As I run, I think about Niklas. How he no longer dares to bring friends home. And I think about Frederik, who wants to have sex with one of his son’s friends. Has he always been like that? Are all men that way? Maybe the only difference between Frederik and other men is that the others keep quiet about it because their inhibitory mechanisms are still intact.
As my feet find their way around the potholes and slush on the path, I think about Frederik during the years he was unfaithful. I think about Hanne’s boyfriend, who drove her to jump from a high-rise. About my father just wanting to ball hippie chicks. About the married men who made passes at me in the weeks after I’d thrown Frederik out, and my tennis coach, all those years ago when I was in gymnasium. They’re everywhere. I think about all the drunk married teachers running around, potbellied and red-cheeked, during faculty Christmas parties. How can a woman ever have a trusting relationship with a man?
Through the low-hanging branches I can see the mist over the lake, which is itself the color of thickened mist. That’s what it is after all, I think, and I stop by the pier. I walk quickly out over the water and suck the air deep into my lungs.
I had thoughts like this before Frederik became sick. And I’ve spoken with Helena about it often. Her attitude is Yes, all men are like that. But in a few years it’ll all be over; we should enjoy it while we can.
That’s where we disagree.
Still in my running clothes, and with sweat pouring down my face, I pop into the mini-mart at the train station. I only have a few minutes before I need to be home and shower, but we’ve run out of milk, since I never went shopping yesterday after all.
There are already people here. I grab two quarts of milk and stick my credit card in the terminal.
The girl behind the counter says, “Didn’t go through. Try again.”
I remove the card from the slot and slide it back in.
The display says it’s not working. The girl doesn’t say anything.
“You know what, I have another card,” I say. “Let me try that one.”
I fish Frederik’s card out of the inner pocket of my damp sweatpants, stick it in, and enter his PIN.
“It says on my screen to confiscate it,” she says.
“Confiscate it? Why?”
“I don’t know. You stole it, maybe.”
She stares at me with big blue eyes that might have been beautiful if the rest of her pale face wasn’t so listless. You’d think it must be all she can do just to sit upright.
“Of course I haven’t stolen it!” I say. “It’s my husband’s card.”
“Give me it,” she says.
“What if I don’t want to?”
“I don’t know. Hasn’t happened before.”
She wants me to think she’s an idiot. That’s what she wants. She wants me to think she doesn’t give a damn about me or the store or her own future. Doesn’t give a damn about anything but TV, fries, ketchup, and a boyfriend who’s as dumb as she is.
“I need it, really,” the girl says. “You’ve got to give me it.”
Two men are now standing in line behind me. One of them lives on our street, and I know he’s a sales manager for a discount shoe chain. I suppose he’s seen the item about Saxtorph on last night’s news. In front of the milk fridge we nodded at each other, but now he pretends to examine something in his basket.
The girl’s face is as wrinkle-free as a blow-up sex doll’s. I find myself talking with much too much volume and emphasis. “I have no idea what this is all about.”
I force myself not to look away from the men. I’m determined to look as if our family hasn’t done anything wrong. The second man sends me a frightened little smile.
“I’m going to try the other card again,” I say, a little too quickly. “Are you sure there isn’t something wrong with your machine?”
She doesn’t answer.
It’s only a matter of two quarts of milk, but what else are we going to have on our cereal?
She looks at her screen. “Now it says I’ve got to take that card too.”
“What! My card? You also want my card? It didn’t say that before!”
“Does now. Maybe you stole that one too.”
“Stop saying I stole it! I haven’t stolen it! It’s my card!”
“Well maybe, but hand it over.”
I don’t answer her, I keep the cards and leave the store without any milk. I run back the way I came—toward the woods. It’s impossible for me to go home now, I have to keep running in order to flush this from my body. Even if it means I’m going to be late for my first math class.
How long can the bank freeze our accounts? A month, a few months, a year? Some of our friends will have to lend us some money. But will they?
The rhythmic strike of my feet against the wooded path, my panting breath, the big crooked black branches between me and the sun; the light scratching me in the eyes. I’m standing before my seventh graders. Tons of light:
After taxes, the Hallings receive 23,000 crowns a month from a disability pension and a teacher’s salary. They owe 10 million crowns that Mr. Halling embezzled from money entrusted to him. How long will it take the Hallings to pay the money back if:
a) they spend 2,000 crowns a month on food and clothing and move into a one-room apartment, enabling them to reduce their fixed expenses to 10,000 crowns a month?
b) they move together into a rented room and cancel all their subscriptions, memberships, and insurance, cutting their fixed expenses to 6,000 crowns a month?
c) they say screw it and live as they’re accustomed to, even though that gives them a shortfall of 8,000 crowns a month?
Now calculate a, b, and c again, based on the understanding that the family finds 6 million crowns of the embezzled funds in an account that the father has forgotten about because he has brain damage.
I’m going to have to call Bernard again. Is it too early? Definitely. Yet he’ll be up now, won’t he? No, I don’t know him that well.
I leap to the side to avoid three big wet furrows, and Anna, who sits right in front of my desk, raises her hand.
May we assume that the Hallings borrow a lot of money from their friends, and that they never pay it back?
No you may not. Other questions? Kevin?
May we assume that the parents of the brain-damaged father give the family a large advance on their inheritance, to use as a down payment on a condo?
I enter a stretch with lots of spiderweb filaments streaming over the path; no one else has run here today. The filaments are the color of the lake mist, the lake, my sweat. They cling to my forehead and cheeks and mouth, and when I pass trees standing right by the path, I lift my arms and try to bat away the invisible strands. I run and strike out with my arms, grimacing as yet another filament drifts through my defenses and sticks to my eyes.
• • •
It was late when Niklas came home last night, but I went to his room anyway and insisted we talk about prison, about his father on the evening news, and about the poor girl on the street, who I found out is called Emilie. I said it would be okay if he needed to stay home for a day before seeing everyone at school again. That was what I wished I could do myself, yet it was as if he almost couldn’t wait to go back. He didn’t want to put off having to face them all, my strong son. I gave him a hug, and when I left, I told him to just wake me up during the night if he wanted to talk about it some more. I placed my hand on the top of his head as I said this, though I’m not sure he liked that.
Back from my run, I set out breakfast, still in my sweaty running clothes. Niklas tromps down the stairs and looks at me in that teenage way—as if he doesn’t notice anything and yet is justified in being annoyed.
“Why haven’t you taken a shower?” he says right away.
“I was held up.”
“Are you going to eat breakfast in that?”
“Yes. I’ll take a shower afterward.”
“I don’t want to sit and eat breakfast while my mo
ther’s sitting next to me all sweaty and gross.”
I want to say that he’s going to have to, that I’m not gross, that he needs to show some consideration when he speaks to me. But his tone and his entire manner remind me too much of his sick father. Niklas isn’t himself—and he has every right not to be.
Then he pours muesli in his bowl, concentrating deeply, as if I’m not there; but today there’s no milk. Niklas looks around, appearing not to notice the big glass pitcher of water that, for the first time ever, stands on the table in front of him.
“Where’s the milk?”
“Today we’re going to have to eat our muesli with water. It’s no big deal, people did that all the time in the old days.”
“I don’t want to eat this shit.” He’s already shoved his chair back from the table and stood up.
Make room for his anger. I have to accept it, his anger and my anger both. Accept everything he feels. Of course he’s angry, of course he’s self-absorbed, of course he doesn’t have any extra energy to be considerate of his mother. Don’t I have room for that?
Yes, I do … And besides, I remember reading a few nights ago, in one of the many neurology books I now have from the library, that teenagers aren’t fully developed, orbitofrontally. It turns out that you aren’t until the beginning of your twenties. No matter how clever teenagers can be, according to the books they’ll always have a trace of Frederik’s dramatic symptoms: the poor self-control, the wild mood swings, the lack of concern for others, and the limited ability to plan very far into the future.
I don’t say anything other than, “Well, what would you like then?”
“Not this in any case. It tastes like shit.”
“You don’t know that, Niklas, you haven’t tasted it.” My voice sounds mild when I speak. I feel unbelievably maternal. Room. Give him room.
He roots around in the fridge, using large rough movements. Like his father. Again I say, “I can understand if you want to stay home today. Just go ahead and stay.”
“How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to stay home?”
“No, you should just … I think I only said it once last night.”
He doesn’t respond. I have a wild urge to stay home myself, to quit and never see my students or colleagues again.
“Maybe it’ll be mostly just the younger kids,” I say. “That’s probably right. Yes, the parents think they’re so clever. They’ll get the kids to ask for them.”
He must register something in my voice; he’s finally looking at me as if I’m a human being. He stands there with half a loaf of dark rye in one hand and a block of cheese in the other. “Well, are you going to school today?”
“Yes,” I say.
“What are you going to tell them?”
“Maybe I’ll say that it isn’t true.”
“But they saw it on TV last night, didn’t they?”
“Yes … I don’t know.”
• • •
For the first time in a long time, I don’t bike to work. Instead I take the car, which none of my colleagues or students will recognize, and park behind the school. From there, a back door leads to the stairway going right up to my seventh-grade classroom.
The office knows that I have problems at home, and when I rang this morning and said I’d be arriving an hour late, the secretary was kind and said they could find a sub on short notice.
I turned off my cell phone to avoid talking to journalists. Now I switch it back on for a minute, not checking messages, and call Bernard. When I called before from home, he didn’t answer and so I rang up his office, but no one was answering the phones there yet. He’s still not answering his cell, but this time when I call his firm a secretary picks up.
“Berman & Friis, Bernard Berman’s office.”
Her voice is friendly, her pronunciation straight out of a 1950s film.
My words tumble out in the wrong order as I try to explain that I know Bernard, that all our accounts have been frozen and I don’t know when we’ll be able to access our money again—if ever.
“Mr. Berman is in court right now, but I shall tell him that you have called. May I ask if he has your number?”
I give it to her and go in to my class.
The quiet in the classroom seems tense, but no one says anything about Frederik being on the news last night. As I teach, I wonder if it’s only my imagination, or if the knowledge that their math teacher’s married to a big-time swindler is making them uneasy. I also try to think about who the hell we can borrow from so we can make it through the month—and who we can borrow a lot more from if we still need money in the months to come.
The obvious choice would be Thorkild and Vibeke, of course, but even without any debt, it’s already hard to keep Vibeke from taking over the entire family. I understand that she wants to do whatever she can to help her sick son, and that as a retired nurse she has some caregiving experience that I do not. And there’s no getting around the fact that I do need their help. But when she insists that Frederik and I have to save money now and refuses to buy the organic goods I’ve written on the shopping list, or when she moves the vacuum cleaner to a closet where she says it’s easier to get to and replaces all my cleaning agents with other ones, or when she starts talking about staying overnight, then I have to put my foot down.
The psychotherapist training that she embarked on after retiring has made her more irritating than ever. One day I found myself losing it as she sat in my armchair, fiddling with the big piece of amber in her necklace while trying to convince me that the reason I wasn’t letting her move in with us was the immature nature of my relationship to my own mother.
The next person I think of in a situation like this is of course Laust. Until the day before yesterday, there was no question that he’d be there for us if we had a problem—and be there with money too. And then there’s Helena. I could ask her during lunch break, though I know that she and Henning are having trouble with their bills these days.
I’m in the middle of going through some problems in perspective drawing. “Can anyone tell me how to find the two vanishing points?”
Anna, who sits right in front of my desk, raises her hand.
“Is it true that your husband’s going to jail?”
Have they planned this? Have they talked to one another about who should ask? She looks so sincere—regardless of how rehearsed this might be—and ignoring all the responses I cobbled together last night in half sleep, I blurt out the truth.
“He might go to jail. We don’t know. He took a lot of money, but that’s because he has a disease. He couldn’t help it. His brain is diseased.”
We talk about it briefly, and they accept my explanations. It’s surprisingly easy, and then we turn back to math. During recess I send Niklas a text, telling him that I’ve been telling people the truth.
I’m late to my next class because I try to avoid the halls and the schoolyard between bells. I also avoid the teachers’ lounge, but during lunch I have to go in.
I texted Helena beforehand, saying that I want to go in with her. We meet outside the bathroom and we hug. A little later, she’s the one who opens the door to where all the other teachers are and quickly, with a dismissive air, leads the way over to our usual table, right by the window.
Here I go, the swindler—or maybe just the swindler’s wife, they have no way of knowing—in any case, half of the married couple that has destroyed one of the most highly respected schools in the land.
“It’ll work out.”
“It’s lovely the way you keep supporting Frederik.”
“If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”
The teachers at our table are hugging me, they’re flashing me smiles. Others come over to say a friendly word, or wave encouragement from the other end of the lounge. Helena must have talked with some of them earlier, during one of the breaks. They don’t think I’m a criminal. They think that I’m staying to support my sick husband.
“That’s the way to do it, Mia. I only hope I’d have the strength to do the same.”
It really catches me off guard, and Helena can’t have spoken with all of them. I feel that I’m liked, and I find myself crying at the table a little, where everyone can see.
On the way out to the next class, I say to Helena as a joke, “I ought to call up the women Frederik had affairs with. I could say to them, Now the fun is over. Now it’s time to bear your share of the burden. For the time being, what we need from you is 20,000 crowns, here and now.”
Helena doesn’t laugh.
“Well anyway, I do know that I shouldn’t ask you for a loan,” I say. “That you guys are having a hard time right now.”
She pulls me over by the teachers’ mailboxes, and in a low voice she says, “I don’t think you should go to your next class.”
“What? I feel marvelous about the way they all took it so well! I could teach until … all the way until … for a really long time.”
“You should go home now. It’s great that you came. But you’re not yourself today.”
11
Did Frederik really want to have affairs with those women? In everything else, he was the most reliable person in the world, but when it came to our relationship, it was as if he had an opposite set of rules.
I remember his callousness when I confronted him with what I had discovered. The indifference in his features, the complete disengagement and lack of empathy. Was his coldness pathological—something wrong in his brain? It was in any case a far cry from his ordinary self. It might have been an incipient phase of his disease.
And in our first years together, he didn’t bury himself in his work. Since then I’ve learned that a tumor can make it harder for someone to multitask, that it can lead to monomania. Medically, it’s definitely possible that it took root at the beginning of our marriage, transforming my marvelous charming husband into an unfaithful workaholic. That it then stopped growing until he learned to compensate and, for three good years, became more like himself again. And that at the end of that time, it started growing again until the seizure and operation.
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