The Conqueror Read online

  After the initial shock he simply kneeled there, staring. He could see deep into the heart of the tree root. Eventually, he realized what it reminded him of, this thing down in the depths: it reminded him of his mother’s brooch. And I really ought to say a few words here about this jewel, since it played such an important part in Jonas Wergeland’s life. Children have a unique capacity for being fascinated by things, for regarding – for inexplicable reasons – certain objects as magical. For an Albert Einstein, it was a compass, for others it might be a special stone. For Jonas Wergeland, it was a silver brooch.

  There may well be a simple explanation for his fondness for this piece of jewellery: it was the first thing he remembered. His mother must have worn it a lot when he was little. She had been given the brooch, a so-called ‘round brooch’, as a wedding present from Aunt Laura, the goldsmith. The surface was completely covered in an intricate tracery of ribbons that twined around one another, interlacing and seeming to form lots of S’s or figure eights. ‘It looks like a gigantic knot that hasn’t been tightened,’ Jonas would say, fingering it. This silver brooch was absolutely the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen – much more beautiful than the aforementioned clock workings on top of the chest of drawers. That little shield glowed, not outwardly, but inwardly, with a secret and powerful lustre. In his imagination he thought of it as a weapon, a disc that, if one were to hurl it out into the cosmos, would set momentous processes in motion. For Jonas, in terms of latent power the brooch was a miniature atom bomb.

  Jonas is on his hands and knees, gazing down into the hole laid bare by the dislodged rock. And what he sees there resembles the design on his mother’s brooch: a coiling mass of ribbons. It’s like looking down into the nerve centre of the Earth, he thinks. Which is not so surprising, since Jonas is staring straight down onto a huge ball of snakes, nestling between the roots of the fir tree, possibly as much as five feet down. He can see it quite clearly, though, as if at the end of a narrow tunnel; an exceptionally large winter nest, containing at least fifty, maybe a hundred, adders – probably ring-snakes and slow-worms too, and even lizards and toads. All twined together in an enormous, tangled ball. Nature’s very own clove hitch.

  Jonas thought they were still deep in their winter sleep, but then he noticed that some of them were moving ever so slightly: this was obviously the day when they were going to wake up, now that the temperature had risen enough for the warmth to seep as far down as the snakes. Fascinated, Jonas knelt there, observing the ball of reptiles slowly coming to life. Just for a moment he considered running home to fetch the canister of petrol that was kept in the caretaker’s shed, pour it over the nest and set light to it: create a living ball of fire. But why would he do that? These were timid creatures; they wouldn’t do him any harm.

  For ages Jonas sat there, seized by a sort of awe, watching this tangle of reptiles gradually stirring. He could make out the zigzag stripe along the backs of the adders, a pattern within a pattern. Some, presumably males, began to break away from the ball, wriggled sluggishly and silently up the tunnel, along passages that Jonas could not see. And at that same moment he realized that the ball of snakes reminded him of that recurring dream of his. He tried to pursue this thought but gave up. It fitted and yet did not. As a grown man Jonas Wergeland would be struck by the thought that on that spring day he had been confronted with an image of his own vast multitude of unrealized lives.

  He didn’t say a word about any of this when he returned to the campfire and his parents, with his trousers caked in muck. ‘Poor Jonas – looks like he’s seen a wood nymph,’ said Chairman Moen, handing him a sausage wrapped in a slice of bread. Jonas sat down next to his mother, felt his hand trembling slightly as he took the cup of orange juice she poured for him.

  It remained his secret, that spring day and that sight. Little did Jonas know what it would lead to. In any case, and thanks to the silver brooch, the ball of snakes seemed not so much frightening as precious. Jonas remembered it as a pattern, thought of it as a treasure. A jewel deep in the ground. A living jewel. Something swirling round and round, almost hypnotic.

  Sonja and the Stars

  It wasn’t that Jonas Wergeland forgot that spring day in the forest, but it would be a long time before he could, so to speak, learn from it. To show you what I mean, allow me to remind you of the programme on Sonja Henie, one of the twenty-odd chapters in that masterpiece, Thinking Big, Jonas Wergeland’s epic television series on Norwegians who had won themselves a place in the world consciousness, whose names were bywords, rich in associations, in the international vocabulary.

  Jonas Wergeland not only scored the highest viewer ratings ever recorded in Norway, he also, and much more importantly, achieved the highest viewer intensity. Expectations were always great, so to begin with – until they were won over, that is – people were a little disappointed with his portrait of Sonja Henie. The programme contained no facile, sarcastic remarks about her father, the colourful and ambitious Wilhelm Henie, said nothing about those three incredible Olympic Golds, the ten world championships, the crowds at the Eastern Railway Station and the Royal Wharf when she came home to Oslo, nothing about her ‘Heil Hitler’ salute to the Führer and her refusal to help Little Norway at the start of the war, nothing about Tyrone Power, nothing about the triumphant ice show at the Jordal Amfi Arena, nothing about two broken marriages, expensive mink coats, flamboyant jewellery, problems with alcohol, not so much as a word about the fashionable house on Hollywood’s Delfern Drive and the parties held there, with swans carved out of blocks of ice in the swimming-pool and orchids flown in from Hawaii. Jonas Wergeland produced an all but silent programme, a programme that focused, basically, on just one thing: skating. With skating as dance, as acrobatics, as – yes, beauty. It was a scintillating ice-blue programme. ‘It sent shivers down my spine like some eerie, yet beautiful, sight,’ as one reader’s letter put it. And in case you have not guessed, Professor, this too has a bearing, of course, on the inconceivable factor round which we keep circling: a dead wife.

  Originally, Jonas Wergeland had intended to build the key scene around a training session at Frogner Stadium, but instead he decided to set this scene – a fictitious one, naturally – on a tarn, a little lake in the forest, where the atmosphere was that much more magical. The camera captured an image of a clear winter’s night with stars reflected on the glassy blue ice. Jonas commenced with a close-up of the skates, showing how forlorn they looked – a pair of battered skates, abandoned on the ice. Then he showed them being slipped onto two feet, the laces tied, and the transformation, as if they had been invested with spirit, before – steel blades flashing – they exploded into a series of turns, inscribing, as if by magic, an enormous ‘S’ on the ice. The camera focused tightly on the legs the whole time, on the skates, on the blade slicing through the ice, etching out markings, figures, exercises from the world of the compulsory programme: Mohawks, reverse Mohawks and double Mohawks, snaking curves and loops. The camera pulled up to reveal that the tarn was a circle upon which Sonja’s dancing had etched flourishes and arabesques, an exquisite pattern; carved a gigantic, glittering brooch out of the very countryside of Norway.

  This programme had a strikingly erotic feel to it, distinctly at odds with the image of the girl with the baby-doll face. For the close-ups of the finer techniques of figure skating, they used the top female figure skater in Norway at that time. But the actress Ella Strand, who played all of the series’ heroines, also did her bit, in a wig which bore a passing resemblance to Sonja’s blonde curls, and with her own natural hint of a snub nose – as luck would have it she had done figure skating herself as a girl, and still retained some of her old skill. Jonas had no scruples about making the most of her womanly silhouette, the line of her bust and her long legs, got her to wear a simple, tight-fitting dress with a short skirt – one of Sonja’s many revolutionary innovations, as it happens. The camera dwelt on a woman spinning around, ardent and intent, dwelt on her thighs, alm
ost caressing them, caught – with something close to awe – the suppleness that transmitted itself to the blade of the skate and made the ice fly up.

  This was the programme’s key scene: Sonja on the little tarn, alone, in a wintry Norwegian forest, alone with her skates and the stars, executing a high-speed dance across a mirror-like expanse of ice. Jonas highlighted the physical nature of figure skating, the stamina it craved, by running the sequence without music, by amplifying the sound of the skates cutting through the ice, and that of Sonja’s heavy breathing. With an adoring camera, Jonas Wergeland managed to convey the difficulty and beauty of, and the effort involved in, some of the figures from those days, for example the execution of three figure of eights in succession in such a way that it looked like just one. It was Sonja alone on the ice, encircled by snow-laden pine trees, skipping, gliding, swooping, in the midst of a strange display, like a rite, the blade of the skate etching figures in the ice, heavy breathing and the swish of swift swirling movement. ‘Talk about an undertow,’ was the cameraman’s comment.

  A lot has been said about Jonas Wergeland’s intelligent filming – before that earth-shattering scandal, that is – about a producer who finally took people’s intellect seriously. What rubbish! The truth is that Jonas Wergeland understood, better than anyone else, that television was first and foremost based on emotions, on the irrational. Jonas Wergeland knew that you conquered a nation not by appealing to its reason but by bombarding its senses. Which meant that you had to simplify. And the challenge, as he saw it, lay in coming up with the best, the most surprising form of simplification, the one which could, to greatest effect, reduce even a complex life to a few essential and comprehensible figures that could be etched out in a flurry of ice, like a figure of eight on a frozen lake: simple and yet infinitely fascinating.

  For this reason Jonas Wergeland built his programme on Sonja Henie primarily around the techniques of figure skating and, in the first sequence, on the jumps in particular: the axels, the lutzes and the split jumps, soaring leaps rendered even more impressive by the lowering of the camera as Sonja took off. Over and over again. Almost dauntingly simple. And therefore so entrancing. Many viewers claimed to have experienced a feeling of weightlessness; and perhaps that, when you get right down to it, is what figure skating is all about: becoming weightless, suspending gravity, soaring up to the stars.

  Jonas had Sonja conclude this part of the programme with a move of her own invention, ‘the strip’, in which she glided backwards, balancing on the toe of one skate and leaving a glorious groove in the ice, to simulate the way in which she had cut her way through the ice and the firmament, like a diamond through glass, to suddenly find herself in another world, the one place where she had always dreamed of being: Hollywood.

  The Hollywood sequence concentrated on the first of the eleven films she had made in the USA, One in a Million. They reconstructed a number of meetings between Sonja and Darryl F. Zanuck, the redoubtable head of 20th Century Fox, and made much of the fact that she secured herself a sensational five-year contract and a stupendous amount of money for each film, even though she had no experience in front of the camera. They also showed a clip from One in a Million, the story of a country girl who becomes Olympic champion, then turns professional and scores an overwhelming success at Madison Square Gardens – in other words, pretty much identical to Sonja’s own story. The film culminated in a lavish set piece, a forerunner to her ice shows, in which Sonja twirled and leaped in a skating ballet featuring hundreds of girls in extravagant costumes, as if in some glamorous opera on ice.

  In also illustrating how this film was received, with an acclaim that fulfilled all expectations, Jonas aimed to make two points. Firstly, that Sonja Henie was the greatest Norwegian film star of all time. In short, she conquered that most impregnable of all realms: Hollywood. And secondly – and it is surprising how often this is forgotten – Sonja Henie was a brilliant figure skater, a true virtuoso, three times Olympic champion. And when she won such a victory – even in a silly film in which she spoke dreadful English and only had two facial expressions to choose from, with a script which was nothing but a mishmash of romantic drivel, sets composed of fake ice and artificial snow and the Swiss Alps as backdrop – it was thanks solely to her charm, her personality and her skating skills, the fact that she sparkled, did things on skates which the audience could not have imagined possible and which made them cheer in admiration. Even a few clips from this second-rate – and antiquated – film was enough to show viewers why Sonja Henie deserved to be called one of the western world’s first superstars. There was no lack of response either – interestingly enough in a day and age when television channels strove so hard to encourage viewers to take an active part in programmes: NRK, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, was inundated with letters and faxes, the switchboard jammed by calls from people wanting to compliment Jonas Wergeland on how well he had comported himself on skates in his own regular slot and demanding that NRK show all of Sonja Henie’s films immediately, which they duly did, to the great delight and satisfaction of the nation.

  The transition from Hollywood to the programme’s closing sequence was a masterstroke: from thunderous applause straight into a soundless pirouette, a vertiginous whirl, and then, clearer and clearer, the solitary sound of the blade on the ice, Sonja alone again on the tarn on a winter’s night in Norway, in a magical – some said, demonic – atmosphere. Jonas lingered particularly on the pirouettes now, the corkscrew turns, imparting a sense of how mind-reeling they were, ecstatic almost, as if executed by a seductive winter dryad or by a dervish attempting to throw himself into a trance. And for Sonja, figure skating had as much to do with mystery as it did with the dream of winning, of conquering the world. Jonas ran the turns in slow motion, very, very slowly, such that the shots of the solitary, pirouetting woman had as mesmerizing an effect as any big production number from Hollywood with its meticulously choreographed repetitions, duplications and symmetrical formations.

  And then, again: Sonja Henie, zooming along, alone on the ice, alone with her skates and yet happy here, on the ice, with her dancing, her art. Jonas Wergeland took issue, indirectly, with the myth that said that all her life Sonja Henie was a lonely, unhappy child who never found real purpose. The way Jonas saw it, and presented it to the people of Norway, she did find happiness, here, in her pirouettes, in the total control, in the innate musicality of her movements, in the jumps, in speeding across the ice, when she tilted her body forwards or back – and anyone who has tried this, as in fact very many Norwegians have, has some idea of what an exhilarating experience this can be. During those seconds, Sonja became something that no one else was, or understood: when she used the toe picks to stop dead in the middle of a pirouette, then run forwards on her toes, throw herself into another jump, into flying spins and parallel spins, three corkscrew spins with an Arabian cartwheel. Again the camera captured the breathtaking speed, with close-ups of the skate blade, the tracks crisscrossing, steel suddenly scraping the ice and sending up a flurry of ice. A small camera had also been fixed to one of her skates, thus giving viewers something of the same thrill as that derived from watching a film shot from the front of a racing car, or a car on a roller-coaster. ‘My stomach lurched just watching her,’ people said.

  Finally, Jonas got the camera to pull up slowly, pull high up to reveal that Sonja was dancing – almost sketching it out herself, the loops, the design, with her skating – on a huge painting by Joan Miró, projected onto the ice by means of trick photography. It was, aptly enough, a masterpiece by Miró entitled Women in the Night, one of the first paintings which Sonja bought for herself after meeting Niels Onstad – for this too was one of her gifts, a talent akin to the art of drawing lines on ice: she knew a good picture when she saw it.

  What was Jonas Wergeland saying with this? He was saying that Sonja Henie’s exercises on the ice, what she did, was just as childlike, just as lovely, just as mischievous and bold as Joan Miró’s pain
tings. And I’m sure you have already observed, Professor, how this closing scene puts one in mind of Jonas Wergeland’s experience in the forest as a little boy, the sight of a living brooch in the ground. It might not be going too far to regard the whole of the programme on Sonja Henie as a silvery tracery of ‘S’s and figures of eight on an enormous brooch of ice – that, at any rate, is how one critic summed it up: ‘A real gem.’ And if you were to ask anyone what they remember from that programme, this is the first thing they would mention, this shot of Sonja on the Miró painting; it has become a kind of national ornament, imprinted on the consciousness of the viewers.

  Even those viewers – a fair number of older people – who had been negative to start with were delighted with Jonas Wergeland’s slant on Sonja Henie’s character. They realized what her unique talent had been when she was at her peak: to skate like no one else in the world. Sonja Henie elevated figure skating to an art form. She paired the essence of all things Norwegian, winter sport, with a global spirit. As a human being, and a Norwegian at that, Sonja Henie truly was one in a million.

  Napoleon

  Are you tired, Professor? Just one more story, then we’ll call it a night.

  At the end of the eighties, after the last programme in the Thinking Big series had been screened, the plaudits rained down on Jonas Wergeland from all quarters. Advertisers felt that he had helped to colour the nation’s image of itself in that rare way in which only a troubadour can do with his simple yet unforgettable ballads. Teachers testified to the positive effect the series had had in terms of filling in the gaps in young people’s knowledge of history. Another outcome, more interesting within our own context, was all the interviews which Jonas Wergeland gave at that time, and in which he repeatedly used the same expression in describing his first years in television: ‘A life of luxury.’ Time and again too, he compared the chance he was given to make his earliest programmes with that of a trainee chef suddenly being given the run of a huge kitchen complete with every mod-con and all the world’s freshest raw ingredients, where his imagination alone set the limits for what he could serve up. The descriptions of Jonas Wergeland’s early days in television were positively aromatic, people said.