We had been lucky with the weather. In the evening we were able to sit up on deck, exchanging findings and ideas while the sunlight slowly loosened its grip on the top of Bolstadnosi, behind Skjolden. Was there, for example, any correlation between Wittgenstein’s theories and the carvings in Urnes stave church? This was the sort of question we meant to encourage people to ask. Already we had some inkling of what our main challenge would be: of all the information we gathered — what should we take with us?
I think, though, that I spent just as much time observing our passenger, a man who had once had the whole nation in the palm of his hand and almost succeeded in steering it onto a different course, before he was sent to prison for the murder of his wife. Who was this man? I had taken it upon myself to uncover unknown aspects of his life. I had already written a long and elaborate rough draft which I was continually turning over in my mind, in parallel, so to speak, with my actual assignment.
I asked myself who I thought I was, to be undertaking such a task. I was neither a god nor a devil. I was a human being. I was a conjecturing individual. My style — even where my account sounded pretty dogmatic — could not help but be tentative, hypothetical. Full of eventualities and qualifications and reservations. Although I never actually said it, never revealed my scruples, my doubts and my unquestionable shortcomings, not even in parentheses, the whole thing was pervaded by an implicit ‘it may be that …’, or ‘as I see it …’. And yet sometimes, even when I was sitting up on deck, making more notes, I felt like a spirit drifting over the water, an omniscient spirit, a spirit with the power to create light, to separate sea from sky. It was easy to become enamoured of this illusion. I knew a lot, a nuisance of a lot, about the man sitting on a deck chest across from me. And I considered my youth an advantage. I was not interested in adding anything or tearing anything down. I simply wanted to understand: why did he do it?
I studied him surreptitiously. It was a rare privilege to be able to spend some days with one’s subject. Although he looked different after his time behind bars, after his first years of freedom — his hair was grey now, his face thinner, his skin oddly darker somehow — I was surprised to find that he could stroll around Skjolden, check out the goings-on at the Fjordstova community centre — the climbing wall, the library — without being recognised. As far as I could tell, this did not bother him at all. Looked at objectively, though, this was quite something, in fact it was almost unbelievable: his visage had been erased, so to speak, from people’s memories. As if someone had pressed a huge ‘delete’ button.
His slide into oblivion had been a gradual thing, of course: long after he had exchanged the spotlit pedestal of television celebrity for the dim solitude of the prison cell he had remained the object of an interest bordering on mass hysteria. All the newspapers printed special supplements about him, detailing the high points of his career. Both the press and television behaved as if they were suffering from bulimia. They could not get enough of him. It was said that a number of women had tried to kill themselves, that they had been found clutching photographs of Jonas Wergeland. He had been an incandescent, edifying icon to the people of Norway, exalted and inviolable. Many people, I’m sure, can still recall how shocking it was, back in the infancy of television, when a newsreader got a fit of the giggles and thus revealed that he or she was only an ordinary mortal. But the wave of disbelief that swept the country when Jonas Wergeland, a national emblem, the nearest thing to a demi-god, was convicted of murder, was of another order entirely.
Even the most sensational scandals do not last for ever, though. After remarkably few years Jonas Wergeland was no more than a distant legend associated with the best of television broadcasting, He had been reduced to a word, a concept. If his name did crop up it was not uncommonly in the form of a superlative: ‘Wergelandian’. His television series — and other programmes made by him — had, however, a life of their own. The repeats had been running for years. The videos of Thinking Big also sold steadily. The reaction — an almost religious collective response — to the first showing could obviously never be repeated, but for that very reason perhaps, the artistic merits of the programmes came more into their own. Despite the ephemeral, soon to be outdated nature of the medium, Jonas Wergeland’s television series was an indisputable masterpiece. I am not alone in thinking this. A well-known English television critic wrote in his column in The Sunday Times that these programmes possessed the same undeniable quality and brilliance as the paintings of Rembrandt or Matisse. Nonetheless, these works of art had taken on a life of their own, independent of Wergeland’s person. There was no longer any connection between the name and the face. He could wander, unremarked, around a small Norwegian town, even pass the time of day with people without anyone recognising the features which they had idolised ten years previously.
One evening he was standing outside the old Klingenberg family home, where Wittgenstein had stayed during his first winter in Skjolden, when an elderly man happened along. They got talking. After a while I heard the other man say: ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what do you do for a living?’
‘I’m …’ Wergeland began, then stopped, as if he were trying to say something for which there were no words. ‘I am a secretary.’
Which was true. He was now working as a secretary. And he was clearly proud of it.
On our third and final day in Skjolden harbour, he asked me if I would act as driver for him; he wanted to show me something. When we got to Luster he instructed me to turn down a narrow road immediately after Dale Church. We zigzagged up the steep hillside and eventually emerged on a plateau to be met by the unreal sight of a huge, white crescent-shaped building, four storeys tall. ‘Welcome to Hotel Norway,’ he said. It wasn’t as bad as it sounded. I learned later that the place was up for sale, and that a lot of interest was being shown by the travel industry.
This ghostly establishment was Harastølen, an old sanatorium from the turn of the century. The fresh air and the surrounding pine forests had made it a perfect spot for the treatment of tuberculosis; there were still some signs, like the low-ceilinged ‘cure porches’ set into the embankment skirting the front of the main building, suggestive of a world of deckchairs and blankets — like that described by Thomas Mann in his novel The Magic Mountain. Later on, the premises had been used as a hospital for long-stay psychiatric patients.
I don’t know whether anyone remembers now, it is already so long ago, but it was here in the early nineties that the Bosnian refugees whom the Red Cross succeeded in having released from Serbian concentration camps and who then came to Norway by way of Croatia were interned. There were around 340 of them all told, counting their families. Many of them were severely traumatised; they had been subjected to what psychiatrists term ‘catastrophic stress’, they had witnessed the most appalling violence — ethnic cleansing — and were in a very vulnerable condition, one which could easily escalate into acute crisis. The Norwegian authorities meant well, I’m sure — they called it a transit centre — but it does not take much imagination to see that it was not good for people suffering from this sort of syndrome to live in such isolation — halfway up a mountain, deep inside a Norwegian fjord — for over a year. Things became so bad that the inmates staged a hunger strike. But not until over half of the refugees had applied to return to Bosnia — they actually preferred that war-torn region to Harastølen — did the baffled Norwegian immigration authorities realise just how embarrassing the whole situation was. The refugees received a promise that they would be resettled in the surrounding community.