by Peter Høeg
I never got any further than that. The mood plummeted to well below freezing and Laban and I were obliged to make ourselves scarce in the break. We argued all the way home, or at least as far as Kirkevej, where we got stopped by a patrol car and a well-mannered police officer pointed out to us that there was a new centre just opened called Dialogue Against Violence, and would we be interested in him showing us the way?
Which prompted us to adjust our charm levels. The disagreement, however, continued. At least until reality intervened and came down on Laban’s side. When the twins reached the age of five, they at once stopped calling us anything else but Mum and Dad. All that’s left of Susan and Laban is what comes out in situations such as this. Whenever they feel it necessary to have a very serious word with us, they address us by our first names.
So I sit down.
‘Kamal,’ says Thit, ‘my priest. He had a white Rolls-Royce. We drove from Kolkata to the Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur. We stayed there for two weeks. It’s the only time I ever felt I was anywhere near understanding India. After a week I knew I had to put an end to it. When I told him, he broke down. In Denmark, unrequited love is sort of temporary. At some point you dry your eyes and get a grip, maybe find someone new. If you don’t top yourself instead. Or go into therapy. In India it’s a way of life. It can go on for years. All of a sudden he could do nothing for himself, he was like a child. I had to drive him home, without a driving licence, all the way with a blubbering man on the seat next to me. He hardly slept at night, all he did was cry. After three days I was coming apart at the seams. But I still drove him home.’
She looks at us in turn.
‘If you’ve started something, you must carry it through. And tidy up after yourself. Someone’s dead here.’
I get to my feet again.
‘Let me tell you all something,’ I say. ‘Do you know what it is, basically, that I’ve been looking for in life? A normal existence. That wish has been stronger for me even than getting to the essence of physics, stronger even than the urge to understand the Effect, or to understand anything at all, for that matter. Deep down inside, all I ever wanted was a normal life. With a house, a job, and a husband, kids, and food on the table. Safe in the knowledge that entropy and chaos apply only to closed systems, not to me. But what I want now is a normal separation, a normal divorce, normal on-one’s-ownness. You, Thit, and you, Harald, can go on living with Laban or you can live with me. Alternatively, you can move into student accommodation, or board at whatever college, or else find yourselves a bedsit or a cardboard box. You can do what you want. But neither you nor anyone else is going to stand in my way of getting back to normality. That path leads past Thorkild Hegn. If the papers get wind of what happened in India there’ll be court proceedings, I’ll be suspended from the university and my normal life will be postponed by at least ten years. And in ten years I could have Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s and, no matter what else, the long haul towards sheltered accommodation and the care home will have begun. Thorkild Hegn is the only person I’ve ever met who I think can manage the media. The only person who I think can keep this secret long enough for the case to cool off and lapse, and who can afford us police protection until it’s all been cleared up. And to do all that he needs this piece of paper.’
They’ve gone quiet. It’s a characteristic of the Effect’s phenomenology that I’ve deduced from the empirical evidence but never understood. It’s never lasting. Eventually someone will say something, or make a gesture that effectively draws things to a close. I’m assuming their silence is just such a gesture.
But I’ve underestimated Thit. Her caustic burp now follows.
She’s the smallest of us, even more delicate than me. Her features are refined, her voice soft and rather husky, though never raised, not even now.
‘There’s one last thing. For me, at least. Someone tried to kill my mother and my brother. I’ve got an account to settle with that person.’
I sit down again.
They stare at me. They know I’ve given up.
I unfold the sheet of paper once more and place it in front of them.
On it are six names. Written by hand. Magrethe Spliid was from a generation for whom handwriting was the only means when time was of the essence.
It strikes me that she and computers shared a childhood and a youth. That they grew up together, she observing their development in close connection with the hydrogen bomb.
Four of the names, lumped together in a single row, are the surviving members of the Future Commission. Beneath them is Thorkild Hegn’s name and address. And below that a single word, or perhaps a name: Gaither. I’ve googled it in Danish. Zero hits.
Laban and the twins lean across the table. After each name there’s a job designation: chartered surveyor, priest, Governor of the Danish National Bank, metallurgist.
The only name I recognise is Kirsten Klaussen, the metallurgist.
A national treasure. Like Bohr. Like Tuborg. Like Danish bacon.
I fold the paper back up.
‘Thit,’ says Harald, ‘how did you know you and that priest of yours weren’t going to work out?’
He looks out into the winter’s darkness. You can’t see the waters of the Øresund from Evighedsvej. But you can sense the way they reflect the moonlight in the low-hanging cloud.
‘He was too nice. He wouldn’t have been able to stick with me in the long run.’
This is a sixteen-year-old girl talking. About a grown man with a Rolls-Royce and a million disciples to ease his procession through life.
And here on Evighedsvej, we all know how right she is.
I send a text message to the Volvo’s fuel-driven heater. It responds with a Message executed. The twins have always been fond of a warm car.
It’s only just gone five a.m. Andrea Fink once explained to me that the hour between five and six in the morning is the most important of the day. She could cite fifteen hundred scientific papers to corroborate what all of us already know.
She referred to it always as the arsenic hour.
It’s the hour during which the human body is at its most relaxed. In that short period, the relation between the REM cycle and deep, dreamless sleep is optimal. In that hour, the vital early-morning sensation of having enjoyed a good night’s sleep is founded. It is the hour in which a city is at its quietest, and the pattern of brain waves among a test group spending the night in a sleep laboratory is most likely to approach gamma coherence.
It is lack of sleep in that hour that brings the parents of infants to their knees and breaks the fabric of shiftworkers and newspaper delivery drivers. It is in that hour the authorities send psychologists out to private homes unannounced in order to assess whether a child should be removed from its parents. The phenomenon of stress itself has its issue in that hour.
So, of course, that was when Andrea Fink and I scheduled our interview sessions. And it is in that same hour that all four of us now climb inside a warm Volvo to drive into Frederiksberg and pay Thorkild Hegn a visit.
Unannounced.
18
WHEN YOU’RE A kid with two aunties living in Frederiksberg, you think the only people who live in that part of the city are old ladies.
Then you grow up and go to university and become a quantum physicist and discover there aren’t just old ladies there, but old men too.
In keeping with this spritely demographic, the villas that lie between Vesterbrogade and Frederiksberg Allé are designed like mausoleums, with the kind of shrubberies in their tiny gardens one usually finds in cemeteries.
Thorkild Hegn’s house, halfway along Kochsvej, is no exception.
And yet, on each side of the front door a dark disc of glass has been inlaid in the brickwork. Not for show, but to conceal a pair of CCTV cameras.
The panes in all the windows are fine-wired with flat grey conductors that are most likely hooked up to a security system monitored by police intelligence at PET as well as the regular police. Fifty m
etres from the house, on the other side of the road, a Ford is parked, and in it are two early risers, both of whom get out and watch us attentively as we pull up and get out before proceeding to the front door.
Thorkild Hegn is a man of precaution.
I smile at the glass discs and tap the number he gave me into my phone. I hope my call’s going to find him in that most unprotected, dreamless phase of sleep.
It doesn’t. He answers immediately, wide awake.
‘I’ve got the names,’ I tell him.
‘Where?’
‘On your doormat.’
The door opens within seconds, no matter that Hegn himself is at least fifteen metres away, in the depths of his desirable abode, in pyjamas and dressing gown. Maybe he’s got a remote control. Or maybe the door just respects him so much that it opens on his command.
In his get-up anyone else would appear half naked and vulnerable. But not Thorkild Hegn. He must have a tailor doing his nightclothes. You’d be excused for thinking he was on his way to a palace ball.
He ushers us into a drawing room. I hand him the sheet of paper. He unfolds it, glances at what it says and folds it up again.
‘She hadn’t got the minutes,’ I tell him. ‘She wasn’t present at the final meetings. I know it’s the truth. We’ve kept our side of the bargain.’
He nods.
‘The charges against you in India are dropped. Your house in Manipur has been taken care of. Your personal effects are on their way to Denmark in a container and will arrive next week. The story is, you were called back prematurely due to important business. The Indian authorities will confirm it, as will our own Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the University of Copenhagen. The matter is closed.’
‘If only it were,’ I say.
I take a seat. Laban and the twins take a seat. Thorkild Hegn remains standing.
It was never the idea that we should turn up at his house. As such, we weren’t supposed to sit down in it either. Now he wants us to leave as quickly as possible.
‘Magrethe Spliid’s dead,’ I tell him. ‘She was suffocated in her home last night. Harald and I barely survived an attempt to kill us. With an excavator. The car was pulverised. We need police protection.’
If any of us had been expecting tears and flowers we’d have been disappointed. But he does sit down, at least.
What’s more, he’s shaken. To begin with he can’t speak. Then, gradually, words begin to form, if only with difficulty.
‘Who says she was suffocated? Only an expert can ascertain the cause of death.’
‘Go and see for yourself,’ I say. ‘We can talk about it once you’ve seen the body. And the bits that are left of the guy whose skull she smashed.’
Hegn’s wife appears. She has sensed he needs her. Great men always have formidable wives. The weightiest Nobel laureates have always had an Amazon at their side: Bohr, Fermi, Alvarez, Gorbachev, Sakharov, Schrödinger. And those who didn’t quite make the final cut were those whose women backed out: Oppenheimer, Szilard.
One shouldn’t be deceived by the fact that the woman now standing in the room with us is half a metre shorter than her husband. Shield-maidens come in small sizes, too.
‘What’s the matter, Thorkild?’
Her voice has authority. She’s as much in the know as he is.
Hegn has now got to his feet and paces the room like an animal in a cage.
‘Something’s out of control.’
Then he remembers we’re still here.
‘Perhaps the children might like to stretch their legs outside for a minute,’ he says.
‘You could ask them,’ I say. ‘They don’t listen to me.’
For a second he can hardly conceal his surprise.
‘My grandchildren do as they’re told.’
‘They’ve got you for a grandad. Thit and Harald weren’t that lucky.’
Thorkild Hegn has cultivated many excellent traits. Unfortunately, he hasn’t had time to work on his sense of humour.
He looks at his wife.
‘We must get them to safety. Until we get this sorted out. Italy, the witness protection programme.’
A moment passes before I realise he’s talking about us.
He’s made a decision. Now he turns to face us.
‘You must go straight home and pack. Someone will come and pick you up within the next few hours. You fly out today. On the way to the airport you’ll be given new passports and the relevant practical information. Everything will be taken care of. You’ll be home again in a few months at most.’
He doesn’t know it yet, but the Effect is active. One of the first things that tends to happen, as it does now, is that politeness disappears. Human politeness is never anything more than the finest veneer.
In the air of mutual lucidity that has arisen between us, some measure of his physico-chemical history becomes apparent to me.
Some people believe in psychology. I don’t. Everything is biochemistry on a substrate of quantum-electric effects. Thorkild Hegn must have been made by dissolving a barrelful of senior civil servants, lieutenant colonels and CEOs in a strongly corrosive liquid. Whereafter the solution was evaporated down to the dry concentrate that now, once again, is seated before us. I’ve seen men of power, but Thorkild Hegn takes the biscuit.
Nevertheless, he’s afraid. Which tells me something about what he, and we, must be up against.
Laban and the twins are stunned. They’ve come here to get things sorted out. And now they’re being sent out of the country.
‘We’re still jet-lagged,’ I say. ‘It’d be nice if we could wait a few days.’
He gathers himself. And then he makes a mistake. Calmly, and in a low voice devoid of any remaining molecule of politeness, he says:
‘It’s non-negotiable. Together, the four of you are looking at the kind of criminal records that in the future will close off your every professional avenue with the exception of newspaper rounds. You do as I tell you!’
Very few people can handle being cut down to size by a true master. Most of us shrink in the face of such crushing disapproval. At the age of sixty, and world-famous, Bohr, like a naughty schoolboy, stood before Churchill and allowed himself to be torn off a strip.
But a good ticking-off has always had a different effect on us. We don’t shrink, we get meaner.
You can’t tell by looking at us. That’s what a decent upbringing does for you.
We get to our feet.
‘We’ll go in our own car,’ I tell him.
‘Out of the question!’
‘It’s a four-wheel-drive Volvo and cost the wrong side of a million kroner. You’ll have to add that to our monthly allowance.’
He swallows visibly. I’ve touched a very sweet, very deep nerve: like all civil servants, he’s stingy as hell when it comes to government money.
‘Very well. But you leave tonight! Within the next hour and a half a man will come to your house with temporary passports, credit cards, the relevant addresses and information about what to do once you arrive. Have a nice trip!’
We draw towards the door without turning our backs on him. It’s not that we think he’s going to come after us and ask for a farewell kiss. It’s because backwards is the way you withdraw from a royal court.
As we get to the front door, he and I look each other in the eye for the last time.
At that moment something dawns on him. He remembers the situation in the prison. He remembers the Effect. Only, by then, we’re gone.
Instead of starting the ignition, I pause for a moment in the driver’s seat.
Harald grips the overhead grab handle and tries to wrench it from the interior. Once, at school, following a fleeting attack of presence in a history lesson, his classmates gave him the nickname Hardrada. After a Norwegian king who wouldn’t take prisoners, or no for an answer.
I don’t bother turning round, and address the windscreen instead, speaking on behalf of us all:
‘We’re not going to
Italy.’
19
I’VE FOLLOWED WITH pleasure and interest the increasing role women’s sexual fantasies have come to play in the public mind during my lifetime.
What’s more, we’ve only seen the start of this beneficial trend.
Indeed, I believe I have a rather juicy contribution of my own to make in that respect. All I need is to find the right forum in which to present it. I’m considering the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
My own steamy fantasies involve the great physicists, many of whom were scrumptious to say the least, including a number of women. Female physicists have often been titillatingly in touch with their inner masculinity. Marie Curie, Irène Joliot, Cecilia Payne and Lise Meitner are all high up on my list.
My favourites, however, will always be the great male physicists of the nineteenth century. Moreover, they enjoy the very great advantage of being dead. Coveting the dead is a lot easier than lusting after anyone living. I’ve always been aware of how fortunate it was for Bohr to have passed away before I was born. Otherwise I’d have been compelled to try it on with him. It would only have got complicated.
My number one is Thomas Young. A looker if ever there was one, with the sartorial elegance of a fashion council to boot. They say he danced like a musical puma, was versed in sixteen languages, able to read and write from the age of two and to differentiate and integrate complex functions at five. But most importantly, Young was the first to fully grasp and describe the phenomenon of interference. From the moment Andrea Fink showed me Young’s formalisations I knew he must surely have been the first to truly comprehend wave phenomena in the energy flow that exists between humans.
When Laban, the twins and I are positioned correctly, the way we were in Thorkild Hegn’s drawing room a few minutes ago, and when for the slightest of intervals there is no dissonance between us, our systems will then be coherent and we will amplify one another in what is perceived as a form of interference. That’s what we were investigating with Andrea Fink, it’s what we’ve used and abused throughout our existence, and for better or worse it’s what has led us here, into our present situation.
