The Exception (59 page)

Iben catches on quickly and starts laughing too. ‘You have a friend who … I see! Of course you do!’

Anne-Lise is not satisfied. ‘Which party is that?’

Paul leans on Malene’s desk. ‘Anne-Lise, guess!’

‘Your old friend is an MP for the Danish People’s Party? That racist lot?’

Paul smiles proudly. ‘Yep. That’s right.’

Then he notices the look on her face. ‘Whatever we’re doing here, we’re doing it to serve our cause. That’s all that matters.’

‘I see. But what happens now?’

‘We carry on as usual. But now we have a new trophy to add to our collection. And the risk that we’ll be put under DIHR is a little less imminent.’

Malene returns with the glasses and tries to catch up. ‘And Frederik, what about him? Is he going to put up with Ole’s decision to let you stay?’

‘No. That he will not do.’

Malene looks around to catch someone’s eye. ‘Aren’t Frederik and Ole friends any more? Is he leaving the board?’

Paul begins to twist the champagne cork. ‘Malene, that’s exactly why we’re celebrating!’

The cork pops and shoots off to land high up on a shelf. Camilla glances at Iben. If she hadn’t seen her anger this morning, or heard the story about her past, or read the fragments from her article – well, she would’ve thought Iben was quite normal. Every time Paul says something meant to be funny, Iben laughs longer and louder than usual. She sounds as if she’s been at the bottle already. Camilla sips her champagne and curses the day she first allowed Dragan into her life. Three years have passed since she learned all the things that Iben has now found out about him. When she looks back at the men in her life, she is so grateful to Finn. After Dragan, marrying someone like Finn is the best choice she could ever have made.

Malene hasn’t touched her champagne and seems uneasy. ‘Paul, we’ve been so worried about you. And about the Centre too. About all of us. You vanished so suddenly and then we thought, maybe Ole would try and …’

Paul watches the bubbles in his glass, tilting it gently sideways to top it up. ‘I was thinking about all of you too, Malene. But the
situation turned out to be more complicated than I’d thought because a group of politicians had just left on a fact-finding trip to Iraq. So I couldn’t meet with the people I needed to see – not until they returned. I hadn’t anticipated that.’

When he finishes pouring his champagne, his eyes meet Malene’s. ‘And if the board is to work together as a team, Ole couldn’t have the chance to say the wrong things to me or to send me a letter he’d only regret later. Everything had to be put on hold.’

Iben has more questions. ‘Paul, when you said you hadn’t anticipated it, do you mean …? You know, when Gunnar was here and Ole turned up “by chance” …? Did you plan it all along?’

Paul raises his glass to her and beams. ‘Strictly off the record.’

Camilla stays silent. Her attention is slipping. The office atmosphere is suddenly so excitable and she realises now what a relief it is to have read Iben’s jottings, with not a mention of Camilla or Dragan anywhere. She sighs and takes a hearty sip from her glass.

Iben has insisted, day in and day out, that Camilla is lying. But now it seems certain that Iben knows no more about Camilla’s past than what she has already announced.

Camilla goes to sit in her own chair. She feels very tired now. It would be a dream if this new, jovial Paul told them to take the day off, but of course he won’t. He pours everyone more champagne and splashes some on his black jacket. It doesn’t seem to worry him. He’s on a high.

‘I should’ve bought another bottle!’

Malene’s glass is still full, but Iben and Anne-Lise want more.

How can he miss the way everything has changed while he was away?

He raises his glass in another toast. The third one, at least. ‘Malene, this celebration is for you too! None of you needs to worry any more. Our Centre has a future. We are stronger than ever. This is a good day for genocide studies!’

It all starts without a sign of anything out of the ordinary.

A woman professor from Missouri is speaking to Iben on the phone.

‘In my view we overcomplicate the process leading to genocide. Fundamentally, it’s straightforward. Once a population group sees advantages in killing off another group, it triggers a sequence of psychological mechanisms. Gradually, suitable adjustments are made in the group’s ideology. History is revised accordingly. Highly charged public debates will emerge spontaneously and, step-by-step, they’ll develop the intellectual rationale for extermination.

‘In the end, the stark truth is that members of one group murder members of another. The only possibility of stopping them is if the world community demonstrates that it is keeping an eye on the situation and isn’t going to condone any criminal activity.’

Iben objects, but only to keep the discussion going. Actually, she’s so fed up with her own arguments, which sound naïve and kind of Danish, that she almost looks forward to being contradicted. The professor obliges.

‘You know, with hindsight everyone notices the falsification of history in the lead up to genocide, the ideology and so on, and decides that this must have been what did it. But just examine the genocides you’re more familiar with and you’ll see that, when all’s said and done, the perpetrators are driven by egoism every time. Never mind the cover stories they use to persuade themselves or the world at large. Or their victims.’

Later that day Iben feels nauseous and shaky. She’s definitely
not well and takes two aspirins, even though she can’t identify any aches or pains.

The
Genocide News
issue on Turkey has been badly delayed by the upsets of the last few days. She must try to concentrate. Even so, an hour before the end of the working day she can’t stand sitting there any longer. She must get home.

This anxiety is no stranger to her – she recognises it from when she was nineteen and suffered a breakdown: her body seizing up, as if she has caught a dreadful illness, but nothing hurts.

She is terrified of being referred to a psychiatric clinic and put back on medication again. Many of her former fellow patients are probably only able to exist with the help of mind-bending drugs. Ten years ago, Iben had to fight for her return to stability and real work and she isn’t certain she can do it again.

Before leaving the office she looks out to make sure that there’s no dark-haired, square-jawed man waiting down there in the street. It’s pointless, though. You can’t see properly from up here. Perhaps Dragan Jelisic is there. Perhaps he isn’t.

Iben announces that she needs to go home because she has a headache. She quickly checks the on-screen camera image. The landing is empty. The elevator is empty too. Nobody is waiting for her in the street.

She cycles away. For a February day it’s not that cold. Then she realises that her balance is too poor to continue cycling. She locks up the bike just a few hundred metres from DCGI.

Men, broad smiles on their faces, hold severed human heads in their hands. Archive images drift in front of her mind’s eye.

We distort our memories when it serves our purposes. Our thoughts, too. Even our senses cannot be trusted; we reshape the messages they send to suit our needs.

How much of what I’m thinking is nothing but the egoistic, post-hoc rationalisation that the professor was talking about?

When I stood up for Anne-Lise, I believed I was good. Was I lying to myself? Was my choice to risk my job and my friendship
with Malene based on nothing more than a notion of what would be to my own best advantage?

Three million corpses scattered over the paddy-fields of Cambodia. All slaughtered by their own countrymen, believing they were right – but also because they felt that there might be something in it for them.

Five skulls, sticking up from a water-filled ditch. Plants, winding their way up, around and between them.

Sure, I might gain from losing my friend. I’d be free to date Gunnar. Also, I’d be free of the duty to help Malene, whose arthritis will only get worse with time.

How could I believe that I was making a sacrifice in order to resist the bullying? But I did believe it. I truly thought it was hard to make the choice I made. I felt heroic. Truly good.

‘Hey! Watch where you’re going!’

Iben walks with her head down, without looking where she is going. Now she has almost fallen over a small, white bulldog. Whining, it leaps sideways against a wall, obviously thinking that it’s about to be stepped on.

Its owner tells her off, while he pulls at the dog’s long, red leash. ‘You’re not the only one on the pavement, you know!’

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!’ She sighs.

Meanwhile a thought has struck her. That’s it! Though I’ve seen myself as idealistic, I’ve lied to myself. That’s the evil act that has been gnawing at the back of my mind all day long. I couldn’t figure it out. But now that I know, my nausea will fade and disappear.

The sense of unease and queasiness does not leave her, however. She straightens up and looks around. She hasn’t gone very far. No one resembles Jelisic. She scans the streets in both directions. Pedestrians are few and far between, but he could be in any one of the cars. The traffic seems unending.

She cannot possibly defend herself against a man in a car.

She cannot possibly go home now.

Jelisic could find her there, no trouble at all – there is no
steel-lined door, no CCTV camera. If she did go home, she wouldn’t be able to relax.

Crowded streets are her best hiding place. She walks quickly now, taking long, decisive strides. It helps against her tremor, which grows fainter the faster she walks.

No Jelisic at the Vibenhus roundabout or in Tagens Road or Nørrebro Street.

She practically flies along, one street after another, running to get away from Jelisic and from the evil she senses in everyone she overtakes. She knows that at one time in their life, each person she passes has done evil things towards another person, but they no longer think about it. They all pretend they’re so innocent.

If they thought it would benefit them, they would knife the next man in the back, each and every one of them. Only lack of opportunity determines if they become genocidal killers or not. If their community leaders pressed the right buttons, these people would be off on the hunt straight away.

When she gets to Nørrebro, there are more people about and it is harder to keep her distance.

Iben can smell the evil inside a young man cutting in just ahead of her. He is wearing a long coat and carries a briefcase, but she has a vision of him inside a Russian army helicopter throwing out mined toys to kill children in Afghanistan. Ruthlessness oozes from his pores and the smell prickles inside Iben’s nostrils, like the drinks of freshly opened lemonade she remembers from childhood.

She veers to pass him, steps into the cycle path and hears the bells as two cyclists come up from behind. She leaps back onto the pavement.

She lands near a young woman walking her old bike with a child-seat on the back. She is the type of person who, as a trained nurse, helped eliminate invalids in gas chambers well before the Second World War. Her brand of evil stinks like the raw meat
left in a plastic bag that you forgot to throw out before going away on a holiday.

I’m like a rat, Iben tells herself. My sense of smell is a rat’s. A lab rat’s.

When they tickle one tiny bit of my brain with an electric current I’ll run one way and when they try another bit, I’ll run in the opposite direction. Like everyone would. Social psychologists can predict what I’ll do next. And when a researcher puts me in a cage with another rat, we will tear and bite each other until one of us dies.

That’s what we do, never mind what intellectual ideas we use for display. Razor-toothed rats without free will.

A little boy is strapped into the bicycle child-seat. He is asleep and his head in its little helmet is drooping. His romper suit is open at the neck and the smell of evil rises from him like the reek of burning grass.

I am sick, she thinks. It’s obvious. It isn’t normal to smell people like this. Or to think in this way. The next moment she is sweating copiously under her thin jacket. Her whole body becomes damp and cold.

She knows why. And she knows that she doesn’t want to think of what is to come. Her nausea grows, until at last she throws up. Leaning against a board advertising a kebab place, her stomach contents pump out of her and into the gutter.

Didn’t I have one of these attacks in the office one night? The others had left. I remember how furious I was with myself then. And with Malene. What was I doing there? It was something that eased the pressure. Some people smash china or cut themselves. What did I do?

What was I doing? I know I was writing. When I freak out, I write or I read.

She weeps.

I’m sick in the head. I don’t want to be sick. It’s hateful. I want to be able to work at DCGI. And to live with Gunnar.

I want a life.

I won’t have one much longer. The others will realise soon enough that I’m the one who’s abnormal. I’m the only one in the office who has been in a psychiatric ward. The only one who Frederik called ‘Batgirl’, because he – like the rest of them – can tell that I’m different. I’m the only one who’d willingly walk around for four months with a knife tied to my leg.

She wipes her mouth with the back of her glove and cleans off the vomit. She is still leaning against the board. She remembers that after the evening in the office she had a headache cycling home.

I was sick then. Like now. When I rode along St Kjeld Street I kept telling myself: ‘I’m not like that. I didn’t do that.’ Nevertheless I recalled what it was that I had done. But by the time I had turned into Jagt Street it had become very distant, like hearing about it late one night at a party. Once I reached Tagens Road and home, I had even stopped saying, ‘I didn’t do that.’

Her ability to think is gone. She wants to lie down, but can’t do that on the pavement. The next-best thing would be to sit on a bench for a while or maybe go into a shop to rest, but that’s out of the question too. She feels safer from Jelisic while she’s on the move. Now she has to hurry, or he’ll find her.