Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

But these reflections belong to the future. Or do they? When Jonas reached this understanding at Gardermoen, he had the feeling that this vision, not just the story, I mean, but the vision of a strip of tarmac running across the former site of a smallholding, had always been there in his mind, like a prism in his memory.

In any case, Jonas was now lying on the floor of Grorud Church, listening to his father’s extraordinary organ music. Wrapped in a cocoon of music, a fine web. He looked up at the picture of the Great White Flock, figures seeming almost to run together into a surging sea of humanity.

Earlier that autumn Jonas had had an experience which had reinforced his fear of crowds. He had taken part in one of the many demonstrations against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, not so much because he actually felt strongly about it as because it made a change from all of the demonstrations against the USA, expanding the protest march selection, so to speak, by a hundred per cent — besides which, a couple of not exactly unattractive girls in the parallel class to his own had lured him into taking part. The following day there was a picture in the paper from the mass rally on Universitetsplassen, a shot of the crowd. And Jonas was nowhere to be seen. He knew exactly where he had been standing: in reality between one of girls, the one carrying a Czech flag, and the guy in the unmistakeable parka holding one of the poles of a banner, both of them clearly visible in the foreground of the picture. But Jonas Wergeland had disappeared, he could not understand it, held the newspaper photograph up to the light as if that might help, reveal a shadow that was not otherwise discernible, but he was, and he remained, quite literally out of the picture, as if Judgement Day had come and he had been dragged down into Hell, while the true believers remained behind, or like those pictures one heard about — in the Soviet Union, aptly enough — from which people had been erased as if they had never existed. Jonas puzzled over this for a long time but eventually had to drop it. Only later did he come to interpret it as a clear forewarning, and an equally clear hint, as to the consequences of his grandfather’s death: Jonas would become invisible, merge with the crowd. One snowflake in a flurry of flakes. White. Colourless.

When do we become who we are? When do we become more than we think we are? When do we open the door onto all our inherent potential?

Jonas Wergeland lay on his back in Grorud Church, while the snow settled in a soft, thick layer on the roof and on the ground around the granite walls. The snow also seemed to make the light that much more intense, a light that made the stained-glass windows in the church glow, come alive. His father was playing another piece now, ‘ Les mages ’, although Jonas did not know that was what it was called, he was simply aware of the unusual rhythm, as of something swaying, pitching — for some reason he found himself picturing a caravan, a procession, something in motion, planets orbiting around one another; he had a feeling of weightlessness, of tremendous clarity, of gold, frankincense and myrrh. Again his eye turned to the fresco behind the altar, the two angels, both holding stringed instruments, in the air above the mass of humanity, the Great White Flock, those completely identical figures. Jonas was sure of just one thing: he had to break out of the crowd; no matter what it took he must not become invisible. And so he lay there, letting himself be spun into a cocoon, letting himself be enveloped, wrapped up; he felt heavy but no longer afraid, because something was about to happen, he knew it, the music would make it happen.

Outside the snow was falling, packing the whole of Grorud in cotton wool, making everything hushed . A hush that made you prick up your ears. Jonas lay in the choir and listened, was struck by a sensation that the crystals in the minerals of the granite — the quartz especially — were somehow singing along to the music, had been set in motion. As if the whole church were in the process of turning into a conductor, linked up to something greater. His father had always supported the theory that there was a connection between music and stones; that, particularly in Grorud Church, an accord existed between the strains of the organ and the granite, something normally found only in the great cathedrals of Europe.

Jonas felt his body going numb or going to sleep in order to recharge its batteries, he lay inside a casing, preparing for a metamorphosis. He listened to the music, hearing how it abruptly changed. He shut his eyes, let himself be enfolded, affected, and all at once he knew, knew that it was not impossible; a person could lift a ton-weight of a cupboard or do away with seven lovers at one blow, or not die even, despite the fact that everyone said you were doomed to die, so why, he thought, why couldn’t a person turn out at any minute to be quite different from what they appear to be.

And so they were talking about man’s potential to change his own nature. Or rather, Jonas and Axel started out by discussing the criteria for beauty; they were trying, as so often before, to define the hallmarks of a ‘sophisticated lady’. They had the same taste in women, would watch a lovely woman weave her way between the tables then nod eloquently at one another and say, as one voice: ‘Sophisticated Lady’. It was during this discussion of ‘sophistication’ and what it entailed that Axel embarked, right out of the blue, on a discourse on Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov and Grusjka, a woman who personified the Russian ideal of beauty and who, according to Dostoyevsky, or the narrator, had sable eyebrows. Axel found this enormously intriguing, wanted to know what Jonas thought about it: sable eyebrows, I ask you, what’s that supposed to mean? Was it an inference to her worth? Or was it the colour, the dark-brown, or the sheen, or did it perhaps say something about warmth or a savage streak? Thereupon they launched into a lengthy, fairly heated and amusing discussion of sophisticated ladies and sable eyebrows. It was not until the very tail end of this conversation that Axel got onto the subject of the human genome and from that to DNA — not the political party, that is, but the molecule.

Although many Norwegians know today who Axel Stranger is, not everyone knows much about his background or that he was for many years a promising figure in research circles at the University of Oslo, working in the borderland between chemistry and biology, a scientific field which, in Norway at that time, was lagging hopelessly behind the rest of international research; but since Axel Stranger had taken as his motto a quote from the philosopher Democritus — ‘Better to discover a causal relationship than to be the King of Persia’ — it was not surprising that, having been a keen turtle hunter at high school, he should have become caught up in, and wish to devote the rest of his life to, the study of what is possibly the greatest of all causal relationships: human DNA. ‘It’s such a privilege,’ he was forever telling Jonas, especially once he had reached a more advanced stage in his studies. ‘DNA has an inherent beauty that defies description, really sophisticated stuff,’ he said. ‘And what a story. Perfect. As good as the story of the Creation in the Old Testament.’ Jonas was not always the most interested of listeners, and Axel’s more involved chemical explanations tended to go right over his head, not least his somewhat long-winded lectures on the attempts being made, primarily in the USA, to dissect DNA, thus paving the way for the possibility in the future of artificially splicing together DNA molecules from different organisms, a carpentry of sorts involving micro-level joints and dovetailing. And then there was the almost unimaginable prospect of being able to map out all of the genes by figuring out the sequence of the base-pairs in the human DNA, which was made up of the twenty-three chromosomes. When, as on this day, Axel was pursuing these trains of thought at his quickest and most intense, Jonas would simply comment wryly ‘Well, let’s hope they soon find the gene for sable eyebrows,’ before turning his attention back to his surroundings.