The Exception

by Christian Jungersen

  Lena was right. Most of the Yugoslavs turned up really late and their behaviour at the party was something of a shock to Camilla. The drinking was much heavier for a start, the dancing was wilder, and the music louder. And all of them seemed to feel that parties were not only for chatting about this and that, but also an outlet for their emotions.

  At one point during the evening, a dark-haired man with a square jaw stood outside on the balcony and shouted incomprehensibly at people in the street. In the flat everybody laughed, as if the man’s behaviour were a normal part of their Saturday-night fun. Some of his friends made him come back inside and sit on the sofa. Camilla started talking to him. His English was very good. He said that his name was Dragan and he had been a schoolteacher in Bosnia. He had come to Denmark a month ago and lived near Lyngby, in a refugee camp for Yugoslav asylum-seekers. He looked to be in his late twenties, roughly the same age as her, but he didn’t mention anything about a wife or children.

  They got up to dance, but it went badly. The music was unlike anything Camilla had ever heard before, a surreal mixture of gypsy melody and punk rock. Dragan was dancing about wildly, with big leaps and flailing arms, but even in all the noise and under the low lights, Camilla couldn’t let herself go.

  Later that night she went to the kitchen to rest her legs. Two friends from the choir were there too. While they were talking, a spat broke out in another room. There was a terrific crash.

  They hurried to find out what was going on. A group of angry Yugoslavs had gathered around Dragan. Someone explained that Dragan had got into an argument with a buddy who had locked himself into the toilet. After some shouting at each other through the door, Dragan had kicked it down. Some of the guests seemed very frightened.

  Dragan himself was still very agitated about whatever the man in the toilet had said and wouldn’t stop yelling. Something made Camilla walk towards him. She heard Lena saying to her husband that she was going to throw Dragan out. Simo replied that he didn’t want her to.

  When Camilla stopped in front of Dragan, he took her in his arms. They stood together for a while. Quite still. He stopped shouting. Then they went off to dance.

  A few minutes later Lena came up to them. She said she wanted to thank Camilla for calming Dragan down. She asked if he had ruined the evening for Camilla and if she would like Lena to ask him to leave. Camilla told her no.

  They kept on dancing and talking. Later on they made love on his large black coat, spread on the ground in the shrubbery behind a large, upmarket block of flats in Frederiksberg. He walked her home afterwards and seemed so different from the way he had acted at the party. He recited long Serbian love poems, which he knew by heart, and spoke about the ideas and characters in books written by Russian authors a hundred years ago.

  The next few weeks were special. Camilla had suddenly become a member of a circle of Yugoslavs that included both recent refugees and older immigrants who had come to live in Denmark before the war. She went to dozens of their wild parties, as well as to little get-togethers in asylum-camp rooms and down-at-heel flats with a decidedly Balkan décor. Since the refugees had plenty of spare time, there was a gathering almost every evening.

  A flat belonging to Goran, a stage technician at the Betty Nansen Theatre, was a favourite meeting place. Evening after evening Goran’s hallway was full of his guests’ black jackets, frequently smelling damp because, even when it rained, his friends would walk everywhere to save money.

  They got along well together, the Serbs and Muslims and Croats. Back in the old country, their brothers, fathers, colleagues and schoolmates were busy killing one another, but here they worked hard to form a community that would help them live with some dignity in what they hoped would be their new homeland.

  Apart from Camilla and three Yugoslav women, everyone in the group was male – young men with strong features and, sometimes, muscular bodies shaped by military training. They hung around Goran’s flat, ate hearty soups in his sitting room, and teased each other. When they watched television, they would become very serious and discuss everything under the sun. And when they thought of something to celebrate, they would pour out shots of slivovitz, a plum brandy that Dragan explained was mostly a drink for old people in Yugoslavia.

  Camilla noticed that the others had respect for Dragan. They regarded him as wise and well read. Only when he had too much to drink would his personality change. He would pick fights with the others, shouting abuse and calling them names. Once he threw a television set through the window because of something that was said on the news.

  All the same, everyone seemed genuinely fond of him. This was something Camilla realised was part of their culture: you stood by your friends no matter what. You gave each other space to be wrong and explode, unlike the Danes who would have run the other way. Such resolute loyalty was something Camilla would come back to again and again when she told her friend Anja about her new boyfriend and his world. Camilla heard of only one person who could never be forgiven. That man was Mirko Zigic. In those days she didn’t have a clue why Zigic was such a reviled figure. The others never said more than: ‘Zigic enjoys the war, while everyone else suffers.’ Dragan said he’d kill Zigic if they ever met again.

  Dragan moved into Camilla’s little flat just two weeks after the party at Lena and Simo’s. Every morning she woke feeling happy and somehow cleansed. Sex with him was wonderful and washed away her past, because he came to her with the same passion that seemed to drive his rage.

  He usually stayed in bed while she flew through her morning routines. Often – maybe a little too often – she arrived late at the City Post Office, where she was working as a junior secretary.

  One day a friend told her that during his escape from Bosnia, Dragan had lived for a while in a rubbish skip. He had put a mattress in it and slept there at night, after bolting the lid from the inside so that no one could rob or kill him. Someone else told her what had happened when Dragan had taken a train from Banja Luka. A group of Serb militiamen had stopped the train, ordered the male Muslims to get out and pile into large, locked vans. They also took the young male Serbs, forced them to join the militia after a short period of military training, and informed them that any deserters would be shot. That’s why Dragan had been a member of the uniformed militia.

  She made attempts to unravel Dragan‘s past, but every time she tried to ask him about it, he became annoyed and told her to mind her own business. Yet she felt that, as his girlfriend, she had a right to know.

  One evening over supper she decided to push again for answers. He started to shout at her and throw things about. Although he didn’t hit her, she knew he would have if he hadn’t checked himself and rushed out of the door into the street. By ten o’clock he still wasn’t back. Worried, Camilla called Goran to find out if Dragan was there. Goran’s girlfriend, Natasa, said he wasn’t. She could hear how upset Camilla was and urged her to tell her the whole story. Natasa reassured her. She had lived and worked in Denmark for ten years and knew both cultures well.

  ‘Camilla, I want you to know that Dragan cares for you very much. It means a lot to him that you appreciate what a warm and wise man he is.’

  ‘Oh, I do.’

  ‘But, you see, if your relationship is to last, you must also respect him as a man.’

  ‘I do, honestly.’

  ‘It’s hard for him to believe that you do. There he is, living in your flat without paying anything himself. Just two years ago he was a schoolteacher with good prospects. He had done well for himself in a country that, in many ways, was rather like Denmark. He wants you to see him as the kind of man who can quote by heart from Dostoyevsky and Borges and Kundera. It was humiliating to have to live in a skip. It was humiliating to be unable to stand up against men who marched him off a train and into an army truck. And it is humiliating to live off handouts from the Danish state, and not be in your own country, defending yourself and your family.’

  Camilla understood all that perfectly we
ll, but she still couldn’t grasp why he was being so secretive.

  Later, Natasa came back to this question: ‘Perhaps it has something to do with defending your family – or not.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Camilla knew instantly that she was about to hear something she’d rather not know.

  ‘Camilla, there isn’t one of our friends who hasn’t experienced something truly horrific. We don’t talk about it, but we all know.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Natasa took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t spoken about this with Dragan, but everyone in our little group seems to know about it. At one time or another they heard, in confidence from someone else, that Bosnian Muslims raped and then killed Dragan’s three sisters.’

  A silence followed. Camilla couldn’t think of what to say. ‘Someone knows that for sure?’

  ‘Yes. You must remember that everything in Dragan’s life would have been different, if only he had been free to decide. Everything!’

  When Camilla came home from work the next day a delicious smell of cooking met her on the landing. Dragan had taken possession of her kitchen after borrowing money from a few friends to buy the ingredients for a casserole and a good bottle of wine.

  Neither of them referred to the night before. During the meal, Dragan recited verses in Serbian for her. He explained that they were from a poem written in the 1950s, or maybe the 1960s, by an exiled Serb poet. He had left Yugoslavia because of its communist government and gone to live in London. The poem was very long, and was entitled ‘Lament for Belgrade’. In it, the poet described his travels to the most beautiful capitals of the world. Regardless of whether he was in Paris or Rome or Lisbon, the foreign cities only reminded him of death and emptiness. He longed to leave those places and return to the Belgrade of his youth, the city between the rivers, full of light and a steely will to fight for self-preservation.

  Dragan quoted from the English translation of a famous poem:

  Belgrade, your blood, like dew, has fallen on the plains again To cool the breath of all those whose quietus nears.

  The sun is rising in my dreams. Now shine! Flash! Roar!

  Your name, Belgrade, rings out, like lightning from a clear

  blue sky.

  In bed that night, they impatiently made up for the twenty-four hours that they had been apart.

  Afterwards, Dragan lay with his hands behind his head and spoke to her quietly. ‘I’ve escaped. That’s the most important thing. I risked my life to leave. What’s done is done. I must learn to put the past behind me. From now on I’ll live properly, like you do. You’re so good.’

  She moved closer to him and kissed his cheek, but he didn’t turn his face towards her. In the dark she watched the reflection of a street light, like a glowing dot, in his pupil. He was lying absolutely still, staring at the ceiling. She kissed him gently once more.

  The last time Camilla had spoken on the phone to her parents, her father handed the receiver to her mother much too quickly: a bad sign. Whenever there was a need for white lies, her father usually let his wife handle it. They all knew she was better at pretending than he was.

  Camilla had already drawn the conclusion that they wouldn’t like Dragan. Never mind that they had never met him: her parents had disapproved of all her boyfriends. Each time she had taken their dislike to heart. She simply could not escape from wanting to please them.

  After she and Dragan had been living together for almost two months, she felt he must meet her parents. They invited Camilla and Dragan for Sunday lunch. Her parents’ flat was in Vanløse and Camilla still hated the place. For the rest of her life she would always drive the long, roundabout routes just to avoid having to pass within sight of her old school. Their home was crammed with every sort of bric-a-brac, which, in a strange way, made it appear vaguely reminiscent of the old Yugoslav immigrants’ flats.

  Her parents welcomed them, smiling. Both Camilla’s father and mother did not speak English well, but they tried hard, since Dragan’s Danish was even worse. It went well enough. They showed Dragan into the drawing room first and then led the way to the lunch table. The meal started with toasts of aquavit and explanations about Danish schnapps and its different flavourings.

  Camilla knew she had been right all along. Everything was so obviously orchestrated, so perfectly smooth, that there was no way of knowing what they were truly thinking.

  During the meal they exchanged the names of various foods in English and Danish and Serbian. Camilla’s parents seemed to be endlessly surprised by how different the words were for the same thing and kept bringing up other dishes to talk about.

  She watched them. They avoided eye contact with each other and took care never to leave the room at the same time: they knew she would think that they were criticising Dragan behind her back.

  Previously she had told them about the way Yugoslav homes were full of handiwork, so her mother had covered the table with a white-lace tablecloth, a family heirloom made by her great-aunt. Dragan praised the fine lace and told them about the different lace-making techniques that had gone into the tablecloth.

  Camilla’s mother remarked that cousin Susanne was also going out with a foreigner. Dragan at once referred to a song by Leonard Cohen about a Suzanne, who ‘takes you down to her place near the river’. In Cohen’s music and lyrics, Dragan had discovered the dark depths he loved in art. He quoted from that song and then from other songs, analysing the music and the tempos and how they related to the words. Camilla smiled at him to show her support. He was trying so hard to demonstrate to his prospective in-laws what a cultured man he was. In Denmark, his education was his one claim to respectability, but Camilla knew only too well that everything he said went right over her parents’ heads. Still, they were trying to make this work, laughing, asking questions.

  When Camilla leaned forward and reached across the table for the spiced herring, her mother froze. Something had caught her eye. Camilla knew what it was.

  Her mother’s chair shot backwards and fell over as she jumped up and ran out of the dining room. Camilla hurried after her, pulling at her blouse to cover the oblong blue bruise that crept up to her collarbone.

  Standing in the kitchen, Camilla’s mother, who also was a little too plump, was short of breath. Camilla stopped a few metres away from her. She wanted to say, ‘Why do you have to be like this, every time?’ or, ‘Why do you always think the worst of every single man in my life?’ But she couldn’t make herself.

  Camilla’s mother was in tears. ‘Please, forgive me. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have run out like that.’

  ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter,’ Camilla murmured involuntarily.

  Her mother hugged her. ‘Oh, Camilla, thank you. We really try, you know. We mean so well … but you have no idea how hard it was for Dad and me when you were with Morten.’

  ‘But you didn’t know what he was like at the time.’ Camilla backed out of the hug.

  Her mother let go. ‘We did notice, you know. We realised what was going on. And we’re so worried that someone would start abusing you again.’

  Camilla was furious with her mother and she too was crying. Two months earlier, Camilla would never have dared say anything back. But Dragan had given her the confidence to speak out. ‘You don’t like him. You don’t want me to be happy!’

  ‘Of course we do! We only want what’s best for you!’

  Camilla’s knees gave way and she sat down on the small kitchen bench with its hard, red cushions. It was where she had sat with her glass of juice and marmalade sandwiches every day after school, trying to pull herself together after yet another day of torment.

  Her mother watched Camilla as she sat in silence. ‘We are pleased that you care about Dragan. I’m sure he’s good to you. I didn’t mean … It’s very bad of me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Again her mother tried to reach out to Camilla. ‘It’s just that … well, there have been times when we talked on the phone and when you came to see us here over
the last few months and you didn’t seem … Are you happy?’

  Camilla met her mother’s eyes. ‘Yes, Mum. I am.’

  ‘Does he make you happy?’

  ‘Yes, he does.’

  ‘And you really care about him?’

  ‘Yes. I really do!’

  ‘But then all’s well! I’m happy too. When you’re happy and if you really care for him … then everything is fine.’

  46

  That evening Dragan went off on his own to see some of his friends. After he had left, Camilla phoned her friend Anja to say that she’d like to drop by. Anja was a nurse. She and Camilla had once lived in the same building, but later Anja had moved to a bungalow with her husband.

  Seated in Anja and Finn’s bright, tidy sitting room Camilla told Anja about the awful lunch at her parents’ place. She wanted Anja to understand how unbearable her mother was. Anja agreed, but the expression on her face seemed less sure.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  ‘I’m just thinking about what your mother is like.’

  ‘No, there’s something else.’

  ‘No, that’s all.’

  It seemed that everybody could spot something in her relationship with Dragan that Camilla couldn’t see.

  ‘Anja, you’re my best friend. If anything is bothering you about Dragan and me, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I just think it’s great that you’ve met a nice guy. And that you’re crazy about him and he’s crazy about you.’

  It didn’t matter. Camilla knew that if she hadn’t approved of Finn, she’d never have let on to Anja. While they chatted, Camilla wondered if she had made a big mistake thinking that Dragan was the right man for her. She felt that he had helped her to become braver. Why couldn’t other people see this? Or could it be, she thought, that this is exactly what they don’t like? Maybe the people around me would prefer me to remain withdrawn and insecure?