‘Tell me more about Princess Li-Lai,’ Jonas asked.
And at such times the word ‘no’ never passed Aunt Laura’s lips. ‘In Xanadu,’ she said, ‘Princess Li Lai received another suitor in her cool palace, in the innermost room in which she had shut herself away for many years because she had not yet found one who could make love to her until she saw a turtle with a shell that looked like a face. The one who had come to woo her on this occasion was the celebrated rug-maker, Kara Bagh, and he did not waste any time either but carried her to the bed where he immediately proceeded to make love to her. Kara Bagh concentrated solely on her insides as if she contained a multitude of threads which he was resolved to knot into a rug. The princess thought she could feel his member growing hard and soft by turns and how he alternated between long strokes and short, close-knit twists and turns deep inside her as if he were knotting something that was attached to the very tip of his penis. And as he made love to her, ever more strangely, with the most surprising movements, in the oddest patterns, Princess Li Lai felt these touches filling her with a warm glow as if she had stepped out into the sunshine and were walking through a landscape that Kara Bagh the rug-maker slowly created in her path, knot by knot, with vegetation in glowing colours and high mountains in wild formations stretching away behind and beyond one another, seeming to go on forever, and as she came to a river it suddenly overflowed its banks and swept her away, and she floated off, as if caught up in a tidal wave, a delicious pressure against her body, floated and floated in a warm stream that flowed faster and faster, harder and harder, until she was thrown onto the bank, and there she caught sight of a bridge nearby. She crossed this and it brought her to a plateau at the foot of a mountain, and while Kara Bagh the rug-maker made love to her ever more vigorously with his alternately hard and soft member, with long and short strokes, with knots and loose threads, the princess felt her legs carrying her towards the mountain, more and more swiftly, until she was lifted up, rose higher and higher, drifted, and when she reached the top of the mountain Kara Bagh made love to her in patterns so rare and with actions so studied that she lost her balance and toppled over the edge of the cliff and fell and fell and fell through the air, as if being set free, heavy, replete, until she came once again to a stretch of water, went on sinking, sank and sank, a glorious, all-embracing feeling, an endless sinking, until suddenly she had a sense of climbing, even while she went on sinking, climbed and sank, sank and climbed as if she were being expanded in all directions, liberated from without and from within, achieving consummate insight, immaculate stillness, a rainbow of light and then she broke the surface again, shot through with warmth and discovered that she was being carried by a large turtle, lying on her stomach on its back, and Princess Li Lai saw, on the instant, that the shell looked like a face, the selfsame face that she gazed down on when she opened her eyes, the face of Kara Bagh the rug-maker for, unknown to her, he had changed position, so that she now lay on top of him. And she thanked him and asked him to stay because she was sure that this must be the best way to be made love to. “What did you do to me?” Princess Li Lai asked. And great was her astonishment when Kara Bagh told her that he had not been inside her at all. For, as he said later: “No man can reach the innermost depths of a woman with his member.”’
Often, perhaps too often, in novels, one reads of young men being seduced by their voluptuous aunts; an aunt, for example, with a pale face, a lot of kohl around her eyes and blood-red lipstick. Jonas Wergeland was not, however, seduced by his aunt’s body but by her stories. Many things in Jonas Wergeland’s life would have been different had he not spent so much time surrounded by rugs and copper in Aunt Laura’s flat.
‘Tell me about Samarkand,’ he said at last, as always, just before he left.
‘As for Samarkand and what I found there, that I can never tell you,’ she said. ‘You will have to go there yourself.’
Opium of the People
Allow me to introduce Nora Næss, resident of the town of Bryne in the Jæren area of south-west Norway, a teacher, married to a man who works out in the North Sea, two children, own house. A perfectly ordinary, middle-aged Norwegian woman, exactly like Nanna Norheim in Bærum or Nina Narum in Tromsø. On the evening on which NRK TV showed the first programme in Jonas Wergeland’s series Thinking Big, Nora Næss had not really been intending to watch television; she pressed the button more or less out of habit, without checking to see what was on, because she was in the dinette, ironing tablecloths and could just as well have something to look up at now and again, something to break the monotony of the job. And then suddenly there was this amazing programme. First she glanced up more often than usual, possibly for a little longer, then she started watching more and more and ironing less and less until eventually, without taking her eyes off the screen, she pulled the plug of the iron out of the socket, sat down on the sofa and watched television as if she had never watched television before. Or, as she confided to her friend, and the odd thing is that Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum both confided almost the same thing to their friends: ‘To be honest, I felt as though I was being made love to. I mean it. And as the programme was coming to a close I could feel myself swelling up with pleasure.’
Now of course this should not be taken too literally. What Nora Næss — likewise Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum — wished to convey was, first and foremost, a sense of being taken seriously: a sense of gratitude that someone had fondled her of all people, her eyes, her ears, all of her senses, not least her intellect, giving her a sort of all-embracing sense that this concerned her, concerned her to such a degree that it gave her goosebumps.
So over the months that followed Nora made sure, as did Nanna and Nina, that she saw all of the programmes in the series; in fact she not only saw them, she lived them, she videotaped them and watched them again, more than once, really watched them. For the first time, thanks to Jonas Wergeland’s television series, Nora Næss thought of herself as a viewer, or rather as a seer in the true sense of that word, a visionary. Because, although she found it hard to put into words, she had seen something new, something important, something she had never seen before which filled her with a positive energy and moved her to watch the programmes yet again, such that she was constantly discovering aspects and details that she had missed on previous occasions while at the same time spotting more of the similarities and devices that cropped up again and again; thus she was continually expanding her grasp of the common thread linking all of the programmes. ‘They’re like gems within a larger gem,’ as she put it, not knowing that Nanna Norheim and Nina Narum had said pretty much the same thing. She talked about those programmes, really felt a need to speak to someone after viewing them, and since others had the same urge, they discussed them in the staff room or outside the local shop or in each others’ homes. Nora Næss also talked to her husband about them, in case anyone thinks there were problems on that front. He had seen the first two programmes out in the North Sea and was every bit as hooked on them as she; in fact they actually believed, both of them, that their relationship was somehow strengthened by the series.
I am telling you this in order to make it clear that there is no way that Jonas Wergeland’s series, Thinking Big, can be condensed into words; what is more, in resumé it seems banal and rather dull. I would like therefore to take this opportunity to apologize for my earlier accounts of it, because the series’ success, if that is the right word, is impossible to explain. Mind you, media experts have for a long time been producing big fat treatises in which they have attempted to analyse why and how these programmes had such an impact, but apart from citing those factors which were patently obvious, such as the high professional standard, the sophisticated technical quality, they had to admit defeat and resort instead to drawing parallels with poetry, not to mention mysticism and talk of ‘the unutterable’. A few did keep their feet on the ground and venture to highlight Jonas Wergeland’s voice ‘which has the same appeal as that of a prime minister, a national father-figure’, some spoke of his knack for composing pictures while others pointed to the original viewpoints, the actual angle of attack, and still others latched onto his personal presence in the programmes, the intensity of his expression — all this without, of course, a single person mentioning anything about a silver thread in his spine, a crystal prism in his head or balls of gold. No one has yet been able to say anything about the cause, only about what an almost narcotic effect the series had on large sections of the Norwegian viewing public.