The Seducer

Satori

And do not forget, either, the story which is bound up with, and indeed, lies at the root of this torment in a television studio, even if it did take place at an earlier point in time and on another continent, but which began with that same ominous feeling of nausea, mixed with a generous helping of dizziness. He had been sitting, lost in his own thoughts, over a notebook, when he heard a cry from outside. Although he was sure that his ears must have been deceiving him, Jonas went to open the window. On a narrow ledge outside the corresponding window of the next-door apartment stood a man. Ten storeys above the ground. Jonas was instantly struck by how appallingly simplified the whole situation was, so pressing that it made his stomach sink, and Jonas knew, as his limbs began to tremble, that this called for a swift and, above all, a simple response.

‘I’m gonna jump,’ the man said.

Jonas’s first thought was that this was a quite impossible situation, wrapped in such grotesque banality that it tipped over into unreality. He shut his eyes for a second and offered up a silent prayer to the Great Planner, that he might be spared this, but when he opened his eyes the man was still there, and he looked, what is more, as if he were gathering himself, was about to jump. All at once, Jonas found this confrontation quite comical; it had an age-old familiarity about it, there was something so hopelessly hackneyed about the whole scene — the combination of a desperate man on a narrow ledge and his potentially imploring helper — that the words ‘like a movie’ inevitably sprang to mind. The whole scenario was like some obligatory nightmare, a test, something to which every human being was subjected, to some extent, at some time in their lives.

Jonas glanced about. No one else had opened their windows. No crowd was gathering on the street below. Looking one way he could just make out the river, and when he turned the other way he saw a corner of the Chrysler building rearing up between the other buildings. He fixed on this, on the way the building’s distinctive spire sat directly behind the would-be suicide’s head, like a sort of crown or a jester’s cap.

‘I’m gonna jump,’ the man repeated, more firmly this time, turning his head towards Jonas for the first time as he did so. There was something about that face, a look there that he could not interpret, which cut through all talk of banality and made Jonas see that he had to do something, although he had no idea what.

‘Don’t jump,’ Jonas heard himself say; words that seemed to have been engendered by some genetically determined impulse, a moral instinct. But he could tell how hollow it sounded, wondered whether it might not, after all, be better to let the guy jump, so he could prove that he had the courage and could perhaps die a happy man.

‘Give me one reason, just one good reason, not to jump,’ the man on the ledge said, thereby indicating that his decision was not — Jonas found himself involuntarily thinking: unfortunately — altogether inflexible, and that this was going to be tricky. Into Jonas’s memory flashed something that Alva had once said, or maybe it was one of the other Nomads: There is only one really serious philosophical dilemma: suicide.

I am not going to trouble you with the details of the man’s full name or the reason for his profound despair, his wish to die. I will simply say that, as far as that goes, he had as plausible, which is to say ‘as good’, a reason to jump as any other suicide.

Jonas had been about to say something but thought better of it, because even as an unspoken thought he could tell it was a no-go, a ludicrous platitude. After all, what was this man asking? He was asking, quite simply and with horrible directness, for an answer to the meaning of life. He stood out there on a narrow ledge, ten storeys above the ground, asking for a reason to live, and Jonas Wergeland did not know, had not the foggiest notion, what to say. There had been times in his life when he could, with reasonable conviction, have come out with some relatively fine words on the meaning of life but sadly not now, ten storeys above the ground, in such an extreme, unbelievably unlikely situation — a real B-movie cliché! — at a time when he also had to think fast, and find something straightforward and simple. Some indisputable value. A turtle that was solid enough, a ground that would not shake, not too much at any rate, when you set your foot on it.

And yet he realized that he had to say something, his whole body was telling him so; something that would stop the man from jumping. He at least had to try to give this man an idea, a hope. Jonas hated the situation, found it hard to believe that it was actually happening, but there was a man out there on the ledge, with his face turned to him, and he, Jonas Wergeland, was the only person to be making any contact with the man, to see that face, and he had to say something, if nothing else he had to try. But what? What do you say to a man — a desperate man, robbed of his last fragile hope — to prevent him from jumping to his death?

Jonas Wergeland was in New York to make a programme for NRK TV about the Norwegian artist Per Krohg’s large mural in the Security Council chamber at the United Nations, a programme about art. Jonas had always wondered whether in some way Per Krohg might have had an influence on the political decisions made by the Security Council, due to its members having gazed at his mural during their deliberations.

Once they had finished shooting the programme Jonas had, however, stayed on in New York. He was totally burned out; he needed a break. Jonas Wergeland had made something of an impact at NRK — the so-called cognoscenti had taken a particular liking to his programmes — but the major breakthrough and ditto viewing figures had so far evaded him. The way Jonas Wergeland himself saw it, he still had not come up with a truly earth-shattering idea, one that would change everything, send him off down a new track. Up to that point, his programmes had mainly taken a negative slant, whereby he demolished, criticized, poured scorn on his subjects, but in the long run something in him reacted against this as if he knew in his heart of hearts that these were shoddy and, not least, unsatisfactory, tactics.

Earlier that day, he had stood on the deck of a ferry bound for Battery Park, after visiting Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty. It was almost as if he thought that the sight of the copper lady, that colossus, might jolt him into a state that would trigger the great idea. Instead, he fell into conversation with a man, a history teacher from London, who was also leaning on the rail, gazing across at the financial district, which was slowly coming towards them, like a barge loaded to the gunwales with rectangular boxes. As soon as he learned that Jonas was Norwegian, he asked: ‘Do you know who the greatest Viking of them all was?’

‘Harald Hårfagre?’ suggested Jonas.

‘Harald Hardråde,’ the man said firmly.

‘How come?’

The Englishman held his arms out to Manhattan, rearing up into the air straight ahead of them, more like a warship now, an armoured vessel bristling with cannons and missiles. ‘Because he tried to conquer York, the old York that is, tried to conquer the whole of England, come to that,’ he said. ‘A pretty harebrained scheme, but had he succeeded, it could have changed the whole course of history.’

The man knew a great deal about Harald Hardråde; Jonas listened with interest, sensing that there might be something in this, the germ of an idea.

‘Just imagine,’ the Englishman concluded, his face turned to the conglomeration of buildings in front of them, “the new York”. The sheer ambition of it. Coming in from the sea all set to conquer a place mightier than your own land. It’s a while since any Norwegian had such a thought, eh?’ The man gave an ironic smile.

Jonas had picked up some groceries before going back to the apartment — an apartment belonging to someone he knew, situated in the part of town between the UN headquarters and Park Avenue. He had been sitting thinking about Harald Hardråde, jotting down some fragmentary words and headings in a notebook, when he heard the cry from outside, and now there he was, standing at a window on the tenth floor, charged with saying something inspirational about the trials and tribulations of life to a man who wanted to die.

‘Come back inside, please,’ Jonas said.

‘Can’t think of anything, can you?’ the guy said threateningly, again making as if to jump.

Helplessly, or perhaps in order to draw strength from it, Jonas gazed at the Chrysler building, taking in its vertical lines and being struck yet again by the juxtaposition: the beautiful building in the background and the desperate face in front of it, aesthetics and ethics in one shot. So what lies at the heart of life? he thought, and even as he was thinking it he realized that the question had been wrongly formulated, because there was not just one heart to life, there were several hearts, lots of turtles, both within and outside of oneself, and possibly this was the very thing that so dismayed and confused people and prompted them to call for just one heart, so they would not have to choose. Here, in the middle of Manhattan, looking into the face of a suicide, and with the Chrysler building in the background, for the first time in his life Jonas understood why it was so difficult to say what the meaning of life actually was: because there were many meanings to life, a whole host of indisputable values. So one might as well start, he thought, by selecting one of several that were all equally good, begin with that rather than die of frustration.

‘Okay, I know one good reason not to jump,’ he said.

‘If you really mean that, then come out here and tell it to me,’ the man yelled. ‘I’m not going to believe you until I see you out here.’

The words alone, just the thought, made Jonas freeze, and a wave of terror wash over him. This was too much to ask. Jonas knew he had lost. The man would just have to die.

‘I’m gonna jump!’ the man yelled.

Is this the most crucial story in Jonas Wergeland’s life?

It is difficult to explain how, before he had time to think any more about it, Jonas managed to climb out of the window, even as he felt himself breaking into a cold sweat, with an awful numbness warning his body that this was madness, but he went ahead anyway, crawled out onto the narrow ledge, ten storeys above the ground, then edged his way centimetre by centimetre along it until he was standing right next to the man, who actually seemed slightly surprised. And when Jonas, unable to resist the temptation, looked down at the street below, he found that his nausea was gone. Thus it was only now, several decades later, that Jonas saw the point of that episode in the Torggata Baths, that time when he had ventured out to the edge of the five-metre board for the first time, when he had imagined that he was Sammy Lee, gold medallist from the ’48 and ’52 Olympics, with twists and somersaults contained within his body, a body free from dizziness; only now did he see the whole point of that incident, that the cause lay here, that Torggata had merely been practice, a rehearsal for something bigger, a true balancing act, a real leap, and it was as if, for the first time, now, here, in the middle of Manhattan, on a narrow ledge ten storeys above the ground, Jonas saw that the pieces of a life actually did fit together.

This discovery proved to be only the first stage of a colossal brainwave: after having whispered something to the man next to him, who had suddenly been relegated to a supporting role in a quite different drama, and who, after an expression more of surprise than of relief had spread over his face, actually did clamber back through his window, Jonas stayed where he was on the ledge, and in the midst of that brainstorming moment, when ninety per cent of his thoughts were going so fast that his mind had no chance to register them, he caught a glimpse of the Chrysler building, the glinting of the stainless steel on its spire. And at that very moment, linking up with the tingling sensation between his shoulder-blades, he had his vision, his great idea, it seemed to hit him all at once, not just one detail, but the whole thing, with such force that the itching sensation spread from that point between his shoulder-blades right up to the inner side of his skull as if something were in the process of unfolding.

Jonas returned to his window and into the apartment in time to open the door to the other man’s knock. The latter still looked pretty stunned, or rather, almost exhilarated, expectant. And what had Jonas said to him? Jonas Wergeland had not said anything momentous at all. Or actually that was the whole point: he had said something banal, but no more banal than anything else he might have said. He had promised the man a loaf of bread. It was as shockingly simple as that: some new-baked bread. That, and a good story.

Jonas had known that he had the ingredients, he had actually bought yeast and linseeds earlier in the day, and while he made the dough, while it was rising, while the loaves were baking, they talked, he and the strange man, Eric, a perfectly normal conversation, about parents and children, about interests — Eric was a keen fisherman — about relatives and friends, jobs and films, B-movies even, and the sight of Jonas with his sleeves rolled up and his clothes covered in flour seemed to have a strangely soothing effect on Eric, so much so that he never mentioned or tried to explain, or to apologize for his act of desperation, and when the loaves were lying, golden-crusted, on the table between them, Jonas told him the story about the beetle, and Eric was pleased with the story about the beetle, extremely pleased, he sat there shaking his head and chuckling as if he really felt it was worth being alive for at least one day more just to hear that story about the beetle.

Afterwards he called his sister and was standing ready, itching to be off and clutching a loaf of bread, when she arrived. ‘Thanks,’ he said to Jonas, ‘I owe you one.’ A thumbs-up and then he and his sister disappeared into his own apartment.

That evening, or rather, that night, Jonas sat down and wrote; he had never written so much at a stretch before, the words simply flowed, he barely had time to organize his thoughts, he just wrote, looking out on a Manhattan that slowly metamorphosed into black silhouettes and millions of lights, like a starry sky dropped down to earth; by the end of it he could not have said whether what he was so feverishly scribbling down was the result of his vision out on the ledge or whether it had something to do with Harald Hardråde, or maybe even the story about the beetle, or why not the bread? Whatever it was, he kept on writing, noted down twenty-three names and at the top of the first sheet he wrote ‘Norwegian Life’. By the time he eventually stopped, totally drained, on the desk in front of him lay thirty closely-written pages, the synopsis of what was to become the superb television series Thinking Big, and it was only when he happened to glance out of the window that he saw, with remarkable clarity — or as if he had suddenly perceived the source of this unexpected burst of creativity — that the skyscrapers that surrounded him were like organ pipes, and that once again he found himself inside an organ chest.