A number of people have pointed out that this programme rests on a somewhat objectionable assumption: that Ibsen died and was restored to life, became a new man. Became more than he had been. What people did not know was that Jonas had made this assumption on the basis of personal experience. In one discussion he did, however, claim that in Peer Gynt Ibsen himself had hinted at something similar. In several scenes, Peer appears to die, and yet goes on living — on the high moors, in the hall of the Mountain King, in the Asylum, on the boat home. As for Henrik Ibsen, from that summer on, more than one person observed a sudden and marked difference in his manner. He became more impulsive, for a long time he read nothing but the Bible and he changed his whole style of dress. This new sense of freedom boosted his self-confidence. The following year, in his ambitious application for a poet’s pension he wrote — in a hand which had also undergone an abrupt transformation — the words which Jonas Wergeland used as the title of his television series: Ibsen would, as he said, fight ‘to arouse the Nation and encourage it to think big’.
Jonas Wergeland, still merely an announcer with NRK television, sat in a church, at an organ, and he too saw a light of sorts: a woman clad in brilliant orange, on her knees before his father’s coffin. The final strains of ‘Love divine all love excelling’ still hung in the air. Jonas did not know whether this occurrence, the woman down by the altar, was going to bring everything to a halt, make time stand still, but he got ready, anyway, to play the postlude while the coffin was carried out to the hearse which waited to take it to the crematorium. Time went on. The strange woman got to her feet and met the eyes trained on her from the packed pews. The precious stones in her earrings flashed. What an amazing figure, Jonas thought to himself. In her orange coat, in such a gathering, she looked like a butterfly on a winter’s day, a peacock butterfly caught in a snowstorm. A creature who lifted the lid off this funeral scene to reveal that it was all about something else, something more. No one knew — no one ever discovered — who she was or why she did it. Whether she belonged to a past time or, as Jonas was inclined to believe, to a parallel time. As she walked — no, strode — up the aisle she seemed, wordlessly, to be saying: ‘You are wrong, this is not a church, it is a palace; that is not an organist in that coffin, but a king.’
Then she was gone. A glowing ember leaving behind it only ashes, dead and black.
Jonas, however, was left with the feeling that she had lit a spark within him. Or that she had blown more life into the tiny flame which he had become aware of earlier when his eye lighted on the nape of Margrete’s neck. He focused on his music, prepared to play the postlude, which was in fact a prelude. The same piece that his father had been playing when he died, Bach’s prelude in A minor. As if picking up where his father had left off. A triumph. Jonas raised his hands and, as he did so, in a flash he saw how the most disparate threads of life intertwined in this room, at this moment; how seemingly parallel, unconnected events suddenly came together to form harmonies, music, a prelude which showed him that his own life had not even begun yet. Did it always take a death to render complex matters simple?
Jonas played the first few bars, with the A note held as a pedal point, like a prolonged insistence on new beginnings, on life. Jonas threw himself into this work which, strictly speaking, he was in no way qualified to play, but which he managed to play nonetheless, played it so that the whole church shook. And the longer he played, the greater became the feeling of something of colossal importance welling up inside him, something which had long lain buried, and as he neared the end of the piece, as he caught himself holding his breath, one thought outweighed all others, the thought of taking his talent seriously, because he had the opposite problem from Ibsen: he had the ability, but he lacked the will. Jonas made the air vibrate with his playing, and perhaps because he had long since been imbued with the geometric beauty of this moment, and because the music felt like a crystalline net in which every fragment reflected all of the others, and because he was sitting in a small church, building a cathedral out of music, he found that he had already made up his mind: he longed to have more wind in his sails. He would approach his bosses at NRK and ask to be allowed to make programmes. And some day — again he was reminded of those metro stations in Moscow — some day he might create a series presenting the bright spots, the underground stations, in the collective life of Norway, a series of programmes which would encourage the whole nation to think big. Maybe, the thought struck him as the echo of the final chord died away and a hush fell in the church, such a series could even be regarded as life-saving.
Io
On the way down to Turtagrø he turned back several times to look up at the three peaks behind us. ‘They remind me of the pyramids at Giza,’ he said. Late in the afternoon, down by the car, he stood for a moment regarding Store Skagastølstind, the mountain we had climbed. As if considering something. Then: ‘I’ve seen the Great Pyramid at Cheops,’ he murmured at length, ‘but this is greater.’ To me it sounded as if he were saying: I was dead, but now I am risen.
‘Why did you go so close to the edge?’ I asked.
‘I thought I could fly,’ he said. ‘I thought I had sprouted wings.’
We reached Skjolden that evening. The village lay in shadow, but the sun was still shining on the slopes high on the east side of Lustrafjord and on the snow atop Molden, the peak which formed the cornerstone of a chamber in which the shining water constituted the floor and the mountains the walls. The blossom on the apple trees we drove past seemed luminous. The beauty of it was almost too much.
The Voyager was lying waiting for us at the Norsk Hydro wharf, below the old Eide farmstead; Hanna and Carl had sailed up the day before. We got ourselves settled in the old lifeboat, a genuine Colin Archer, built over a hundred years ago. For the next few weeks it would be our home. A boat that had saved the lives of hundreds of people in distress. A stormy petrel. A vessel designed to put to sea when others were making for harbour. The perfect mobile base.
Martin promptly disappeared into the galley, I heard chinking sounds coming from his tiny, but discriminatingly stocked drinks cabinet. ‘Here you are,’ he said, as he came up again with a glass for our guest. ‘A Talisker from the Isle of Skye, laced with the tang of the ocean. The perfect whisky for drinking at sea. Welcome aboard.’
‘Cheers,’ said our guest. ‘Here’s to a boat fit for an old lifesaver.’
We had to make the most of our days at Skjolden. Carl had been allotted the most important task: the stave church at Urnes. Martin would be concentrating on the natural wonders of the area, particularly the Feigumfossen waterfall and Fortunsdalen. Hanna would be visiting places like Munthehuset at Kroken, where so many painters had stayed. And I was to chart the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s movements in and around Skjolden. In the course of this work I found myself one afternoon on the hill above Eidsvatnet, sitting by the foundations of his cottage, ‘Østerrike’. As I leafed through the fragmentary writings in Philosophische Untersuchungen, I was suddenly struck by the similarity between the project on which we were engaged and Wittgenstein’s efforts to eschew the traditional limitations of the book form, where ‘b’ inevitably follows ‘a’. This made me wish that we could insert a ‘link’ to a small display — I envisaged a graphic image inspired by Wittgenstein’s clarinet — illustrating the connection between the fjord as form, as a network of branches, and the composition of his book.