The Seducer

Code of the Planets

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.

So where were they sitting, Axel and Jonas? They were alone for once, without the rest of the Nomads, and they were sitting not just anywhere, but in Bényoucéf’s restaurant, La P’tite Cuisine, in Solligata, directly behind Industry and Export House, and at that very moment their food came sailing out of the kitchen, an armada of uncommonly aromatic dishes, served up with a great deal of ceremony, having been prepared in their honour by Bényoucéf himself. Before them on the table landed a large steaming dish of couscous, along with another dish of freshly-cooked lamb and chicken and one containing turnip, courgettes, carrots and the odd-looking little legumes known in English as chick-peas; then there was a bowl of raisins and onion and one containing his fabulous hot red sauce. Eagerly, almost greedily, Jonas and Axel helped themselves, piling couscous onto their hot deep dishes, the smell of the food making their mouths water expectantly.

I had better say something about this. The Nomads were not, in fact, the ivory-tower intellectuals that some would have us believe. Against society’s three prevailing fundamental values they set a fourth: a hunger for knowledge — and, quite simply, hunger per se. One of the mainstays of the Nomads’ activities was a taste for — or better, still a hunger for — un-Norwegian food. And believe me, apart from the odd obligatory touch of French cuisine, it was not easy to find a foreign restaurant in the European backwater that Oslo then was. When Peppe’s Pizza Pub opened its doors it came as little short of a sensation — pizza in Oslo! Suddenly Norwegian citizens who ventured out on culinary expeditions could enjoy a flat circle of dough topped with mozarella cheese and all sorts of tasty titbits, from mushrooms and olives to chunks of bacon and spicy meatballs, all of this laced, what is more, with the most un-Norwegian and challenging ingredient of all: garlic. Other than that, it was the Chinese, enterprising as always, who in the Nomads’ day had already established themselves with the China House in Sofies gate, the Peking House in Munchs gate and the Min Wah Inn on Parkveien, which meant that even in Norway one could eat shark-fin soup and Peking duck, dishes which until then had only been the stuff of detective novels. Other notable oases and sources of input were Valente’s Osteria Italiana on Kirkeveien and Jacquet’s Bagatelle on Bygdøy allé, not, by any means, to be confused with today’s far more exclusive Bagatelle.

The Nomads often began their forays at one of these restaurants, to then, replete with un-Norwegian dishes and with the spices still smouldering on their palates, spend the rest of the night wandering the streets — with a pit-stop at the Magnet all-night café in the wee small hours to scribble down notes which, at any rate after a bit of polishing, would surely, at the very least, split the nebulae asunder with their brilliance. This unfamiliar food seemed not only to take their discussions down different tracks but also to facilitate the pursuance of one of their guiding principles: to dispute their own ways of thinking. Thus they had, for example, to reconsider their repudiation of both Arne Næss’s theories of philosophical ecology and Johan Galtung’s differentiation between direct and structural violence, late one night on their way down Pilestrædet from Bislett, having first consumed a variety of foreign dishes, the one which really tipped the scales — as far as self-criticism was concerned, that is — most probably being the chicken with cashew nuts in a hot spicy sauce.

Their favourite place, however, was still Bényoucéf’s bustling restaurant where, once they came to know the lively and extremely hospitable proprietor, they could order couscous even when it was not a standard item on the menu. Not surprisingly, the Nomads felt an affinity for Bényoucéf, a Muslim, born on camel back, so to speak, in Aïn-Sefra, deep in the desert, to the south of Oran in Algeria: a real live nomad in the middle of Oslo. And I believe that Bényoucéf had a particular soft spot for the five young people who were such frequent visitors to his restaurant and who, in many ways, stood out from the rest of his clientele, which included all of the A-list celebrities of the day, names long since forgotten, who went there on account of the establishment’s status as an ‘in’ place — to be seen — rather than, for example, because of the wonderful gigot of lamb you could get your teeth into there. Some people may perhaps remember La P’tite Cuisine, that pulsating place where a straw hat was popped on your head and the tables were set so close together that they looked more like long tables, with red and white checked clothes, candles in bottles, walls covered in Campari signs and tricolours, photographs of patrons and a lot of other bric-a-brac; all accompanied, of course, by accordion music, and with the patron himself, sporting a ring in his ear and a straw boater given to him by none other than Maurice Chevalier, shouting and exclaiming, a constant litany of ‘mon Dieu!’ and ‘c’est vrai!’ and ‘merde alors’. All in all, La P’tite Cuisine was the scene of much friendly chaos, incredibly exotic back then, a fact which most people seem to have forgotten: how different and new this easy-going manner was, this warmth, so totally alien to Norwegians. They have forgotten that Bényoucéf the nomad was the first to break with the stuffy Norwegian tradition for boring white tablecloths and haughty waiters. For this he ought of course to have been awarded a medal instead of having the derogatory term ‘dago’ slung at him, as so often happened. Gratitude is not the most apparent Norwegian virtue. No one stood up for Bényoucéf when he went bankrupt, no one demanded that his restaurant should be reconstructed as soon as possible at the Folk Museum as the significant cultural milestone that it was.

So how do the pieces of a life fit together?

As he was finishing off his second generous helping of couscous, Jonas, fired by the chillies in the Harissa sauce, had the urge to tell Axel something about his own studies, first and foremost about how scientists were trying to locate unknown planets, calculating on the basis of minuscule, inexplicable disturbances on known planets, something he knew would strike a chord with Axel, for whom the whole question of cause and effect never palled. Following on from this, he told him about Percival Lowell’s somewhat confused hunt for Planet X, a hunt that eventually led to the discovery of the planet Pluto, although Lowell himself did not live to see it. It was a little like the hunt for the genes, Jonas thought. Even Lowell’s Christian name, Percival, put one in mind of the search for the Holy Grail.

By a strange coincidence, that evening they had both brought something to show the other. Axel had a copy of an article from a relatively recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which he showed Jonas some electron-microscope pictures from Herbert Boyer’s and Stanley Cohen’s successful attempt to create and duplicate a plasmid made up of DNA fragments from various sources, an attempt which, incidentally, introduced the methods which to this day form one of the cornerstones of the furiously expanding — and as furiously debated — recombinant DNA technology. Jonas, for his part, produced a book containing two telescope images from the 1930s that enabled Clyde Tombaugh at long last to detect the planet Pluto, ten thousand times too faint to be discerned with the naked eye. Just as Bényoucéf came over to ask if they were enjoying their meal, they noticed, to their astonishment, how alike the two pictures were. The electron-microscope images of plasmids with their DNA loops might have been a picture of the stars in the heavens, especially of the sort in which the outlines of the constellations have been drawn in, and vice-versa. Jonas had a fleeting vision of a day when scientists would discover patterns in the galaxies not unlike the coiling form of the DNA. Jonas was aware, in other words, of a childish notion, magnified only slightly, resurfacing: the suspicion that the universe, all of that inconceivable vastness, amounted to no more than one teeny-weeny cell in the fabric of something else entirely. Axel, who had also been musing over the similarity between the two pictures, wondered out loud, ‘What if the guys who were straining to catch a glimpse of Pluto’s secrets quite unexpectedly discovered a new clue to the mysteries of DNA, or that the guys who were trying to chart our genes unaccountably stumbled on a new planet. What if it were all somehow part of a circle?’

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.’