She began by making love to him long and lingeringly, with a dreamy look in her eyes, as if she were planning great exploits, or as if he were a great exploit, a wide-open space in himself. Outside, darkness had fallen, the wind howled around the walls of the hut, crystals of ice spattered against the window; he lay there, warm from head to toe, while she made love to him with greater and greater intensity, her whole body eventually working furiously as she rode him, purposefully, tirelessly, as if this too were a wilderness that she had to conquer, a peak she had to climb. She made love to him all night long, so many times that Jonas could not believe that they — or at any rate he — could go on, but she would make him rise up again, whipping him on as relentlessly as when she dragged him to the top of the mountain, making love to him so fiercely and so divinely that his whole body seemed to glow. And it was during this exhausting coupling with Sigrid A. that Jonas not only learned how much his body could stand, that he could hold out for far longer than he had imagined and that the volume of semen in his glands had not run out, even though he was crying out that it had; during the course of that pleasurable and demanding night a new determination was also born in Jonas Wergeland, making him realize that it was time he put his experiences into some sort of order, set himself some big goal, select, as it were, a peak. And, what with the fiery glow in his body, the great, bright light of creativity in his head and the thought of the transmitter standing at the top of Gausta, right outside the window, he had the feeling that their lovemaking was being broadcast, that the image of their coupling was being beamed into all those thousands of homes.
The next morning they stepped out into the most beautiful weather. Everything, the whole, wide world, was shimmering blue and white — sparkling white — and charged with a breathtaking silence. The television mast a hundred metres above their heads glinted like one of Carl Nesjar’s year-round fountains, a sculpture of ice. Jonas was sure that Le Corbusier would have appreciated this sight, that Le Corbusier, like Jonas, would have been filled with awe at the thought of such a heroic project: a wild, elongated and sparsely populated country linked together by a telecommunications network. An epic undertaking, Jonas thought. And beautiful, Jonas thought, as beautiful as nature itself.
It was said that you could see a seventh part of Southern Norway from the top, and it certainly seemed so. As Jonas spun round and round on his own axis, like a little kid, wide-eyed and speechless, he discovered — and this he automatically put down to the events of the previous night — that suddenly this landscape meant a great deal to him, he actually felt a kind of love for these vast open spaces, these mountains. And the snow, even the snow. He bent down and scooped it up, having to screw up his eyes against the light, and as he crouched there, hunkered down on Gaustatoppen, clutching a handful of snow, it dawned on him why so many people migrated to the mountains at Easter time: on account of the light, the dazzling light. And from that day forth, Jonas Wergeland was always to regard this as being his countrymen’s finest trait: their longing for light which, not unreasonably, manifested itself at Easter time, during a religious festival; and in days to come this insight was to form the basis for his optimistic estimation of television’s potential, inasmuch as television was a form of light, dazzling light.
The trip down was something of an anticlimax. Even though he took the slopes diagonally, crisscrossing his way down, it went so fast that his eyes were tearing behind his sunglasses; his leg muscles ached and he fell God knows how many times, slithering and bouncing. Sigrid A. was way ahead of him, executing elegant practised Telemark swings as though she were taking part in a display and only lacked the felt hat, the homespun breeches and the traditional sweater. When he finally caught up with her at the foot of Longefonn she was standing talking to the rescue team that had been about to institute a search for them.
The Mystery
And remember, promise me you will remember, in the midst of all this, how Jonas Wergeland dwelt on the Norwegian landscape in his programme on Knut Hamsun, a programme which also provided him with a golden opportunity for shots of the country’s natural wonders, although a lot of people were surprised at the way in which he did this. Jonas was never in any doubt as to what constituted Knut Hamsun’s key story, the one story which in its own special way shed a revealing light on his life: his meeting with Adolf Hitler. Because Hamsun would never have met Hitler had he not been a great writer. Nor would he have met him had he not sympathized with the Nazis. His meeting with Hitler was an extreme situation which highlighted most clearly the extremes of Hamsun’s own character, the breadth of this most vexatious of all Norwegian authors.
Jonas Wergeland focussed, therefore, on the writer during his last and possibly his most amazing journey to foreign parts, into the heart of darkness, so to speak. Hamsun was eighty-three years old — that in itself is astonishing — and had been attending the German minister of propaganda’s press congress in Vienna. Hamsun had then been invited to meet with Adolf Hitler and duly found himself at Berghof, the Führer’s renowned headquarters in Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden in Austria. It was Saturday June 26th 1943, the time 2.00 p.m.. The two shook hands, author and dictator, and Wergeland showed this handshake in slow motion, over and over again, the close-up of their hands, as if to emphasize the irrefutability, the irrevocability of this event which shocked so many Norwegians to the roots of their being.
Jonas cheated a little with the setting. There were eight people in the drawing-room at Berghof, but he showed only three: the two protagonists plus assistant secretary Holmbo, who had acted as interpreter, and to save having to reconstruct that remarkable room with all its paintings and tapestries, its oak beams and heavy furniture, he seated the three of them with their teacups right up against the ten metre long panorama window in the gable end, overlooking the valley, and he replaced the view from this window, which should in fact have shown Unterberg and Berchtesgaden, with a glimpse of Salzburg in the distance, with long, almost dreamlike panning shots of the Norwegian landscape, an effect achieved by allowing the camera to almost drift off through the window occasionally, while Hamsun and Hitler were conversing, to present shots of the scenery of north Norway, from Kjerringøy with its beautifully preserved trading post, Kråkmotinden, snub-nosed and majestic — it was at the foot of this mountain that Hamsun had written The Fruits of the Soil, spellbinding, sweeping shots of Lofotveggen, and from Hamarøy, of Hamarøyskaftet in particular, rearing high into the air like a brazen old codpiece, as refractory as Hamsun himself. These sequences were run to the accompaniment of readings from Pan, descriptions of nature, and even though Jonas was well aware of the high cliché factor in this, he could not stop himself, the temptation was simply too great. This was also the only occasion in the Thinking Big series when he consciously set out to woo the public. And it did not fail, could not fail, what with the almost unbelievable landscape of northern Norway and Hamsun’s magical words from Pan. These passages went down particularly well abroad, quite taking the viewers’ breath away, they made the whole programme — in fact they paved the way for all the later programmes in the series. What saved these scenic interludes, however, from being run-of-the-mill, was the ‘impossible’ aspect, the fact that they were viewed from a balcony near Berchtesgaden in Austria. It was as if Jonas wished to hint at the connection between an extreme landscape and an extreme situation. Either that or the paradox of it: the contrast.