The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  Of course, they’ve always been slightly nervous about Laban, the twins and me. But their fears are generally put to rest by that rule of existential geometry that says that where there’s a relatively stable midpoint in which to plonk oneself, there will always necessarily be a more unstable periphery. As long as the radius is great enough, restricted to Christmases and birthdays, everything should be all right.

  That said, Thit’s homeless person is of course a rather niggly detail. A couple of years ago it was a university lecturer who’d lost his job and been kicked out by his wife. When Thit ran into him he was begging on the Metro, and on Christmas Eve at ours he recited French poetry once he got drunk enough. The year before that, it was a former nobleman down on his luck. I had to frisk him when he left in order to get my silverware back.

  But this year’s model looks like the real thing. Behind his unkempt hair and shaggy beard is a man presumably in his fifties, though he looks twenty years older. His name is Oskar, his fingers are yellowed from tobacco, he smells dismal, and when I pour him a glass of chilled Grenache, one of the few grapes not to tremble at the sight of eight ducks, he peers anxiously at it, then leans towards me and says: ‘I don’t suppose the lady would have a teeny-weeny bottle of Bavarian pilsner hidden away at the back of the pantry, by any chance?’

  All in all, then, there’s a decent chance we might get to the ris à l’amande in one piece.

  Only we don’t. And the reason why is the Effect.

  Laban, the twins and I have done everything right by sitting together. In that way it’s as if we form a sealed container, inside which the Effect works like a standing wave, imperceptible to any outsider.

  On the list of all the many kinds of intelligence, there is one that modern psychology has overlooked, and that’s dinner-party intelligence. Laban has it. He can converse with a whole table in such a way that the youngsters feel respected, the men admired and the women tickled behind the ears by an invisible hand.

  At the same time, it’s as if he erects a safety barrier along the precipice we all know to be the peril of any dinner party, so that everyone is aware, without having need to be told, that they can only go so far and no further.

  Inside this rectangular, meticulously chalked-up court this Christmas Eve, we discuss economics and nice new cars, and how well the children are doing at school, and we are asked politely about our time in India, to which we reply evasively though to everyone’s satisfaction, and I’m just beginning to relax a bit when Harald puts down his knife and fork.

  ‘Grandmother,’ he says, ‘why did Mum get put into care?’

  My mother carefully dabs the corners of her mouth with her napkin. She’s a solo dancer. From the age of eighteen, until she was forty and gradually moved into teaching, she danced more than a hundred performances a year. So she’s got plenty of training and is more than canny enough to improvise, even if the orchestra by accident should suddenly play a few bars of a requiem in the middle of Swan Lake.

  The problem now is that we’re not talking about accident.

  ‘It was a residential institution for young people. I couldn’t manage her. I couldn’t, the schools couldn’t.’

  ‘How long was she there?’

  He’s not asking me. He knows I’d put a lid on it.

  ‘I don’t quite recall.’

  It’s all gone quiet around the table. All families have their contaminated areas: dumping grounds for old waste, radioactive isotopes or skeletons still with residual tissue. They are places all of us avoid, out of politeness or anxiety, or simply because dredging an entire life, taking it apart and putting all the bits through an autoclave, seems so insurmountable.

  We’ve now ventured into just such an area.

  Harald turns to face me.

  ‘How old were you, Mum? When they put you away?’

  I look him straight in the eye. To make him stop.

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘When did you go home again?’

  ‘I didn’t. I moved into student accommodation when I was sixteen.’

  ‘How come?’

  Frankness has its own timetable. I don’t know who manages it, but I do know that once it’s started and has got to a certain point, it’s very difficult indeed to stop.

  And then there’s the build-up of pressure. From too many Christmas Eves, the small talk of too many family get-togethers. Too much putting a lid on things.

  ‘It was a place called Holmgangen,’ I say. ‘There was a young staff member there who used to have sex with the girls. Most of them didn’t mind, they wanted the contact. But not me. I spent four years avoiding him. I was the one who repaired things and kept things running. He was afraid of losing my expertise. But then one day it was my turn. He’d got me putting down new decking over at the small house they rented out to him not far from the main building. We were on our own. The others had made themselves scarce, they knew what was going to happen.’

  I look at Thit and Harald by turn.

  ‘He threw me to the ground, tore off my knickers and penetrated me. I made my body relax completely. I could hear myself crying, but mentally I kept calm. Inside, I was almost serene. I wrapped my legs around his torso and squeezed as hard as I could, trapping him so he couldn’t get free. On one side of me was an electric drill driver. A twenty-four-volt Dewalt, new on the market. On the other side was a box of stainless-steel deck screws. They cost nearly a krone a piece, even then. Eighty millimetres in length, with an auger point to prevent splitting. Fifty millimetres of sharp-angled thread to drive the screw downwards. Then twenty-five millimetres of square thread, meaning that once it’s in, it’s going to stay there until the timber’s rotted away. I picked up the driver in one hand and a deck screw in the other. And as he pumped away inside me I felt along his spine until a point I gauged to be somewhere around the kidneys. I put the screw to his back, turned the driver on full and drove it into him. There was no resistance, so it didn’t pass through bone. These days I know it takes a surgeon to drill through the spinous process. But it did go through the erector spinae like it was butter. He tried to get away, but I kept him in a thigh lock while I picked up the next screw.’

  Laban looks away. My mother looks away. The others want to look away, but can’t.

  ‘Again, I went for the spine, only again it glanced off through the muscle. At that age I didn’t know where the organs were, but today I’d have gone a couple of centimetres further down. I was only sixteen, all I knew about was physics. Now he was almost paralysed. I wriggled out from underneath him. He tried to get up, but couldn’t. I screwed his hands to the deck, one after the other, then sat on top of him, straddling his back. There was no hurry after that. I picked up a screw and located the medulla. That was where I was going to put the last one in. He’d have been finished then. I pressed the point against the base of his skull and switched on the driver. But I couldn’t do it.’

  I look across at Fabius. He can’t even blink.

  ‘The next day, social services came. I told them either they moved me into student accommodation in Copenhagen and gave me textbooks on physics or else I’d spill the beans and get the others to witness. Not that it was a threat, they had to understand, but a promise. The day after, a temporary guardian came in a taxi and took me back to the city.’

  The room is a hush.

  After a bit, my mother gets to her feet, goes into the hall and puts on her fur coat. Fabius slinks after her. After a few more minutes, one of her most decent cousins rises and announces that they’d best be making tracks, after which the two other cousins likewise get to their feet, followed by their children and husbands.

  Laban, the twins and Oskar remain seated. I see our guests to the door. I find their unopened presents under the Christmas tree and put them into carrier bags, and insist on giving them doggy bags to take home, and a special treat of freshly chopped apples and walnuts in crème fraiche, my way of getting round the Danish tradition of red cabbage with the duck.

&nbs
p; As a final gesture, I also give each of them a tightly sealed, heavy-duty freezer bag filled with duck fat, which they accept mechanically with a lifeless look in their eyes. Nonetheless, I feel sure they’ll appreciate it in the days to come. You can make a banquet out of finely chopped onions, potatoes and beetroot, if only you fry it all together in duck fat.

  I check and make sure they haven’t forgotten anything before walking them out to their cars and waving goodbye.

  By the time I go back in, the table’s been cleared and the living room’s empty apart from Oskar. In the fridge I find the bottle of beer I was given by the Trappist monks of Vor Frue Kloster. I pour it into two glasses and hand one of them to Oskar.

  Now it’s my turn to savour the peace and joy of Christmas, albeit a bit earlier than planned. I step outside, beer in hand.

  32

  LABAN IS SITTING on the bench. He has spread out a throw on which to sit, and made room for us both. I sit down beside him, he grabs another and we wrap ourselves up. We’ve done it so many times before.

  He points up at the moon. It’s almost full, a shining disc edged by the opal-coloured rainbow phenomenon commonly referred to as the circle of the moon.

  ‘Susan, what do you see?’

  ‘Refraction. The supernumerary bow.’

  He nods pensively. We’ve done this before, too. It’s an old game of ours, going back to the time we first got to know each other. Laban picks out some physical phenomenon and we describe to each other what we see.

  We never saw anything the same way.

  ‘I see an emotion. A feeling of destiny. Inevitability. In that inevitability there is also harmony.’

  I refrain from comment. What can I say? Correlating concepts of destiny and harmony with a refraction phenomenon is not the kind of procedure that would garner support at the Department of Experimental Physics.

  ‘Where was your father in what you were telling us, Susan?’

  ‘He went away when I was eight.’

  ‘And never came back?’

  I nod. He gives himself time to take it in.

  ‘How come you never told us before?’

  I try to gauge my feelings. I don’t think I’ve intentionally held anything back. I’ve just avoided having to be precise.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  I search for an explanation, but none is forthcoming. What comes to mind is an image, a recollection.

  ‘The last time I saw him was one day in summer. He had a hunting lodge on the edge of the forest at Rude Skov. He loved hunting and had several cabins dotted about the country where he could go. There was a stream running through the property. I was playing about with rocks, building a channel so I could investigate the current. He came up to me. There was something he wanted to tell me. Somehow I knew it was the last time I’d see him. He sat down. I couldn’t make myself look at him, so I looked at the whirlpools in the stream instead. Then he said: “Susan. Make sure your bite is as hard as your bark.” I hugged him for the last time. I sensed his despair and embraced him the way a grown-up embraces a child. Then he stood up and went.’

  Laban has closed his eyes while I’ve been speaking, the way he always does when listening intently. Now he opens them again. We look up at the forty-two-degree angle of deviation, the rainbow angle, of which he’s never heard, and Alexander’s band, the dark area within the incandescent circle. The phenomenon begins to fade, and in less than a minute it’s gone.

  Rainbows are fleeting.

  We’ve gone back inside. I’ve put some wood in the stove and we’re sitting at each end of the sofa.

  Oskar is over by the Christmas tree, staring dreamily into his glass of beer. The bubbles that rise to the surface are tiny and ascend in little trains, like champagne. I study him, and at the same time it’s as if I forget about him completely. That’s how it is with castaways. We’ve all had a lifetime’s training in getting them to merge with the paintwork.

  Laban lifts one of my feet onto his lap and rubs it gently. I allow him to. If the world is nothing but an illusive convention anyway, as modern quantum physics would seem to suggest, what difference does it make to insist on sticking to your limits?

  He must have massaged my feet like this hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. Whenever I got home from the endless meetings of the academic council, or came traipsing in at dawn after a night in the labs with Andrea Fink. Even if I crept straight into my own room, he’d still come out in his dressing gown and make me tea, and we’d sit down on the sofa here with my feet in his lap.

  I never knew beforehand how much I needed it. But after a few minutes, and always to my own surprise, I realised how tight and numb the surface of my skin felt. And then it was like the tips of his fingers brought something dead to life again. Usually I’d be talking, an insistent flow about the experiments we’d been doing. He can’t ever have understood much of it, but he never protested once and always gave me my head.

  Now, too, I feel my skin gradually loosening up.

  ‘Susan,’ he says abruptly. ‘When did it start to go wrong for us?’

  We look back. Across the years.

  33

  I WAITED A week after the day I discovered my Raleigh in the middle of my room at halls. There was a concert on at the music conservatory, students of composition were putting on their own works. Laban was on the bill. I sat in the front row.

  As soon as he took his seat at the piano, I knew I should never have come. I should never have given in. None of the great physicists ever got anywhere by being soft.

  When the interval came I made off. He must have taken a short cut, because all of a sudden there he was in front of me on the stairs, blocking my escape.

  ‘Your admirers will be expecting you,’ I said.

  ‘I’d give them all up for you.’

  ‘That might turn out to be a rather foolish exchange. I’m worse than you think.’

  I could hear the murmur of voices, the shuffle of footsteps on the landing above us. Laban threw out his arms and lifted his voice, exploiting the stairway’s acoustics to the full.

  ‘You and I, Susan, we are lost! But at least we are lost together!’

  We walked our bikes home together, he beside me as we went. It was spring, the Tivoli Gardens were full of revellers, and the chestnut trees that lined H. C. Andersens Boulevard were thinking about coming into leaf.

  ‘I’ve got a suggestion to make,’ I said. ‘It’s the only offer you’re going to get. We rent a cabin in the middle of nowhere and spend a month there together. There’ll be no touching unless absolutely necessary. And no telephones or computers either. All we’re going to do is see what happens.’

  We cancelled everything and took off the very next day. We’d found a place by the Limfjord, dirt cheap, with no electricity and an outside loo. It was on a steep slope some twenty metres above the fjord, across whose gigantic waters we could look out towards the neighbouring Skive Fjord.

  We slept together in a narrow bed, on a straw mattress, and for the first three weeks we never laid a finger on each other. When eventually we did, he was impotent the first two nights. That was what finally made up my mind: the fact that deep down he was so besotted that his normal functions had been put on stand-by.

  We talked about children, as if we knew they’d come, and we promised each other never to let them take over. We told each other about previous love affairs. It hurt me to sense how hard it was for him to hear me tell of such things, and how he stuck it out nonetheless, for just a tiny morsel of my life from before we met.

  We didn’t have any money. I cooked pasta and vegetables, and we shared our dreams about the future. He’d always seen a house in the country, with an annexe to which he could withdraw to compose, from which he could emerge in the evenings to rejoin a woman who stood preparing dinner while four children tugged at her skirts. I told him I’d always seen a flat in the city, to which I could return home late from the labs, to a man who lo
oked after the kids.

  In our final days there, the Effect began to kick in, or maybe it was just our being together, and by the end we were able to see each other the way we were. And we realised how difficult it was all going to be.

  He told me that ninety per cent of all music has love as its theme, albeit only in one of two ways. Either the couple have just met and walk off hand in hand into the future together, or else they’re separated forever, with violins weeping all over the place. But the love that lies between those two extremes, he said – true love – is never even touched upon.

  I told him about Wheeler’s use of Schrödinger’s equation to describe a universe in which everything hangs together.

  The day before we were due to leave, the Limfjord was colder than the air. He pointed out into the fog and asked me what I saw. I told him radiation fog, its upper boundary sharply delineated over the land on account of inversion. He laughed and told me he saw a world in which we were the only living creatures, floating in a state of timeless invulnerability.

  We’d used up all our money, and somewhere along the line we got an idea, both of us at the same time, though neither of us articulated it at any point. We got on our bikes and cycled to the shop.

  The shop was on a square across from the church. There were white tables outside, on a decking with a little white fence all around. It was the middle of the day, though hardly anyone was out. There was nothing remarkable about our appearance, apart from our glowing with newfound emotions, but passers-by turned and stared.

  We waited until there was no one else in the shop but the shopkeeper and us. It was a good and well-assorted store, with a look of care and attention to quality. Most likely they catered for the well-to-do segment of summer-house owners in the season. The counter was a right-angle. We positioned ourselves in such a way that an invisible line ran in a triangle from Laban through the shopkeeper to me. With such coordinates, the Effect becomes most intense. Later, we would employ the same model in our experiments.