And this last circumstance would prove to be a turning point. At first Jonas thought it must have been the shot on Bergensveien in Grorud that had roused Viktor, but he was woken, or rather: brought to his senses, some time later by another shot. Jonas only heard about it. One day, when the nurse who made sure that Viktor got to see Jonas Wergeland’s programmes regularly looked in to check on him, she found Viktor pointing excitedly at the television screen and uttering the first words anyone had heard him say in more than twenty years: ‘Jeeze, who fired that shot?’
What was on the TV? The aforementioned nurse was able to reveal that she had popped in forty-five minutes earlier to put on a video and that, because she remembered it so well herself, she had chosen the episode dealing with Harald Hardråde. She had even stayed to watch a bit of it before having to tear herself away and continue her rounds.
The programme which resulted in Viktor’s miraculous shout, opened with a boy shooting with a bow and arrow in a clearing beside a river, and the scene had been composed in a way which told viewers this was an art, that it took years of training to become such a fine archer. The boy moved as if in a dance, with everything – from the moment he drew the arrow out of the quiver until it left the bowstring and the bow was lowered – executed in one smooth, fluid action; it made viewers think of the moves performed in tai chi, or the katas in karate. Jonas realised later, partly because he had made the sound of the bowstring so pronounced, that he must have been thinking not so much about the glorious games of bows and arrows from his own boyhood – which he had also been fortunate enough to be able to relive with Benjamin – as the Indian epic The Mahabharata and the marvellous tales from it told to him by Margrete: of Drona who trained the Pandava brothers in the use of arms; of Arjuna and his bow Gandiva which was so formidable that it was recognisable to his enemies by its sound alone. The whole of that mesmerising opening sequence, indeed the sound of the bowstring alone – part music, part dangerous threat – spoke of a programme about a heroic warrior. And a brutal death.
At the close of the scene one saw what the boy, Harald Sigurdsson, had been shooting at: a huge sheepskin stretched out on a log wall. Drawn on this golden fleece was a rough map of Europe, with each arrow marking a different place, like a guide to one of the most wide-roving and warlike of all wide-roving, warlike Viking lives. The fifteen-year-long voyage which began after the Battle of Stiklestad, would take Harald, half-brother of Olav II, to places known to us today as Novgorod, Jerusalem, Sicily and, above all, Istanbul. One arrow, embedded at York in England, was broken: a token of the prophecy which says that he who lives by the sword shall die by the sword. But also of an ambition unparalleled in the history of Norway.
Indirectly, the programme on Harald Hardråde also served as a reminder of Viking times, an age with which all Norwegians were still secretly in love, which is fair enough when one considers that never since has Norway or any other Scandinavian country left such an indelible stamp on the world. By dint of artful little details, rather like a limning of the biographical account, or a juggling act in the background, Jonas Wergeland managed to say something about the double-edged nature of the Viking culture: bloodthirsty, plundering forays which also acted as cross-fertilising cultural exchanges. Viking raids and trading expeditions rolled into one. One caught glimpses, images neatly and almost imperceptibly inserted, of longships – to the Vikings what the horse had been to the Huns – scabbards, drinking horns, runic inscriptions, amulets in the shape of Thor’s hammer and small bronze statuettes of one-eyed Odin. But also there, if one looked carefully, were furs and lumps of amber, gold spurs and silver jewellery, scales and Anglo-Saxon coins, carved wooden caskets and chess pieces made from walrus tusks, parchments covered in writing. Wergeland used a sign from the main street in modernday York – Micklegate – to illustrate how Nordic words had left an enduring mark on the language and names of England, Ireland and Normandy.
But it was the end of the programme that people remembered best, the original depiction of the Battle of Stamford Bridge. After all, who was Harald Hardråde? Harald Hardråde – or Hardrada – was not only an unscrupulous, power-hungry man, a seasoned and victorious warrior who came home from foreign parts with ships so laden with gold that they listed in the water, he was also the only Norwegian ever to have so much as a little finger in the course of history. When he decided, at the age of fifty, to assert his right to the English throne, he timed it so that Harold Godwinson had to divide his attention between two fronts. Harold, then King of England, was in the south, anxiously awaiting William, later to be called the Conqueror. But when Harald Hardråde and his fellow-conspirator, Tostig Godwinson, Harold’s brother, landed in Northumbria the English king was forced to march north to York with all haste. And the bitter and exhausting Battle of Stamford Bridge had only just been won – with Harold losing many of his best warriors, among them some of his indispensable bodyguards – when he received word that William had sailed across the channel and landed in the south. The man who was at that point still King of England had to rush south again, set out on yet another gruelling forced march. Had Harold Godwinson met William and the Normans with a rested and, above all, undepleted army, the Battle of Hastings – although it would have been fought elsewhere and at an earlier date – would in all likelihood have had another outcome. Harold would not have died when that dreadful stray arrow pierced his eye. And the history of Europe would have looked very different.
But it was not so much this, which can never be anything but speculation, albeit interesting speculation – questions are always more important than answers – as the scenes of the battle which stuck in people’s minds. Earlier, Harald Hardråde and Tostig had beaten the armies of the Earls of Northumbria and Mercia at the battle of Fulford Gate, whereupon York surrendered without a fight and accepted Harald as king. On the morning of Monday, 25 September 1066 – one of the most important dates in Norwegian history, right up there with 17 May 1814 and 9 April 1940 – the Norwegians reached Stamford Bridge, about a mile outside of York, either because they were on their way to the town to hold council or to receive hostages from the villages around the bridge, which stood at a spot where many roads met. The question has been raised as to what would have happened had it not rained before the Battle of Waterloo, but one might just as well ask how history would have turned out if the sun had not been shining before the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Because, since the day was uncommonly hot, Harald’s and Tostig’s men had left their vital coats of mail in the boats, in the over two hundred ships anchored at Riccall, where a third of the seven thousand strong army was gathered.
To begin with at Stamford Bridge all Harald and Tostig could see was a cloud of dust. Then they began to make out the glint of weapons – like a wall of ice in the sunlight, a mirage in the heat – as Harold Godwinson’s vast army advanced on the other side of the little River Derwent. Instead of running back to the ships and putting on their chain mail or making a temporary retreat downriver, the Norwegians sent messengers to summon the rest of the army. Then they took up their positions, shield to shield. Rather than run they would all fall together, one on top of the other as Harald had said on a previous occasion, when faced with another apparently superior foe. In the end, after a long, fierce battle, it was Harold Godwinson’s cavalry which tipped the scales. Only thirty or so Norwegian ships sailed back across the North Sea. Harald Hardråde had meant to win the whole of England, but all he got, in the words of the English king, was six feet of its soil – or a foot more because he was so tall.
The truly unforgettable thing about the programme was the way that Jonas Wergeland depicted that mighty battle, over ten thousand men clashing in a hellish, bloody melee, with just one person, Harald Hardråde himself. No one knows for sure where the battlefield lay, nor whether the wooden bridge of that time crossed the river at Danes Well or somewhere else. But Jonas Wergeland used the present stone bridge which, with its patina, could easily pass for a thousand-year-old bridge. H
e specifically wanted to feature the bridge because of the classic Viking legend which told of how a giant, a red-haired berserker, had single-handedly defended the bridge for several hours before being killed by a sneak attack from below – an event which is actually pictured on the sign outside the Swordsman Inn at Stamford Bridge today. Wergeland decided to have Harald Hardråde take the swordsman’s place. Actor Normann Vaage, tall and well-built and blessed still with the agility of his young days as a promising gymnast, was perfect in the part.
In the programme Harald Hardråde, clad in a blue tunic and silvery helmet, was seen standing on the parapet at the centre of the bridge, battling on alone with a fearsome two-handed sword that sang as it cut through the air. Jonas Wergeland shot this stylised spectacle from the bank of the river in order to get the whole bridge in the shot. One saw Harald, the universal warrior, executing a kind of sword dance. His actions were as acrobatic as they were measured and balletic – again: like the moves in the more meditative forms of the Asian martial arts. And even though there was no sign of the pennants or the barricades of spears or the rain of arrows or the wall of raised shields or the rocks thrown by slings and catapults, viewers were treated – thanks to the soundtrack, a marvellous recreation of the hideous din of battle, with lots of ringing swords and screams and thundering hooves – to the illusion of a real battle. Nothing like it had ever been seen on television before. Jonas Wergeland made viewers see the horde of adversaries, he had them biting their nails, even though Harald Hardråde was quite alone, hacking and slashing at thin air. The Norwegian king fought in lone majesty on a bridge in England, one which also represented a decisive crossroads in European history, but people at home had a clear, vivid impression of a battle surging nerve-rackingly back and forth, and no one could help but see that Harald Hardråde was a splendid warrior, displaying as he did, with his lithe, supple movements, all the resourcefulness and skill in arms he had developed as commander of the Nordic division of the Varangian guard in Constantinople. Harald Hardråde – or Jonas Wergeland, as Kamala Varma once pointed out – seemed to possess one of those astras spoken of in The Mahabharata: a weapon that can create mighty illusions.
At last, when it actually looked as though Harald Hardråde was gaining ground on the bridge, one of his adversaries, he too invisible, loosed an arrow from his bow. A resounding twang was heard, like a symmetrical echo of the programme’s opening scene. A fateful sound, a sound louder than everything else. There was a shot of the arrow flashing through the air, heading straight for the viewer, so lifelike and deadly, a bloody great arrowhead about to burst right through the screen. In a thousand homes people ducked, threw themselves off their chairs. A moment later, from the floor, they saw the arrow embedded in Harald’s throat and the sword slipping from his hand.
And it was this same pitiless ending, this grisly shot that caused history to take a different turn, so to speak, which also changed the story of Viktor Harlem. It was the shot that woke him, or so he said. He had clutched at his throat, as if to pull out a hurtful arrow, and suddenly he could talk. ‘Well, that was a long trip, I must say,’ he exclaimed. ‘Where am I? Who are all these old folk? Wow, what a great chair, is it mine?’
Jonas read all about it in his cell a few days later. A medical miracle the papers called it. Sadly, though, all was not as it should be. Viktor had woken up, but he could not remember a thing. Where his head might have been designed by the Creator to take a sixty-watt bulb it now seemed to be running on twenty-five watts. He had no idea who he was, and he could remember nothing of his past. He could, however, remember absolutely everything else. He knew that Habakkuk was a prophet, that Ittoqqortoormiit was a region of Greenland and that the birr was the unit of currency in Ethiopia. He knew that Haydn’s mother was Anna Maria Koller and that his wife’s name was Maria Anna Keller. He knew that Galileo died in the year that Newton was born. He knew that B.B. King’s guitar was called Lucille. Everyone was baffled. Not least the doctors. Jonas alone guessed the truth. Viktor had spent a couple of decades watching television, to begin with only NRK and the two Swedish channels, but also the other channels as they came along. For some reason every single bit of what he had seen – snippets of news broadcasts and documentaries, natural history series, soap operas and music programmes – had lodged inside his brain. He remembered nothing from ‘the real world’, but everything from twenty years of television-viewing, from an artificial existence spent with his face turned to the television screen. He also had a rapid, rather staccato way of speaking, as if he were zapping between channels in his head.
But Viktor Harlem was to make the headlines again later. It so happened that his awakening occurred around the same time that the Norwegian version of the popular American quiz programme Jeopardy! was first screened. Viktor, who was now back living with his mother – not that he remembered her, he simply accepted that she was who she said she was – was persuaded to apply for the show and passed the tough and pretty extensive audition with almost daunting bravura. As a contestant he was unbeatable. It was clear that he could answer just about anything, that is to say: answer in the form of a question. He had the most unbelievable fund of knowledge on everything from Ananga Ranga to orang-utans, and could differentiate without blinking between Lee Marvin, Hank Marvin and Hank Williams, not to mention Pasteur and Patorius. After becoming the all-time greatest Jeopardy! champion five times in a row, he was accorded the title of Grand Champion, as if he had suddenly joined the upper echelons of some mysterious brotherhood. Never before had a winner scooped up such breathtakingly large cash prizes or provided such stunning entertainment. Viktor’s popularity soon reached such heights, helped along by all the press coverage, that the TV2 management decided, after consultation with the company which produced Jeopardy! for them, to break with the rules of the game just this once, to bow to public demand – with one eye on the advertising revenue, naturally – and invite him back on to the show. With equally fabulous success for Viktor and equally gratifying viewing figures for the channel. Viktor, who had reverted to his black polo necks and who, with his baby face and longish, wispy hair, looked rather like a seven-year-old Einstein, became something of a national hero. His staccato voice was soon to be heard on every talk show and his zap-zapping comments could be read in every newspaper and magazine. Jonas followed his friend’s Jeopardy! escapades from his cell, shaking his head in disbelief. This Viktor was almost the very opposite of the boy he had been when they were knocking back his illicit absinthe in Seilduksgata in Grünerløkka and calling themselves The Three Heretics. The Viktor whom Jonas saw on television had a head bursting with facts, but his mind was a blank. He could answer any question on the most trivial subject, but he did not know who he was.
Viktor was now proclaimed Norway’s only Double Grand Champion, but the story does not end there. Once there were enough Jeopardy! Grand Champions – twelve in all – a special tournament was held. For weeks beforehand the papers were full of it, with hundreds of column inches devoted to what might have been a showdown between the gods on Olympus. On an Easter weekend in the latter half of the nineties the scene was set for the actual final between the remaining Grand Champions – and a record viewing figure. With Viktor in the last three it seemed certain that everyone was going to get what they were hoping for: a tremendous fight. And a battle it was – with Napoleon playing a starring role.
Although Jonas very rarely watched the television in his cell, for obvious reasons he did follow Viktor’s bizarre career on Jeopardy! with ever-increasing wonder. To Jonas it seemed so ironic: you could be considered an expert on the world without having been consciously present in that world. On the other hand, he had to admit that he enjoyed the programme, and not only because it tended to suggest that the questions were more important than the answers. Like his countrymen Jonas had been fascinated by quiz shows of this sort ever since the first series of Double Your Money was broadcast in the early sixties – that same Double your Money which had played and wo
uld play such a curious part in Viktor Harlem’s life.
Before the much publicised Grand Champions Final that Easter, Jonas decided to take a hand in things. Not to spoil anything, but to try, if possible, to shake Viktor awake. Fully awake. Because Jonas knew something known only to a few. Viktor had a complex. Which is to say: a complex of which he had no recall. As a child, in the days when everybody, absolutely everybody, watched the same programmes, especially on Saturday evenings, Viktor had been bullied terribly and had had to watch his father go seriously downhill after the latter, as a contestant on Double Your Money answering questions on the multi-faceted subject of Napoleon, had failed to answer one of the last parts of the 10,000-krone question. The fateful question was: What was the name of the marshal in command of Napoleon I’s Corps at the Battle of Austerlitz? The answer, which his father could not remember due to a mental block as freakish as it was unfair, was of course Jean Baptiste-Jules Bernadotte. In other words, the man later to be known as Karl Johan, the king who lent his name to Oslo’s main thoroughfare.
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