Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

Such a thought called for at least one glass of calvados, not to say two, and it was after a much more down-to-earth conversation, more in the vein of the sable eyebrows, when it was almost time to meet up with the other Nomads as agreed, in front of the National Theatre, that Axel first told Jonas about his feelings of frustration. He confessed that he had immersed himself in the study of molecular biology and biochemistry and groped his way towards an understanding of DNA and the genome in an attempt to find out who he was. ‘No, I mean it,’ he said when Jonas laughed. But he had been disappointed. ‘Christ, Jonas, we’re talking out-and-out reductionism. An attempt at utter simplification. Downright materialism. A one hundred per cent mechanical view of life. A totally passé bit of Newtonian logic when you come right down to it.’ Axel was more than just frustrated, he was undergoing a crisis; even his thick shock of hair was looking a little limp. ‘I mean, it goes without saying,’ he said. ‘There are some things that occur in biology for which there is no simple explanation.’

‘Like what?’

‘How a person is formed. How the pieces of a life fit together. Why a person can suddenly change.’

‘I thought that was exactly what DNA was — quite literally the story of how the pieces of a life fit together.’

‘Yeah right, a life, in purely biological terms, but what is Life?’

It was all Jonas could do not to make a face that said ‘bullshit’. Instead he said: ‘Maybe we should get going.’ The minute he said it he regretted it. Jonas Wergeland had nothing against extravagant issues, questions that were two sizes too big, that made pragmatic individuals and, not least, commonsensical Norwegians snort. Besides which, Jonas knew that this was one of Axel’s great goals in life: to pose questions that were worth more than a hundred answers. ‘How’s about another calva for the road?’ he said.

Axel waved to Bényoucéf, simply raised two fingers, and seconds later two glasses of calvados were set on the table. ‘Promise you won’t laugh,’ said Axel, ‘but here’s what I’ve been thinking: what have been the most important experiences in my life?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Amazing as it may seem, the most important experiences in my life are experiences I have heard about from other people.’ Axel waved his arms in the direction of the other people in the restaurant, or bistro as Bényoucéf insisted on calling it. ‘In other words, other people’s experiences have become my experiences.’

‘I still don’t see what you’re getting at,’ said Jonas.

‘I think what I’m trying to say is that every human being could be said to be as much an accumulation of stories as of molecules. I am, in part, all the things I have read over the years. They don’t leave me. They settle inside me like — how can I put it? — like sediment.”

‘So you believe that the stories you have heard are every bit as important as the genes with which you’ve been endowed?’

Axel looked thoughtful, as people often do on hearing someone else neatly summing up their own thoughts. ‘Why not?’ he said.

‘Yeah, why not?’ said Jonas. ‘So you think a person can actually be changed by hearing a particular story?’

‘Exactly. Maybe that’s what life is all about. Collecting stories,’ Axel said. ‘Building up an arsenal of good tales, that can be put together in all sorts of complicated ways: like DNA.’

‘If you’re right, then it’s not a matter of manipulating our genes but the stories in our lives,’ said Jonas.

‘It’s not the sequence of the base-pairs, the genes, we ought to be mapping out, but the sequence of the stories that go to make up a life,’ said Axel. ‘And who knows? Arrange them differently and you might get another life altogether.’

They sat for a while in silence, each fingering his empty glass.

Jonas looked at his watch. Axel nodded. They were both feeling a little sheepish.

They paid their bill and were escorted to the door by a concerned Bényoucéf: ‘You boys think too much,’ he said. ‘ Bien sûr .’

And so, and here I am thinking of the discovery of the planet Pluto, in every life there are stories which are not immediately apparent but which you know are there due to their unseen effect on other people and the known stories. I fumbled about in the dark for a long time before coming upon the story I am now about to tell, one that ought to be told at this particular juncture, while we are on the subject of astronomy and molecular biology, since it was hardly a coincidence that the moon, La Luna, should have been the focus of world attention during the summer when Jonas Wergeland first shot his genetic package at a girl’s womb, or, as it is so grandly termed, made his sexual debut.

The house on Hvaler had stood empty since his grandfather’s death, and Jonas was not sure how he would take being back on the island again when he set foot on it in the middle of July, after several tedious weeks of sorting mail for the Post Office. But the minute he dumped his rucksack down in the yard between the nasturtium-covered rockeries, he began to feel that this summer might spell the beginning of a new era. This was Jonas Wergeland’s first summer as the Duke, and by a stroke of good luck he had two whole weeks to himself, before his mother and Buddha came down from Grorud. And, as if to physically mark the passing of a very difficult phase in his life, Marie F. appeared on, or floated onto, the scene.

Jonas was down on the jetty, seeing to a mooring line when she slid, suddenly and soundlessly, into his line of sight in a slender white kayak, an older model. She backed water, held still, smiled up at him. The oars glinted. She was not brown like the other girls: if anything she was pure-white. And pretty well built. Or voluptuous, Jonas decided later. She had fair hair and blue eyes and Jonas, standing there with the rope in his hand, in the middle of tying a half-hitch, felt that tingle starting all the way down at his tail-bone and slowly working its way up to the back of his neck as if his spine had turned into some kind of thermometer.

He stretched out on the jetty, on his stomach. She held the kayak still. They talked, while minnows and jellyfish glided past in the perfectly clear water, transparent as an aquarium. She came from Sandefjord but was studying at the College of Commerce in Oslo. She was visiting an aunt on the other side of the island. Jonas told her about his grandfather. They talked half the day away, while dapples of sunlight danced on the hull of the kayak, leaving rippling patterns on the sandy bed when the odd crab sidled past.

It was a two-man kayak and the next day, after she had got rid of the ballast, she took him out in it. The weather had been quite beautiful for weeks, the sea like a millpond most of the time. They paddled all the way out to Tisler. Jonas was surprised by just how fast they could move if they put a bit of effort into it; he loved the nice sound the slender vessel made as it sliced through the water, liked paddling in time, in sync, sitting behind her, copying her movements, watching the play of the muscles across her back, bare apart from the straps of her bikini, white skin and a faint tang of sweat from her armpits. ‘I prefer a kayak,’ she said, ‘because you sit so close to the water, almost become part of it.’ They had the sea pretty much to themselves, this being before the waters around the skerries were transformed into something akin to a motorway, trafficked by a constant stream of whining motor boats — a fleet whose numbers and aggregate value increased in inverse ratio to the general grousing about hard times and the size of the national deficit.