Ten seconds — an eternity — pass before he replies to Veronika’s question: ‘Again you’re forgetting what it all comes down to: fantasy. Stimulating our creative faculty. You’re doing what we Norwegians always do: Underestimate. You’re underestimating the viewing public. You’re forgetting that a viewer can easily create a whole picture out of fragments.’
Now, here, Jonas was back in his proper element, in front of television cameras that brought him straight through the screen and into millions of homes, and I mean through, because he almost seemed to be there in their living rooms. ‘You’re right,’ he said, knowing he could afford to indulge in an argument verging on the banal, knowing that his audience would consider it to be absolutely spot-on anyway: ‘I’ve left a lot up to the viewers’ imagination. You could say that I created a caterpillar, but only because I believe that a generous viewer has the ability to metamorphose it into a butterfly.’
Veronika could feel her victory slipping away from her. ‘A lot of very seductive talk,’ she said, fuming. ‘But you still haven’t answered my question as to what becomes of the truth.’
‘I’m not a minister,’ Jonas said, ‘I’m a storyteller.’ And from that moment on Jonas took over the show completely, because he had the idea of telling a story, to show what he meant, and to provide the only adequate response to these accusations, and he had many stories to choose from. He could tell them about a man playing opera music among the glaciers on Greenland, or he could tell them about an actor who sustained a cut to the eye, or he could tell them about an old lady who went around buying up fine works of art. Or why not the story of Hjallis’s fall or, even more incredible — not to say, improbable — the story of Norway’s expansion, how Norway multiplied its geographical area several-fold in the early sixties without anyone, not a single Norwegian, although they were normally such avid protesters, saying so much as a word? Instead, speaking straight to the camera, straight into people’s living rooms, he said that he was going to tell them the story — no more and no less — that had prompted him to make a television series about twenty-odd Norwegian men and women whose names have become part of the international vocabulary. So he told this story, he told it succinctly and well; it was the story of the beetle, and he told them, the viewers, just what a challenge, what an inspiration this story of the beetle was to the imagination and how it had given him the urge to make a series about a clutch of Norwegians who had not done what Norwegians are better at than anything else, namely, tearing down, moaning, criticizing, but who had, instead, done their part to build up, had helped the world to grow; people who showed that even Norwegians could think big. And he concluded with an appeal of sorts, to the effect that the entire future of Norway — a nation of only four million frozen souls — should ‘not be dependent on German interest rates, but solely on how we, the people of Norway, every single inhabitant, use our imaginations.’
It was one of the most extraordinary programmes in the history of NRK. It stuck in people’s memories in much the same way as Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream …’ speech; they were genuinely moved, sat there with lumps in their throats, and all because of a man who said, quite simply: ‘All I have done is to tell a story about thinking big.’
Then, just before the end, seeing that she was not going to get her answer anyway, Veronika leapt out of her seat and lunged at Jonas, ripping the ‘mic’ off her lapel in the process, and dealt him a clout round the ear, a resounding slap, right there, on camera.
Up in the control room, the Colonel was working frantically, hardly able to believe his luck, firing off orders simultaneously to the vision switcher and the cameramen. He had obtained some wonderful close-ups of Jonas Wergeland’s reaction, as it passed from a glare to a smile — possibly because he, Jonas, had guessed that Veronika had a motive known to few others: the front page of her newspaper — and a beautiful total in which Audun Tangen was seen trying to call Veronika Røed back as she stomped off the set, livid and lovely; after which the Colonel switched to the overhead camera up on the ceiling, to give an illusion of drifting away. And then, the trump card, the real stroke of genius; they showed the clout round the ear again, in slow motion, for two million Norwegians who were still rubbing their eyes in disbelief. The Colonel had borrowed a slow-motion controller — the sort used mainly for live coverage of athletics events — on the chance that something dramatic might happen. ‘Have you got it?’ he called. ‘Okay, run it slow!’ The sequence was shown over and over again while the credits rolled, and I hardly need say that that clip was to become a classic, regularly featured in programmes dealing with high points in the history of NRK.
Nonetheless, it was Jonas Wergeland who won the day; if anything his fame actually went up an extra notch after this programme. But it did not, as he thought, come down to two faces, but to two stories: Veronika’s had to do with a man who seduced an entire nation with his lies — this, too, a fascinating tale — while Jonas’s story was about a beetle in a cowpat. And if there is one laudable thing to be said about the Norway of the nineties it is that it allowed Jonas Wergeland’s enigmatic appeal to the imagination to win over Veronika Røed’s insistence on an unequivocal answer.
Imago Dei
So welcome, then, the warmth of the story that was played out at a time when the Beatles had already released their hit single ‘Love Me Do’ and their debut album, Please Please Me, although Jonas and Nefertiti knew nothing of all that — neither of them would ever share in the general adulation of these particular idols.
The Beetles, on the other hand, were a very different matter.
It all started with the two of them, Jonas and Nefertiti, walking down to the shops on Trondheimsveien to buy a fresh loaf and two fogged bottles of Mekka, the chocolate milk with such divine properties that was a firm favourite with both of them, before cutting across the stream down in the dip near Nybygga and onto the grouchy old farmer’s fields, a wide expanse of cultivated and fallow fields which was the scene of many an adventure — like the time when they, or Jonas at any rate, had watched wide-eyed as the stallion let out its huge member, a circus act in itself, and a sight which provided him, forever after, with an excellent frame of reference for the invective ‘you great horse’s dick’; or like the time down on the bank, when they dug up the city of Troy, all nine levels of it, together with Heinrich Schliemann, after Nefertiti, with a couple of sentences and a wave of her hand, had transformed a patch of perfectly ordinary Ammerud soil into the ruins on the mound at Hissarlik in the Dardanelles.