The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  Like a single organism it seems at first to extend its slender pseudopodia towards him, the writhing mass then spilling onto his face, smothering his features, obliterating eyes, nose and mouth, hanging from his chin like a beard.

  He is completely still. Even from where I stand, behind two layers of glass, I can hear the hum of myriad insects, deep as a turbine engine: the overwhelming energy of the swarm.

  He sits there for perhaps three short minutes, motionless, immersed in the consciousness of the swarm against his face. On the border of vivid existence and most painful death.

  Then he lifts his right hand, draws it gently across his mouth to clear his lips, removes the box and, without yet being able to see, extracts the queen and places her inside the hive.

  As if by some biological magnetism, the swarm follows her. First a few individuals, then more, until the entire seething mass pours itself into the wooden hive. Some hover for a moment in the air above the opening. Oskar waits, motionless, until they too descend into the hive, allowing him finally to close the lid.

  He straightens his shoulders, as if returning slowly from another world to the one inhabited by the rest of us. And then he sees me. With half a metre between us, we look at each other through the glass.

  2

  I TAKE HIM one of my first successful loaves, without quite knowing why. When I get there he’s standing in the laboratory sharpening a knife. The blade is a concave curve. To sharpen it he uses a cylinder held in his hand, made of a white ceramic material, matt, like unpolished ivory. I bring him the bread wrapped in a tea towel and put it down on the table next to him.

  I stay there a few minutes. His procedure is meticulous, movements unhurried, yet swift and economic. At one point he pauses and passes the blade over his thumb, placing it at an angle of ninety degrees against the nail and exerting gentle pressure. A tiny curl of keratin blooms against the metal.

  ‘A grafting knife,’ he says. ‘The incision has to be precise.’

  During the following weeks he is absorbed in the systematic work of grafting. Sometimes he’s in the lab, other times at the tables in the greenhouses. Now and then I linger and watch. The trees on which he works look strangely unfamiliar, and occasionally their bark has a scaly or shaggy appearance, like coconut palms. He works painstakingly in the high temperatures, humidity close to a hundred. Apart from exchanging details about our grocery orders, we do not speak.

  We receive what we order. One day, after two months, there are books for Harald, though no explanation.

  The end of February brings a period of unexpected spring. The sun warms everything up. In three days the snow is gone, except for the drifts that remain in the shadows. After five days the sea is free of ice. Gradually, the ice in the inlet breaks up.

  One morning I wade out until the water reaches my thighs, then submerge myself for a moment before climbing onto the jetty in front of our house, towelling myself dry and sitting down in the sun to sense how greedily the skin soaks up its light.

  The next day I see Oskar swimming.

  I’ve come earlier than usual. The farm, too, lies on the inlet, and as I arrive I spot him straight away.

  He’s at least 100 metres from the shore. The water must be around freezing. At first I mistake him for a seal, but as I get closer I realise it’s him.

  He’s doing the butterfly. I’ve thought him to be in his late fifties, yet his swimming is powerful, thrusting and explosive.

  I stand and watch, fascinated by the elegance of his movements. Amazed he can spend such time in water so cold. Only when he wades ashore do I turn and leave.

  As I pick up the groceries he comes into the utility room. He holds a photograph up in front of me. Monochrome, taken from above, some twenty metres perhaps, from a light aircraft whose shadow is visible on the ground below. One sees the corner of a building. Outside the shadow are three people, two men and a woman. They’re looking up at the camera, the woman is alarmed. One of the men is wearing a white, wide-brimmed hat. He is the eldest of the three. The other man is in a grey three-piece suit. The sight of him brings pain to my body. This is the man who kicked me into the van. But he’s a lot younger in the photo. Boyish, almost.

  Oskar says nothing. He waits.

  I hand him back the photo.

  ‘You’re a physicist,’ he says. ‘What’s that at their feet?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘And their identities?’

  Again I shake my head.

  ‘Where’s it taken?’ I ask.

  He slips the photo back inside a worn notebook.

  ‘The Kalahari Desert.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Nineteen seventy-seven.’

  He turns and leaves.

  For some weeks, Harald has been engrossed in his reading. When he’s not reading, he seems distant. That evening after dinner he fetches a stack and puts it on the table in front of us.

  Bound volumes of various magazines. My eyes catch a few titles: Army News, Journal of Strategic Studies, Journal of Military Studies, Foreign Affairs.

  ‘Magrethe Spliid’s articles. Twenty of them. All are about mass killings. She employs a concept she calls man-made violence: the violence humans inflict on one another. Between one hundred and one hundred and fifty million people were killed by human hand during the twentieth century. Perhaps some fifty million in the Second World War, fifteen million in the First World War. Ten to fifteen million as a result of Stalin’s Red Terror. She calls it unprecedented in world history. Only the great infectious diseases and natural disasters have ever claimed as many lives. Her articles are an attempt to understand why. She says the history books count losses as the number of soldiers killed in action, but this amounts to only a quarter of the actual fatalities. The remaining three-quarters is made up of the elderly and the sick, and women and children dying of hunger, disease and cold in the wake of the fighting. She introduces a concept she calls public security, which she compares to public health. She says that in view of the fact that we were able to so emphatically increase standards of public health during the period eighteen eighty to nineteen fifty, primarily by improving hygiene and gaining an understanding of and then eradicating many major infectious diseases, and given that we were able to improve poor public health by directing reason at its causes, why then haven’t we been able to do the same in respect of man-made violence? The reason, she suggests, is that violence comes from a place impervious to reason. It issues from human anger. This, basically, is what all her articles seek to illuminate. All end with her posing the same question: What is the root of our anger? That’s what she was trying to understand.’

  ‘And what answer did she propose?’

  The question is Thit’s.

  Harald shakes his head.

  ‘I’ve only read a third at the most.’

  ‘Harald,’ I ask, ‘what happened in the Kalahari Desert in nineteen seventy-seven that someone might have found interesting enough to take a photo of? Something having to do with high explosives?’

  He searches his singular memory. In vain.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘Why high explosives, Mum?’

  ‘I saw a photo,’ I say. ‘There were cable trenches in it, cast in concrete.’

  The next morning, a learning curve begins. I’m watching Oskar repotting when he stops and hands me the sharpening cylinder and a grafting knife.

  I work an hour a day in the potting room. It takes me days to learn how to make the blade sufficiently sharp. It’s a technique significantly different to the one required for the twenty-degree blades of kitchen knives, and indeed for the slanting sharp edge of a chisel.

  Oskar shows me how to select the wild stock. He’s working on Danish fruit trees now. He teaches me how to tell apart what look like seemingly identical twigs he places in the soil. He is a patient instructor, allowing me time to memorise their classification numbers and properties. MM 106 yields seventy per cent bigger apples than average, but requires go
od soil. M 7 is a hardy variety, akin to the crab apple. M 26 puts out small roots and is best suited to espalier, yet is a healthy sort. M 9 produces a very small tree with a short lifespan, though is quick to bear fruit.

  From the very first time I saw him handle a plant, I have seen gentleness and care.

  He shows me the shallow-angled incision of the whip and tongue graft. How, immediately after the incision, to avoid oxidation and the risk of germs, the stock and the scion are married up and sealed with tape and wax. In his hands, it is a process of surgical precision. The first time I see one of my own grafts produce buds it feels like a little miracle of birth.

  As I arrive home one day and stand washing my hands at the sink, Harald looks up from his reading.

  ‘I found it, Mum. What you said about the Kalahari Desert. I found it in one of Magrethe Spliid’s articles. Photos taken by a Soviet satellite above the Kalahari in August nineteen seventy-seven uncovered the fact that South Africa had its own nuclear weapons programme.’

  I let the water run over my hands. The stiff bristles of the nail brush flay the epithelium beneath my fingernails.

  ‘Were there other photos? Taken at closer range, like from an aircraft?’

  He shakes his head.

  I put the nail brush down. Here and there, blood trickles from my fingers. But the nails are clean.

  I sit down at the table. Laban comes in and sits down opposite me.

  ‘In nineteen seventy-two, Andrea and Magrethe Spliid put together a group of individuals,’ I begin. ‘They’ve been working on the idea for about ten years, though we know little about their exact reasons. They’re given the support of the Folketing, their proposal coming at a time when think tanks are all the rage. The group is officially dubbed the Future Commission. Official, but secret. Its purpose is to put forward scenarios. For the first time, the welfare state is worried about where everything’s headed. To begin with, the commission comprises six young specialists in key fields. Soon, their number is doubled to twelve. Every few months they deliver a report. Only no one takes any notice. Andrea and Spliid discover that in its first two years the commission has struck an unprecedented prognostic seam. Perhaps by chance, or perhaps because of what Andrea knows about structuring collective intelligence. Maybe a combination of both. She draws up an overview, a summary of the group’s results showing a predictive precision without parallel. We don’t know who saw this report, but what we do know is that police and military intelligence services were informed. They try to assume control of the group, but fail. They’re afraid of losing it, so a monitoring unit is set up under Hegn’s command. For over forty years that monitoring unit removes itself to some extent from parliamentary control. It’s been seen before in Denmark. At the same time, the commission itself retains a certain independence. Presumably they realise that being able to predict the future might be a rather perilous ability. At no point is Hegn informed as to the identity of the commission’s members, or indeed of any subsequent changes to its make-up due to members passing away, or whatever. At some point along this timeline, the commission decides it wants to earn money. Big money. That much appears obvious. But then come the riddles. The commission believes a comprehensive global collapse to be imminent. It decides to discontinue itself. Without giving Hegn the minutes of its final meetings. Hegn isn’t pleased. So he tries me, having heard about me from Andrea. We’re brought home, only something goes wrong. The killings of Magrethe Spliid, Kornelius and maybe Keldsen too are not of Hegn’s doing. Nor is the attempt to do away with Harald and me. Which means there’s another factor involved. The people who brought us here weren’t police. Our psychopath on the quayside certainly wasn’t. We’re dealing with a different category of people. The man in grey. He was in the photo Oskar showed me. From the Kalahari Desert.’

  Thit looks at me.

  ‘Mum, might we suppose the commission, in striving to make a packet, ran up against a very specific issue? About where to draw a line between use and abuse of a special talent?’

  3

  TOWARDS THE END of March, Oskar shows me a more complex graft, particularly suited to more delicate scions: Bøghs citronæble, Ballerina Obelisk, Red Astrakhan.

  ‘Oskar, what exactly is this set-up?’

  ‘It’s a plant-physiological experimental facility.’

  ‘Why is it so big? Ten by ten kilometres, most of which is fallow land?’

  ‘There’s a minimum requirement for grafting experiments. To prevent cross-pollination.’

  ‘We’re in the south of Sjælland,’ I say, ‘aren’t we? The northern part is too densely populated for this.’

  He doesn’t answer me.

  ‘Who does it belong to?’

  He doesn’t answer.

  The next day I’m alone in the laboratory when the postman arrives, in the same little van as always, the one that also brings in our groceries and Harald’s books. The letters are left in a basket inside the door, and the van drives off.

  Oskar is nowhere to be seen. I skim through the envelopes. Most seem to be catalogues, addressed to the Plant Physiology Research Centre. The postcode is 4720 Præstø. The last envelope is addressed to Oskar Larsen. It’s from the Danish Defence Special Forces.

  There have been a number of nights now without frost. Oskar tells me it’s time for bud grafting: the insertion of single buds of particularly attractive varieties directly into the stem of already-bearing stock plants.

  He stands side-on. In his left hand he holds the green bud, with his right he makes the incision: a single, exact movement.

  ‘Oskar,’ I say, ‘why no woman?’

  He puts down the knife, turns and walks away.

  In early April I lend a hand planting spinach.

  After an hour I break off and tell him I need to go to the bathroom. The field is 400 metres from the lab. From the building I can see the arch of his back.

  At the far end of the lab is a door I’ve never seen open. I open it now. Behind it is another, edged with a rubber seal some ten centimetres in width, like an airlock.

  The room has no windows and is dark, but a dim red safe-light goes on automatically. Cupboards line the walls. I open one, it too is fitted with a rubber seal. Inside are what look like small jam jars, hundreds of them, tightly packed.

  All are three-quarters full of grain. Each has a label stuck to it. I read: Barley. Landrace. Scandinavian Gene Bank No. 3071. Barley. Landrace. Scandinavian Gene Bank No. 12.440. Rye. Landrace …

  On the floor is a wooden crate measuring a metre by one and a half. I remove the lid. It’s sectioned up into compartments with thin plywood dividers. In each compartment is a jar. The crate contains more than a thousand, each carefully packed with wood wool.

  ‘What’s a landrace?’

  Harald is engrossed in his reading. He doesn’t even look up when he answers me.

  ‘Cereals selected in the normal way, by picking out the best seeds. They yield less than modern varieties but are much hardier. A bit like you, Mum.’

  ‘Harald,’ I say, ‘don’t be so precocious. You’re not vanishing into books in order to avoid girls, are you?’

  A moment passes before he glances up. The look he sends me is one of despair.

  The next day I’m seized by enthusiasm for the job of planting the spinach. I find myself working in a rhythm, as if on a good day in the physics lab, an inner metronome driving me on, row by row, heart pumping steadily as I concentrate.

  Returning to reality, I realise I’ve worked four hours without a break.

  I go back to the farm and into the laboratory. Oskar’s sitting at a microscope with what look like tweezers in his hand. He doesn’t look up. I stand next to him and watch.

  ‘We remove the outer group of cells from the shoot, Susan, for propagation. In order to eliminate such organisms as carry disease, which are further inside.’

  ‘That photo,’ I say, ‘from the Kalahari Desert. Was it from the South African nuclear test site?’

 
‘Vastrap Weapon Range. That was the name of it.’

  He still doesn’t look up.

  When I get back to our wooden house I hear music from Laban’s instrument. I go into the barn and find him seated. He throws me an icy glance.

  ‘I know you’ve got something going on with him.’

  When he’s really hurt, his features don’t alter at all. It’s his skin. It changes colour.

  He gets to his feet.

  ‘Oskar’s the old gardener,’ I tell him. ‘He’s ancient.’

  ‘He’s a man in the prime of life. I sensed there was a spark the first time I saw you together. And now here you are, obviously returning from some sexual tryst!’

  Jealousy is an interesting chemical combination. One minute we’re big-hearted and generous, the next we’ve snorted 0.25 milligrams of the stuff and are transformed into despicable gnomes.

  ‘Brazenly, in front of our noses! Mine and the children’s!’

  ‘Laban,’ I say, ‘get a grip.’

  And then he hits me.

  He hasn’t got the slender hands you’d expect of a piano player. They’re broad and strong.

  Not all his life has been spent at the piano either, for that matter. His mother once told me he was a boy with a temper, always on the lookout for bigger boys on whom he could vent his aggressions. When Thit and Harald were younger I put a climbing frame up for them in the garden on Evighedsvej. It’s years since they grew out of it, but Laban still swings about on it like an ape.

  He’s never hit me before, so it comes from nowhere, and he hits hard. Even though I go with the punch, it still knocks me to the floor.

  But I follow through, rolling out of the fall and back onto my feet.

  Laban has to mount the wooden crate of his instrument to reach out and grab me.

  ‘I know you’ve had sex!’

  ‘You’re right,’ I tell him. ‘A good old romp in the haystack, among the apple trees. The only thing that made us stop was that.’