The Battle of Hafrsfjord
Remember, I say, remember that time with the sound check, when the ‘mic’s, those tiny lapel microphones, had already been attached, and they were all asked to say something. He listened to the others mouthing inane phrases, and because he had the idea that these said a lot about their subconscious minds, on impulse, when his turn came, he quoted Charles Darwin: ‘The mind cannot grasp,’ he said, as if plucking the words out of thin air, ‘the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years.’ No reaction, no laughter, just a ‘thank you, that’s fine’. A bad sign, he thought.
There were five minutes to go before they went out live on the air. Jonas studied the set décor, the flimsy studio walls which would give the viewers the impression of a relatively cosy room, but which to him represented something quite different, namely, the scene of a battle. Nor could the viewers tell that the light was disturbingly bright, as glaringly bright as the light in Eastern Greenland, he thought, peering round about him at these familiar surroundings which had suddenly become so alien, unreal, and as he did so he became aware of that ominous feeling of nausea that had dogged him throughout his life, the feeling that had hit him whenever he was too high up, or too far away, when contours were obliterated and details lost; a detector of sorts that picks up grandiose lies. One of the three cameramen nodded to him, Jonas could not tell whether it was a nod of encouragement or of malicious glee, he tried to catch the eye of Gunnhild, the floor manager, who was bustling about with a sheet of paper in each hand and a headset on, but she avoided looking his way, treating him with professional detachment, close to condescension, as if he were any ordinary guest. These people used to be his colleagues, now suddenly they were potential antagonists. He tried to breath deeply, slowly, he could tell he was nervous, and he had reason to be nervous; he had reached a critical juncture in his life, an event which could turn everything on its head, leave his brilliant career in ruins. That was the media circus for you. Riding high one day: consigned to oblivion the next. Like Timbuktu. A city of gold one year, a heap of sand the next. Jonas sat in that studio, bathed in an unpleasant light, and suddenly found himself wondering whether his prism was still out there somewhere, among the Tuaregs in the desert around Timbuktu, or whether perhaps it lay buried in the sand, one crystal among other crystals. Whatever the case, he could have done with it now, something to hold in his hand, something with which to break up that disturbingly bright light.
He looked at the two seated next to him, two people who would be vying with one another to tear him to pieces before the very eyes of the Norwegian people; he turned his eyes up to the control room, high above the studio floor, could not make out anyone behind the walls of glass but knew they were there, seven of them at least, including the Colonel, the producer, an old adversary; Jonas knew that the Colonel was girding his loins for the transmission of his life, a golden opportunity; that at that very moment the Colonel was scrutinizing his face on several of the monitors in the bank in front of him, Jonas could almost feel it physically, this dissection, as if he had been carved up, ready for distribution to all those thousands of homes.
Four minutes to go until they went on the air. The cameras were gliding back and forth a bit. Up in the control room, they were checking the scene coverage, whether the lighting was okay, the colours, whether the cameras were matched up. Jonas knew the routine, he looked at the welter of cables on the floor, at the maze of spotlights on the grid above their heads, some of which could even be raised and lowered hydraulically, he stared up at this galaxy, letting himself be dazzled while he thought of how simple television actually was: light, an outward light, no more than that, even a white shirt could cause problems. Jonas was momentarily hypnotized, completely and utterly, by all that light, remembering, too, that this debate had been advertised as a meeting of stars — or, with the medium’s gift for exaggeration, as a collision of supernovae.
There is, as most Norwegians could tell you, some doubt as to whether Norway was actually united into one nation after the battle of Hafrsfjord, as generations of Norwegians were taught in school, which only serves to illustrate a fact which those same Norwegians find hard to swallow: that our knowledge of the world changes, old theories are adjusted, new theories are hatched. What is certain, however, is that Norway was united into one nation on that September evening in 1990, in the sense that a record number of Norwegians, close to two million — even the blind, so they said — had settled themselves in front of the television to see this programme, one which had been awaited with the sort of interest and excitement usually reserved for the live coverage of certain events at the winter Olympics, the sort that tend to occasion statements such as ‘the whole of Norway came to a standstill’.
Behind all this lay, of course, Jonas Wergeland’s stupendous series Thinking Big, which had put everything else on television in the shade the year before. Later, people were to talk of 1989 as being ‘Wergeland year’ in the history of NRK. Not only did people find themselves with a new Europe that year but also with a new NRK, twenty-odd programmes which, in keeping with the turbulent changes taking place on the international front, created, for a brief spell at any rate, a whole new awareness of Norway’s place in the world. But where, the year before, people had been on the alert, sitting there with pen and notebook in hand, or their fingers on the video record button, or at any rate with a cup of coffee to clear their brains, they now lounged back with their potato chips and mineral water, happily anticipating that this was going to be fun, and, it has to be said, harbouring a sneaking hope of a juicy bit of scandal.