In everything he did or said I saw or heard stories, or connections with stories. The evening before we left Lærdal I happened to open a document and read something I had written about his programme on Thor Heyerdahl. He could not have known this, but when we cast off the next morning he said, with a sly glint in his eye: ‘This boat is another Kon-Tiki. A vessel which will prove whether it is possible to sail from the continent of the past to that of the future. From an old life to a new.’ He was talking, of course, about himself, but still.
Deep inside Aurlandsfjord Jonas stood gazing up at the steep slopes and high mountains rising on either side. ‘What is Samarkand compared to this?’ I heard him murmur. Although, did he actually say that? Or was it only a voice inside my head? At one point, after staring open-mouthed at my first sight of the tiny church at Undredal, the snow-covered peaks rearing up out of the valley beyond, I happened to glance round, to look up at Stigen, the little hill farm perched on its ledge – had people really lived there, and managed to scrape a living from it – and saw Jonas staring at a power line running across the fjord just ahead of us, strung with those spherical orange markers that look like basketballs; I heard later that a Dutch fighter plane had had a near miss there. Jonas stood there, utterly mesmerised, gripping the main shroud and peering up at the high-voltage cable. ‘Are you thinking of Lauritz, your uncle?’ I asked gently. He nodded, somewhat surprised that I should be able to guess this. I was not alone in seeing stories in the landscape. When Carl arrived with the car – he had driven through the new tunnel and was full of ideas for ways in which we could present the most spectacular stretches of road around the fjord – and we prepared to carry on down to Flåm, to see what we could possibly make of the railway line there, which had already been done to death, Jonas chose instead to go and take a look at a dam built as part of the hydro-electric development in the Aurland region. He ordered a taxi, asked to be taken to Låvisdalen. He wanted to find the spot where Olav Knutzen had taken that famous photograph of Leonard. ‘You understand, don’t you?’ he said to me. I understood.
Leonard’s father was, as I have said, not just anybody. Some people may recognise the name Olav Knutzen, since he was at one time a well-known photographer with the working-class press. And if the last part of his surname evokes associations with a Zen master then that is not really so surprising, since Leonard’s father could almost have scored a bull’s eye blindfold. He had such an eye for things, as well as a set of values so solid that he could make a picture of a granite quarry in Grorud seem as fascinating as the rock tombs in Egypt’s Valley of Kings.
The basement room in which Jonas and Leonard nursed their youthful wrath was not only painted red – an ideological prerequisite, you might say; the walls were also covered with framed photographs calling to mind the growth and the triumphs of modern Norway. Because Olav Knutzen was a staff photographer with Aktuell weekly; he called himself ‘a reporter with a camera’. Aktuell was the sort of publication in which the pictures were as important as the words. The international flagship of such publications was Life magazine. These days, when the full media circus seems to be on hand for every occurrence, it is easy to forget that there was a time when a single photograph could be the cause of an event becoming known worldwide. As Thor Heyerdahl discovered when he sold the photographs from the Kon-Tiki expedition to Life: pictures which captured the imagination of the people in a way that written reports of the expedition could not do.
It is to be hoped that many do still remember Aktuell, that admirable weekly, which had its foundations in the labour movement and its roots in the old ideal of popular education. Younger generations may well find it hard to imagine that such a thing ever existed in Norway. And if anyone should wonder whether we have lost sight in Norway of certain ideals and values, all you have to do is lay some copies of the old Aktuell alongside its modern-day equivalent: the tabloid Se og Hør. Jonas was, of course, familiar with Aktuell before he and Leonard became best friends, not least thanks to the pile of old copies in the attic of his grandfather’s house on Hvaler. Jonas never tired of reading those dusty magazines. Which is to say: he looked at the pictures – photographs of reindeer races at Kautokeino, or from a revival meeting in Skien, or from a farm halfway up a mountainside run by two sisters, little old ladies in their eighties, or from Mandal where – Jonas stared in disbelief – Arnardo’s elephants could be seen lumbering through the streets. I think it is safe to say that during the first couple of decades after the war this magazine represented the contemporary equivalent of television. Like an earlier day’s Round Norway it presented the country to the people.
While waiting for Leonard to finish his dinner meatballs Jonas would sit in the Knutzens’ red-painted basement, leafing through the back numbers of Aktuell ranged proudly on the shelf alongside the Workers’ Encyclopedia – as if this were all the learning one needed. He studied picture spreads depicting the building, step-by-step, of a tanker, or the life at the huge steelworks in Mo i Rana. Some of the street scenes in the older numbers were especially fascinating, not least if the subjects were familiar to him. Had the Eastern station really looked like that? And the bus stop by the gasworks? Such photographs were clear proof of how time flew. Only fifteen years ago, and yet things seemed unrecognisable. For Jonas, Aktuell was rather like an Illustrated Classics version of an ideology. Jonas Wergeland never read up on the theoreticians of the labour movement, but he always felt that he had some knowledge of the subject, just as he knew a bit about Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim after reading the comic-strip version.
Aktuell presented articles from all over the world, but what Jonas liked best were the features and series on Norway. From the Red Room’s somewhat dilapidated sofa he could accompany the fishermen to the fishing fields, lumberjacks into the forest, construction workers into tunnels; Aktuell described a day in the life of a checkout lady, it followed the course of rubbish men through the city and depicted the world inhabited by the potato peelers at the Rainbow Restaurant. Below many of his favourite photographs Jonas could read the name of Leonard’s father, Olav Knutzen. Sometimes all it said was OK, as if this were a stamp indicating that these pictures or – why not? – the reality they portrayed had been approved. ‘In a basement room in Grorud I got to know Norway,’ he was to say later. When Jonas Wergeland thought back on the golden age of the Norwegian Labour Party he always thought of Aktuell magazine.
What with his father working in the church and his mother at the Grorud Ironmonger’s, Jonas was a little envious of Leonard. Both his parents worked in the city centre. And not only that, but in buildings on the city’s finest square. Because if Oslo had a heart at that time, a real, pulsating heart – as London had its Smithfield Market, Paris had Les Halles and Rome the Campo de’ Fiori – then it had to be Youngstorget. Leonard’s mother worked in an office at the People’s House, headquarters of the National Federation of Trade Unions, and his father was based on the first floor of the People’s Theatre building itself, when, that is, he was not out travelling.
In the summer especially, the boys were forever running into town to meet Olav Knutzen on Youngstorget. Leonard always swelled with pride when his father came walking towards them with his Leica or, even better, the two-eyed Rolleiflex dangling over his stomach. There was something so bohemian about his big, burly figure. Apart from the eyes. These Jonas thought of as sharp. It was almost as if every now and again the z in the middle of his surname triggered a flash in his eyes, a little bolt of lightning. Olav Knutzen often took pictures of the boys standing among the market stalls on the square, munching plums or pears. In later years Jonas would often look at the copies of these photographs which he had been given, because they documented something he had already forgotten: how that time-honoured square had once been a cornucopian fruit and vegetable basket, possibly even a Red Room, for the whole city.
Leonard was proud of his father, and especially of those keen eyes of his. ‘That’s what it all comes down to,’ he often sa
id when they were sitting in the Knutzens’ basement room. ‘The eye. The ability to perceive the world.’ He believed that he had inherited this gift. Leonard was, in general, uncommonly interested in the attributes passed on from parent to child. And Jonas had to admit that there was something about Leonard’s eyes, a quality reminiscent of a finely ground optic, an exceptional system of lenses, of the sort found in a Hasselblad camera. Jonas had been aware of this right from the moment when Leo stepped into his life, in a pair of Beatles boots, after the brushfire: those dark, alert eyes which seemed constantly to be on the lookout for things that were hidden from others. ‘You have a “da Vinci eye”,’ Jonas told him. They agreed to train this one sense: their sight. As a beginning. And in so doing they might even find a direction for their anger; discover, throw into relief the one detail which would lift the lid on the whole shebang. And that was exactly what Leonard would, unwittingly, do.
Since there was another reason, besides the colour of its walls, for calling their basement den the Red Room, the most obvious form of training seemed to be to join Olav Knutzen in the darkroom which he had set up in one of the storage rooms in the basement. Jonas was in his element in that dim, orange light, surrounded by the sweetish smell of chemicals; he loved the sense of anticipation as shadows began to form on the white paper in the developing dish, to then consolidate into sharp images in the clear liquid: Jonas and Leonard, grinning, each with their ice cream, and with the police headquarters and Youngstorget arcade in the background; a close-up of Jonas with a plum between his teeth, so sharp and with so much depth to it that the dusty, purplish bloom on the plum was readily discernible even though the print was in black-and-white. Later, when Jonas thought of Olav Knutzen, he would envy the way he could endow a snapshot with an eternal dimension, something which the ephemeral images on the TV screen could never do.
For Jonas, the darkroom with its red ambience and its chemical processes also came to symbolise a space one could inhabit mentally. Soon he was going to fall in love with a girl called Eva. Very much in love. As if his wrath had found its parallel in desire. This was in the middle of that stage in life when one is almost always in love, when one suddenly has the ability to blow up the tiniest detail to colossal proportions, not to mention a capacity for developing the most bizarre images in one’s mind. This is a time when, as most people seem to intuit, it is only a short stumble from love to stark, staring madness.
Jonas was in the school playground one day, and it would not be too far from the truth to say that an anorak made him see red. He never did figure out how or why it happened, whether it could be attributed to a keen-honed eye or what. He felt as though he was in a darkroom, watching a face come into view on a sheet of white paper, as if out of nowhere. All of a sudden she simply stepped out of the crowd during break at Grorud School and was so obviously the One. She was one of a kind, too. Words such as ‘proud’ or ‘noble’ sprang to mind when you looked at her. Eva N. was then, and even more so later, the sort of figure whom male artists would use as a model when illustrating the Norse sagas. First and foremost she was, however, a notorious skier. She wore a red anorak all winter, as if life itself was a high moor, and in the plastic pocket in her wallet she carried a picture, not of Cliff Richard or Mick Jagger, but of cross-country champion Gjermund Eggen. She went skiing as often as she possibly could, it was her passion. Every weekend, Sundays in particular, she would set out from Grorud on long expeditions into Nordmarka. From reliable sources Jonas learned that she almost always stopped in at Sinober, the Skiing Association café at the northern end of Lillomarka, and so he devised a plan whereby he would bump into her there, accidentally on purpose and in such a way that she would take him for an expert skier, a real bouillon and malt-beer-drinking mile-eater who more or less lived on the hills in winter.
In order to understand just what a crack-brained plan this was, one has to bear in mind what an exceptional antipathy to skiing Jonas had. One reason for this was Daniel’s excessive keenness for this very sport. Once or twice as a small boy Jonas had attempted to keep up with his brother on the many tough slopes leading up to Lilloseter: an experience which would appear to have satisfied his need for the taste of blood in his mouth and the feel of a string vest sticking to his back as he stood on a senseless finish line gasping for breath, with his whole body pulsating and his lungs feeling way too small.
So it says a lot about his achievement and even more about his red-hot infatuation that for several Sundays in succession he went for long runs along the ski trails of Lillomarka, despite being in very poor skiing form, to say the least of it. He staked all his hopes on running into her on the lot outside the main building at Sinober, possibly while she was engrossed in the inscrutable mysteries of ski waxing. Jonas was so besotted with Eva that he was quite sure luck would be on his side. Although in his frame of mind you did not think in terms of luck. You dealt in imperatives. She would be there – waiting almost – at Sinober. And how was he to make his entrance onto the lot? In this lay the very heart of his plan, the cunning detail designed to win her heart: he would come skimming in like a ski racer, or one of the elks of Lillomarka. At full speed and with a rime-coated face as proof of how fast he had been going.
This was a trick he had learned. If it was cold enough, and fortunately on those Sundays it was, he would pull up at the foot of the last slope before the café – having taken it nice and easy up to that point, while constantly looking over his shoulder, just in case she happened to be coming up behind him – and puff his breath up onto his face, building up a becoming layer of frost on his eyelashes, eyebrows and the edge of his woolly hat. And bearing this irrefutable evidence of breakneck speed he would sprint over the last rise and come swooshing onto the clearing in front of the café, hawking and spitting and panting just heavily enough.
Sadly, the one thing lacking was the key ingredient: Eva was conspicuous by her absence. That he received approving glances from other skiers every time he swept onto the lot decked with frost like a Lillomarka elk was of little comfort. No red anorak, no noble girl with strong fingers wrapped around a tub of ski wax or a mug of blackcurrant cordial. Sunday after Sunday Jonas stood at the foot of that last slope, breathing frost onto his eyebrows, and even he could see the funny side of it, see himself from the outside – this boy, puffing and blowing like some animals do when mating. But even this laughable bird’s eye view of the situation could not stop him; he was convinced that Eva would only deign to bestow her attention, a glance, on him, if she could see what a brilliant skier he was.
Sunday after Sunday Jonas went haring off into the forest; it occurred to him that these cross-country treks might be a sublimated form of anger, that here on the ski trail he had actually found a direction for his wrath: love. Sunday after Sunday, by dint of some hefty double poling – over the last stretch at least – he would skim onto the lot at Sinober which, in his mind, had gradually become a symbol of a crazed red haze, an infatuation which he found almost frightening. But Eva always seemed to be somewhere else in Nordmarka. So Jonas ascertained, with equal disbelief, every time; he did not see how she could not be there when he had strained every sinew, masked himself so magnificently, rime-encrusted eyelashes and all, and was so bone-wearily lovesick. He stood outside the Sinober lodge café, feeling trapped, possibly because he happened to be staring down at his ‘Rat-Trap’ ski bindings. But still he held to his belief that he would meet her there. And sometimes he would glance up and, for a split-second, see a mirage, a red anorak, and he would be as sure as ever again: next Sunday she would be there. He could already picture the look on her face: first amazement, then sincere delight and finally: her inevitable, reciprocated love.
In the meantime there was some consolation and distraction to be found in the orange glow of the darkroom, watching Leonard’s father forcing, as it were, negatives into something positive. From the very outset of their friendship Jonas had kept telling Leonard: ‘You should take up photography, too, you know.
If you want to be any good, you need to get started right away.’ Jonas felt so strongly about this that on more than one occasion he actually thrust Olav Knutzen’s well-worn Rolleiflex at his chum, rather like a relay baton. Leonard never took it. He felt he ought to make it his aim to do something else. It was not enough merely to foster the gifts you had inherited – a pair of penetrating eyes; you also had to improve upon them. ‘I know where I’m going to start,’ he said one autumn. ‘With films. We should always surpass our fathers’ achievements.’ Leonard did not know how right he would prove to be.
Again: how could anyone fail to see it? When one considers everything that has been written about Jonas Wergeland’s ingenious and innovative television programmes, it is a mystery that no one has ever mentioned his passion for the most closely related of art forms.
The next couple of years were pretty hectic. After a little doctoring of their school ID cards – a crime of which not a few were guilty – Jonas Wergeland and Leonard Knutzen became in all probability the youngest ever members of Oslo Film Club. And if anyone got wise to their scam they never let on. Leonard was big for his age anyway, and Jonas masked himself as well as he could – if not with frost then with a moody expression. During the late sixties, every Saturday afternoon without fail they would go along to the Saga cinema, or sometimes the Scala, and take their seats together with people who viewed new Polish or Japanese films in utter silence, or sighed with pleasure at Orson Welles’s three-minute long, unbroken opening shot from Touch of Evil.
The Discoverer Page 26