The Exception

by Christian Jungersen

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  Grith’s large eyes are fixed on Iben. ‘And as far as you know, no one in the office has been hard on this woman?’

  ‘People have been irritated with her, but that’s normal. We all have our ups and downs, but there’s nothing unusual about that, surely?’

  ‘Not at all. Quite normal.’

  ‘So, she might misinterpret mood swings that the rest of us think nothing of, if she’s another personality type. It’s the kind of thing I thought we might talk about.’

  Grith leans back, stretching one arm out on the back of the sofa. Her flexibility makes her thin, elongated limb seem to flow along the cushion.

  ‘Iben, you’ve never seen anyone have a go at this woman?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything like that. We try to be helpful and kind. Don’t we, Malene?’

  ‘Yes, we do.’

  Iben is quiet for a moment. ‘Still, it’s difficult to know what goes on inside her head because she withdraws into her shell such a lot. She can seem quite odd. That’s what we wanted to talk to you about …’

  Grith uses both hands to lift the mug of tea to her lips, the way Malene sometimes needs to do. Not that Grith has arthritis, of course. She listens and blows on her drink before interrupting Iben.

  ‘You said that the door to her workplace is always closed?’

  ‘Yes, Camilla likes the library door to be closed, to keep out draughts. It’s debatable …’

  ‘And we do debate it,’ Malene points out.

  ‘True. But Camilla has worked in that office longer than she has. And that door has always been shut. It’s a bit much.’

  Grith asks more questions, especially about Camilla. Does she harass Anne-Lise when the others are out of earshot?

  It’s still Iben who fields the questions. ‘She wouldn’t … Look, Camilla is OK, isn’t she?’

  Iben’s question puts a stop to Malene’s discreet finger-exercise session. It’s the time in the evening when she usually massages her knuckles.

  She nods. ‘Yes. Camilla is easy to work with.’

  Grith pushes a fine strand of hair away from her cheek.

  ‘It could be just a little thing,’ she says. ‘You two might not notice. You’re committed to creating a good working atmosphere for the whole office and that’s great. You talk with this woman and invite her to join your group, even though you’re not that keen on her. What do other people do? Someone in your office is giving her a hard time. And if you don’t demonstratively take her side, she might well feel that you’re all bullies. That’s enough to make anyone unhappy and very angry …’

  Iben tries to interrupt, but Grith continues. ‘It explains why she’s reserved and insecure in your company. It’s quite understandable.’

  ‘Grith, it’s not—’

  ‘Try to see things her way and the pieces fall into place. Don’t ignore her angle.’

  Iben has been eager to talk for so long that she has to draw breath. She says quickly, ‘Grith, listen. Apart from the head of the Centre – and he’s almost always out – there are no other people. Just Camilla and us!’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Malene leans forward to get a little closer to Iben. She looks at Grith.

  ‘Grith, only us. You see? No one is harassing her.’

  By now Grith’s measured approach has become even more deliberate. ‘Is that so? I assumed there were more … that there was a large staff.’

  ‘There isn’t. We’re it.’

  Silence. Grith’s eyes flit around the room, scanning the bookshelf, the bare walls, the small table with the telephone, the dining table made from heavy wooden beams.

  Then she looks calmly at her visitors and smiles.

  ‘Aha …’

  They talk about the possibility that Anne-Lise is envious of them, maybe because of their friendship, or because their jobs are more exciting, or their relationship with Paul is better than hers; any envy she feels that might remind her of other disturbing situations in her past, when she felt undervalued and excluded. Maybe she didn’t dare allow herself to show anger then.

  At last, they’ve arrived at the point where psychological expertise might help them understand.

  Malene sums up: ‘Something about Anne-Lise’s personality makes her reactions unpredictable. We wondered if that “something” means it’s essential that we treat her with special care? Could she cope, if we confronted her and told her that we think she has sent the emails?’

  Malene waits for Grith to say something illuminating.

  She doesn’t.

  Malene tries again. ‘… Of course, we’ve also come to you because we want to help Anne-Lise. Do you think she needs psychological counselling?’

  Grith says that they mustn’t expect yes-or-no answers and doles out psychological tit-bits straight from an agony-aunt column.

  Malene starts checking out the furniture. The large brass standard lamp behind Iben is elegant and casts a pretty light. The cachepot on the window sill is stylish too and would be perfect for her own place.

  What a disappointing session. Or it would’ve been if she had come here expecting something special.

  Malene realises that her main reaction is relief. If you’re close to someone, you can easily develop all kinds of funny ideas about that person’s relationships with others. Now that she has seen Iben with her ‘other friend’, she can be reassured that Iben is much closer to her than to Grith.

  Malene warms her hands on her mug. God knows what Grith has observed tonight and what she thinks about the whole episode.

  Grith sets out bags of potato chips and they devour them instantly. Malene thinks that they should leave soon.

  Grith starts to speak about one of her patients: ‘She’s a woman with what people used to call a split or multiple personality.’

  ‘Christ! One of your patients?’

  Malene has always been fascinated by stories of people with split personalities but has never met anyone who has actually known someone. Her interest makes Grith warm to her subject.

  ‘Yes. Only the new classification for psychiatric conditions calls it Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID for short. My patient has at least two personalities, in addition to her dominant one. One of them is a little girl. That’s very common.’

  At last Grith is coming alive. It’s impossible to tell what has held her back, but she is completely animated now; her eyes seem even larger and as she talks, her thin arms flail about.

  ‘In psychiatry we’ve come to take a much greater interest in DID than we did before. All those Hollywood films packed with clichés about split personalities were distracting, I suppose. Somehow they made psychologists and psychiatrists take their cases less seriously than they should. Most people in the trade thought it was embarrassing and dull to write up DID case histories in professional journals, but it’s not like that any more – things are moving fast. During the last twenty years or so, the number of recorded cases in the US has risen sharply and so have the much more common borderline cases.’

  ‘How many people do you think suffer from DID, including the minor cases?’

  ‘Just over six billion, give or take.’

  ‘But that’s the entire …’

  ‘Think about it. We’ve all done things that we would hardly have believed we were capable of. It’s especially common in young people, while the personality is still in transition, to a certain extent. You do things and then you forget all about them.’

  Grith looks at Iben and then over at Malene. ‘Can either of you recall having done anything like that?’

  They both try hard to remember. Neither speaks.

  After a while, Grith continues: ‘See what I mean about forgetting? Keep trying. Can you recall ever experiencing a deep feeling of regret?’

  ‘Isuppose so …’

  ‘Maybe I can …’

  ‘There, you see! Behaving badly is dramatic, so it ought to be something you remember. But sitting alone in your
kitchen and repenting over a glass of milk is sad and dull, so in theory it should be more difficult to remember. In practice, though, we recall these dreary moments of regret quite easily. You know that and I do too. It’s because we’re all split – a little anyway. In the kitchen, with that glass of milk, we are who we know ourselves to be.’

  Malene’s voice sounds faint at first. ‘Grith, you describe it so well – the whole scene, that glass of milk, everything.’

  ‘Thanks. Everyone knows that when you’re depressed, you can only remember sad things and it’s difficult to think of something cheerful. It’s as if the happy experiences have vanished. The important thing to remember is that the divide between one aspect of a personality and another needn’t be anywhere near as extreme as the characters you see in films. The sides to dissociated personality are usually much less starkly differentiated, but, even so, the split can be enough for a patient to forget what he or she was up to ten minutes earlier. Or it can make days or months or even whole years of a life disappear into the shadows.’

  Malene has a question: ‘So, just as an example, is it conceivable that Anne-Lise might have sent the emails, but can’t remember having done it?’

  ‘It certainly is. She might not have a complete alternative identity, with a name and so on; but even so, she could have sent them and forgotten about it.’

  Malene had taken off her shoes earlier. She gently rubs the sole of one foot over Grith’s rug, registering the rough surface with her toes.

  ‘We could never be frightened of Anne-Lise,’ she says. ‘At least, the Anne-Lise we know – that’s why we wouldn’t take her threat to kill us seriously. But how different might her other personality be?’

  ‘If I’ve understood you correctly, no one knows if Anne-Lise wrote the emails. They could have been sent by anyone at all. Right?’

  ‘Right. Absolutely anyone. I was just wondering, you know, “If … then what?”’

  ‘If she did, then she could be like the other cases I’ve come across. Each identity can have any combination of characteristics and other identities are entirely independent of the person you think you know. The “other” could be the complete opposite.’

  Iben stares at the tropical fruit slices. She raises her hand a little, but doesn’t actually reach out for the bowl. ‘What you’re saying is that hypothetically we could all have many sides to our personality that we don’t know of. And these “others” might be out of control, doing all kinds of things, while we have no memory of it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Logically, then, it’s impossible for a person to know if there are any “others”.’

  ‘Yes … well, no. People often seem to have an idea that something is going on, if they dare to pick up the signs. The possibility of fluid identity boundaries is one of the new areas of research. So are the implications of discovering that splitting is relatively common. Even if you’re one of the rare cases of zero awareness of other identities, looking for physical traces usually works: objects in your home in unexpected places, something as simple as a shopping bag in the wrong room – that sort of thing.’

  Malene accidentally kicks out with one foot and her toes hit a table leg. It hurts, but not too much. The others don’t notice. She bends over a little to examine her foot and massages a tender arthritic toe.

  She hears Iben laugh. ‘But, Grith, if we stick to just these two emails … then what? Could they have been sent by anyone? Apart from ourselves, that is?’

  Grith appears to flounder momentarily. ‘What I’m about to say isn’t that … Of course, they can’t … but in purely theoretical terms …’

  At last she finds a way of saying what she really means.

  ‘Look, if I didn’t know you, I would have guessed that the likeliest possibility would be that a split personality would send messages to herself. We aren’t talking about two sides of the same personality, but two separate individuals, even though they inhabit the same body. One of them might remember everything from the other’s life, but not vice versa. It’s usual for one identity to hate the other, accusing it of being “evil” or “self-righteous”.’ She pauses for a moment and stares at Malene.

  Dropping her professional manner, she becomes more relaxed. ‘But why should it be one of you? Why should the emails have anything to do with a split personality? People who develop deeper than normal splitting usually have other psychological problems, like a traumatic childhood.’

  The atmosphere in the room has changed. It seems so strange to be in this place, sitting on this sofa, watching and wondering about each other. Twenty years of science have proved that strange things could be hiding inside their mind. Absolutely anything. Or anybody. And at the same time, they are looking at you and wondering about you.

  For a while no one speaks.

  This atmosphere – did Grith plan to create it?

  Malene can’t help but remember how Iben told everyone so many times that she was ‘someone else’ in Nairobi. And though the police were positive that no one had broken into her flat, Iben had insisted that the door was open and a stack of papers had been arranged more neatly than she had left it. Iben is so knowing about aspects of her personality and uses scientific terminology when she discusses her own psychology with Malene and Grith. But perhaps there is another hidden self, one she couldn’t know of ‘logically’, to use her own word.

  Malene makes a pact with herself not even to think about this, regardless of what Iben’s other best friend and her science might say.

  It’s late when Malene phones Iben.

  ‘Are you in bed?’

  ‘Yes I am.’

  ‘Sorry. Did I wake you?’

  ‘No, don’t worry. I was reading.’

  ‘I can’t stop thinking about how it could’ve been anybody.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have brought you along?’

  ‘Of course you should! It was good. Fascinating.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Grith often says something unexpected.’

  12

  When Malene steps into the office the following morning she notes that the library door is closed, as usual.

  She tries to catch Camilla’s attention. ‘Is she in?’

  Camilla nods.

  Malene checks the corridor. Sure enough, the door from the hallway to the library is open, so Anne-Lise did come in today.

  She whispers to Camilla: ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing special.’

  ‘Did she say anything?’

  ‘No. Just “Good morning.”’

  Camilla is always curt in the mornings. Malene sits down at her desk. Something is wrong, but she can’t quite put her finger on it. As her computer goes through its start-up routine, she ponders the odd atmosphere in the office. What might have caused it? Nothing seems out of the ordinary. Is it she who has changed?

  After a good night’s sleep Malene has decided that they all overreacted yesterday. If you’re attacked, that’s what you do: go on the defensive. They should be able to rise above their anger, though. Working here brings certain obligations. They spend every day compiling and passing on information about the tragedies that follow when anger overrules common sense. So, if not even Malene, Iben and Camilla can show self-control, who can?

  Obviously Anne-Lise is in bad shape just now. Maybe her home life isn’t that great and, if so, her colleagues should support her. Malene considers dropping in on Anne-Lise in the library and asking her how she is, but feels it would be overdoing it. Instead she stays where she is, dealing with a few jobs she didn’t complete yesterday afternoon. She’s waiting for Iben.

  Iben turns up at a quarter past nine. She and Malene talk in low voices, leaning across their desks. It’s hard to know how much Anne-Lise can hear through the closed door. To catch what they’re saying, Camilla has to walk over to them.

  Malene explains what she’s figured out: ‘When someone behaves like Anne-Lise the normal response is for her co-workers to crucify her. We did
n’t and that’s good. But it isn’t good enough.’

  The others are listening attentively.

  ‘We could carry on as if nothing happened, or be more distant than before, because she behaved so aggressively. That sort of treatment would make anyone resign, sooner or later.’

  Malene says, while she looks at Iben: ‘It would be so easy to do: just let things take their natural course. We’d get everything we wanted: peace and quiet, and a new colleague who might be an asset to the Centre. Great, but it would be the same as deliberately shutting her out and we must try to do better than that.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘We should learn from the conflict-resolution projects we write about. The first, crucial step is to get the opposing sides to sit down together and talk about their problems. And we know that an independent adjudicator must be present at the meetings.’

  Camilla is taken aback. ‘It’s a bit heavy, don’t you think?’

  But Iben agrees. ‘I’d like to have a meeting with her.’

  ‘I’m sure she’d like the idea,’ Malene says. ‘Usually it’s the stronger party that has the most reservations about a reconciliation process. In this situation, we are the strong ones. And we should tell Paul. We’ll need a neutral adjudicator, someone with authority.’

  Camilla looks sceptical. ‘But the projects deal with international conflict resolution. And you’re suggesting Paul is to be our judge and peacekeeping force all rolled into one?’

  Malene gives a little laugh.

  When Paul arrives, they chat about this and that, then he disappears into his office. Malene stares at the closed door and hesitates. The presentation of their case could wait until lunch time.

  Her working day is taken up mainly with phone calls to foundations in Germany on behalf of a research team at the Institute of History at Copenhagen University. The team is arranging a conference focused on the crimes against humanity at the end of World War Two when Germany was defeated. Fifteen million Germans were expelled from East and Central Europe and some two million women were raped. The researchers turned to the DCGI for help in raising funds, and Malene suggested that they should appeal to German, as well as Danish, sources of grant money. Her first lead was a human-rights institute called Schutzgemeinschaft für Menschenrechte, Humanität und Toleranz.