Jonas felt the pit of his stomach contract with nausea, he felt as though he were being shut up in an icy cold snow cave — no, more, that the whole of Norway was one cold snow cave, enclosing him within walls of ice — and he knew that the Colonel was up there in the control room, rubbing his hands with glee, and that he had long since caught all of his, Jonas’s little twitches, not to mention his shivers, in an all-revealing close-up. Veronika talked on and on, but Jonas knew that for the most part the Colonel kept the camera on him, the listener, the butt of this searing, and worse, persuasive, critique.
Then it was his turn. With an ironic little comment, Audun Tangen gave the floor to Jonas, it was up to him to respond. Out of habit he fixed his eye on the camera with the red light showing, but caught himself in the act and turned instead to Veronika, conscious, as he did so, of the Colonel’s voice in the headset of one of the cameramen, giving instructions for one of the cameras not in use to move in closer, with the result that off to one side he had a vision of a Scania-Vabis coming at him and was gripped by panic at the thought of being run over just as he was about to start talking — an ambush, sneaky — and perhaps that was why he suddenly had a mental block, could not remember even the half of what Veronika had said, but he knew that over a million TV screens throughout Norway were showing him in close-up, and that at that very moment millions of Norwegians had caught a whiff of a sensation, the chance that one of the biggest celebrities in Norway was about to break down, live on TV, and Jonas Wergeland did indeed feel rather weak, he knew that he had to find the angle that would crack this paralysis, break this strain, but he felt totally frozen, numb from head to toe, as if he were battling against a headwind, a headwind so stiff and chill that all he wanted to do was to lie down. ‘What do you have to say to these not exactly flattering words of criticism, Jonas Wergeland?’ Audun Tangen repeated in the same importunate, arrogant manner that had once won him such fame as Audun the Tongs, accompanying his words with a malicious smirk that said he knew Jonas Wergeland would never be able to parry this onslaught.
Broadcast
So do not forget the story that starts, or continues, at the moment when he realized just what a risk he was taking; that he should, of course, have done as the stupid safety regulations said, and turned back the minute they came out into the hollow in the hills and he saw his companion raising her eyes to the huge mountain straight ahead of them. They were heading south, towards the sun which only occasionally showed itself behind the clouds, in what would normally be described as heavy going: swirling snow and several degrees below freezing. The girl ahead of him on the track turned and grinned: ‘How’re you doing?’ He tried to smile back, feeling a cold sweat breaking out the length of his spine; he had been struck, after only the first few strides, by how deeply and sincerely he still hated this invention: skis, fibreglass now, and how terribly unfit he was; each time they stopped he had the urge to cough, his lungs seemed too small, and every inch of him pulsated with his heartbeat. They were making for a place she called Heddersvann: ‘a reasonable point to make for in such bad weather’, and let me just say right away that in writing the following I am treading with extreme care, because it deals with one of the few spheres in which Norwegians actually can boast greater expertise than any other nation: skiing.
At one point it seemed to him that she had altered course. They passed beneath a power-line and came to the foot of a steep slope. Just at that moment the clouds parted and the afternoon sun turned the landscape into the perfect picture of Easter in Norway as presented in tempting brochures aimed at foreign tourists. Directly above them towered a relatively high peak. The girl ahead of him made the sort of neat 180-degree turn that Jonas had never been able to do, neither as a child or now, before gliding up alongside him. ‘We’re going for the bloody top,’ she said, squinting over the top of her sunglasses.
‘That one?’ said Jonas, pointing to Store Stavsronuten.
‘No, that one,’ the girl said, pointing further up at a point diagonally behind Jonas, where Gaustatoppen itself lay hidden by cloud. She gazed resolutely, almost covetously, up what in Jonas’s eyes seemed a formidably steep mountainside.
‘But we haven’t told anybody,’ he said. ‘I mean, we said we were going to Heddersvann. And we don’t have time, it’s three o’clock now!’
‘What is it with you?’ she said. ‘Don’t tell me you’re chicken? We’re going for the top, I said.’ She had definitely altered course, was already heading uphill, as the sky clouded over again.
‘Completely Gausta’, Jonas thought, this being their way as kids of saying somebody was crazy: a reference to Gaustad Hospital. He turned, needing to have a piss. The sight of the yellow patch on the snow made him feel like an animal, a dog. He set off after the girl, even though he knew it was madness, feeling the action beginning to tell on his upper arms and shoulders right away.
It was the week before Easter and the massive influx of people to the mountains. Jonas Wergeland had been hanging about for some days, almost totally alone, at the Kvitåvatn Mountain Lodge above Rjukan, having come to a breakthrough decision, an almost perverse decision: for the first time in his nigh-on twenty-four years he was going to give the Norwegian mountains a try. And even though, typically for him, he chose to avoid the Easter crowds, he did also cherish a faint hope of coming up with an explanation for this almost animal-like characteristic of the Norwegian race, this abrupt, almost panicky migration, this mass exodus to the mountains over the week of the Easter holidays.
There was also another, and more intriguing, motive for Jonas’s choice of Rjukan in particular, and it was not, as one might think, the splendid hydroelectric monuments of Vemork and Såheim — Jonas Wergeland was to remain shamefully ignorant of these almost baroque, or perhaps one should say fantastical, buildings until the day he met an African at Livingstone in Zambia many years later. No, it was curiosity about NRK’s main transmitters, set up on the tops of mountains all over Norway, that had brought him to the Gausta area — I consider this worth mentioning since it casts some doubt on whether Jonas Wergeland did indeed join NRK on an impulse as sudden and random as he himself has always claimed. The fact is that while at the College of Architecture he had come across Le Corbusier’s book, Vers une architecture, one of the few books which he had read as avidly as the Kama Sutra of his childhood, and what Le Corbusier had written about the link between the products of modern industrial design — cars, planes, passenger ships — and architecture, had led Jonas to think of television masts — surely these too could be transformed into an exciting architectonic impulse. He envisaged them almost as church spires in a new secular era or as the minarets of some sort of media religion. In other words, he had come to Rjukan to view the mast on the top of Gauta, the only problem being that, until now, it had not shown itself, due to the miserable weather — the clouds hung around the peak like a cap — and Jonas had not felt much like getting out on his skis.
When Sigrid A. had walked into the fire-lit lounge the previous evening, tall and fair, with piercing blue eyes and a distinctive nose, Jonas had immediately been aware of that soft feather, which made its presence felt in his life only occasionally, being run up his spine by an invisible hand before coming to rest in the form of a prolonged tickling sensation between his shoulder-blades. But she — it must be said — had noticed him right away, too, and in a manner quite at odds with her normally shy nature she had, without a moment’s hesitation, walked straight over and sat down in the chair opposite him.