‘Okay, I know one good reason not to jump,’ he said.
‘If you really mean that, then come out here and tell it to me,’ the man yelled. ‘I’m not going to believe you until I see you out here.’
The words alone, just the thought, made Jonas freeze, and a wave of terror wash over him. This was too much to ask. Jonas knew he had lost. The man would just have to die.
‘I’m gonna jump!’ the man yelled.
Is this the most crucial story in Jonas Wergeland’s life?
It is difficult to explain how, before he had time to think any more about it, Jonas managed to climb out of the window, even as he felt himself breaking into a cold sweat, with an awful numbness warning his body that this was madness, but he went ahead anyway, crawled out onto the narrow ledge, ten storeys above the ground, then edged his way centimetre by centimetre along it until he was standing right next to the man, who actually seemed slightly surprised. And when Jonas, unable to resist the temptation, looked down at the street below, he found that his nausea was gone. Thus it was only now, several decades later, that Jonas saw the point of that episode in the Torggata Baths, that time when he had ventured out to the edge of the five-metre board for the first time, when he had imagined that he was Sammy Lee, gold medallist from the ’48 and ’52 Olympics, with twists and somersaults contained within his body, a body free from dizziness; only now did he see the whole point of that incident, that the cause lay here, that Torggata had merely been practice, a rehearsal for something bigger, a true balancing act, a real leap, and it was as if, for the first time, now, here, in the middle of Manhattan, on a narrow ledge ten storeys above the ground, Jonas saw that the pieces of a life actually did fit together.
This discovery proved to be only the first stage of a colossal brainwave: after having whispered something to the man next to him, who had suddenly been relegated to a supporting role in a quite different drama, and who, after an expression more of surprise than of relief had spread over his face, actually did clamber back through his window, Jonas stayed where he was on the ledge, and in the midst of that brainstorming moment, when ninety per cent of his thoughts were going so fast that his mind had no chance to register them, he caught a glimpse of the Chrysler building, the glinting of the stainless steel on its spire. And at that very moment, linking up with the tingling sensation between his shoulder-blades, he had his vision, his great idea, it seemed to hit him all at once, not just one detail, but the whole thing, with such force that the itching sensation spread from that point between his shoulder-blades right up to the inner side of his skull as if something were in the process of unfolding.
Jonas returned to his window and into the apartment in time to open the door to the other man’s knock. The latter still looked pretty stunned, or rather, almost exhilarated, expectant. And what had Jonas said to him? Jonas Wergeland had not said anything momentous at all. Or actually that was the whole point: he had said something banal, but no more banal than anything else he might have said. He had promised the man a loaf of bread. It was as shockingly simple as that: some new-baked bread. That, and a good story.
Jonas had known that he had the ingredients, he had actually bought yeast and linseeds earlier in the day, and while he made the dough, while it was rising, while the loaves were baking, they talked, he and the strange man, Eric, a perfectly normal conversation, about parents and children, about interests — Eric was a keen fisherman — about relatives and friends, jobs and films, B-movies even, and the sight of Jonas with his sleeves rolled up and his clothes covered in flour seemed to have a strangely soothing effect on Eric, so much so that he never mentioned or tried to explain, or to apologize for his act of desperation, and when the loaves were lying, golden-crusted, on the table between them, Jonas told him the story about the beetle, and Eric was pleased with the story about the beetle, extremely pleased, he sat there shaking his head and chuckling as if he really felt it was worth being alive for at least one day more just to hear that story about the beetle.
Afterwards he called his sister and was standing ready, itching to be off and clutching a loaf of bread, when she arrived. ‘Thanks,’ he said to Jonas, ‘I owe you one.’ A thumbs-up and then he and his sister disappeared into his own apartment.
That evening, or rather, that night, Jonas sat down and wrote; he had never written so much at a stretch before, the words simply flowed, he barely had time to organize his thoughts, he just wrote, looking out on a Manhattan that slowly metamorphosed into black silhouettes and millions of lights, like a starry sky dropped down to earth; by the end of it he could not have said whether what he was so feverishly scribbling down was the result of his vision out on the ledge or whether it had something to do with Harald Hardråde, or maybe even the story about the beetle, or why not the bread? Whatever it was, he kept on writing, noted down twenty-three names and at the top of the first sheet he wrote ‘Norwegian Life’. By the time he eventually stopped, totally drained, on the desk in front of him lay thirty closely-written pages, the synopsis of what was to become the superb television series Thinking Big, and it was only when he happened to glance out of the window that he saw, with remarkable clarity — or as if he had suddenly perceived the source of this unexpected burst of creativity — that the skyscrapers that surrounded him were like organ pipes, and that once again he found himself inside an organ chest.
The Story Teller
Then hear, and hear with pride, how things went with Jonas Wergeland when, as a natural consequence of all this, he found himself in a television studio at Marienlyst in Oslo, almost visibly squirming, as if he really were being grilled, tortured, at a question concerning Knut Hamsun, a question so pointed that it was virtually an ultimatum.
He tried to get round it. ‘The programme had nothing to do with whether he was a Nazi or not,’ he said, his voice barely audible; he had to clear his throat before continuing. ‘It dealt with one pivotal event, intended to shed some light on Hamsun’s life.’ Jonas glanced up at the studio firmament in such a way that the viewers must have thought he was seeking help from there, or possibly looking for an almost invisible planet, like Pluto, but the only thing to catch his eye was a little overhead camera, mounted close to the ceiling, hidden away like a black hole amid the galaxy of different lamps, this too an innovative element, with the Colonel, from his all-powerful position in the control room, occasionally cutting to a bird’s-eye shot of the studio and the three protagonists, as if to create a certain distance, while at the same time giving the viewers the illusion of sneaking up on them, of eavesdropping on a private quarrel.
Veronika Røed, quite unaffected by half-an-hour in the studio, by the inhuman concentration which the cameras and spotlights craved, was not about to back down on the Hamsun issue; she could tell that this was a weak point: ‘But the event in Hamsun’s life which you selected is only a detail. How can you be so incredibly naïve as to think that such a tiny slice of Hamsun’s life could give viewers any insight into how it hung together as a whole? I doubt if Hamsun has ever been presented in a less credible light!’
Jonas was aware that the Colonel, on the alert and rubbing his hands, was now showing an ultra close-up of his, Jonas’s, face, as if holding him up to ridicule, on one and a half million television screens; slicing him up; illustrating Veronika Røed’s point and letting everyone see how badly his makeup had been applied, see the beads of sweat on his upper lip, giving the impression of a gloss surface about to crack.