When he left, Axel was lying lifelessly amid a tangle of rugs, as if buried in a broken up jigsaw puzzle. Jonas considered smashing the double bass but managed to restrain himself. Don’t go too far, he told himself, well aware that he couldn’t possibly go any further than he already had. He staggered out of the flat, out into Oslo, wandered around aimlessly, found a restaurant where he gorged himself like a Roman emperor, out again, on to a bar; he felt like celebrating, got as sloshed as it is possible for a man to get, before he was all but thrown out, politely, but firmly, and as good luck would have it managed to flag down a taxi right outside, a taxi with an inexperienced woman driver. ‘Bergensveien,’ he said, hearing how he slurred the word. And then, muttering to himself: ‘Or to hell. I’ve just killed a man.’
~ ~ ~
I — the Professor — had long suspected that there was something odd about the confession Jonas Wergeland made in court. That he should have killed his wife in a fit of uncontrolled aggression brought on purely by her unexpected request for a divorce did not fit, or fitted only in part, with the red — or rather, green — thread of jealousy that wound its way through so many of the stories, a thread which was bound, in the end, to be drawn tight, like the noose on a gallows.
Modern physics is right: observation alters the thing being observed. I was confused. On the one hand, I had — there was no denying it — a bundle of exceedingly unpleasant stories; on the other hand, I had all the positive things I myself had experienced — learned, in fact — thanks to Jonas Wergeland. Could I–I mean during that year when I, like most Norwegians, let everything else go hang in order to catch every single programme in the Thinking Big series — really have been wrong about Jonas Wergeland’s talent for television? Would his programmes too have evinced other, very different, qualities, maybe even fallen completely flat, if viewed in the light of what I now knew? I unearthed the folder containing comments on Jonas Wergeland’s television work, flicked through the bundles of cuttings and copies of articles. Superlatives all the way: ‘He has created a new National Portrait Gallery inside our head,’ wrote one critic. Despite the controversies that were sure to be sparked off by such programmes, there was no doubt that, prior to his arrest at any rate, Jonas Wergeland was regarded by expert media researchers as a television genius — not because he had gathered an entire nation around the TV, but because he had produced original programmes, films which broke with the usual, tired old fare. ‘A born natural,’ as several commentators put it. He was proclaimed television’s Copernicus because he upset prevailing ideas of what should lie at the centre of a programme. ‘Jonas Wergeland did not just transform the media,’ one writer concluded, ‘he reinvented it.’
But still I was not sure. I got out one of his programmes — I have them all on video, ranged on the shelf next to my own biographies; picked one at random: ‘The Dipper’, the programme on Sam Eyde, and slotted it into the video machine. I felt tense, afraid almost, as I sat in my Stressless chair, eyes riveted on the opening sequence, the close-up of a stylised form, a Viking ship, a logo on a plastic bag, before the camera pulled back to reveal a factory and then, from above, the surrounding countryside, a foreign landscape — the viewer would automatically place it in the Middle East — and right enough, it was Qatar, a fertilizer plant in Umm Said, part-owned by Norsk Hydro: a Viking ship in the desert, a strange conquest, like a fantasy, not to say a mirage. One could not help asking what was the connection here? And as if in reply the camera homed in once more on the drawing of the Viking ship, which gradually began to change, clearly working backwards through various graphic incarnations until it ended up at the original, far more figurative Viking ship logo, now on a barrel containing Hydro’s first major product: what was known as Norwegian saltpetre.
I had been thinking of getting myself a cup of coffee, but I couldn’t get out of my chair nor stop the video; I went on watching, had to see the next scene and the next and the next, felt almost as though I had become Sam Eyde in those last years before the turn of the century, first as a student and then working as an engineer in Germany, in metropolises such as Berlin and Hamburg, Dortmund and Lübeck. I meant to get myself a cup of coffee, but I went on watching, losing myself in the shots of the massive constructions which Eyde tackled: stations, docks, bridges — I even took his great idea about communication for my own. Without knowing how I got there, I found myself standing, so it seemed, beside Sam Eyde in Germany, in a highly developed society with lots of heavy industry. I identified with Eyde, living and working in a country experiencing explosive growth and thinking of Norway, a dirt-poor, underdeveloped country. But, Eyde thought — or we thought, Eyde and I — Norway had one enormous resource: its waterfalls. The question was: how to use all this potential? One would have to create a major industry — founded on what, though? And this is where Eyde mobilizes his powers of imagination, his bridge-building skills, by connecting two separate ideas. In Lübeck, two years before the start of the twentieth century, he reads a lecture on the catastrophic shortage in nitrogen with which the world will soon be faced. This is just the spark that is needed; a bridge is formed between two synapses in the brain. What, besides water, does Norway have in abundance? Answer: air. Eyde — or rather, we: Eyde and I — see a way of generating wealth in Norway from two things as elementary as air and water. He — we — will quite simply pluck assets out of thin air! An electrochemical industry! I sat there watching, staring, oblivious to all else, I was there, in the scenes depicting his collaboration with Kristian Birkeland, the development of the electric reverberatory furnace which drew nitrogen from the air; an invention which, once they had secured the capital and formed the company which would one day become Norsk Hydro, paved the way for the quite incredible development — by Norwegian standards — of the hydroelectric stations and factories at Skienvassdraget and Rjukan, while the people of Norway shook their heads: until, that, is, they were presented with the aforementioned Norwegian saltpetre — Norwegian air packed into barrels, nitrogen fertilizer for the soil — and what a success it was, a Viking ship which conquered the world. Thus the whole programme revolved, in an almost imperceptible but exceedingly elegant fashion, around the four elements: air, fire, water and earth.
As I say, I went on sitting there, had thought of getting up to fetch something to drink but went on sitting there, delighting in the way my senses became so involved; I spotted delectable details which I had not noticed before, even though I must have seen this programme at least four times. And it was not only the actual substance of it, those uplifting trains of thought, which enthralled me. I saw, or felt inside myself, with the whole of my subconscious, how important the sound was; I understood this better now, of course, after the story of Jonas Wergeland’s love of the radio and radio plays. Like its theme, the soundtrack to the programme on Sam Eyde was inspired by the four elements; the camerawork almost took second place to the sighing of the wind, the crackling of fire and electricity, the scrunch of shovels delving into earth — this last alluding both to the groundbreaking work done by the company’s founders and the relevance of the fertilizer. But the predominant sound — the essence of the programme — was that of water: waterfalls, of course, but also rain and murmuring brooks, conjuring up associations of something close to paradise, of Norway as an oasis of opportunity.
As I pressed the stop button on the remote control, I realized — as if this were a criterion of excellence — that not for one moment had I sat back in my Stressless chair, I had remained bolt upright through the whole thing, my wits somehow sharpened. There was no doubt: this programme, this grand conception, this bubbling, sparkling programme, would surely act as a counterweight to some of the dark tales my guest had told me.