The Seducer

Breaking the Light Barrier

And so Jonas Wergeland’s moment of truth came on a day like any other, without him having given any thought to it, just like the old folktale of the boy who leaves home to look for his father’s donkeys and returns home a king.

Jonas had lunched with Margrete at the University, where she was attending a seminar, and was on his way to Chateau Neuf, the student rec, at Majorstua, when he became aware that his feet were carrying him, quite of their own accord, in another direction, perhaps because it was pouring with rain, and he had had to hop over a huge muddy puddle; and as his umbrella was buffeted by the wind he saw where they were leading him, namely, straight towards the white building on the hillside, headquarters of NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. And before he knew it, as it says in all the best fairytales, he found himself in the personnel department, whence he was directed to an office where he asked, again without having planned it and with no idea what made him say it, whether they were looking for any new television announcers; and by sheer coincidence — let’s just call it that, far be it from me to spoil anything — that was exactly what they were looking for, new faces, as they put it, and he was asked to send in an application.

In our day and age, as we are repeatedly being told, everybody gets their chance to be famous for fifteen minutes. As Rakel, Jonas’s Wergeland’s sister, discovered during the oil crisis in 1973, when she was on her way to visit her cousin Veronika Røed in Gråkammen, up on Holmenkoll — Heights, and had to take the electric train. And what happened? She climbed onto the train and took a seat, all unwitting. And who should be sitting next to her but His Majesty the King himself, Olav V, with that well-known profile from the coin of the realm, right beside her, large as life, in his skiing gear, dog and all. And before she had time to collect herself, the cameras started flashing. The next day she was inundated with phone calls from people she had not heard from in years, but who had seen her picture in the paper.

Jonas Wergeland’s fame was of a more lasting sort, but that too had its beginnings in front of a camera.

Some weeks after submitting his application, Jonas was back at Television House in Marienlyst, sitting in a little room that put him in mind of a dentist’s waiting room, mainly because he was feeling so nervous. There were two others in the room: both girls, attractive, very attractive, although Jonas did not feel any tingle running up his spine. They too had been provided with some sheets of paper which they were studying, a list of disconnected phrases to be read out. ‘Announcer Audition’ it said at the top. Over a hundred people had applied for the job. Rudeng, the director, had decided to screen test twenty.

So only now, and still with no idea what he was doing there — he was, after all, still attending the College of Architecture — did Jonas Wergeland find himself standing on the threshold of NRK, ten years after Gabriel Sand’s earnest advice to make television his career. He had not followed this advice, had never felt drawn to that flickering box. On the contrary: he had regarded it as an asset not to watch TV. He loved being on the outside, particularly enjoyed being able to interrupt passionate discussions with some shocking remark: ‘The Ashtons? Who’re they when they’re at home?’ or ‘Who is this guy Odd Grythe?’ Only now, possibly because it had been raining and he had had to sidestep, was he, as Gabriel had urged, venturing to make the big leap.

It was his turn. Jonas Wergeland was escorted to one of the announcing studios by a veteran female announcer. The room was actually painted dark-blue, but it gave an impression of total blackness, almost frightening, cave-like. And it had a smell about it, sweetish: makeup perhaps. It was a tiny untidy room, with a welter of cables on the floor and littered with all sorts of paraphernalia. For Jonas, it was worth the visit for this alone: to discover that what to the viewers appeared to be a warm, bright, cosy and, above all, spotlessly clean, room was actually a filthy black cupboard with only just enough room for the announcer to squeeze in between the desk and the back wall, a cyclorama coloured by light. Jonas sat down at the desk, which was covered with a black molton cloth, squinting in the glare of the lights aimed at him from all angles: spots and soft lights, backlights. What about makeup? No, no makeup. The veteran female announcer gave him a few practical tips and went out. He was alone. In front of him, a little to one side, were three monitors. In one of them he could see himself. For a split-second — although what made him think of it he could not have said — he felt as if he were back inside the organ chest, at the heart of some ineffably complex mechanism. He was nervous, terribly nervous.

‘Let’s hear your voice,’ someone said over a loudspeaker.

Jonas felt like saying ‘Yoo-hoo! There’s a hole in the loo-oo!’ the way they used to do as kids, shouting it into mysterious cracks and holes or places with a good echo, but he managed to restrain himself and instead, since it seemed appropriate in that room, in that situation, he said: ‘The mind is incapable of grasping the full significance of a time-span of hundreds of millions of years.’ Pause for effect. ‘Charles Darwin.’

No response. A bad sign. Nerves rippled through his body like the northern lights.

‘Look at the camera, so we can get a proper shot of you.’ A voice over the loudspeaker. ‘That’s it, good.’

There was no one behind the camera; the instant he focussed his gaze on the lens his nerves steadied. He had the overwhelming feeling that this little circle was what he had been searching for all along, and his surroundings were forgotten completely in his effort to remember what it was: a hub. Here it was, at last, the hub.

‘You can start when you see the red light,’ said the voice over the loudspeaker.

In one of the sidewalls was a large window into the main control room, CR1, and through the slats of the Venetian blinds Jonas could see the head of programming and a couple of technicians, together with the veteran announcer: people who would be judging his performance, which is to say, they were getting it on tape. Rudeng, the director was also there, as if he knew that something extraordinary was about to happen — something that would make a good story someday — and wanted, therefore, to witness it firsthand. He had his eyes fixed on the screen which was now showing Jonas’s face in profile, giving Jonas himself a feeling of seeing his face reflected in mirror upon mirror.

The red light came on and he began to read out the announcements on the sheet in front of him, totally disconnected phrases, the sort used to introduce a programme, or between programmes, or for rounding off the evening’s transmission. He read them out as best he could, trying to remember to look up every now and again, look at the camera lens, at the hub: he thought of Gabriel Sand, thought to himself that he was a television announcer, that he was many people, among them a television announcer; that it was inherent in him, it was just a matter of dredging it up; he read, pronouncing each word as clearly as possible, taking especial care over words in English, German and French. ‘And now, via Eurovision, we bring you a performance of the opera Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed by the Orchester des Nationaltheaters Prague,’ he read. ‘The conductor this evening is Karl Böhm. The role of Don Giovanni will be sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau,’ he read. ‘And now,’ he read, ‘a programme on the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author, among other things, of the fable Le petit prince,’ he read, and it was not going too badly, certain words and expressions in particular really hit home, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, for instance, and Le petit prince, hit home with a vengeance as if all his life had been a preparation for just this moment, for a job as a television announcer. He read on. ‘And we rounded off this evening’s programmes with “I Don’t Know What Kind of Blues I Got”, performed by the Duke Ellington Orchestra,’ he read. ‘The soloists were Barney Bigard, Lawrence Brown, Ben Webster and Harry Carney with Herb Jeffries on vocals,’ he read, names he could have recited in his sleep; tried to look up every now and again at the faint light deep inside the camera lens, a bright dot, a photographic Pluto; he read on and on, no one asked him to stop, he went on reading for a long time, read all three sheets, in fact, a crazy assortment of announcements, out of context and yet oddly familiar; and when he reached the end and still no one had asked him to stop, he looked at the pane of glass and the people inside the control room, all of them with their eyes glued to the screen as if they had just been presented, not with a face, but a new planet, which was not all that far from the truth. Not until Jonas turned into profile did they rouse themselves. ‘Thank you,’ said the voice over the loudspeaker.

Rudeng asked him to come in to the control room. They reran the take, and the phenomenon was repeated. The others sat in total silence, hypnotized in fact, or as if they could not believe what they were seeing. Even Jonas was surprised, because it was powerful stuff. Only then, when he saw himself on a television screen, did Jonas realize what a striking face he had. And on the screen, or on camera, something had happened to it, making it even more striking; the face on the screen was different from the face he saw in the mirror. The camera must have acted like a prism in reverse, Jonas thought, in such a way that the lens united the entire spectrum of faces that he owned and transformed them into one powerful dazzling face. Jonas stared at the screen and felt, with a touch of dread, a tingling sensation creeping up his spine, and I would like to stress that this had nothing to do with his being infatuated with his own looks, what is known as narcissism — it was simply because, as Jonas himself realized, he found himself confronted with a work of art.

And right there and then, in that control room at NRK’s Television House, Jonas also realized something else, because he had not always had such a striking face, it must only have become fully formed some years earlier, through some slow process of inner growth, and Jonas understood that this face had something to do with the exceptional women with whom he had lain. He had converted this beauty into other currency, as his grandmother had done with her collection of paintings. He had converted it, not into cash, but into strength, into personality, into charisma.

Rudeng would later describe the most important criterion when assessing people: whether they could come across on screen. Jonas Wergeland had certainly come across on screen, so much so, said Rudeng that he had had to take a closer look at the monitor to satisfy himself that the image he was seeing was not, in fact, three-dimensional. Rudeng would tell that story again and again. ‘You should have been there when Jonas Wergeland auditioned for the job of announcer,’ he would say with a note of pride. ‘It was like witnessing someone breaking not the sound barrier, but the vision barrier.’

Before they parted, Rudeng asked Jonas whether he had been thinking of anything in particular. Jonas shook his head. But he had been thinking of something in particular, he had imagined that he was talking to Nefertiti, and that may well be why people would later say that they felt as though Jonas Wergeland spoke to them as a friend, directly to them, with a warmth and charm, not to say love, that could not help but strike at their hearts even if he were only presenting a run-down of the next day’s programmes. And in a way it was true, Jonas truly believed that Nefertiti was listening to him.

They called, of course they called; and he was signed up for a trial period, first assigned to the morning slot but soon moved to the evening broadcasts so that his real breakthrough came with the ingenuous words: ‘Good evening, and welcome to Children’s Hour.’

And from the word go, Jonas liked it, liked it better than reading astronomy or architecture; the minute he sat down on that chair he knew that there, finally, in that broom cupboard, was where he was meant to be; there, sitting all alone, talking out loud, talking to the wall; he could not explain it, but he loved it. It was a hub. He recalled Gabriel’s hymn of praise to his little boat: I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, and to begin with he did not give much thought to the fact that, while he was sitting alone in that cupboard, his face was being reproduced a million times over, appearing on sets in a million households; nor did it occur to him, naïve though it may be, that his face would strike a chord with people, possibly because he had watched so little TV himself. To his surprise, however, people started nodding and smiling at him in the street and at bus-stops; and Jonas, who had long been in the business of recognizing fine art, pictures, when he saw it, found that he was now being recognized, like a picture, like fine art; and only then did it really dawn on him that there were people beyond the wall of the broom cupboard, that despite his seclusion, he was visible to all and sundry — a fact which was reinforced when the letters started to pour in, not to mention the people being turned away from reception, elderly ladies asking for his autograph.

Another few months were to go by before Jonas Wergeland perceived, with his eye for an angle, that the job of announcer was the one angle that revealed everything there was to know about Television House, the whole secret of television, for that matter: that it all came down to the face, to showing one’s face, to being recognized, no matter what one said or did. All that counted, as far as the public was concerned, was that you were a face on the TV. And hence, strangely enough, Jonas Wergeland felt as famous after a few months in the announcer’s chair as he did after years of programme making. The way he saw it, only from a tiny slice of the population could one win greater respect for creating something than for showing your face.

In all fairness, it ought to be said, by way of excusing the majority of the Norwegian people, that there was something quite unique about Jonas Wergeland’s career with NRK. And moreover, people could tell one face from another. It was not every day that you were confronted with a face which suddenly raised a mouth organ to its lips and launched into a virtuoso performance of Duke Ellington’s ‘Take the “A” Train’ before going on to announce one of Children’s Hour’s long series of films about a group of little locomotives; and even without the mouth organ, Jonas Wergeland had such exceptional presence that people almost had the feeling that he was sitting there, in person, in their own living rooms. In other words, Jonas Wergeland’s face possessed such an uncommon luminescence that he rapidly came to overshadow everyone else; he was quite simply NRK’s supernova. For years Rudeng never referred to him as anything but ‘the Duke’, completely off his own bat, not merely on account of Jonas’s marvellous English pronunciation of the names of the Duke and the members of the orchestra. There were even those who would recall Jonas Wergeland’s first appearance on the television screen as a milestone on a par with the live transmission of the lunar landing. There seemed almost to be a certain prestige attached to having seen him and discovered him when he was still filling the morning slot. ‘I knew it,’ people would say years later when Jonas Wergeland was one of the country’s most famous, most written-about figures. ‘The minute I laid eyes on him I knew there was something special about that guy.’

And now here you are in your own office, surrounded by video recorders and cassettes, cassettes containing film of yourself, old programmes, black tape testifying to your fabulous success, welcome to this evening’s programmes, and you look at the map of Venus, a highly provisional map, you think, a planet populated by lobsters, you think, boiled lobsters, you think and your eye moves to the map of Antarctica, that too provisional, you think, with the lines of latitude running out from it in circles, like a target, you think, like a lens, you think, and you look at those circles, circles within circles, and you try to see the connection between all of those cassettes and Venus and Antarctica, and you look at the circles and see that they are spinning, like a wheel, you think, and you are growing dizzy, everything is moving too fast, round and round, and you realize that you are shaking; if only you knew how I wish I could be there, how I wish I could comfort you, hold your hand, help you to pick up the thread of the story, the thread you have lost, show you that all things are spokes in the same wheel, stroke your beautiful face, warm you, because you are shivering and it comes to you that you ought to put on some clothes.

So you walk out of the office, naked, and you step back into the living room, and you look at the picture of Buddha, you look at the figure on the floor, and for one second, for one split-second, the living room is a place where everything eases up, comes to a standstill, clear, transparent, and you are struck by a synchronicity of space and time that suddenly affords an insight into all the inner mysteries of causality, and then it is gone, and once again all is chaos, an unbelievable scene, and you can only sneak past, on tiptoe, and you glance at the polar-bear skin, Ursa Major, you think, stars fallen to earth, a betrayal, you think, a nomad, a wanderer, laid low, stretched out, an object of derision, on a living-room floor, you think. Margrete wanted to chuck it, you remember, called it tasteless, perverted, but you could not chuck such a memento of a precious victory, you said, although what good does that do now, you think, and you look at the blood, red against white, strawberry jam on ice cream, you think, like in the old Studenten ice cream parlour, you think.

You walk through to the bedroom, you, Jonas Wergeland, Mao Tse Tung’s equal, hater of planes, discoverer of the ice cream factory, and you open the closet door, put on underpants, selecting your best pair, slip into a thick, white cotton shirt, slip into a pair of khaki trousers, pick out a dark jacket, a jacket you like, a jacket just right for discussing things with Axel, you think, and you pick your favourite shoes, the ones you wear for taking long walks, because you have the idea that you are going to take a walk, discuss things, rock the Milky Way on its axis, and you have to dress with care, you have to hold chaos at arm’s length; you open the door of Margrete’s closet, see her clothes, every garment a considered purchase: Margrete had very distinctive taste, you think, sophisticated, you think, and you remember how the looks on men’s faces would alter when she walked into a room, at a party, you think, how the tone of their conversation would unconsciously change, how the mood would become heightened, how they tried to excel themselves, as if they had decided to eschew all that stupid flirting and win her with intellect, you think, and you look at her clothes, the row of clothes-hangers and you wonder whether you knew anything at all about her, or whether you actually know as little about her as you know about Nefertiti, and you realize that they are two sides of the same coin, Nefertiti and Margrete, and your eye falls on the book on her bedside table, and you walk across, flick through it; you see that it is called Largo, and you see that it is written by Agnar Mykle, and you see that it belongs to Axel Stranger, and it strikes you that you have never liked this, Axel and Margrete, this common interest, this love of reading that you never could fathom, all that talk, that bullshit, about DNA, and what do they end up with, novels, you think, and you can tell that you don’t like it, this book, nor the fact that it is lying here, next to the bed, and you wonder if it could have been Axel, but that is just too far-fetched, just too crazy, you think, you hope.

And you walk back into the living room, and you look at the polar-bear skin, you look out of the window, you half-expect to see snow, soft flakes, falling thick and fast, but it is night, and it is spring, the air smells of spring right to the marrow, and you stand there, staring out of the window at the blocks of flats at Ammerud, those hulking great mastodons, Le Corbusier, you think, quasi-Le Corbusier, you think, and you think of Norway, think of that lack of originality, of how they can’t even manage to copy anything, how they copy what are already botched copies, and too late, you think, when everyone else has got it taped, you think, and suddenly you remember that you are an architect, even this house, your parents’ house, was originally your idea, it was you who found the plot of ground, you who succeeded in persuading the old lady, succeeded in doing what hundreds of others had tried to do, you, with your face, not only that but you have extended it, turned the house, too, into an angle, the Villa Wergeland, a new wing in Grorud granite, like the church, you think, right here, you think, where Margrete lies, you think, and you look at Margrete, and you think of Palladio, Palladio of all people, and you look at Margrete’s body, and think about architecture, and behind all of this again you are thinking of something else, wondering how long it takes for a corpse to decay.

And you look at the murder weapon, a puzzling weapon, you think, because Margrete has been laid low by a ball, hit by a serve, you think, that shot a hole in life itself, and you notice that it is a pistol, a Luger, of all the ridiculous things, an old Luger, and you remember the toy guns of your childhood, your brother, gun-mad he was, always the revolutionary, the romantic, you think, and you think of Daniel, could it have been him, had there been something, some hostility, between Margrete and Daniel, but you find that hard to believe; he’s a simple man, you think, and you wish you were as simple a man as Daniel, because then you would not be standing here, now, and you look out of the window, onto Bergensveien, the street of your childhood, and it occurs to you that you are not rootless after all, because your roots are here, in Grorud, in that patch of ground just across the road, between those low blocks of flats, and you contemplate the road that led from childhood to here, from what you can see through the window to what you can see on the floor, a dead woman, a dead story, a tale cut short, or a tale run wild, and you think of the chain of cause and effect, you think of Axel who would rather discover a causal relationship than be the King of Persia, and you think of another friend, a girl with the longest eyelashes in the world, who left you on the road you can see right outside the window.