The Exception (3 page)

She does the rounds of the room and then tucks herself away in a corner where she can half-sit, half-lean on a table. A man starts reminiscing about nights spent clubbing. He’s a dentist, fresh from his qualifying exams and already well on his way to becoming an alcoholic.

She looks up and, across the room, sees Gunnar. Malene once spoke of him as ‘such a big guy’ and Iben got the impression that he was John Goodman-sized. Now she realises that he is more like the young Gérard Depardieu.

Iben sees Malene get up from an inflatable armchair and walk towards Gunnar; the dentist turns to watch.

Iben crushes a crisp between her teeth. Some women, she thinks, would be bloody irritated if their friend had that sort of effect on every single guy they met. She observes Malene lead Gunnar away to the relative peace of the hallway.

Later, Iben and one of Rasmus’s best friends end up side by side on the sofa. He wears a neon-blue jacket with contrasting seams and is proudly telling her that he’s just landed a job as a copywriter in an advertising agency. His voice sounds louder than it used to be and his laughter seems more mechanical.

‘Human rights and art – great stuff, but there’s no money in it!’

He sees the expression on Iben’s face. ‘Sure, it’s not so bad being more or less broke. But unemployment, that’s something else. It’s awful. I mean, just look at the way you’re treated by your prospective employers. They couldn’t give a fuck. They know perfectly well they can take their pick from thousands of graduates.’ Some of the people standing nearby are listening in and he turns to them as well. ‘But in a good agency you get treated differently. The bosses know how few there are who have both the talent and the stamina to put up with that line of work.’ He smiles. ‘Like, watch the style; fuck the substance.’

He mentions the name of his agency and Iben is obviously meant to recognise it. ‘We’ve been on TV. Like you.’

Iben pours fruit juice into her plastic cup while keeping an eye on Gunnar, who has come back into the room. He isn’t surrounded by any female admirers. Maybe because by now they’re old enough to feel self-conscious or because they think that, in the flesh, he doesn’t quite live up to their fantasies. Or maybe because he is just too old.

Rasmus’s friend is still working his story. Now he’s telling everyone about how his agency paid for him and the rest of the crew to take a three-day Christmas break, partying in Barcelona, and how it was worth it, given the firm’s investment in their salaries.

Maybe it’s the impressed looks on the faces of the listeners that prompts Iben to jump in and defend traditional values, such as ‘Money isn’t everything’ and ‘You can’t buy happiness’. In no time she realises that this discussion is just a rerun of their old debates, as if they are all battle-worn politicians in the last days of an election campaign, able to predict their opponents’ arguments.

Avoiding eye contact, she deliberately turns away from the discussion and tries instead to eavesdrop on the conversation of the two strangers sitting opposite.

But Rasmus’s friend hasn’t finished. ‘Iben, your job is different. I would’ve liked it myself. You investigate serious stuff. Humanitarian issues. That’s really worthwhile. It means something.’ He pats his bright-blue jacket. ‘You try to make the world a better place, sure. But I’m not convinced that will ever happen. It’s not top of the agenda.’ He breaks off, apparently amused by his own paradox.

Later, Iben finds herself standing next to a child’s folding cot, all aluminium and nylon, like a tiny piece of camping equipment. She is balancing a glass of red wine and three broken crackers.

Suddenly Gunnar materialises at her side. ‘What’s it like to be back home?’ That calm voice of his.

She looks at him. He has grey-blue eyes. ‘I’m not sure if I am back.’

They laugh.

Iben doesn’t know where to look. Sophie has put on one of her Buddha Bar CDs. At the other end of the room Malene walks over to a wooden chair and sits down. Only Iben knows exactly how Malene looks when her feet begin to hurt. She will want to go home soon.

Gunnar is telling her about being in Dar es Salaam to interview Habyarimana, the former Rwandan President. Not long afterwards the presidential plane was shot down and his widow kept herself busy by killing Rwandan Tutsis. These revenge killings alone led to half a million deaths. Gunnar speaks of when he handled one of the heavy, nail-studded wooden clubs used to break human skulls.

‘A lot of the murdering was done inside churches, where many of the Tutsis sought refuge. It was hard work killing human beings with whatever was at hand – mostly household implements and agricultural tools. Faced with hundreds of victims, the Hutus found it expedient to cut the Achilles tendons of their victims straight away. Then they could take their time about the slaughter – days, if necessary.’

In his company Iben finds it easier to recall the three months she spent in Nairobi before being captured. She tries to express how surreal it all was. Most people are bemused, but Gunnar knows Africa.

They lean against one of Sophie’s bookshelves. She loses track of time. Then somebody passing by accidentally bumps into Iben and she discovers that she’s been standing there with her mouth half open a bit too long, gazing up into Gunnar’s regular features and drinking in his long, absorbing explanations. She gives herself a little shake, like a dog that’s clambered out of the water.

I’d better go and talk to someone else, Iben tells herself. But she sees Malene heading over to join them. This is not good.

Malene doesn’t look at Iben, only Gunnar, when she tells him about meeting one of his journalist friends at the Centre and what a weird encounter it was.

Iben wants a glass of water. She turns to go, but Gunnar grabs
hold of her wrist. ‘Who knows, I might run into you one day at the Metro Bar.’

‘Metro Bar?’

‘Don’t you know it? I was sure I’d seen you there. It’s the café, next to Broadcasting House. I go there several times a week.’

‘No, I don’t know it.’

Iben realises what he has just said and quickly looks at Malene.

Malene pats Gunnar’s broad shoulder. ‘Look, I really came over to tell you that I’d better leave. My feet …’ She smiles a big goodbye instead of finishing the sentence.

Gunnar and Iben nod in silence, looking at her arthritic hands and feet.

Malene smiles again. ‘Iben, are you coming?’

The Danish Centre for Genocide Information, or DCGI for short, was set up to collect data about genocide and make it available, both in Denmark and abroad, to researchers, politicians, aid organisations and anyone else with a genuine interest. Over the years, the organisation has accumulated Scandinavia’s largest collection of books and documents on the subject.

The DCGI is housed in a restored old red-brick building, along a lane in Copenhagen’s central Østerbro district. Its offices and library take up the entire attic floor, a space once occupied by the city council archives.

The library is expanding all the time. Grey steel shelves cover the walls almost everywhere – in the kitchen, the hallway and the space they call the Small Meeting Room. They have also invaded the largest room, which serves as a shared office for Iben, Malene and Camilla. Wider and heavier industrial-style shelves, the steel lacquered dark green, have been tucked into the less accessible corners and are laden with cardboard boxes full of documents such as diplomatic reports and transcripts of foreign court proceedings.

Only five people are employed to manage the Centre and handle the mountains of printed material. In addition to Iben (the information officer) and Malene (the projects manager) are Paul, the head of the Centre, Camilla, Paul’s secretary, and Anne-Lise, the librarian.

Apart from Paul’s room, the spacious main office is the brightest and most pleasant. Iben and Malene sit facing each other at ergonomically correct desks. Although most of the walls are lined with books, the shelving is not as tightly packed as it is in
the library. Malene has put potted plants on the sills in front of the three windows, which is why the office is lovingly referred to as the ‘Winter Garden’. The point of the joke is, of course, that the room will always look like a library, regardless of how much vegetation is crammed into it.

Iben and Malene have tried to make their office look more homely in other ways as well. They have put up a notice board and with time it has become covered with photos, conference invitations, newspaper cuttings and postcards with teasing messages about the sender having a great holiday while they’re slaving away in an office.

It’s the Monday morning after Sophie’s get-together and Iben and Malene are at work as usual. They sometimes chat with each other, sometimes with Camilla, whose desk is at the other end of the large room, next to Paul’s door.

Iben can sense something – something in Malene’s eyes.

At one point, Malene sighs audibly and Iben looks up. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh … nothing.’

Malene prints out a piece that she’s been working on and starts correcting it, first with a green marker and then with red. After a while she sighs again.

Iben looks away from the screen, hesitates and tries a little smile. They are such good friends that Malene can’t help smiling back.

‘What’s up?’ Iben asks.

Malene slams the printout down on the wrist-support in front of her keyboard.

‘I just can’t get it right. Not the way I want it.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘I’ve got to get the text ready for at least three posters about how Danes rescued lots of Danish Jews. It’s for the exhibition. It’s so hard … Whatever I write sucks. It sounds so self-satisfied and so … evangelical!’

Iben leans forward, pleased that Malene seems to have
forgotten about the slight awkwardness at Sophie’s party.

‘I’ve rewritten the whole thing four times, but it’s just … How do I avoid writing stuff like: “The only country in the world” and so on?’

‘Why not add something about the restrictive asylum policy towards foreign Jews during the 1930s?’

‘I thought of that, but it doesn’t fit in with the main theme of the exhibition. Besides, what I wrote sounded crap as well.’ Malene starts writing again.

Iben gives up and returns to her own screen. She can’t quite put Malene out of her mind, even though she knows that there’s no real conflict between them and Malene is probably just having a bad morning.

They are both working on an exhibition based on an idea that Malene had while Iben was away in Africa. Malene thought that many people might share her own sense of weariness at all the evil deeds in the genocidal world out there, and want to know more about the heart-warming exceptions. She thought up a theme for a poster exhibition that would celebrate the small minority of good and brave people in Nazi-controlled regions – people who saved lives during the Holocaust. She talked to Paul and he liked the idea. The Copenhagen City Library agreed to allocate space and time, and afterwards, the exhibition would be made available to schools and any other interested institution.

Something occurs to Iben. ‘Maybe it would work better if you described the civil servants behind the thirties asylum policy? It would fit in with your approach of looking at the individuals behind the rescue stories.’

Malene takes her time to reply and Iben doesn’t want to sound bossy.

‘Look, it’s just a thought.’

Iben’s job is to research the background for Malene’s posters. She is revising her notes on the story about the Polish shepherd Antoni Gawrylkiewicz. He risked his life by digging underground shelters, where he housed sixteen Jewish survivors of the
ghetto massacre in Radyn. The Jews had managed to escape by hiding in an attic. When the Germans were searching the house, a Jewish father had to strangle his youngest child, a little boy, because he started to cry.

As so often at work, Iben feels hopelessly spoilt. How could anyone possibly think that what she had experienced in Nairobi was of any consequence? She had been kept prisoner for four days. When she came back home, she was offered all the counselling she needed, paid for by the aid organisation she worked for. Antoni Gawrylkiewicz had never got any kind of support or care.

True, her supposedly therapeutic talks hadn’t been particularly helpful. The therapist had asked about the depression and panic attacks that had hit Iben after the death of her father nine years ago. At that time, talking to friends and to a psychologist had actually helped, but after Nairobi, with the new therapist, it seemed to her that nothing at all came up that she didn’t already know.

Those who challenged the system during the war were left terrifyingly alone with their fears. Iben had found another item about a man, a passer-by, who was suddenly shot dead in the street by an SS officer. The man’s crime was to hand a jug of water to the prisoners in a Jewish transport.

Regardless of the terror, Antoni Gawrylkiewicz, and others like him, had fed and housed Jewish strangers for years. Night after night they must have fallen asleep knowing that the family might be woken up at any time by hammering on the door and be deported to a concentration camp, together with their secret house guests.

No one dared tell anyone else about the deadly risks they were taking. For two years Antoni Gawrylkiewicz cooked for sixteen Jews and, to make sure there were no signs of their existence, carried away their excrement from the earth shelters where they lived. Many of the units in the Polish resistance movement were as driven by anti-Semitic hatred as the Nazis,
and one local unit suspected Gawrylkiewicz of hiding someone. He was tortured, but revealed nothing.

After the liberation the Jews he had saved were at last free to return to their homes. Even though resistance fighters kept up their murderous attacks against Jews, at the end of the war there were many survivors because of him.

And as it is said in several religious creeds, including Judaism: ‘He who saves one life, saves the entire world.’

Iben misses the laughter she usually shares with Malene. Ostensibly there is no problem. They talk, as ever, about work-related topics. They haven’t really fallen out with each other. If anyone has the right to be cross, Iben feels it should be her. Malene, always so sure of being attractive to men, is making a big fuss over nothing.