He heard the sound of skates, turned round, and at that very moment, as Margrete was making her way towards him, arms outstretched, smiling, black hair shot with blue — in his moment of triumph — disaster struck. Jonas would never understand how it could have happened, where it came from, who had sent it — although hadn’t he perhaps seen a shadow after all, someone who hadn’t gone home, down by the dam? For just then a puck came gliding towards him; Jonas spied it while it was quite a long way off, a dot, a tadpole, it should have ground to a halt long ago, but it glided on and on, not moving all that fast, but not slow enough for Jonas to get to it and stop it, he was too far away from the ice structure, he tried, but his legs kept giving way on the ice, it looked hilarious, and meanwhile the puck, ‘out of nowhere’ he thought, glided relentlessly towards the ice palace — which at that moment was shimmering with an almost unearthly lustre, as if it were made from frozen air — and rammed one of the nethermost blocks sideways on, knocking it just enough out of place to bring Jonas’s work of art tumbling down, with infinite slowness so it seemed to him, and with a lovely tinkling sound, like sleigh bells, he thought later, sending all the little pieces slithering in every direction, a long, long way in every direction; and in some measure — Jonas had to admit it, even though he was half in shock — the actual destruction was as fascinating an experience as the building of it, that glorious instant of utter collapse, a shower of bright sparks and the music created by the sound of tinkling ice.
And Margrete, what did she do? Margrete had almost reached him when the structure collapsed, she stopped and stared at Jonas, but while he was still standing there, stunned, long after the shards of ice had ceased to jangle and halted in their star-shaped flight, she did a few neat steps on her figure skates, began, in fact, to dance around him, as if through this, her dancing, she was trying to tell him something, forcing him to view this fiasco from another angle. Not only did she dance, she smiled, smiled in a way that, for the first time, led Jonas to suspect that there was a complex, possibly even dangerous, side to her: something he would never understand no matter how hard he tried. She started laughing, could see Jonas was hurt by this but could not stop herself, laughed at him, danced round and round him, laughing out loud, a laughter he would never forget.
So I ask you, Professor: is it possible, if one considers it from a great enough distance — I was on the point of saying from the ice planet Triton — that Jonas Wergeland killed her way back here?
Right then, Jonas — as he saw it, at least — was less concerned with Margrete’s odd behaviour than with finding the piece of ice containing the pearl stud. He hunted frantically, he ran hither and yon, combing a wide radius, lifting blocks of ice up to the fading light, but no matter how hard he looked he did not find that one piece. He was desperate, it was as if he knew that he had to find this fragment of ice again, that for some reason it was absolutely vital, that if he could lay hands on it he would be able to avert a catastrophe, that no matter how fake and cheap the pearl was, something of tremendous value would be lost if he did not find it.
It was a very crestfallen Jonas who slid back to the centre, to the point where the ice monument had stood and where the puck now lay, like a full stop on a huge sheet of paper, putting an end to his endeavour to make an impression. He picked it up, hefted it in his hand, studied it. And I don’t think I’m giving too much away if I say that this black disc was to become a talisman for Jonas Wergeland. Indeed, he was instantly intrigued by all the scratches, the patterns on its surface. ‘It looks like a scarab,’ Margrete said, looking over his shoulder. ‘The sort of beetle they used to place over the hearts of the dead in Ancient Egypt.’
After saying a bewildered goodbye to Margrete at the junction with Bergensveien, with the dreadful feeling that their relationship was unlikely to survive the skating season, Jonas went home and took out his own personal Kaba, the black lacquer casket with the mother-of-pearl dragon on its lid. Acting on instinct he lifted out his mother’s round brooch and set it on top of the puck. It was almost the same size in diameter; it fitted astonishingly well. A silvery disc and a black disc. Jonas looked. And what he was looking at was bafflingly beautiful. A brooch, with all of its associations, atop a puck with all of its possibilities, not to say stories. He immediately perceived that, like alchemy, when put together these two became something more than a gem and a puck. A spark had been ignited inside him as he placed the silver brooch on top of the black surface; ideas had taken shape, so disjointed and inexplicable that it made him jump. Maybe that was why the next second he picked up the clock workings from their place next to the box on top of the chest of drawers and threw them into the wastepaper bin. All of a sudden the frame and all those cogs seemed somehow hopelessly old-fashioned and mechanical. Like a psychological steam engine, he thought, something that is no longer of any use to me.
He eyed this new object, a tracery of silver on a black circle. He stared at it for a long time, so long that he began to discern the corner of something unforeseeable. He felt almost afraid, as if he had discovered something dangerous, an unknown weapon with enormous potential.
Jonas Wergeland had produced his first programme.
Venus and Mars
It would not be totally amiss to look upon Jonas Wergeland’s magnificent television series as an extension of sorts of the project at Steinbruvannet, slivers of ice set at different angles to one another to create a three-dimensional space. Or, if you wilclass="underline" a national monument constructed out of crystalline fragments.
Jonas Wergeland’s programmes were, as I say, subjected to vigorous reassessment after his arrest. Suddenly it seemed that everybody and their uncle could see that Thinking Big was a mass of transparent segments and felt, therefore, duty-bound to sing out like the little boy in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. One after another they came forward to prove that this ‘monumental work’, as it had been called, was both cold and cynical and fell into a million pieces at the slightest, critical touch.
One of the few things which might merit our attention is an interview with one of Jonas Wergeland’s closest colleagues — an exception, this article, in that the emphasis was placed not on Wergeland’s arrogance and effrontery, or his brutality: the fact that he would trample over anyone who got in his way, not unlike the case of the Emperor Qin Shihuang and the Great Wall of China. Instead what was communicated here was an ill-concealed bitterness over the fact that Jonas Wergeland had taken all the credit. This colleague claimed that Wergeland never knew where to draw the line; while he might well have been a wizard once everything was in the can and the post-production work begun, he needed the assistance of a critical eye at the actual planning stage. Jonas Wergeland’s great failing was his tendency to want to include too much, to bite off more than he could chew. His colleague used the programme on Sigrid Undset as an example, and I think it is worth our while to dwell for a moment on this programme, seeing that it turned out to be one of the series’ real tours de force, the one which was bought by the greatest number of television channels worldwide.
Originally, if this source is to be believed, Jonas wanted to include scenes from Sigrid Undset’s sojourn on the Swedish island of Gotland and her later visit to Carl Linnaeus’s home, Hammerby Manor near Uppsala, its rooms papered with drawings of flowers; Jonas was particularly keen to highlight the legendary moment when she leans down in this chapel to nature and kisses von Linnaeus’s desk, just as pilgrims kiss the statues of saints. In his head Jonas had a clear idea of how telling this scene would be: Undset virtually kissing the ideal of the Grand Scheme of Things, the Great Classification, in which everything falls neatly into a certain order — a parallel to Catholicism; but his colleague had managed to foil this suggestion, thereby, as he saw it, not only saving NRK the considerable cost of a trip to Sweden, which was now cancelled, but also laying the foundations of a better programme — and receiving no credit for it. To his mind, he was the Ezra Pound to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.