it did so the Skipper Clement sounded its siren, a long, deep note from the ship’s horn as if from the bass pipes of an organ but in this case amplified to such a fearful extent that the sound alone looked likely to send them to the bottom.

Just before Jonas lit the lamp, Gabriel had appeared on the deck, with his coat on as if he had been thinking of going ashore to a party. He did not seem at all surprised or startled by the sight of the mountainous bow slicing through the water towards them. ‘No, they cannot touch me for coining; I am the king himself,’ he roared at the ferry. Then, once Jonas had succeeded in sending the life-saving signal and the bow had veered aside, he tore off his coat and leapt, or rather staggered to the rail and drew himself up like a matador with his cape, seeming almost to flick the huge vessel away, yelling ‘Olé!’ and hooting with laughter as the hull swished past, almost soundlessly, a rustling whisper, only a few feet away from them.

So entranced was Jonas by this vast black wall which simply went on gliding and gliding past them as if there were no end to it, that he had to hang on tight to the mizzen shroud, to the life buoy. How wonderful! he thought. The merest whisper. A black wall swishing past, right alongside them. A black wall strung with glittering holes. To Jonas it seemed like another universe ploughing past. Another possibility entirely. A sort of tangent to the circle of real life.

Then all at once it was gone. In place of the black wall they saw the lights on the other side of the fjord. They were floating in a vacuum, in an all-engulfing hush which only gradually allowed room for sounds, enabling them once more to hear the wind and the creaking of the rigging. The Skipper Clement was already a long way off, a shimmering layer cake, unreal, as if it had never been.

As luck would have it, a cabin cruiser came along, on its way to Fagerstrand, and gave them a tow back into the bay, where they tied up once again to the buoy from which the severed end of the mooring rope trailed in the water. They climbed down into the saloon. Sat a long time in silence. The stove was smoking, there was a smell of gunpowder, as after an explosion. ‘More whisky?’ said Gabriel. Jonas rejected the offer with a wave of his hand, that was the last thing he needed right now.

‘Well lad, you saved my life back there, I’d say,’ Gabriel said at length. ‘For that you deserve a reward.’ It was as if he had woken up, become another person. He looked at the skylight, not at Jonas. ‘I said you should become an actor. Forget that. Where’d I put my mug? What I’m going to say to you now is the most obvious thing in the world, so obvious that folk just don’t see it.’ Gabriel took a swig from his mug. ‘Television, that’s the future, lad. Damn right it is. Television. It came to me a couple of years back. The day my TV went on the blink.’ He pointed into the forecabin where the old television, stripped of its innards formed a 3D frame for the skull. ‘I went in to Drøbak. Not a soul to be seen. They were all inside watching TV. Watching the royal wedding — Sonja and Harald. D’you know what? That day marked a revolution in Norway. A social revolution. An entire nation synchronized, sitting in armchairs in front of a screen. A watershed in the history of mankind! And what’s television? Light, lad. Light. Take it from me: before too long television is going to be as important as sunlight.’ Gabriel lifted his empty dish and raised it heavenwards. ‘Give us this day our daily bread,’ he said without realizing of course that in so doing he was anticipating the dishes which many Norwegians would eventually have fixed to their house walls or roofs.

Jonas had no idea what Gabriel was on about, he had never taken much interest in television. Granted, his family had, like so many others in Norway, bought a television for the sake of watching the 1964 Winter Olympics, and his father in particular had felt that it had been well worth the money, and then some, just to see the three Norwegian speed-skaters step up onto the podium after the 5,000 metres. Other than that, though, his parents didn’t watch much television. Jonas had only vague memories of the programmes from his childhood: one of the Falcon Club programmes with Rolf Riktor, a couple of episodes of The Saint, the odd evening with Gunnar Haarberg and Double Your Money and of course the fish during the interval, which were possibly the most interesting part of the whole thing, inasmuch as the television was suddenly transformed into an aquarium. To be honest, he found it boring. Before they acquired a television of their own, he used to watch Robin Hood on a neighbour’s television which had a sheet of plastic in front of the screen. This plastic sheet was split up into three horizontal panels, blue at the top, reddish-brown then green, supposedly to give the illusion of colour television, and everybody would clap enthusiastically when the three colours actually matched the picture, more or less, which is to say for the five seconds each evening when a shot of some scenery appeared on the screen. Years later, this would still be Jonas’s impression: that television only matched reality for a handful of seconds every night.

Nonetheless, Jonas understood that television represented something important, though he could not have put it into words, something tremendous that had an effect on people’s daily lives. There was one time when he had been visiting a friend who lived in a villa on a hill facing one of the new twelve-storey tower blocks in Ammerud, which meant that they could see into something like 250 living rooms. It was a Saturday evening, dark outside, and Jonas could not figure out what the blue light was that he kept seeing. To begin with he had thought it must be some sort of mass psychosis: that all these people had suddenly felt the urge to sit under a sunlamp. This sight was to stay with him, this image of a modern Norwegian society in which almost all of its inhabitants were stuck in front of a television screen, as if they believed that it gave off some life-giving, or at any rate, vital radiation.

Gabriel stood up and came over to him: ‘So to put it simply, Jonas, what I want to say to you, as a reward for your heroic action with that torch this evening is: start with television. You could do the trendy thing and start with computers or something along those lines. Forget it. Television is the future.’

Gabriel then proceeded to deliver a lengthy lecture, astonishingly lucid considering the amount of alcohol he had taken on board, or maybe because of that, on all the possibilities presented by television, from which I will confine myself, here, to quoting his assertion that television broadcasting and the products it could create, all of which had to do with symbols or information — remember that word, Jonas: information! — would have as much of an impact on the society of the future as the steam engine had had in the past, and not only that, but that these days, it was as much a matter of mental as of material resources, knowledge-based enterprises, a fact which filled Gabriel with optimism since it offered everybody an equal chance and, hence, the opportunity for Norway, this tuppenny-ha’penny country to make its mark on the world. ‘It’s no longer a matter of luck, m’lad, of who just happens to have the waterfalls or the oil, oh, no, what’s in demand these days is creativity, whatever country has the people with the greatest imagination.’

Gabriel walked through to the forecabin and came back with the empty shell of the television with the skull inside it and set it on the table. ‘Shell within shell,’ he said, picking up the death’s-head. ‘Layer within layer.’ Jonas was almost expecting: ‘Alas, poor Yorick!’ or, at the very least ‘To be or not to be’, but Gabriel’s face grew grave, and he said very softly: ‘Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unus’d.’ And with that he crossed over to the ladder, tossed the skull out of the hatch with a basketball player’s flick of the wrist, an act which was followed by a faint splash.

‘If you want to direct the course of events, this is the new stage,’ said Gabriel, pointing to the empty box of the television, which truly did resemble a miniature stage. ‘Being an actor is, after all, a particle option. Remember what I said? About my friend Niels Bohr? That people, like all matter, can take the form of either particles or waves? Okay. Now listen: to start with television, that would be something different, something new, a wave option. A chance to explore all the different inexplicable ways in which people can be influenced. A chance to make some totally new discoveries about cause and effect.’

With one firm blow, Gabriel loosened and removed the base of the television then slid the box over Jonas’s head, bringing it to rest on his shoulders. ‘There. I hereby crown you. Jonas, it’s time to reinvent yourself. Be a duke, be a king!’ Gabriel eyed his handiwork with satisfaction: Jonas’s face looking out of a television set. ‘Set your sights on television, lad. Dare to take that giant leap!’

Thus Jonas Wergeland made his first appearance on television.