Something stirred inside him. It was that word ‘credible’ that had given him a glimpse of an angle of escape: ‘There, you’ve just said it yourself, that’s why you don’t like my programmes,’ he said to Veronika, who looked quite flabbergasted to see him baring his teeth. ‘You’re accusing me of not making what you want to see: psychological portraits. The sort of programmes that people are used to. The sort of thing we’ve been seeing on television for the past thirty years. With the emphasis not on “psycho”, but on “logical”. That good old logic which is true because it is recognizable and safe.’
To his relief, Jonas found himself growing more animated, but he was cut short by a VT spot. Then, while that was running, one of the studio hands had to turn on a fresh spotlight to replace one that had gone out. Jonas watched him turning the little cogs on the side of the spotlight with a pole rather like a boat-hook; working intently, sweating, giving Jonas the urge to help him, or simply to have a go himself, with that boat-hook, which reminded him so much of his summers on Hvaler, his grandfather’s stories.
‘Ah, so you admit that you don’t give two hoots for the moral aspect? You feel you’re above all that, do you?’ This from Veronika, they were back in the studio, and even though Jonas’s eyes had fixed once again on the overhead camera, she did not catch him off-guard. ‘It’s amazing,’ he said. ‘It really is so depressing to have to say this — but the thing is, my programmes are neither psychological analyses nor ethical commentaries …’
‘What are they, then?’ Audun Tangen asked like a shot, in an echo of the quick-fire interviews of his heyday.
‘They are stories. And stories don’t convey a moral, they don’t teach, they provide an experience, they get under our skin, become part of us, like genes, and like genes they can be used for good or evil.’
Now the studio really came to life. Audun Tangen and Veronika Røed were both talking at once; Veronika, in particular, was up in arms, but to Tangen’s credit it has to be said that he kept her in check, endeavoured to pursue Jonas’s statements, possibly because he was happy that Jonas was finally answering back. ‘How on Earth can you say that a story has nothing to do with morality?’ he asked.
‘Okay, so I’m splitting hairs,’ said Jonas, confidently as if up until then he had been treading water and now, suddenly, felt his feet come to rest on the back of a huge turtle. ‘But everyone else is splitting hairs, so why shouldn’t I.’ Jonas Wergeland leaned forward in his chair, addressing his words as much to two million viewers as to Veronika Røed and Audun Tangen: ‘Stories are not about what is good or evil, but about good and evil. A story embodies both aesthetics and ethics in a sort of complementarity, if I can use such a word. But stories also embody a third indefinable element, something which gives rise to a sort of a leap inside us, something outside of, or contained within, the ethics-aesthetics issue. And we are not talking here about something above and beyond good and evil, but about another issue, an issue which comes before, as it were, a more fundamental issue; and this totally different level relates to our imagination. When you come right down to it, the point of stories is to give people fresh eyes, to enable them to see the world differently. That’s what the programme on Hamsun was about.”
A great many people agreed that a change came over Jonas Wergeland during the final third of the programme, that he seemed to revive and presented them with his old self, the persona for which he was famed: his face, his charisma, his winning personality, and from then on he could have said anything at all, and they would have lapped it up; except that Jonas Wergeland did not just say anything at all; he sat there and talked about stories, he presented a passionate defence of his right to tell stories.
I can now reveal what had actually happened, although I do so with some reservations, knowing that this could lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation; it was the camera mounted on the studio ceiling that had provided Jonas Wergeland with a fresh angle. As he looked up into its lens, that black hole, he had the sensation that the camera lowered itself down over him and settled on top of him, and this led him to fantasize that, via this camera, he was making love to the people of Norway, and it occurred to him that much of his career at Marienlyst came down to just that; and at this thought, or rather this fantasy, this in many ways shocking fantasy, he felt his nervous shivers giving way to warmth and furthermore, as with his encounters with women, he had a revelation. Jonas Wergeland was sitting in a studio at Marienlyst, head tilted back during a video insert, gazing at a camera lens above his head, when suddenly it dawned on him what it was that he had been trying to do all along in his television series Thinking Big: to tell stories, stories that dealt with those chinks in existence which only the imagination could penetrate, insinuating its way into the grey area between cause and effect, where the ability to select a set of values, to perceive the links in a chain, lay slumbering.
And in passing it ought to be said that this revelation also prompted Jonas to wonder whether he might not have spent his whole life misunderstanding Veronika Røed’s motives, which he was inclined to believe sprang from pure evil. On reflection, however, he realized that Veronika had always had a weakness for a good story which, as well as channelling her quite naturally into the world of tabloid journalism, where she had proved to be a proper little goldmine for the owners, had also in certain instances enticed her into fabricating stories. Such as with all of the debate surrounding his television series. So when she had pushed him into the water as a child, or shut him up inside a snow cave, it was not inconceivable that such things might represent an attempt to dramatize real life, a curiosity to know whether a little shove or a snowball would beget a good story. At best, thought Jonas, she had done those things because she knew that he would be rescued.
Right or wrong as this may be — I prefer, as I pointed out earlier, to say as little as possible about Veronika Røed — she hid her ulterior motives well, sitting there in that television studio, quivering with aggression, attacking Jonas Wergeland for having confused an important discussion; Veronika was so het up that she was starting to contradict her own statements regarding television’s limited potentiaclass="underline" ‘Alright, so you were telling a story,’ she said. ‘But that still only presents one snippet of a life, you still have not explained how all of these fragments are supposed to build up into the truth about a person? Because that’s what it all comes down to, Jonas Wergeland, and you can’t get away from it: the truth!’
Audun Tangen was all set to move on, even though he, the Grand Inquisitor himself, felt that all this labouring on about the truth was going over the score, but Jonas put his hands in the air, stopped him, indicated that he wished to answer, but that he just needed time to consider, and so there was this pause, ten seconds maybe, an eternity on television, with Audun Tangen constantly on the point of breaking in even though he could see how effective it was, how it created a sort of tension: Jonas Wergeland sitting as if frozen stiff, with his hands in the air; ten vital seconds for Jonas, those were, when suddenly he found himself recalling details he had seen in his life, a fir tree growing out of the rock-face on the banks of the Zambezi, the bicycle wheel trimmed with Monte Carlo cigarette packs, the rivets in a ship’s side slipping past only inches away, other such things, and the sum of all these details seemed to be telling him a story of a tangent, something else entirely, a way to shoot out of a wicked circle, out of the constant repetition, because all at once he was taking a critical view of his own success, and he realized that this room, that all Marienlyst, could not possibly be the hub for which he had always been searching, and of course it was Veronika’s question about the truth that was boring into him; Jonas would have liked to have stopped the world, stopped time, because suddenly the studio was acting like a thinking cap, charging him up, the whole of that tense situation, sitting there in front of three cameras, with his face being broadcast to one and a half million television screens, and his hands raised to a studio firmament filled with dazzling lights as if he were praying or having a vision — indeed people had later said that his face had shone with an inner light during those ten seconds, which is not so surprising since, during those moments it was revealed to Jonas Wergeland that this situation in which he now found himself need not determine anything: that this, which to others must have seemed to be the most decisive moment in his career, might just as easily be of no consequence whatsoever. After all, who was to say that it was in television that he was to do the work against which his life would one day be measured? Or, to put it another way: Jonas Wergeland realized that he had not stopped growing, that those ten years at NRK might well be no more than an insignificant parenthesis in his life; from this point onwards he could do anything at all, become something completely different, and yet again he felt a finger describing circles on his brow and then, abruptly, a straight line shooting out from it, a leap.