The Discoverer (71 page)

In other words, by the time the Germans left the country, Jørgine’s second husband had made himself a nice packet. Which no one knew anything about. And better still: he had been shrewd and foresightful enough to stash away his money in an obscure network of bank accounts. It had, in other words, been nicely laundered.

Right from the day when he effected his carefully calculated about-turn, at a time when everyone could see that the Germans’ luck was also turning, he was convinced that he would get away with it. He had not, however, reckoned with his wife-to-be; how was he to know that behind a smiling, friendly and indeed apparently loving mask, Jørgine Wergeland viewed him quite simply as another Hitler, a man whom she had resolved to bring down. If he had not suspected anything before, then he should have done when she turned to him as they walked out of the registrar’s office, looked him straight in his hammerhead face and uttered her first words as a newly-wed: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’

Jørgine Wergeland declared war on her husband, she commenced a
campaign
of resistance of which no one was ever aware, conducted as it was within the four walls of their home. And she resorted to tactics which were much more ruthless than the clattering of pots and frying pans.

I do not know whether Jonas Wergeland associated Høyanger with
demonstrations
, with women and saucepans, but I noticed the rapt expression on his face one day when we were strolling along the steamship wharf and he spotted the old Høyang emblem on the door of the metalworks. He was clearly moved by the sight of that name, which had been stamped into the aluminium of so many of his boyhood’s saucepans, including the ones on which he had done some cacophonic drumming of his own.

Whitsun was just around the corner. We were tied up at a pontoon dock out by the breakwater, under the southern face of Gråberget, with a great view of the town and Hålandsnipa forming a wall behind it, and of Øyrelva, its foaming white stream snaking down the mountainside on the other side of the fjord. The chimneys at the metalworks no longer spewed out black smoke as they did in the old photographs taken by Olav Knutzen; fluoride-laced smoke that had, in the past, done so much visible damage to the environment. No one now could call the works at Høyanger a ‘black cathedral’ or a ‘dark,
satanic mill’. And yet, as we sailed up the fjord I had the strong impression of a meeting between a new age and an old. At first glance the sight of the vast metalworks, the production halls and the towering silos in which the raw material, oxide, was stored, was impressive. But when I thought about it I realised that the
Voyager
, our modest little craft, housed an industry every bit as great. It had struck me before that our boat, with its enormous capacity for storing information and its possibilities for wireless communication with the whole world, represented something bigger, mightier, than all the Hydro Aluminium buildings in this mountain-encircled basin. In terms of potential the Voyager was, in fact, an aircraft carrier; theoretically we could sit here, out on the fjord, and generate assets as great as Hydro earned by selling the aluminium made at Høyanger. Sailing there on the fjord, we provided the perfect illustration of the new Norway and the old. A small mobile object approaching something massive and steadfast. And vulnerable. No one, least of all the townsfolk, could tell when the owners of Høyanger’s cornerstone industry might see fit to shut down the plant, possibly set up production elsewhere.

Sogn. Again and again I was struck by how extraordinary, how
unique
, this area was. In many ways it was Norway in a nutshell. Until well into the
nineties
there was not a single state wine monopoly outlet in the Sogn and
Fjordane
region. And in the whole district there was but one set of traffic lights. Sogn was like a little Switzerland smack in the middle of Norway. Often, when we sailed round a point and one of those little towns hove into view, tucked away at the head of an inlet or the arm of a fjord and ringed by high mountains, I would find myself thinking that there was something unreal about it, that it was a bit like the valley of Tralla La in Carl Barks’s story about Uncle Scrooge; a place where everyone was happy. And people in Sogn
were
happy. A host of surveys confirmed, time and again, that the inhabitants of this region were the most content in the whole country. In every set of
statistics
they came out on top where what mattered was to be top, and came bottom where that was best. They lived longest and were least sick, if you like.

I had wondered whether this might have something to do with the
contrasts
found around Sognefjord. Did they generate a tension, a salubrious force field which in turn made the people expand? Here in Høyanger, with all its clear reminders of aluminium, that attractive light metal, my thoughts often turned – as if running down an opposite track – to all of the
fruit-growing
which we had also seen in Sogn. I will never forget the view as we sailed past Leikanger. The whole place, the slopes running up to the heights, shimmered with the pale-pink blossom on tens of thousands of apple trees, shot here and there with sunlight glinting off the sprinkler jets. The climate
at Leikanger was so favourable that you could plant an apricot tree against a south-facing wall or even grow grapes. We anchored close enough to shore to be able to enjoy the sight of the gigantic walnut tree in the vicarage garden, standing between the main house and the water. Did the key to Sognefjord perhaps lie hidden here? In the tension between plants and minerals, fruit and aluminium? Amanlis, Summer Red and d’Oullins on the one side, cables, ceiling panels and railway wagons on the other. I would not argue with anyone who dared to say that the healthiness and contentment of the local
inhabitants
stemmed from a kind of visual alchemy – the blossom-covered branches of an apple tree against a backdrop of silvery aluminium cylinder blocks.

In Høyanger Jonas could easily have passed for a local, by which I mean that he seemed even more content than usual. Possibly because he came upon so many unexpected links with his own life. As when, for example, someone told him about the slug factory which had closed down just before the turn of the millennium and he realised that the material for the tubes containing his favourite sandwich spreads had been made there. At another factory, Fundo’s, they produced the wheel rims for the car which he himself drove. Høyanger helped one to understand the world of today. In a small town at the head of a narrow fjord, walled in by steep mountainsides, they manufactured a car part for a factory in another country which also received parts from a dozen other countries. You lived in Høyanger, but were part of a global network.

But there was another reason for Jonas Wergeland’s happiness, and that reason was Kamala. I have nothing against that – I least of all. It was the best thing about the whole trip: to see those two, Kamala Varma and Jonas
Wergeland
, together; to observe how devoted they were to one another. ‘How’s my secretary getting on?’ Kamala might say, wrapping her arms around him. And he would not answer, merely allow himself to be hugged. Even when he was sitting alone on deck, possibly writing something in his big notebook or simply staring up at the rigging, her effect on him was clear to see. His name appeared in print at the very beginning of a love story. Whenever I saw him I could not help thinking: there’s a man who is loved. Who simply laps up love. So he can learn to love. Become a lover. That may sound easy, but for Jonas Wergeland it was anything but. It had taken him a lifetime to reach this stage.

I think it must also have been this love which enabled him to view his country in a new and unprejudiced light. ‘You have the Ganges,’ I heard him say to Kamala – in jest, I grant you – on the way to Høyanger, as we were leaning on the rail, gazing incredulously at Ortnevik across the water, ‘but we have Sognefjord. This is our sacred river. And the farms clinging to the mountainsides are our temples.’

With similar pride he showed us the church at Høyanger, designed by
no less a person than Arnstein Arneberg, one of the architects behind Oslo Rådhus. The old town gate offered a perfect view of it, in its lovely setting on the other side of the river, on a low hill at the foot of Gråberget’s steep rock face. Jonas talked Kamala and I into posing on the bridge, so he could take our picture with the church in the background. It might have had something to do with his closeness to Kamala, but sometimes I had the impression that he was starting to look like an Indian, even in his colouring, that soon he really would look like a film director from Bombay – just as his
grandmother’s
features had, over the years, grown more and more Churchillian. He took a long time over it, snapping picture after picture, until eventually Kamala got fed up, went up to him, took the camera and ordered him to go and stand next to me. That was so like her. Kamala Varma is a woman who prefers to take photographs herself.

This same attitude, or mindset, lay at the root of Wergeland’s programme on Liv Ullmann. Jonas’s heroes and heroines were not only discoverers, they were to just as great an extent rebels. Few have discerned the salute to the spirit of resistance and defiance which underpins the whole series.

At the heart of the Ullmann programme lay an incident which many Norwegians recall with ambivalent wonder: the actress’s dinner with Henry Kissinger in March 1973; a banquet which was duly covered by a couple of Norwegian dailies. Jonas Wergeland concentrated, however, on their brief meeting before the dinner, which was by no means an intimate affair, but a huge party in honour of film director John Ford, held at the Grand
Ballroom
of the Beverley Hilton Hotel; a function also attended by President Nixon. A lot of Norwegians felt very proud, flattered even, on Liv Ullmann’s behalf, that Henry Kissinger himself, long-time professor of political science at Harvard University, now the presidential advisor on national security and soon to become the American Secretary of State – not to mention
something
of a womaniser and one of the world’s most written-about men – had personally asked the Norwegian actress to be his dinner companion. But a lot of Norwegians were also rather shocked, and possibly disappointed, that an artist of Liv Ullmann’s weighty calibre should allow herself to be dazzled by something as basic, not to say primitive, as power, and such a dubious sort of power at that; they did not like the thought that she might fall for a man who, while famed for his brilliant analyses of foreign affairs and inspired diplomacy, was equally well-known for his cynical, almost sinister internal intrigues, and was even quoted as having said – the nerve of it! – that power is the ultimate aphrodisiac. Many people found it hard to equate the couple’s little tête-à-tête with their image of Liv Ullmann as a demure woman with a natural Nordic allure. She was accused of being naive. The possibility that she
might have accepted the invitation with her eyes wide open, that she might be a mature woman with masses of self-confidence and great inner strength was almost automatically discounted. This was the politicised Norway of the seventies, readily inclined to think in terms of headlines such as: ‘Sweet,
innocent
woman seduced by nasty, conservative man.’

As an actress, Liv Ullmann was at the very peak of her career, nominated for an Oscar for her role in
The
Emigrants
. But despite her international success, despite all the prizes and honorary degrees bestowed on her from all quarters, despite being the subject of a lead story in
Time
the year before, with her picture on the cover and all, Liv Ullmann’s acting was not
particularly
well appreciated in Norway. In people’s minds she was always associated with a certain type of ‘heavy’, doleful role, with a tremulous expression and a voice which was all too easily parodied.

Jonas Wergeland wanted to shatter the stereotype ‘Ullmann myth’ which prevailed in Norway. In the programme’s key scene the couple, Liv Ullmann and Henry Kissinger, were seen having a glass of white wine in Ullmann’s Hollywood hotel suite – there was no sign of the secret service people, nor of the friend who was visiting Liv Ullmann at the time. It was Kissinger, ever the diplomat, who had requested this brief meeting, so that they could have a little chat, just the two of them, before leaving for the society dinner in honour of John Ford. Jonas Wergeland portrayed them as actors in a film. He had Ullmann, or rather: Ella Strand who played Ullmann, dressed, not in the white gown which the actress had actually been wearing, but in a red number with a plunging neckline, the one which she had worn in the
unforgettable
mirror scene, an almost two-minute long close-up – what a piece of acting, what presence, it was enough to make a cameraman forget all about his camera – from the film
Cries and Whispers
– a film in which,
incidentally
, Liv Ullmann’s radiance and beauty were presented in such timeless and touching fashion that not only Henry Kissinger, but even your ordinary
Norwegian
had to take his hat off to her.

Then something occurred in this half-unreal film scenario, in which a Norwegian woman, a Norwegian maiden – people forgot that she already had two long-term relationships behind her – sat face to face with the
worldspirit
, to use a rather Hegelian turn of phrase. What followed, though quiet and undramatic, was in fact, a variation on the final scene from
A Doll’s House
– it was no coincidence that Nora was one of Liv Ullmann’s great roles – and in order to get this across Wergeland played Ullmann’s strongest cards: her face, her sensitive mouth and, above all, her eyes, that look, the secret of which lay not in their blueness, but in the strength of will that shone in them. Liv Ullmann would later write a book entitled
Changing,
an international
bestseller and a life-changing read for many people. Jonas Wergeland set out to capture just such a moment of change. A moment marked by the urge to object, to do something other than what is expected. In an earlier version – of which he even did a trial cut – at the turning point of the Kissinger tableau he inserted Ullmann’s primal scream from Ingmar Bergman’s film
Face to Face
, as a cry of realisation or protest; a brief clip from the scene in which, in the part of Jenny, she stands with her back to a wall and screams, really howls. Instead, though, he opted for the quieter transition, partly because he wanted to break with the unfair Ullmann cliché of a face contorted by psychotic angst and pain. Suddenly, while sitting there in that hotel suite with Kissinger, she lifted her eyes, that expressive face, and looked out of the ‘fiction’, out of the scene, straight at the cameraman, as if she had caught sight of something extremely important, then she abruptly stood up and walked towards the viewers, giving them to understand that she was taking over the camera, the direction, herself; her voice was heard, giving instructions, as another actress entered the scene, dressed in the same red dress and sat down in her, Liv Ullmann’s, place, across from Henry Kissinger. With this switching of roles, Jonas Wergeland also wished to show how detached Ullmann actually was from the whole carry-on – and from the gossip and the ridiculous rumours to which she knew it would give rise. She took, as it happens, the same rather blithe approach to a later dinner held to mark the end of the
SALT
negotiations
, at which she was seated between Kissinger and the Soviet ambassador to Washington. For Ullmann, this function had about it the inescapable air of a superficial, inconsequential party game or a first-night shindig. The way she saw it, Kissinger would have made the perfect tragic figure in a Bergman film. And so at this pivotal moment, in this fictional situation, when Ullmann got to her feet and stepped out of Kissinger’s dazzling aura, it was with a cool, little smile for which Jonas found justification in her little known sense of humour and self-irony. And by some inexplicable metamorphosis, the woman on the screen, the slightly younger actress who had taken Ullmann’s place, now called to mind Kristin Lavransdatter, while Kissinger suddenly looked like Erlend. A note of
defiance
had crept into the scene, a sense of a secret rendezvous between a woman going against her parents’ wishes and an excommunicated man. Viewers were witness to a provocative flouting of
convention
. A passionate woman who stayed true to her convictions, had faith in her own judgement of right and wrong. A woman who was no longer just a good little girl who listened to what everyone else told her she should do. A woman who was also – no small point this – stronger than the man sitting opposite her.