Among the group of Chinese there was a photographer. He took a picture of Jonas shaking hands with Mao Tse Tung, a picture which found its way, in a roundabout fashion, into a couple of newspapers, accompanied by the caption: ‘Chairman Mao meets the leader of a group of Norwegian cadres during their visit to Peking.’ This picture, which had been heavily retouched, showed an ebullient Mao and a somewhat doubtful-looking Jonas as if the honour were all on Mao’s side. Which was true enough, since Jonas Wergeland had only one thought in mind during that handshake: here I am, shaking the hand of a man who has made people too terrified to play Duke Ellington.
What Jonas remembered best of all was the moment when he glanced towards the square itself, where those people closest to them, hundreds, possibly thousands of them, had turned to stare at them: at Jonas and Mao. Suddenly their facial features had vanished, leaving them looking like nothing but a host of rounded forms, like pebbles on a beach by the sea, or like a rolling sea itself — The Great White Flock — and the ancient face bobbing up and down before him, the old head almost incapable of holding itself upright, assumed an eerie resemblance to the head of a turtle. And in a flash of perception, Jonas saw that he was here confronted with the greatest turtle of the twentieth century, made of jade at that, an almost transparent substance possessed of a quality which dictates that it must be shrouded in gloom for its secret to be revealed.
And now here you are, back from yet another trip, and you know that you are going to regret that trip for the rest of your life, and you look at Margrete, and you try to take it in, and you ask yourself why you were not at home, you try to remember where you have actually been and you realize, to your horror, that all this time, in some padded corner of your brain, you have been working on ideas for your programme on the World’s Fair, on the Expo in Seville; you realize, with something bordering on despair, standing there in a room containing a dead wife, how this shielded part of your brain has been thrown into a whirl of creativity, and it comes as something of a shock to you to realize that the scene with which you are confronted here, and the desperation you feel inside, have galvanized your imagination, and already, much against your will, you find yourself envisaging various possibilities for original angles in the footage you have brought back with you; you look at the picture of Buddha, you realize that it looks like Mao Tse Tung, and all at once you remember who you are, and it dawns on you why you cannot get the thought of television out of your mind, even here, even now, because you are the seducer, the seducer of the people, you think, like Mao, you think, on one occasion you even seduced the great seducer himself, the chairman of the world’s biggest housing cooperative, you think; you turn and look out of the window, half expecting to see a gigantic Midsummer’s Eve bonfire, the size of a world in flames, you think, but all you can see are the outlines of the low blocks of flats on the other side of Bergensveien, and as you look at them you have a sense of being lifted up, as if you were in a small plane, a Piper Cub, you think, of looking down on everything from a great height, your own villa included, like an itty-bitty angle on a granite Norwegian rock-face, you think, so ludicrously simplified and false, you think, noticing as you do so that in your absence someone has been using the old record-player, the one that takes seventy-eights, and you see a record on the turntable, see the title, ‘I Got It Bad, And That Ain’t Good’, you drop to your knees, feeling sick to the marrow; if only you knew how much I wish I could be there, how I wish I could put my hand on your brow, to make it easier for you to throw up, and it is all I can do not to reveal the motive behind this task I have set myself, to keep my deep secret, but I hope that you at least, you, Jonas Wergeland, conqueror of the television masts, saviour of the suicidal, founder of Michelangelo Day, will understand, and understand also how much, how overwhelmingly much, this chronicle has meant to me, too.
So I do not blame you for once again crawling over to Margrete on your hands and knees, as if to inspect a shot elk, with a vague notion that you ought to cut out the heart, in order to examine it, chamber by chamber, you think, because there, you think, might lie the answer, you think, to the mystery of love, you think, and you lean over her, lift one of her eyelids, as if to check whether the image of her murderer might have been imprinted on her pupil, and you think of those television cameramen who have filmed their own killers, sequences which are then screened on the evening news, but you find no images fixed on Margrete’s pupils, only the black reflection of your own face, like a camera obscura, you think, but then you’ve always known, known that it could just as easily be you lying there, on the polar-bear skin, shot, because it is your fault, you think, it is your seductive arts that lie at the start of this causal chain, you think, and your eye goes to the row of videocassettes on the bookshelf, like book spines you think, with no antiquarian value whatsoever, you think, not worth a shit, you think, or worth no more than a bullet through the heart, like that programme of yours that NRK screened just before you left for Seville, the one that had frightened Margrete, you think, the one that had enraged other people, you think, and you gaze at the Luger lying on the floor underneath the coffee table, an unmistakeable message, you think, from people who hate your seductive arts, and more specifically that programme, the one you called ‘Tales from the Ghetto’, in which the new citizens of Norway, Africans, Asians, Latin-Americans, told stories about their adopted country; in which you wanted to make the viewers see, or rather, seduce them into seeing, you think, that immigrants enrich a nation, and in which you made the point, through the pictures, that a society that has no contact with the outside world is bound to stagnate culturally, and in which you held up these new countrymen as being a marvellously creative minority, lending an entirely new, and sorely needed, dimension to Norwegian life, and it was good television you think, it was stunning television, you think, and it had given rise to a gratifying new sympathy for these Norwegians with different facial features, but it had also prompted a wave of indignant protest, you think, and it had taken the lid off a pernicious fear of anything foreign, a ghastly intolerance of anything that was different, something for which not even you were prepared, and you received threats, vicious threats, you think, so you ought to have known better, you ought to have stayed home, looked after Margrete, you think, because she too had felt threatened, but you didn’t take it seriously, and now, at last, you realize that it must have been racists, coming to your house while you were away, to take revenge, you think, intent on protecting the Norwegian way of life, you think, pure, antiseptic Norway, you think, probably neo-Nazis, you think, the Luger pointed to that, it was clear proof, a calling card, you think, left behind on purpose, you think, and it looks old, must be from the war, a relic, something one associates with Germany, with the Nazis, you think, and that fits, suddenly it all fits; it had to happen some day, you think, because you are the star, you are the wizard of television, you are the man who makes the people of Norway sit up and take notice, who can draw a response from people, you think, and to be honest you’ve always been waiting for something like this to happen, always knew that one day it was bound to turn nasty, that one day the idyll was bound to be shattered, that one day a monster of a Scania-Vabis would come crashing brutally, relentlessly through the fragile walls of your villa, shattering bricks and blocks of granite and sending them flying chaotically in all directions. And now here you are, as if in a bomb crater, you think, on your knees before an innocent victim, you think, and you know you have to make that call, you know you cannot put it off any longer, you look at the telephone, and you know what a God-awful to-do there will be, and you know the sort of headlines it will give rise to, and you know the press will have a field day, and you know that from now on nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever be the same again, and you know that you have come to a juncture as critical as that long hard battle you once had to fight in a TV studio at Marienlyst — so I say to you, now, at this desperate chaotic moment, because it could be the saving of you.