The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  When the excavator raises its bucket and starts to move, the tea leaves suddenly reveal a pattern. Our car is trapped in a culde-sac. We’ve got a wall behind us and a vehicle on each side.

  ‘Don’t shut the door,’ I say.

  It’s been years since I last gave Harald an order, and this is the non-negotiable sort. He leaves his door open.

  ‘When I give the word, I want you to duck down under that lorry next to you. Once you’re there, slam the car door shut.’

  His face is a blank. The cab of the excavator is situated high up. Eight metres from the car and the driver can’t see us any more.

  ‘Now!’

  We slither out of our respective doors. The excavator bears down on us. Nevertheless, I manage to grab my bag and crutch. We slam the doors. If we’re lucky it’ll look like we’re still in the car and getting ready to pull out.

  The noise is tremendous. It’s not from the engine but from the caterpillar tracks, their transverse ribs of hardened steel. The vehicle is so heavy the sheer inertia means its acceleration occurs in slow motion. But the hydraulics of the arm and bucket cylinders are of a different amplitude altogether. The driver has tipped back the bucket and brings it down on our car like an axe, splitting it in two down the middle just behind the wind-screen, where seconds ago Harald and I sat.

  The motion has a gentle ease about it, as if what was being parted were a 500-kilo brick of freshly patted butter left out in the sun.

  The vehicle continues its forward movement, crushing the car beneath it and stopping at the wall before reversing back out. Each of its caterpillar tracks is a metre wide. Our VW Passat has been compressed into a plate of tin and vinyl.

  The excavator draws away and comes to a halt. The engine is switched off. The driver gets out.

  In that elevated, irrational state of clarity that mortal danger engenders, it’s his shoes I notice. If truth be told, they’re about the only thing I can see from my vantage point flat out under the van.

  They’re eye-catchingly new and elegant, in grey leather, snug as moccasins.

  He doesn’t hang about. That’s another thing I notice. He couldn’t care less about our car.

  Logically I suppose it makes sense. Nevertheless, the fact of it is striking. Not many people in this world wouldn’t pause to look back in a situation like this. But he walks away. A car has driven into the car park. He opens the back door and gets in.

  I look into Harald’s eyes. His face is chalk.

  The car pulls away. We watch as it heads off between the office buildings, vanishing momentarily from sight, then re-appearing at the security gate. The barrier goes up, the car sweeps up the bridge over the railway cutting, turns onto Ryvangs Allé and is consumed by the flow of traffic.

  We wriggle out on our stomachs, though without getting to our feet. Instead, we sit up and lean back against the wall in the sun.

  I feel like saying something, only language seems to have left me.

  Ten metres away, a figure is staring at us. It’s Magrethe Spliid.

  ‘I suggest we go to my office,’ she says.

  11

  SHE LEADS US not to the main entrance but to the side of the building that faces the sports ground. She keys in a code and presses her fingertips against a biometric sensor, a door opens and we step into a back stairwell. I know I’m going to start shaking, but at that moment I am calm and collected, in some kind of survival mode. All thought is suspended, all senses enhanced. The stairs are cast in terrazzo. I recognise the individual varieties of stone: quartz, granite, marble, little shards of shale. We ascend to the second floor, proceeding through empty corridors lined with rows of closed doors, before coming to her office and being ushered inside.

  It’s spacious, occupying a corner of the building, windows looking out onto the running track and the railway line. She produces a bottle of mineral water from a built-in refrigerator and pours three glasses. From a shelf she takes a silicone mask mounted on a short, transparent plastic cylinder, inside which is an aerosol canister. She puts the mask to her face, presses down on the canister and breathes deeply in and out.

  ‘Chronic bronchitis. Smoke poisoning when I was a child.’

  There’s something mechanical about her movements: she is quite as shocked as we. She turns the centre of the discus with a twirling finger, absently almost, loosening a small plate, and from the recess it conceals she removes a number of small lead ingots and places them on the desk. I understand immediately. She trains using a heavier discus than the standard for competition. The realisation tallies with my first impression: this is a woman on the constant lookout for ways of pushing the limits in order to make things work in her favour.

  She looks at Harald, gauging his age and mental constitution. Then she nudges a phone across the desk towards me.

  ‘The police?’

  ‘Officially we’re still abroad.’

  The shakes set in and I feel the need to move about. The office is as big as a living room, tastefully done out in grey. Her tracksuit is grey, too. The only colour in the room comes from the photos on the wall.

  They’re not of her family. For some reason I know she hasn’t got one. Instead, they depict the pyrolytic phenomena commonly known as mushroom clouds. They are photos of the earliest hydrogen bomb tests, before they went underground in 1961.

  There are perhaps fifty pictures: some black and white, others in colour, some taken from planes, others from boats, others still from the land. Each is marked with the date, location and explosive yield of the device measured in tons of TNT: 1 November 1952, Eniwetok, 10.4 megatons, of which 15–20 per cent from fusion. 6 August 1945, Hiroshima, 15 kilotons. Bikini, 1 March 1954, 15 megatons. 27 December 1960, Reggane, Algeria, 1.6 kilotons. 4 September 1961, Semipalatinsk, 150 kilotons. 6 October 1962, Johnston Island, 11.3 kilotons.

  ‘I had NASA make them public,’ she says. ‘Fifteen years ago.’

  Each image possesses a beauty that is at once inhuman and irresistible.

  Where the photos end, a glass-fronted cabinet runs from floor to ceiling, and behind its doors are her sports trophies. There must be at least a hundred. In the absolute centre is her Olympic silver medal.

  ‘My Danish record still stands, forty years on. If it hadn’t been for anabolic steroids, I’d have won gold in Moscow in 1980. Susanne Nielsson too, in the hundred-metre breaststroke. They took more than nine thousand blood tests, and not one came out positive. Science has made it difficult indeed to find out what’s real and what isn’t.’

  That’s aimed at me.

  ‘I’m a physicist,’ I tell her. ‘Doping’s more the chemists.’

  I sense her natural reserve. Normally she wouldn’t be talking about herself at all. But it’s the shock. And the Effect. Through this breach I try to reach her.

  ‘What is the Future Commission?’

  ‘You mean was. It was abolished in 2018.’

  ‘When was it first set up?’

  ‘The early seventies.’

  She answers like a robot.

  ‘To what purpose?’

  ‘To advise changing governments.’

  Now my legs are shaking. I walk up and down, struggling to regain control of my muscles.

  ‘Why was it secret?’

  ‘To ensure its political and scientific independence. To protect its members against outside pressure.’

  ‘Who picked them out?’

  ‘After a couple of years the commission was self-elective.’

  I pause at a noticeboard on the wall, a cheerful collage of photographs depicting burning cities. Cities being destroyed by firestorms. The flames have that white intensity that occurs at temperatures in excess of one thousand degrees centigrade. Below them are names and dates: Dresden, 13–14 February 1945. Hamburg, 27 July 1943. Cologne, 20 May 1942. Tokyo, 10 March 1945. Highlights of the Allied bombings of civilians during the Second World War.

  She stands right behind me.

  ‘I was there myself. In Dre
sden. I was three years old. My father was German. He died at the Eastern front. I lived with my mother. It’s where I got the bronchitis. Who promised you the charges would be dropped?’

  ‘His name’s Thorkild Hegn. Do you know him?’

  She says nothing. But I’m through to her.

  ‘Secrecy,’ I say, ‘is not a very Danish concept. If the idea was to protect the commission’s members, then the Economic Council might just as well be top secret, too.’

  ‘It was. In the years before it was established, there were plans to keep it from the public. Transparency didn’t come into it until later, in the final months of …’

  She hesitates as if trying to recall.

  ‘Autumn 1962,’ says Harald. ‘The chairmanship was Hoffmeyer, Carl Iversen and Søren Gammelgaard.’

  She is silent for a moment. The way people are when Harald enters the fray in the great quiz of life.

  ‘He’s got a memory like flypaper,’ I say. ‘Has done ever since birth. You wouldn’t believe the stuff he keeps in there.’

  ‘But the idea of a watchdog economic council goes back further,’ she says. ‘The secrecy was Kampmann’s pet idea, from his time as finance minister back in the fifties, to safeguard it by preserving the anonymity of its members. But Kjeld Philip was social-liberal and against any kind of hush-hush. Kampmann wanted no one else but the members themselves to know who was involved.’

  My whole body is trembling now. I feel my concentration beginning to wane. I pick up the phone to call a taxi.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ she says.

  We climb into her Mercedes in the building’s underground car park.

  I ask her to stop at the remains of our car. I get out, opening the driver’s door of the lorry first, then the van. Levering myself on my crutch, I clamber onto the excavator’s caterpillar tracks and peer inside the cab before getting back in the Mercedes, on the back seat next to Harald.

  We pass over the railway cutting. My ballet prince looks up pensively from his Shakespeare. Maybe he’s wondering why we’re not going home in our Passat.

  ‘What were you looking for in the vehicles, Mum?’

  ‘How the ignitions were started.’

  Hellerup glides past in the frosty sun, smug and oblivious.

  ‘So how were they started?’

  ‘A lock pick, perhaps. But that would leave lots of little scratches. And the van was a Mercedes. A Mercedes lock can’t be picked. It has to have been some other way.’

  ‘Like what?’

  I refrain from answering.

  ‘How come you know how to steal cars, Mum?’

  We pass the Charlottenlund Fort. Out in the glittering Øresund, a new complex of buildings has risen up. When we left for India the Kronholm Islets were flat bird sanctuaries, like the nearby Saltholm, hardly visible from land at all, but now they’re gigantic building sites. One of the structures is as big as a tower block, though twisted, like a seashell of steel and glass. North of the islets there’s now a small windfarm.

  ‘I was in care for a few years.’

  ‘You never told me that.’

  We park on Evighedsvej. Harald gets out. I lean forward, towards Magrethe Spliid.

  ‘Harald and I almost didn’t make it,’ I tell her. ‘And they’ve seen us talking to you. If I were you, I’d lock my door tonight and put the chain on. And drag your biggest wardrobe in front of the window for good measure.’

  I climb out, but she’s after me in a split second. The door inside her is wide open now. There are lots of ways to gain access to a person.

  ‘I’m not afraid!’

  ‘You’re afraid to give me the minutes of a meeting of a now defunct commission. Those minutes could be the difference between life and death.’

  ‘You’re better off without them.’

  ‘Then you should have told that to the driver of that excavator.’

  I rummage in my bag and hand her my card. It’s not of normal dimensions, but big as a postcard from a seaside holiday town.

  She stares at it.

  ‘Isn’t this rather on the large side for a calling card?’

  ‘There’s no room for all my titles on a normal one.’

  She scans the list: the professorship; the board and committee memberships of the Council for Research Policy and Planning, the Council for Development Research, the National Research Foundation, the government’s Growth Forum, Euroscience, the European University Association, Danida, UNESCO.

  ‘That’s one reason,’ I say. ‘Another is that if you want to be remembered in a society that generates twenty petabytes of information per day, and you happen to be a woman and forty-three years old, you need to talk in rather a loud voice.’

  ‘I wasn’t there. At the final meetings. I wasn’t present.’

  She gets back in the car.

  ‘Who does Hegn work for?’ I ask. ‘What part of the state apparatus does he represent? Police? Military?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Where does he live? Do you know his home address?’

  She slams the door shut.

  But then an afterthought makes her roll down the window.

  ‘What you said about a loud voice. That bit’s right.’

  The window glides up and the big car pulls away.

  Harald is standing stock-still on the pavement. He’s not looking at the car, he’s looking at me. Imploringly.

  ‘The Effect, Mum. We always turned it on others. Never on ourselves.’

  I walk past him and into the house.

  12

  WE’RE SEATED AROUND the dining table, which is a seventeen-hundred-year-old circle.

  More exactly, it’s the wood that’s seventeen hundred years old. It comes from an oak my great-great-grandfather found whilst digging for peat on his property at Raadvad. He had it sawn into boards and made into two tables, one for his armoury and another for his dining room, which is the one that has remained in the family.

  He must have been a perfectionist, and he must have loved wood. The boards are quarter-sawn, the lip exquisitely rounded. The table has survived a hundred and fifty years without the slightest warp.

  The tannin present in peat bogs turns oak black and renders it hard as stone and utterly imperishable. The beauty of it seems almost unreal. When I was pregnant with the twins I removed the eighteenth-century varnish with caustic soda. Delicately varnished surfaces do not accord with small children, nor with their parents. Since then I’ve scrubbed the table once a fortnight, which has lent the pitch-coloured wood a tinge of grey.

  The table is the only thing I have of my father’s. It’s the only thing I want. When your parents take up as much space inside you as mine, you should be especially careful about filling up your home with their junk as well.

  But I love the table. Its oak is heavy and immovable, resistant to change. Which is an illusory kind of assurance that at least one thing in the world can be relied upon to remain the same.

  It’s just the kind of assurance I need now.

  I’ve told Laban and Thit about the day Harald and I have had. Whereupon a stunned silence ensued of some length, during which I made dinner and the other three stared vacantly into space.

  When eventually I serve the food, they eat nothing to begin with, even though it’s fillets of lamb, fried for twenty-five and a half seconds on each side, then let a tablespoon of fifty per cent double cream simmer in the pan. And still they gawp, oblivious. Until eventually, Laban breaks the silence.

  ‘Thit and I have been to the Folketing’s library. A sudden impulse, you could say. We looked up the chief librarian there. She’s an old friend, appointed by the parliament’s Presidium. I know most of them, actually, and the director’s another friend of mine. Anyway, it’s on the second floor, directly above the main lobby. I told her I’d been commissioned to compose a festival cantata, for the parliament’s one hundred and seventieth anniversary. That I wanted to make a head start and begin by looking at some key events in its
history. I gave her a list. On it was the phrase Parliamentary Future Commission.’

  For Laban to tell a lie intentionally is something of a novelty.

  I put the mixing bowl with the whisk down on the table in front of Thit. She starts to whip the cream. When her arm begins to tire, she’ll pass it on to Harald, as she has always done. I peel the oranges.

  ‘We were received most convivially.’

  That’s how it is with Laban. If one day he should ever pay a visit to Hell, he will be received most convivially there by the Devil himself and all his hideous assistants.

  ‘The library and the archive deliver information to the entire parliament, on all imaginable subjects. Moreover, the chief librarian is responsible for keeping the archives. She gathers our political history, you could say. She’d never heard of the Future Commission.’

  ‘She heard what he said all right,’ says Thit. ‘He read out all the different words on his list, and she kept nodding. Only then when he got to Future Commission there was no reaction, just mild surprise. She was blank. Completely blank.’

  With Thit and Laban at a range of half a metre, even a trained pathological liar wouldn’t be able to hide anything.

  ‘She went into the archives,’ Laban says. ‘She told us they’ve got everything digitalised as far back as Johan Pingel’s speech in 1885 that triggered the failed assassination attempt on Prime Minister Estrup. So she types in Future Commission, but nothing comes up. Then she tells us she’s going a step further up in the system. The archive is organised in a hierarchy with different levels of confidentiality. At the second level are all the sensitive data on individual persons plus all cases that are exempt from the law on open administration. Certain documents of the Foreign Policy Committee and the European Affairs Committee. She doesn’t find anything there either. I ask if she can dig a bit deeper. “We’re not really allowed,” she says. But nevertheless she carries on. At the third level are documents pertaining to the security of the nation. Limited access even to the Presidium. And there she finds it. But the files are barred. She says there’s a kind of upper tier, a fourth level, with information that’s privileged indefinitely. But then we sense she gets the jitters, so we back off. Smooth over, and return to the conviviality of before.’