The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  Since then we’ve had at least one – on a single occasion, three – joining us for Christmas dinner every year. The Christmas before we went to India it was a woman touching on two metres tall and smelling strongly of meths. Five minutes into my duck à l’orange, she winked at Laban and said: ‘Do you fancy a bit of slap and tickle after?’

  ‘We’re barely alive,’ I say. ‘We’ve got forty-eight hours, tops. Christmas is cancelled.’

  Thit and Harald exchange glances.

  ‘You can do what you want,’ says Thit. ‘Harald and I are having Christmas. With a tree, and presents underneath, and a homeless person to share the meal. If I die tomorrow then I’m going out with fairy lights. And the satisfaction of being true to my values.’

  I hobble off to my room and turn down the duvet. I don’t have time to take off my clothes, not even my shoes. All I can do is fall forward. I can’t remember hitting the sheets. I must have dropped off before.

  22

  AFTER I WALKED out on Andrea Fink and Laban in the honorary residence twenty-four years ago, having emphatically blocked all avenues of approach and dashed any hopes Laban might have harboured – thereby trapping the ball for good, so to speak – three months went by before I saw him next. And it would be a fib to claim that I forgot him in the time that passed, even though I tried.

  Then one day he was standing in the foyer of the H.C. Ørsted Institute, waiting for me.

  I saw him from twenty metres off and swivelled on my heels. Even then I knew that if you had to run from your destiny, you’d have to run fast.

  He was right behind me.

  ‘I’ve been waiting here for three days. From morning till night. In the hope of catching a glimpse of you. Campus security have been eyeing me up. One more day and I’ll be banned.’

  We went to the canteen. I filled up my tray and sat down at a table. He sat down opposite.

  ‘I’m not eating. I’ve stopped all intake of nourishment. I’ve sworn I won’t touch a bite until I’ve asked you out and we’re sitting at a table together in a three-star restaurant.’

  ‘You’ll be dead in five weeks then,’ I said. ‘That’s as long as a person can go without food.’

  ‘Tough luck for me.’

  It was obvious he meant it, in a way. There, in the Ørsted canteen, surrounded by six hundred students and professors – all of whom, to one extent or another, were searching for invariable regularities – I sat facing a man who had abandoned structural considerations altogether.

  ‘You don’t know me,’ I said.

  ‘I’m working on that.’

  People passing by with their trays had begun to pause and linger. Those at the neighbouring tables had turned round to face us. It had nothing to do with us. I was nineteen, he was twenty-one. We looked like any other students. It was the Effect. I stood up.

  ‘Don’t go!’

  ‘I’ve got lectures.’

  ‘I’ll wait here until they’re finished.’

  ‘They go on all night.’

  ‘I’ll wait anyway.’

  When I left four hours later, he was waiting outside. Security had thrown him out. His lips were blue from the cold.

  He walked me over to my bike.

  ‘I’ll follow you home.’

  ‘You’re on foot.’

  ‘I’ll run alongside.’

  ‘Laban,’ I said, ‘sometimes, the bitter, inescapable truth of the matter is that the woman simply isn’t attracted to the man.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it marvellous we haven’t got that to contend with?’

  Standing there on Nørre Allé, he looked like a person who’d stepped off a precipice and couldn’t care less whether he floated or fell, because the step was an absolute necessity.

  I couldn’t resist him. To this day I still don’t know if it was right or not. All I know is I couldn’t resist.

  What drew me to Laban Svendsen was not his nascent fame, nor his talent. It wasn’t his looks either, because at that moment on Nørre Allé I hardly noticed him physically at all. What I perceived was the insane high-diver inside.

  ‘You can walk me to the next set of traffic lights,’ I told him. ‘Nice and easy. And there we can shake hands and part for good.’

  ‘Three sets of traffic lights!’

  ‘Two.’

  We walked next to each other.

  What I still keep asking myself is whether I could have done things differently. Whether I ought to have.

  I glance at Laban. We’re seated at the breakfast table, all four of us.

  The others have slept badly, they’ve got shadows under their eyes. I slept like a baby, ten hours straight, deep and dreamless.

  There is mercy in sleep. It is a profound, physiological regularity of human life that if you’re sufficiently tired, sleep will wipe away all fear.

  Until you wake up again. Then it comes back. As it does now, here, at this table.

  I place Magrethe Spliid’s sheet of A4 in front of me. I address Laban, in order to take immediate control of the situation.

  ‘We’ll go and see all four surviving members of the commission. To find out what all this is about. Once we’ve done that we can go to Hegn and make a deal. We get our old lives back. Plus police protection. We’ll do two each. The children stay here.’

  Harald turns the paper towards him and begins to type the names into his phone.

  ‘Forty-eight hours,’ he says. ‘Minus Christmas Eve. Thit and I are in this, too.’

  I couldn’t be bothered arguing. Harald’s already got the addresses off the Internet and written them down. None of the surviving members of the commission, apart from Magrethe Spliid, has done much to keep themselves hidden.

  I go with them to the garage. Follow them out into the road.

  Standing there on the pavement as they reverse down the drive, I sense my fear begin to spiral. I don’t know what it feels like for anyone else, but with me fear starts in the chest, from where it spreads through the entire parasympathetic nervous system.

  More than anything I’m scared of the children dying. It’s a fear that comes up every time I say goodbye to them. The first years, I cried just leaving them at nursery school.

  Right now, the risk seems greater than ever. As I stand there I’ve a feeling of being exposed, as though under a microscope, and that Laban and the twins are, too. Someone could be watching us: through binoculars, in a rear-view mirror, through a hedge. And we’ve no idea who we’re up against.

  23

  KELD KELDSEN, THE surveyor, looks his age in the photo, which is to say just short of seventy-five, though time has allowed him to keep a thick, white head of hair, and his face is thus a pair of gleaming blue eyes beneath a snowy haystack.

  According to the web he’s not only a professor but principal of something called the School of Surveying. Which unfortunately for me is as far away as Hirtshals. It means I’m going to have to try to prise confidential information out of him over the phone.

  The receptionist who answers my call would never have got a job at the Defence College. She presents herself in a motherly Jutlandish as Hilda, and sounds like she wants to bring me a cup of coffee and a wedge of lemon half-moon cake before taking me by the hand and leading me to Keldsen herself. Unfortunately, he’s not there.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ she says, ‘he’s not in today. He’s over in Copenhagen.’

  ‘How fortunate,’ I say. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know where, exactly? You see, I’m calling from Copenhagen myself and I need to ask him a very tiny question. I’m sure he wouldn’t be put out if I could do so in person.’

  ‘I’m sure he wouldn’t,’ she says. ‘He’s very helpful. He’s at the Eksperimentarium. A board meeting.’

  ‘Hilda,’ I tell her, ‘some good advice: if you should ever stumble upon a vacancy at the Royal Danish Defence College, Second Section, promise me you won’t apply.’

  I sense a bashful smile at the other end.

  ‘Oh, I�
�d never leave Hirtshals.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ I tell her.

  I could have walked to the Eksperimentarium in about forty-five minutes along Strandvejen. In any other circumstances I’d have loved it: the sun’s come out and the sky is blue as iron.

  But instead I’m going to have to disguise myself in sunglasses and a scarf, and crouch in the back of a taxi.

  Then something wells up in me. Maybe it’s spite, or maybe it’s because I remembered about my bike and Laban on Nørre Allé. At any rate, I end up putting on an anorak and gloves and getting the Raleigh out of the garage.

  It’s spent a year there in solitude and looks sorry for itself: the tyres are flat and it needs some tender care and attention.

  I pump up the tyres, lube the chain and talk nicely to it. It’s as if it lifts its head.

  Bicycles need someone to talk to them. I decide to mention the fact in the relevant professional fora. Though perhaps not the Academy of Sciences and Letters. The profound scientific truths are no different than any other kind: they must be presented in small measures and with the utmost consideration.

  One of the phenomena for which no one yet has produced a wholly irrefutable and exhaustive explanation is the peculiar occurrence of serial instances of good luck. The wind’s behind me all the way along Strandvejen, all the traffic lights are green, and when I get to the Eksperimentarium’s ticket booth one of my students is behind the counter, a girl of perhaps twenty who, once she’s got over the shock of realising that one of her teachers, who she hasn’t seen in a year, turns out also to exist in some private form outside the auditoria of the Universitetsparken campus, lets me in for nothing and informs me that the board meeting has briefly adjourned for a coffee break but its members will be back in five minutes.

  I go up to the first floor and wait at the balustrade, from where I can scan both the entrance area and the exhibition areas.

  You can’t look out on the great halls of the Eksperimentarium without getting a lump in your throat. All the major set-ups are here: a modern version of von Guericke’s vacuum pump; a simplified reconstruction of Michelson and Morley’s experiment of 1887 that did away with the concept of stationary aether, thereby lending a nail to Lord Kelvin’s coffin; a device demonstrating the conservation of energy by means of perfectly elastic colliding steel spheres that may or may not have been designed by Newton; and a series of photostats as tall as a man, visualising Faraday’s electromagnetic induction, as detailed in his Experimental Researches in Electricity.

  These physical forms have long since vanished from all modern laboratories, yet their depth and beauty live on all around us. I find it inspirational indeed.

  ‘Inspirational, don’t you think?’

  I haven’t seen him, though he’s been standing two metres away the whole time. It’s because of the physics. People are small next to physics.

  Beneath a shaggy white mane, two turquoise beads hold me in their gaze. They belong to Professor Keld Keldsen, principal of the School of Surveying.

  He could be Hilda’s dad. With coffee and lemon half-moon cake to boot.

  The disarming Jutland demeanour provides half the explanation as to why he approached me. The other half is down to the Effect.

  ‘There’s only one thing I’ve always missed here,’ I say. ‘And that’s surveying equipment. Some tripods and ranging poles. Relief maps. A bit of equidistant projection.’

  His ruddy cheeks already tell of the great outdoors. But now he positively glows.

  ‘All on its way!’ he says. ‘At my behest! I’m a surveyor myself.’

  ‘Really? How interesting! You must promise there’ll be an historical explanation attached to each instrument. So we laymen can fully grasp why surveying is so very important.’

  He almost flaps his arms in glee.

  ‘Surveying is without doubt the single most important scientific discipline if one wishes to understand why Denmark looks like it does today. From the first farming laws around seventeen sixty to the zone legislation of the nineteen seventies, surveyors have been right at the heart of any topographical change of note. There are those who think the landscape’s appearance is due to chance. Well, it isn’t! It’s all been managed, down to the last square kilometre! Denmark is one gigantic demonstration of our interpretation of the right to land ownership. From redistribution to the conversion of entailed estates, all the way through to the nineteen fifties, with its sharp decline in the number of holdings, and the modern country of today, Denmark is the result, from arse to tit, if you’ll pardon the expression, of the minutest planning, most of it sociopolitically motivated. And in that process, surveyors have been indispensable!’

  ‘Is that why they wanted you in the Future Commission?’

  He withers before my eyes. The colour drains from his cheeks. The hearty warmth of Jutland evaporates and is replaced by something else that ought not to be there, something that doesn’t fit in with the person he is.

  It’s fear.

  The price for being able to gain a person’s trust. The talent to do that isn’t just a matter of establishing a sincerity that condenses and converges asymptotically in the direction of comfort and intimacy. It’s also about knowing when you’ve got through the outer layers of packaging and need to use the tin opener. And if the tin opener isn’t enough, there’s always the angle grinder.

  He turns on his heels, but I grab him.

  He pulls free and starts to run. He gets to the lift ahead of me, waves a keycard and the doors snap shut in my face.

  I glance around. No stairs leading down.

  My student girl is standing behind me. She’s not asking questions. Instead, she steps forward and unlocks a door. Behind it is a stairwell.

  I’ve got two hundred and fifty students.

  Had got.

  It was impossible to learn their names. If it even mattered. Like the rest of us, their identities are uniquely fixed by their civil registration numbers in tandem with the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiom that states that it can always be established whether an element belongs to the set or not.

  ‘There’s something I want to say. I want to thank you for your teaching. I love physics!’

  Before my eyes stands a model of myself, twenty-five years earlier.

  I throw my arms around her and hug her tightly. She’s as surprised as I am.

  Then I turn and descend the stairs one flight at a time. I can sense her still standing at the top, mobility crystallised into a solid lattice structure. Maybe because of the hug. Maybe because she just saw a professor descend to the next floor down like a gibbon, in two leaps.

  Keld Keldsen’s car is about to pull away from its parking space. He drives a Jaguar. I stand in the way. If he wants out, he’ll have to run me down.

  He seems set on it, and accelerates.

  I jump straight into the air and land on the bonnet.

  He’s yet to pick up speed, but still I’m pressed against the windscreen. I spread out flat to block his view. In front of my eyes, on the inside of the glass, is a parking permit from the School of Surveying. A pair of dividers superimposed on a golden theodolite.

  He brakes. His face is less than half a metre from mine, but he’s not looking at me. I twist round. At the bottom of the stairs stands my student. Calm, but pensive. In the process of revising her view on university lecturers. And members of the Eksperimentarium’s board of trustees.

  I’m off the bonnet. I fling open the car door and get in next to him on the passenger side before he has time to do anything about it. The girl’s presence has delayed his reactions. As a surveyor he must know, from countless boundary inspections conducted in cases of running dispute between neighbours, the risk of one’s petty misdemeanours being witnessed by others. Like running down innocent pedestrians in underground parking facilities, for instance.

  From the pockets of his tweed trousers he produces a pouch of tobacco and a packet of cigarette papers. Normally, I would assume him able to roll himself
a smoke with one hand – and in his pocket – to shield the business from the tornadoes of Vendsyssel. But at the moment, his hands are shaking. A little oblong of paper flutters from his grasp. He retrieves it, draws out the tobacco from the pouch and rolls a make-do cigarette while staring blankly out through the windscreen. Only then does he notice the smoke detectors on the ceiling.

  ‘Damn it!’

  I take the matches out of his hand and light up for him.

  ‘Smoke all you want,’ I say. ‘We’re in a Wilson chamber.’

  ‘What’s a Wilson chamber?’

  ‘The single most important piece of apparatus in experimental quantum physics. Together with the Geiger counter.’

  He takes a drag.

  ‘Magrethe Spliid’s dead,’ I tell him. ‘Someone suffocated her in her home the night before last.’

  He rolls the window down for fresh air. The smoke alarm goes off with a shriek. My student is still at the bottom of the stairs, adding ever increasing layers of surprising detail to her overall picture of the natural sciences’ intelligentsia.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I tell him.

  He drives without seeing. I guide him out towards the water-front. He stops when we can go no further. Behind us is the outer wall of a building, to our right an iron-mesh gate leading to a closed-off area of the quayside. On the wall is a mahogany plate with gilded lettering that informs us the area is the private property of the Kronholm Yacht Club. In front of us, a short flight of stone steps leads down to a jetty.

  ‘What was the Future Commission?’

  Next to the gate, in a glass-fronted kiosk, a young girl sits painting her nails with a look on her face suggesting that at the tender age of twenty she has already wearied of life. And the sight of us in the Jaguar makes her even more tired.

  A small fishing boat has been moored with its prow towards the jetty. It’s rather rusty and looks a bit like a bathtub. This part of the harbour has been turned into Denmark’s own little Venice, and the jetty is here so residents can step straight out of their suites of reception rooms into their own private teak gondolas. But maybe they gave a single fisherman a mooring out of consideration for the local folklore. He’s standing upright in the boat, tending his nets.