The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  He halts and stares at us. Suddenly, I understand him. And I realise why he understands Andrea and Magrethe Spliid. Because basically, it’s the same thing he’s been trying to do all his life with his music. He’s been trying to creep up and spring a miracle on us all.

  ‘It’s not on,’ he says slowly. ‘It’s not enough for the plan to be good. There’s the motives to consider, too. And if they’re not … genuine … if one in some way wants to coerce others, coerce the public, or the politicians … then it’s bound to fail.’

  He looks at me. I look away.

  5

  THE NEXT MORNING I watch Oskar swimming again.

  A thin band of advection fog drifts in over the inlet from the sea, settling on the still surface like a delicate mantle of cloud, the swimmer’s body visible only in glimpses as the sine wave of his butterfly stroke reaches its apex.

  The moment I pass the spot on the shore where he has left his clothes, a blood vessel inside his brain ruptures.

  What I see is that his shoulders and upper arms appear out of the fog and vanish beneath it again. I wait for the movement to be repeated, only nothing happens. I go to the water’s edge. Advection fog always moves sideways. A gap appears in the water vapour and I see his body at the surface. No longer extended flat, but slanting. And as I stare he tips and goes under for the first time.

  I tear off my clothes without a thought. I gauge the water, the temperature and the distance to this drowning man with my body alone. I’ve taken the twins to the swimming baths and the beach hundreds of times. Anyone with that experience will no longer assess bathing safety with the brain. Instead, you project your physical capabilities out across the surface of the water, and feel within your muscles how far away you can allow the children to go, how fast you’d be able to get to them.

  I know as I plunge into the water that this exceeds the limit by far. And yet I plunge.

  In the sequences of compressed time surrounding mortal danger, the realisations that suddenly occur to a person can be astonishing. I realise, deep within myself, that the twins are old enough to get by without me. And that in spite of everything, I trust Laban enough to take good care of them.

  The second the water sheathes my body, my skin becomes numb. I sense the cold begin to close upon the very core of my being. I know I’ve got minutes at the most.

  He’s about 100 metres from shore. It’ll take me less than two minutes to reach him. When I’m halfway there he goes under and doesn’t come up.

  I find a point of focus on the opposite shore and draw a line of sight. I follow it and count the seconds. When I think I’m at the spot, I dive.

  The water is surprisingly clear, blue-green, as yet too cold for the chemistry of decay which in a month’s time will begin to colour the still water brown.

  On my way down I encounter a cloud of bubbles.

  It is the final exhalation of a drowning man. After it, in a matter of seconds, will follow a series of involuntary, retching gasps that will fill his lungs with water, and fungus will infect his mouth and gullet: milky proteins, like whipped egg whites.

  Twice during my time at Holmgangen I helped pull people out of a disused marlpit. One was drowned, the other survived.

  I find him at a depth of some four or five metres. I grab hold of him under the arms and feel for the bottom with my feet. At first they find only eelgrass and silt. But then a flat rock.

  I launch myself upwards. We ascend in slow motion and break the surface.

  His eyes are open. I think he can see, but his body is limp. I turn him over and lay his head back against my chest, only our noses and lips above water, to spread his weight.

  And then I begin to tow him towards land.

  I know I won’t make it. I realise as much even with the first feeble strokes. The water is too cold, the chill already too deeply entrenched within my muscles. The nerve pathways will soon be cut off. My body has already in part stopped doing what I want it to do.

  I feel the fatigue I’ve read about, a gentle urge to give in to an increasing drowsiness.

  And then my fear of sleep kicks in. After thirty years of absence. At once, I am scared stiff of the darkness that looms. My panic gains us fifty metres.

  But it’s not sufficient. There’s still another fifty to the shore. Anyone can drown quite easily in the shallowest of waters. Six metres is an outrageous luxury. Nevertheless, I feel an inexplicable, paradoxical satisfaction: I’m dying the way I always said I would, with as much resistance as possible.

  Then a pair of arms wrap themselves around me from behind. They belong to Laban. He hasn’t had the presence of mind to take off his clothes and has swum out in his trousers and sweater. It’s an unintelligent way of going about the matter, if ever there was one. But before unconsciousness turns out my lights, I decide not to make an issue of it.

  6

  OSKAR’S GONE A fortnight. We don’t know whether he’s alive or dead.

  The farm is locked up, though our deliveries continue. Twice a day, a man in overalls attends to the boiler and the greenhouses. I tell him I’ve promised Oskar to weed the rows of spinach and take care of the grafting. He shakes his head, but that’s all.

  When Oskar comes back it’s by ambulance. He’s in a wheelchair, but after a few days he starts using a walker with big, chunky tyres that can handle the fields.

  A routine is established.

  The cereals, the apple trees and the planting work are taken over by taciturn men whose vocabularies do not extend to greetings. I carry on with my weeding. Oskar sits in a camping chair and watches. A week goes by before he opens his mouth and speaks for the first time.

  ‘It was a blood vessel at the back of the brain. In Denmark it happens to twenty a year. Less than ten per cent survive.’

  Just telling me obviously requires a monumental effort. Several days pass before he can add a conclusion:

  ‘If it hadn’t been for you, Susan, I’d have drowned.’

  The Effect works in silence. I reach the end of the spinach rows one afternoon. The wind off the sea is cold. I always loved the crispness of early spring. The sun feels new. Its presence soothes and nourishes, though as yet it is feeble, the moist air still to be misted by its warmth.

  ‘Oskar, why isn’t there a woman in your life?’

  ‘I’m a soldier.’

  ‘Even soldiers have women.’

  He looks away.

  The following week I dig holes for the strawberry plants, fill them up from the wheelbarrow with three parts topsoil and one part compost, add water, place the plant in the hole and pat down the soil. Affixed to each plant is a plastic label stating the name of the variety. Most are unfamiliar to me.

  Oskar comes and sits down beside me.

  ‘They inserted a camera into a vein in my groin and passed it all the way up through my neck into the brain. I watched it on a screen.’

  A bumblebee buzzes about in search of a place to settle. A trout leaps in the inlet. A woodpecker flies past with a naked fledgling in its beak, amid a clamour of alarm calls. Nature unfolding in all its splendour and horror.

  ‘Susan, I want to show you something.’

  I follow him back to the farm buildings. We pass through the grafting area and the laboratory to the room I have entered only once. He opens the door and the red safelight goes on.

  ‘We’ve got a complete duplication of the Nordic Gene Bank. In an underground facility. It was set up in spring nineteen eighty, immediately after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.’

  In the middle of the floor is a wooden crate, the same as the one I saw when I was here last. He removes the lid and hands me a jar from inside.

  ‘It looks like rice,’ I say.

  ‘It is rice.’

  He hands me another. Rice again, but this time the grains are longer. I decipher the labels: Short Stem Nimrog, Singapore Genetic Bank.

  He’s trying to show me something he’s unable to tell me directly. But the message isn’t getting
through. I don’t get it.

  ‘I spent two years with the Danish Defence Intelligence Service. On Sunday, 7 August 1977, I was on duty when a call comes in from the Pentagon. Later comes a sequence of film the Russians have taken over the Kalahari, from a Cosmo 932 low-orbit close-look satellite. It shows the drill holes where the atomic devices were to be tested, the instrument trailers, the buildings. TASS goes public with the information on the Monday. The reason we’re briefed the day before is because the CIA knows we’re in touch with the building contractors, SecuriCom. Jimmy Carter received the pictures from Brezhnev the day after they were taken. He orders the area to be overflown by a plane belonging to the US military attaché in Pretoria. They take pictures and footage from a height of thirty metres. You can see faces quite clearly. The plane flies over while there’s an inspection going on, conducted by Armscor, the South African government’s own arms manufacturer. And the armed forces. And representatives of the building contractors. We’re presented with the photos, on my watch. I recognise the three men in them immediately. The guy in the hat we knew as the Duke. The second guy, the elegant gentleman in grey, is called Jason Alter.’

  He puts the photo down in front of me, the one he’s already shown me once. I try not to look at it.

  I note that Oskar suffers from a singular obsessive disorder. Whenever he’s feeling tense, he spreads out his fingers and studies them. The red safelight makes it look like he’s got blood on his hands.

  ‘These are the guys transporting the crates. On behalf of Holmens Kanal 42.’

  ‘What’s at Holmens Kanal 42?’

  ‘The Ministry of Defence. And the Danish Defence Command. But the crates are driven to the docks. Loaded onto a boat. And sailed out to Kronholm.’

  7

  THAT AFTERNOON, LABAN gives a concert.

  Just as it’s about to begin, Oskar arrives. I look at Laban, he looks at me. Oskar’s there at his invitation. Perhaps in order to make up for our altercation, perhaps because people kept in isolation band together, even with their keepers. Or maybe just because Laban will always seek to maximise his audience.

  He’s managed to stretch some steel wire out across a beer crate that he has equipped with a funnel. The funnel channels the wind, which in turn sets in motion a length of brass curtain rail set up with elastic bands, bringing it into contact with the steel-wire strings. It’s a kind of wind harp and it makes a sound like tortured souls trapped in a rubbish skip. He accompanies this rising-falling tone by striking with a stick a series of lemonade bottles filled with various amounts of water. And by playing a kind of homemade violin – the body of which is an empty two-and-a-half-litre tin that formerly contained peeled tomatoes – with a bow made of a bamboo flower stick to which he has attached a metre’s length of nylon tape.

  Somehow, inexplicably and wholly contrary to nature, he nevertheless succeeds in making it sound like music.

  We sit down in the kitchen. I’ve made cauliflower soup. Laban puts his spoon down on the table in front of him, instilling in me an immediate feeling of dread. He addresses the twins:

  ‘Just after you were born, a professorship became vacant at the conservatory in Copenhagen. I knew it would land me work abroad, as well as providing financial security. We invited the conservatory’s rector and two of its teaching staff for dinner. The three of them together would make up a majority on the assessment committee. Your mother prepared the meal. And then we let loose the Effect. It doesn’t only occur spontaneously, we can release it too, and by that time we had a lot of experience from the interviews and our collaboration with Andrea. We knew what was going to happen. First, whoever is on the receiving end will feel a confidence inspired within them, a sense of being understood and embraced. People react to such confidence by unconsciously opening up, automatically almost. Then comes a kind of attraction. They are hooked, and can no longer escape. The art is to navigate within that landscape. To interrupt at the right times. To give people back to themselves. If you don’t, it’s tantamount to exploitation and seduction. We went too far that night. In such cases one is abusing the openness of others for personal gain, tainting one’s sincerity with darkness. Deferring payment of a bill until some future time. I got the professorship. And it was just the springboard I thought it would be.’

  I get to my feet and stand at the window with my back to them.

  ‘That’s how we did things for ten years, your mother and I, on many occasions, and mostly with success. Then we tried to make it work with money and our luck ran out. I think this, our present situation, is payback for those years.’

  I turn to face them.

  ‘Your dad’s a crybaby,’ I say. ‘Yes, I exploited the Effect for financial gain, so we could live comfortably as a family. It’s not something I regret. My own professorship was above board and on the level. But we took advantage of it to secure board memberships. In every case, I’ve put in work for the money. So, no regrets.’

  They remain quiet for some time. Oskar stares ahead as if he’s somewhere far away. It all reminds me of our Christmas Eve. The homeless ought to be more careful about who they allow to invite them home.

  ‘What about the costs, Mum?’

  The question comes from Thit.

  ‘There aren’t any. I wanted a normal life. I got one.’

  We eat in silence. Then Oskar places the photo on the table.

  He indicates the three people in it.

  ‘I knew them from Greenland. The Danish military had worked with them before on two occasions. First in a cover-up operation, when a US B-1 bomber armed with nuclear weapons went down in the North Atlantic off the Greenland coast. Then when a Danish air ambulance was shot down by mistake during the tensions of the Cold War. SecuriCom salvaged the chopper and doctored the corpses to remove all trace of what had happened. In nineteen seventy-eight, Botha succeeds Vorster as prime minister. He hires help to implement his programme. SecuriCom are part of that. Once again, I’m brought in to take care of the photo documentation, this time for the UN, to give them an argument for tightening the embargo. Later, I run into them again, only this time they’re working for the KGB. Mokri dela, so-called wet affairs, assassination jobs. Then again, later still, in Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan when I’m over there on behalf of an international committee monitoring radiation levels in the natural vegetation after the fallout from Chernobyl. All of a sudden our contacts are pulled out. It turns out Yasser Arafat is in town, currying favour with the first Islamic state in the world to boast atomic weapons. We hear him address the parliament. Among his entourage I recognise the Duke. And Jason Alter.’

  Again he spreads his fingers, and I study them.

  He gets to his feet. I follow him to the door and step outside with him to get away from Laban and the twins for a moment.

  The night is cold, dark and cloudy. Oskar walks with a stick now he’s stopped using his zimmer.

  I’ve come out without a coat. He takes off his oilskin jacket and drapes it over my shoulders. We pause.

  ‘Susan, do you mind if I hold you for a moment?’

  I won’t say I hadn’t seen it coming. But still.

  No woman in the world hasn’t gone to bed with a man at least once out of pity. I can’t deny that’s probably true for me, too. And possibly more than once. And why not? Female sexuality is an abundance that may also be shared with the needy.

  And in this instance it wouldn’t be entirely out of pity. I think of the thrust of his body in the cold water. His feminine meticulousness in caring for his plants. His face crawling with bees.

  And yet I know the answer will be no. He knows it too.

  Nonetheless, I take him by the arm and walk him home. There’s an inexplicable kind of reciprocity between us. In a way, he’s the executioner and we’re the victims. And in another way, it’s the exact opposite.

  By the time I get back, the twins and Laban have gone to bed. I can hear them sleeping. I enter Laban’s room and look at him. His breathing is deep and measu
red at the same time, and as light as a child’s.

  A dark rage wells inside me. A desire to relieve myself of this lust, a wish that there were some pill I could take to make it go away, an operation, a lobotomy that would remove the urge for ever. Perhaps some medicine exists. I tear off my clothes, pull aside his duvet and lie down on top of him. He always wakes up slowly, as if returning from some far-flung corner of the universe. But his erection precedes him. I grip it immediately, straddle him and slip it inside me. I writhe, briefly, a few seconds at most. Enough for the dizzying blur of frenzy to find form and culminate. And then I get up and gather my clothes.

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ I say. ‘I needed your body, that’s all.’

  He stares at me, eyes wide. I retire to my own room.

  8

  THE NEXT DAY, Oskar comes out into the field with his chair. He unfolds it and sits down next to me.

  ‘I’m a gardener.’

  My eyes ignore him. Yesterday still lingers in a way.

  ‘Before special forces, I was a gardener. In the summer and autumn of two thousand and nine I was in Afghanistan. Helmand, the Green Belt, between Gereshk and Shurakian. I was there to map the extent of the opium growing. There were three of us, two gardeners and a biologist, working in the fields under protection. One day we came under fire from the Taliban. They came in pickups mounted with heavy 12.7-millimetre machine guns. We eliminated a few of them and forced the rest back to a house by the river. A B-1 came in to give us cover, but they shot it down. In the night, I went into the house and killed eight people with a knife. When I pulled off their headgear, two were women.’

  The bees hum. The grass is green. He looks down at his hands.

  ‘Every time I get close to a woman I see them in front of me.’