The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  ‘We’ve run out of money,’ I told the shopkeeper. ‘We’re young and in love. Do you mind if we put a flyer up on your notice-board looking for a sponsor?’

  The shopkeeper was a friendly sort. He chuckled, and we chuckled back. So far we were still within the boundaries of normality.

  And then the Effect kicked in. Without him realising, without him having any chance of knowing what was going on, it propelled him beyond a threshold he no longer even recognised.

  He reached up to the wine shelf. ‘Oh, but we couldn’t possibly,’ said Laban. ‘Though if you insist, a bottle of champagne would be very nice indeed.’

  ‘I’m vegetarian myself,’ I said. ‘But Laban loves meat. So for dinner tonight, which in a way is a kind of engagement celebration, I would so love to do him a roast. Is that tenderloin of wild boar you’ve got there in the freezer?’

  The weather was typical May. In the garden behind the shop, a Danish flag fluttered from a white flagpole. It was a peaceful, idyllic scene. But somewhere in the space between the three of us, a sense of fate and inevitability prevailed.

  We biked home again with baskets laden. I cooked and we feasted. Only once during the course of the evening did a cold front seem to glance by, though we felt its chill:

  ‘I wonder,’ said Laban, ‘if we might not have been a trifle too audacious.’

  I let it pass, and mentioned Rutherford to him. Despite the Nobel Prize, despite a matchless list of discoveries in physics, he ended up running his lab into the ground, losing his best students, and missing out on the discovery of fission. And all because he wouldn’t think big and was too proud to allow himself to be sponsored.

  Recollections will often come in bundles, like some quantum memory. I recall all these things as Laban massages my feet and asks me where it started to go wrong. And I know the same recollections come to him, too, in exactly the same way. He’s not asking because he expects an answer. He’s asking in the hope of finding support to cope with what both of us know.

  Which is that ever since that evening our relationship has carried with it the whisper of a question, so faint as to be barely heard at all: What does it cost to abuse a special talent?

  34

  WE’RE SEATED AT the round table.

  I put the report from the National Archives down in front of me. It runs to about thirty pages. The twins haven’t looked me in the eye since dinner.

  I flick through it, but only to give my hands something to do. I know it off by heart already.

  Twelve exceptionally intelligent individuals, from twenty-five to thirty years old. First six – then, after less than ten months, twelve. An economist, a chemical engineer, a theologist, a chartered surveyor, a priest, a psychiatrist, a painter, a geologist, an historian, a physicist and two statisticians. Their first meeting took place in the summer of 1972. The overview report builds on this and the meetings that follow, and was compiled in December 1974.

  To begin with, they convene every six months or so, but then they seem to be seized by enthusiasm and their meetings become more frequent. The beginnings are termed loose. Young people sitting around talking over dinner, a glass of wine. Playing at being important. Budding specialists within their fields. But this isn’t about areas of expertise, this is broader, and at the outset the mood is relaxed and informal. Amateurish, is how they describe it. They hardly bother to take notes, barely believing there will be anything to report.

  What they’ve been asked to do is to give their take on the future: their professionally justified prognoses. But to begin with, these are few and far between. What they come up with might at best be called creative sketches, the report says. But then it takes off. At first they note the occurrence of a special kind of mood, which they describe in detail. A sense of mutual understanding arises, a deeper feeling between them, a prevailing consensus, which in the course of the following year becomes more profound than any of them have ever before experienced. It’s as if the future presents itself to them. And at that point they start writing things down in detail.

  The beginning of the report is a summary of the commission’s notes from the first eighteen months of its existence, divided into three groups: predictions of individual events, predictions of wider delimited phenomena of collective significance, and predictions of trends. Each prediction is specified in terms of accuracy. The misses gradually cease to occur: the prognoses that didn’t match up, and the wild guesses that had indeed been many. But now information is coming at them, clearly intuitive, and only seldom are they able to provide a more rational kind of reasoning, not to mention hazard a guess at where it might be coming from. And yet it is all so unfathomably precise. Even today, with the knowledge at our disposal, it’s baffling. And utterly without organisation, a mixture of vague suggestion and intimation.

  For instance, the case of the landslide election of 1973. As early as the minutes of their first meeting in August 1972, at a point where they haven’t even officially convened as a group, they note down that they see a political upheaval about to occur, a complete turnaround articulating forces that have been at work within the population since at least the end of the Second World War, but which until that point had yet to find any definite form of expression. Moreover, they predict, what was about to happen – within eighteen months – would be the subject of much international attention. It is hard, the report concludes, not to see this as a very exact prediction of the general election of 4 December 1973.

  At the next meeting they turn their radar abroad, noting the severe likelihood of tension in the Middle East triggering acts of aggression that will involve several nations and have major consequences for world energy supplies. They foresee the attacks on Israel by Egypt and Syria in October 1973. Attacks that would go on to trigger the first oil crisis. They write that the world has misunderstood the progressive development of the Cold War. There is no real détente: Kissinger’s diplomacy shrouds a massive build-up of arms on both sides, American as well as Soviet. This is couched in somewhat vague terms, but all of a sudden there is something very exact: In August 1974, a humiliated American president will fly home to California having been forced to resign from office. That’s what it says, in black and white. As if it were a horoscope, or the prediction of a fortune teller. Nixon! And right out of nowhere! They had no way of knowing, not even the slightest indication that anything remotely like it could occur. And there’s more, much more. Events great and small, domestic as well as foreign. The ruling of the Danish Supreme Court in the so-called contraceptive pill case. The split in the Danish conservative party. The culmination of Soviet stockpiles of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They even get the number right: sixteen hundred.

  ‘Prophets are bound to get lucky sometime,’ says Harald. ‘A meteorologist can predict a dry summer. An economist can foresee a recession.’

  ‘This is different. Once they discover how often they’re getting it right, their self-confidence grows. They realise they need to document it. Their figures are collated in tables. It all speaks for itself. During the first two years they’ve got twenty-four major prognoses where they hit the bull’s-eye, and forty minor ones besides that. As the report says, no other think tank even gets near.’

  ‘Who wrote the report?’ Harald asks.

  Now’s the time to tell them. They have to know.

  ‘It’s signed Andrea Fink. And Magrethe Spliid. They drew it up together.’

  They stare at me like statues.

  ‘Andrea had won the Nobel Prize only a few years previously,’ I say. ‘She was one of the most famous people in the country. Her words carried a colossal amount of clout, and have done ever since. She knew what it would mean to give her stamp of approval.’

  ‘How did she get to know about the commission?’

  The question’s from Harald.

  I get to my feet. I’m hungry. We all are. When circumstances force a person into forgetting themselves, at some point they will realise they need food. And we neve
r got round to the duck.

  ‘She didn’t get to know about it. She knew all along. She and Magrethe Spliid put the Future Commission together. It was their work.’

  There’s one duck left in the pizza oven. I’m in the garden, allowing myself to savour the cold air for a moment, the moonlight reflecting in the snow.

  Before we know it we’ll have moved on. The house will be sold and other people will be living in it. I put my hand to the outer wall. I hold affection for the building, as if it were a person.

  The peace and stillness are tactile.

  People will be returning even now to these suburban streets, to find their homes ransacked by thieves: burglars who have taken everything, ripped the stereo cables from the walls and left not a fingerprint behind. Now, at this very moment, the waiting room of the A&E at the Gentofte Infirmary will be full of casualties: battered wives, but also their beaters, sated with festive spirits, whose victims have retaliated with the frying pan, though not before heating it up to 280 degrees on the ceramic hob.

  A few kilometres away, in the dismal flats of Vangede, single mothers will be celebrating Christmas with aid parcels from the Salvation Army.

  And yet it must be okay to stand here for a moment and enjoy the peace.

  Laban seems to have sat down at the piano. But the music sounds so faint and distant all it can do is highlight the silence.

  Then all of a sudden Oskar is standing by my side.

  I don’t know if any biomechanical studies have ever been done of the way homeless people move. But one certainly does not imagine them to float about the concrete jungle like ballet dancers on pointe. Nevertheless, that’s how he must have come, because I for one didn’t hear him.

  ‘You’ll be picked up tomorrow,’ he says. ‘And taken to a safe place.’

  What strikes me is not that he no longer looks like he’s homeless. Nor that he has somehow ceased to smell. What strikes me is an abrupt sense of powerlessness. The feeling of never being able to escape.

  I follow him round the side of the house to the front. He stops at the gate.

  ‘You’re not going to do a bunk, are you?’

  I step up close to him.

  ‘Suppose there was something I wanted to say to Hegn in person. Before we’re taken away. Where would I find him?’

  I don’t really expect him to answer.

  He looks up at the full moon.

  ‘He’s playing golf tomorrow.’

  ‘In the snow?’

  ‘Where he plays they’ve got heated greens. Out on the Kronholm Islets.’

  And with that he’s gone. I go back inside.

  ‘Thit,’ I venture, ‘where did you actually find Oskar?’

  ‘Outside the riding school.’

  ‘Mattsson’s Riding School,’ I say, ‘isn’t exactly the sort of place you’d expect to find a homeless person.’

  ‘Maybe not. But there was something about him. I could just tell he was down on his luck.’

  I let it drop.

  35

  THIT AND HARALD have gone to bed. Tonight they’re sleeping in the same room: Harald’s.

  They’ve done so once in a while ever since they were little. I open the door. The sight of them asleep together has always filled me with joy and sadness at the same time. Joy at the way they seek each other’s company. Sadness at the fact that it’s always prompted by some threat from outside.

  The moonlight shining on them makes their skin seem almost transparent. Without me being able to do anything about it, Grosseteste’s cosmogony of light, De Luce, comes to mind, and Newton’s theory of light as a material substance in his Opticks, then Euler, Young, Maxwell, followed by Planck and Einstein, and finally Andrea Fink’s collaborative research with Grangier into quantum optics. Five hundred years of science, the sum of which is that we still don’t know what light actually is.

  But then I realise. And the answer comes directly from the moonlight on the faces of my twins.

  Light is touch.

  I put on my coat, find the car keys, and take the crowbar from the toolbox. I switch the lights off in the living room and shut the blinds. A short way down Evighedsvej, a BMW is parked at the kerb with Oskar behind the wheel.

  I walk through the house to the utility room and open the back door. Suddenly Laban’s behind me, in his bare feet and a kimono.

  ‘I’ve got to go and see Andrea,’ I tell him.

  I go through the garden, through the gap in the hedge, through Dorthea and Ingemann’s garden, past the laid-up cutter, through the hedge at the far end, and after that the little park, eventually emerging onto Hyldegårdsvej, from where I walk down to Kystvejen – the coast road.

  I grab a taxi within a minute and tell the driver to let me out on Gamle Carlsberg Vej. I continue on foot, past the place where the Carlsberg physiological, chemical and biochemical laboratories were housed in the sixties, back when Andrea Fink was a professor there and scientists from all over the world were falling over themselves to get a look-in. Word was you couldn’t see a hand in front of you for Nobel laureates. Andrea told me she saw Bohr celebrate passing his driving test there. He drove a stately lap of honour around the grounds, and the laboratory staff hung out of the windows to watch him steer straight into one of the stone pillars flanking the eight-metre-wide gateway.

  She told me this without a smile, adding, as if by way of explanation: ‘Susan, one must bear in mind that the natural sciences are concerned only with a very narrow section of our human experience.’

  Carlsberg owns several very large properties here, and I pass their tall gates with their security systems and walk along beside the railway cutting before arriving at the honorary residence. Here again is a heavy-duty fence and a security entrance with an intercom system and a guard doing the rounds who comes by every twenty minutes. I circumvent it all, as I’ve done hundreds of times before, by taking a key from a hollow tree stub and opening a small welded-mesh gate in the fence.

  There are no lights on in the house. I go to the front door. It’s never locked.

  The hall is brightened by moonlight, Andrea’s hospital bed a rectangular silhouette against the glass front facing the snow-covered gardens. The air is simultaneously fresh as ozone and filled with the sweet fragrance of pine needles and burning candles. A great Christmas tree stands against the wall, presumably moved back from the middle of the floor: her children and grandchildren have been and gone.

  Now she’s alone. I walk up to the bed. My chair’s in the same place as it was three days ago. As if everything has been put in the deep freeze, and time suspended.

  I sit down. She doesn’t turn her head but reaches out, and I put my hand in hers.

  ‘Your crutch, Susan?’

  ‘I’m much better now.’

  Death feels very near.

  Our years together wander by. One particular time stands out, perhaps because it’s Christmas. The first time she took me with her on one of her trips was during our first year of working together. We went to what was then the Soviet Union, flying on from Moscow to a military base called Belbek, near Sebastopol on the south-west coast of the Crimean Peninsula. There we met with Gorbachev, at the dacha he called Zarya, meaning dawn. The Soviet government had spent twenty-five million dollars building the place on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Black Sea. He was still president, his country’s eighth and last leader. Two years previously, Andrea had been commissioned at his request to hold classes in group decision-making processes for the six individuals whose orders the Soviet warning systems required to be coordinated in order to authorise the use of nuclear weapons.

  Present were Gorbachev himself, Andrea and me, Gorbachev’s wife Raisa and their daughter and two grandchildren. An army officer in full uniform stood by one wall, guarding a small briefcase. Andrea told me afterwards this was the cheget, the Soviet equivalent of the US president’s football, the portable doomsday device required to launch a nuclear strike.

  I’d never seen anyone as tired
as Gorbachev. He looked like what he was: a man who had shouldered responsibility for the welfare of an entire nation and its people, and whose time, after six years – only half of his allotted period – was drawing to an end.

  He and Andrea Fink conversed like old friends. He wanted her help putting together a unit to draw up guidelines for the establishment of a federal Soviet Union bestowing wide-reaching independence on its member states.

  Within the first minute I realised she knew it wouldn’t work. After ten, she told him.

  His power was a very physical presence. There was a hum about him, like a giant electric motor. I sensed his bewilderment.

  So I got up and took his head in my hands and placed it between my breasts. The room went quiet. The guard stiffened, the children fell silent. Andrea Fink just stared.

  I wanted to give him something. Sexual healing, perhaps. I tilted his head so he could look up at me.

  ‘Misha,’ I said, ‘if only we could have been on our own together.’

  That opened things up a bit. They knew I meant it. His wife knew, and his daughter, and the army officer with the doomsday device – even the grandchildren knew. As long as you time things right, kids can cope with anything.

  ‘Susan,’ he said.

  He pronounced it Zoozan.

  ‘I am unused to being touched by my advisers.’

  ‘That’s because you’re not yet familiar with the Copenhagen School of Quantum Physics,’ I told him.

  We said our goodbyes. We all knew it was over. We went out past a fifty-metre pool and along a private beach that stretched for kilometres in the direction of the Foros resort, before arriving back at the car. Two weeks later, on Christmas Day 1991, we watched him announce his resignation on national television from that very same room. And we saw him hand over control of his little briefcase to Boris Yeltsin. That’s twenty-seven years ago now.