The Exception (16 page)

Malene’s kitchen knives have upright handles that she can grip like a saw, so she won’t have to bend her wrist when using them, and she owns a selection of kitchen implements with thick, soft handles to make them easier to hold. With a little good will the chubby, colourful shapes could be taken for smart designer ware. Some guests have actually asked where she bought them, because they’d like to get them too. But deep down there is always the persistent underlying fear that another attack could strike at any time; the dreadful possibility that tomorrow she might fall ill again.

You are always hoping, trying to persuade yourself. ‘I’m doing really well. I’ve hardly felt a twinge for the last five weeks. Maybe it’s gone away.’

During the good days Malene remembers what it was like to be free and physically independent of others. Sometimes, perhaps most often in the spring, she even indulges in an expensive whim, like buying shoes that are not made by an orthopaedic shoemaker. And then, always, your hopes are crushed. It seems so arbitrary that you can’t help yourself and you start looking for explanations. Should I stop eating chocolate? Or bread made with yeast? Am I sleeping enough? Or maybe too much? Are the attacks stress-related? Am I being punished? What have I done?

And so it goes, year after year. Malene cannot see any discernible order. The only pattern is that what happens always seems random.

When the attack begins it brings not only the crippling pain, but also psychological malaise and such disappointment. So, three weeks on a no-sugar diet had no effect, nor did avoiding stress. It didn’t help to meditate or attend sessions with a healer. The disappointment mingles with the pain, the helplessness and the humiliation of having to be carried down the stairs once again.

All this doesn’t suit Malene – she who has fought for an academic career, who now lives in a city despite the provincial life that was charted for her; she who has travelled alone in Africa and Latin America and Asia. Some people advise her to give up, to stop fantasising about better days. But she’s not like that – she can’t simply resign herself to this. She needs to beat the system. But with every new setback she succumbs to a bitter rage at having it rammed down her throat that she is not in control of her own body.

Rasmus’s plane from Cologne is due to land just before eight in the evening. His firm is paying for a taxi from the airport, so with a bit of luck he should arrive around nine o’clock. After all those smart German hotels, Malene wants to make him feel that coming home is still special. But how to plan a festive evening for someone who has spent ten days stuffing himself with food and drink in elegant restaurants?

Her idea is a meal that’s light and easy, something they can enjoy in the bedroom. She decides to serve prosciutto, olives, organic tomatoes with olive oil, goat’s cheese and slow-risen spelt bread from Emmery’s. Rasmus loves good bread and happily eats slice after slice with just butter and salt on top.

To make up for the simple menu, she puts effort into the drinks, recreating the blends of freshly squeezed fruit juices that they both loved on their holiday in Vietnam. She has bought four kinds of fruit: lime, orange, peach and melon. They’ll mix the juice with the golden tequila from another of Rasmus’s trips. As an extra, she has also got the coming month’s Cinematek programme – the Film House is showing a John Cassavetes retrospective. Malene hasn’t mentioned this when they’ve spoken on the phone. She wants it to be a surprise.

The moment Rasmus steps in through the door, one look is enough to tell her. It’s not food and drink that he’s been missing. He realises that she is in no mood for foreplay on the hall floor and instead they go straight to the bedroom.

She lies with her head on his chest, sniffing his scent. The hotel’s unfamiliar shower-gel adds a new note.

He is truly fired up tonight. It seems easy to keep her mind off DCGI and for a while her body tells her that she is succeeding. But then she finds herself looking at a cupboard door that hasn’t closed properly. It juts out from the wall at the same angle as that of the open window. And from the bed it’s difficult to make out the image on Rasmus’s film poster by the door. It looks like a dark rectangle with patches of reflected light from the lamp in the ceiling.

She tries to concentrate on what they are doing, but it’s not easy.

‘Rasmus, no, I’m not with you. Let’s wait a while.’

He rolls away from her. A muscle in his face twitches irritably, but when he speaks his voice is kind. ‘Malene, what’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know. It’s … nothing. I just don’t seem to be in the mood.’

He sighs, but is gentle with her. ‘Let me fix you a drink. A bit more lime and no melon – what do you say?’

She sits up. ‘I’m sorry, forgive me. Somehow it doesn’t seem …’

She sits level with his belly, looking down over his handsome body.

‘Let me help you.’

‘I’m not a cow that needs milking,’ he snaps.

‘I didn’t mean that.’

They go to the kitchen and set out the food. Malene speaks about events in the office, but Rasmus has already heard most of it because she called him on his mobile at Cologne airport.

Rasmus is the only one from the Film Studies course who has gone into IT. Two years ago, when Malene met Rasmus for the first time, he was still a member of his film group and they were all out shooting an interview in Lake Peblinge, with both interviewer and interviewee up to their chests in water. Malene walked past while Rasmus was shouting directions from the
lakeside path. Curiosity made her stop and look and it didn’t take Rasmus long to chat her up. One year has passed since he moved into her flat.

Listening to her speaking about her day, he seems rather gloomy. She asks him why and after hesitating for a moment, he tells her: ‘Malene, I’ll happily support you – it’s just that it’s all the time, it never stops. There’s always something on your mind. Don’t you ever relax?’

Malene feels fed up with the way Anne-Lise and the whole office situation has spoiled her evening. It’s been eating away at her. ‘Rasmus! It’s not my fault that someone sent me a death threat. And it’s not my fault that I lost a whole area of my work today.’

‘True. Sure.’

‘But you sound as if you’re blaming me. Anyone would be angry if he or she were told to hand over important work to a colleague who’s useless.’

‘I said it’s true. Look, I know it’s not your fault and it’s really serious. And still you took all this trouble to make great food. And fantastic drinks.’ He starts slicing the tomatoes as he speaks. ‘But you know what I mean. You always have to worry about something.’

‘There you go. You still think I’m to blame.’

‘No, listen. I had a good time in Cologne. I enjoyed it there, just as I enjoyed my sales trips to Norway and Austria and Portugal. Every time I’m away I have to convince myself that I’ll enjoy returning home to you just as much.’

‘Rasmus, don’t start. Not now, with all this happening in my life.’

He puts the knife down. ‘The last time I came home it was just the same. You were unhappy because your best friend had disappointed you by not writing while she was in Kenya. It mattered to you, I understand that. The time before that you were in the middle of one of your attacks … but that’s OK. It’s not the arthritis that bothers me. But then there was the time
you were miserable because you were just back from the trip to your friend Charlotte.’

His expression softens. ‘It would be wonderful if I could just look forward to coming home and being with you.’ He must have seen that his blows have hit home. ‘Malene, I’m trying to tell you that all this makes what we’ve got together seem so fragile.’

She has not the slightest wish to co-operate. If he feels he has to talk about how ‘fragile’ their relationship is, then it’s up to him. But she starts to question him all the same, and then she can’t stop the tears from coming.

Rasmus backs down, saying that he simply meant that their relationship is worth fighting for and they should do everything they can to strengthen it. Slowly, he comforts her, caressing her sore fingers gently. Sometimes she feels as if he too gains some peace by soothing her poor joints. They are both reclining on the new sofa. He massages her shoulders, her head resting in his lap. A little later they laugh about getting so emotional and joke about the way her tears made patterns on the surface of her melon-juice cocktail.

Malene wonders about Anne-Lise and her husband – if they are ever like this. In a suburban villa, shared with their two children, everything must be different. Are Anne-Lise and Henrik happy tonight? Now that Paul has handed Anne-Lise the responsibility for book enquiries, might they be toasting her success with champagne? Malene finds this scene hard to visualise. Besides, she has never seen Anne-Lise truly happy and at ease. Why should getting the book enquiries change her?

Rasmus’s massage is making her relax. Her thoughts drift. She thinks about Iben. Imagine: Iben has no lover to be with. How empty the evenings must be for her, alone with her microwaved food. How she must long for someone to love.

Rasmus has moved on to rub her scalp. The tickly feeling is wonderful. She has filled the room with candles. Rasmus and she don’t speak.

Maybe Gunnar and Iben wouldn’t be such a crazy match. Iben
was obviously attracted to Gunnar, but it hadn’t seemed such a good fit at first. Not that Malene would ever have tried to stop it, naturally.

She has a glimpse of Gunnar and Iben’s future. They live in Gunnar’s flat, sharing it with his pieces of African furniture, their baby and visits from his two daughters from his first marriage. Without Malene wanting to, she is suddenly part of this set-up. Rasmus has left her and she, like an unmarried, sickly aunt, comes to see her friends often. She shakes the image off almost before it has even formed in her mind.

A little later she and Rasmus are in bed together and now Malene takes the initiative. She notes the odd scent of hotel toiletries again and does everything she can to make it special for him. His weight on her is just right and she enjoys his strong, healthy hands. She has an orgasm this time, though a small one.

Rasmus wants to get up and have something more to eat. He is content now, easier to talk to. She is less sure about her own feelings.

Back in bed they lie and talk. She shows him the printout of the email from revenge_is_near. He says she mustn’t be afraid, she’ll be all right. She tells him about the evening they spent with Grith and about the mental disorder that causes a person’s identity to split and dissociate. This interests him. He is sitting up, eating prosciutto with leftover pieces of melon. There’s a slice of bread with butter and salt on the side.

‘What Grith says is, the emailer might behave like a perfectly normal person – not someone obviously violent, that is. It could be anyone who knows us. And whoever it is also knows a great deal about genocides.’

‘So how would you go about finding out who it is?’ Rasmus asks.

‘Well, it could be someone who is connected to the Centre and whose personality has split to separate out his or her anger – someone we meet often, perhaps every day.’

Later, when Malene has started her evening finger exercises,
using her blue ball, Rasmus still ponders what she has said. His mouth glistens with melon juice.

‘Did Grith explain how to find out if a person has parcelled off anger and so on into a separate personality?’

‘No, she didn’t.’

‘So you might think Anne-Lise did it, but you can’t prove it? You have to treat her as if she were innocent?’

Malene smiles to let him know that he has hit the nail on the head. ‘You’re so right.’

They lie close, comfortable together, and fantasise about how they could trap the sender of the emails. Malene’s head rests on Rasmus’s chest and her arms are around him. She looks out through the window.

She thinks about Iben and how it has only been forty-eight hours since Iben was too scared to come here to stay the night because she really believed that someone might break in and slay her while she slept. What has changed since then?

Sometimes you feel deeply sad on the first truly lovely day in spring. Sometimes you feel fresh and alert after a stupidly late night. Now Malene feels exactly the opposite of what she expected: she feels safe. She loves holding her tentative lover close and thinks that she would do anything at all to make him happier about being with her.

Europe’s Forgotten Genocide

In May a conference arranged by the Danish Centre for Genocide Information will examine the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their homes in Eastern Europe. It is one of the world’s largest ethnic-cleansing operations, but until recently it was more frequently discussed among Holocaust deniers than among serious researchers
.

By Malene Jensen

The Second World War was almost over, and the Soviet Red Army was pushing into Germany. The Russian soldiers had fought for two years in German-occupied Russia and Poland, marching through landscapes scarred by the Nazi attempt to conquer the Slav race.

Even before the declaration of war, Hitler had instructed German army leaders to kill ‘all men, women and children of Polish origin, showing neither mercy nor compassion’. Apart from acts of war, German soldiers took part in this genocide by shooting, executing and enforcing planned mass death by starvation of at least ten million Russians and Poles. Now the situation was reversed. The Soviet soldiers found the German countryside and its villages empty of able-bodied men. German aggression had cost practically every Russian soldier the life of a loved one – a family member, an old friend, a comrade-in-arms – and for four years they had all been hungry, frozen and without women.

The men went berserk. There are endless eyewitness accounts of how all women, from ten to eighty, were raped. Some died after multiple rapes. Not all the women were shot afterwards, but the Russian officer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, later a Nobel Prize-winning author, wrote about what he had seen in the long, epic poem
Prussian Nights
: ‘Virgins were made women, and soon the women would be dead bodies, as,
sick of mind and with bloodshot eyes, they begged: “Kill me, soldier!’”