I had wondered whether this might have something to do with the contrasts found around Sognefjord. Did they generate a tension, a salubrious force field which in turn made the people expand? Here in Høyanger, with all its clear reminders of aluminium, that attractive light metal, my thoughts often turned — as if running down an opposite track — to all of the fruit-growing which we had also seen in Sogn. I will never forget the view as we sailed past Leikanger. The whole place, the slopes running up to the heights, shimmered with the pale-pink blossom on tens of thousands of apple trees, shot here and there with sunlight glinting off the sprinkler jets. The climate at Leikanger was so favourable that you could plant an apricot tree against a south-facing wall or even grow grapes. We anchored close enough to shore to be able to enjoy the sight of the gigantic walnut tree in the vicarage garden, standing between the main house and the water. Did the key to Sognefjord perhaps lie hidden here? In the tension between plants and minerals, fruit and aluminium? Amanlis, Summer Red and d’Oullins on the one side, cables, ceiling panels and railway wagons on the other. I would not argue with anyone who dared to say that the healthiness and contentment of the local inhabitants stemmed from a kind of visual alchemy — the blossom-covered branches of an apple tree against a backdrop of silvery aluminium cylinder blocks.
In Høyanger Jonas could easily have passed for a local, by which I mean that he seemed even more content than usual. Possibly because he came upon so many unexpected links with his own life. As when, for example, someone told him about the slug factory which had closed down just before the turn of the millennium and he realised that the material for the tubes containing his favourite sandwich spreads had been made there. At another factory, Fundo’s, they produced the wheel rims for the car which he himself drove. Høyanger helped one to understand the world of today. In a small town at the head of a narrow fjord, walled in by steep mountainsides, they manufactured a car part for a factory in another country which also received parts from a dozen other countries. You lived in Høyanger, but were part of a global network.
But there was another reason for Jonas Wergeland’s happiness, and that reason was Kamala. I have nothing against that — I least of all. It was the best thing about the whole trip: to see those two, Kamala Varma and Jonas Wergeland, together; to observe how devoted they were to one another. ‘How’s my secretary getting on?’ Kamala might say, wrapping her arms around him. And he would not answer, merely allow himself to be hugged. Even when he was sitting alone on deck, possibly writing something in his big notebook or simply staring up at the rigging, her effect on him was clear to see. His name appeared in print at the very beginning of a love story. Whenever I saw him I could not help thinking: there’s a man who is loved. Who simply laps up love. So he can learn to love. Become a lover. That may sound easy, but for Jonas Wergeland it was anything but. It had taken him a lifetime to reach this stage.
I think it must also have been this love which enabled him to view his country in a new and unprejudiced light. ‘You have the Ganges,’ I heard him say to Kamala — in jest, I grant you — on the way to Høyanger, as we were leaning on the rail, gazing incredulously at Ortnevik across the water, ‘but we have Sognefjord. This is our sacred river. And the farms clinging to the mountainsides are our temples.’
With similar pride he showed us the church at Høyanger, designed by no less a person than Arnstein Arneberg, one of the architects behind Oslo Rådhus. The old town gate offered a perfect view of it, in its lovely setting on the other side of the river, on a low hill at the foot of Gråberget’s steep rock face. Jonas talked Kamala and I into posing on the bridge, so he could take our picture with the church in the background. It might have had something to do with his closeness to Kamala, but sometimes I had the impression that he was starting to look like an Indian, even in his colouring, that soon he really would look like a film director from Bombay — just as his grandmother’s features had, over the years, grown more and more Churchillian. He took a long time over it, snapping picture after picture, until eventually Kamala got fed up, went up to him, took the camera and ordered him to go and stand next to me. That was so like her. Kamala Varma is a woman who prefers to take photographs herself.
This same attitude, or mindset, lay at the root of Wergeland’s programme on Liv Ullmann. Jonas’s heroes and heroines were not only discoverers, they were to just as great an extent rebels. Few have discerned the salute to the spirit of resistance and defiance which underpins the whole series.
At the heart of the Ullmann programme lay an incident which many Norwegians recall with ambivalent wonder: the actress’s dinner with Henry Kissinger in March 1973; a banquet which was duly covered by a couple of Norwegian dailies. Jonas Wergeland concentrated, however, on their brief meeting before the dinner, which was by no means an intimate affair, but a huge party in honour of film director John Ford, held at the Grand Ballroom of the Beverley Hilton Hotel; a function also attended by President Nixon. A lot of Norwegians felt very proud, flattered even, on Liv Ullmann’s behalf, that Henry Kissinger himself, long-time professor of political science at Harvard University, now the presidential advisor on national security and soon to become the American Secretary of State — not to mention something of a womaniser and one of the world’s most written-about men — had personally asked the Norwegian actress to be his dinner companion. But a lot of Norwegians were also rather shocked, and possibly disappointed, that an artist of Liv Ullmann’s weighty calibre should allow herself to be dazzled by something as basic, not to say primitive, as power, and such a dubious sort of power at that; they did not like the thought that she might fall for a man who, while famed for his brilliant analyses of foreign affairs and inspired diplomacy, was equally well-known for his cynical, almost sinister internal intrigues, and was even quoted as having said — the nerve of it! — that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Many people found it hard to equate the couple’s little tête-à-tête with their image of Liv Ullmann as a demure woman with a natural Nordic allure. She was accused of being naive. The possibility that she might have accepted the invitation with her eyes wide open, that she might be a mature woman with masses of self-confidence and great inner strength was almost automatically discounted. This was the politicised Norway of the seventies, readily inclined to think in terms of headlines such as: ‘Sweet, innocent woman seduced by nasty, conservative man.’
As an actress, Liv Ullmann was at the very peak of her career, nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Emigrants. But despite her international success, despite all the prizes and honorary degrees bestowed on her from all quarters, despite being the subject of a lead story in Time the year before, with her picture on the cover and all, Liv Ullmann’s acting was not particularly well appreciated in Norway. In people’s minds she was always associated with a certain type of ‘heavy’, doleful role, with a tremulous expression and a voice which was all too easily parodied.