But she just holds her tongue.
“Does anyone know how much extra work you were doing at the office, Trine? Did you keep it a secret?”
The shadows and reflections of the rain quiver upon her face, as if her abandoned eyes were staring into a blue-grey fire.
“Trine, did you know that in cases of slow, insidious brain damage, it’s completely normal for a secretary to cover for her boss so that their workday will function?”
Still silence. But I can see I’ve hit home. I can see that that’s exactly how their days had been during these last years. Her mouth grows smaller, it sort of sucks into itself. I’ve gotten to her, I’ve gotten through!
“He was brain-damaged!” I shout into her ear. “That’s what it was! Brain damage. He was sick, sick, very very sick!”
She emits a plaintive moan as if I’ve struck her, hiding her face by pressing it against the trunk of the tree and raising her arms above her head. The little beggar-woman gives me a dirty look.
And I know that Trine isn’t crying because her husband and her best friend have been fired, or because no one can say whether the school will even survive another year. I know she’s crying because now she understands why Frederik withdrew from her, and from everyone else at school. Because she understands why her hero deserted her and left the empty husk of his body sitting behind in the headmaster’s office.
For he really did have a luminosity—at least until he began to stay home with me in the evenings and on weekends. An ardor, an idealism, a passion for doing his utmost for the school. A light that made me resign myself to his always being gone, though it went against everything I’d dreamt of for my life and our marriage, light that drew teachers and students together in a vision of making Saxtorph something extraordinary. Until a tumor extinguished it all.
I look out from the tree’s grey-green shadow onto the glistening streets, a great flat-bottomed lake everywhere stippled with the impact of raindrops. I’ve gotten Trine to remember who the real Frederik was, how utterly different he was. Her perm’s going flat, as if tears were oozing out of her scalp as well. In a couple of places the water has found a path through the crown of the tree, one thin jet falling right behind her heel. The water that envelops us and continues to intrude on us, flowing toward us over flagstone and cobblestone, the water that, a few nights ago on the web, I read could symbolize grief in an old-fashioned psychological novel.
Gene makes rodents faithful
RESEARCH. For the first time, scientists have succeeded in altering behavior among individuals of one species by giving them a gene from another species. The journal Nature reports that the gene, which was transplanted from prairie voles to meadow voles, changed the latter from polygamous loners to monogamous herd animals.
After the transplantation, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta found major changes in the behavior of male voles when they were placed with females.
While the male meadow voles had previously spent only 5% of their time with females, they now—just like male prairie voles—spent fully half their time with females, and they took good care of their offspring as well. In addition, the males now remained with only one female each, whereas before they had mated indiscriminately.
In the experiment, only a single gene was transferred between the two species—the gene for what is known as the vasopressin receptor. Many other animals, including humans, have their own version of this gene. (KS)
31
“There’s something you should know.”
Helena’s on the phone, and she sounds alarmed. I’m in Nørreport Station, heading up the escalator from the metro.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe we should talk about it when I see you instead. It’s to do with Bernard.”
“Well now you have to tell me.”
I hear how my voice gets hard-edged and clipped. I’m not very good at this, I think. Have we been found out? By Vibeke? Frederik? Who? I’ve known the whole time that this was coming.
“All right,” Helena says. “Where are you?”
“Nørreport Station. On my way home from meeting with Frederik’s old secretary.”
“Oh, that’s right. How’d it go?”
“First tell me what’s up with Bernard.”
“Are you sitting down?”
“No, I’m walking. Stop it already—spit it out!”
“Umm …”
I’ve reached a packed throng of people in the granite-walled passage between the first and second escalator.
She hesitates. Then she says, “My friend Sissel slept with him.”
Helena says this as if it’s supposed to be some sort of sensational shock, and then the line goes completely quiet.
I let out a big sigh of relief. “I know that’s not true.”
“Sissel says he sleeps with loads of women. He’s a real lothario. He’s not at all what you think.”
“Sissel must be mistaken.”
“I just thought I should let you know.”
“All right.” A harried businessman with a big briefcase bumps into me. “You’re right to tell me, but when you meet Bernard, you’ll see that she’s definitely got the wrong man. You just have to see him for two seconds around his wife.”
“Yes, I know you’ve said …”
I put the ridiculous notion out of my thoughts, and then I ask, “Did you tell Sissel about me?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then how does she—”
“I just said a friend and a lawyer,” she says, speaking more quickly now. “No one would be able to tell I meant the two of you, and …” Here she commences on a long, convoluted explanation.
I wouldn’t exactly say that Helena and I are about to drift apart. Yet somehow, I feel that Andrea and I are more on the same wavelength, since like me, her understanding of the world is based on a certain knowledge of neuroscience. A little while later, Helena and I hang up.
I’m still hauling around the Netto bag, with the things I bought to make my encounter with Trine look like a coincidence. I stand on the tram platform at Nørreport, surrounded by wet people who all look exhausted, going home from work to the suburbs.
Our friends at Saxtorph all thought that I tried to commit suicide. They thought I ruined their headmaster, and their school. I drove them out of paradise long before anyone knew Frederik was ill.
I call up Bernard, even though I know he’s sitting in a meeting for the next forty-five minutes, and I leave a message on his machine.
“It went swimmingly with Trine. She said that Frederik changed a lot. There’s definitely something we can use.” Then it just slips out. “Other than that, Helena just called and said you know her friend Sissel from the Energy Agency.”
Should I have kept my mouth shut? But there isn’t anything, is there. I keep talking.
“In any case, I’m going to call Frederik now and tell him about Trine. I’m sure he’ll call you a little later and tell you all about it.”
I call Frederik after boarding the tram to Farum. I sit leaning right up against the window and whisper into my handset, covering my mouth and phone with my hand.
“Did you tell people at school I tried to commit suicide?”
“No, not at all.”
“But then where’d they get that idea from?”
“I have no clue.”
“You do understand, don’t you, that it’s not especially nice to hear that old friends have been thinking that?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
There are so many faces in Farum that are familiar from the old days. I used to like the fact that it was a small town where I was always saying hi to neighbors’ friends or to parents of kids I used to have in class.
But ever since the embezzlement made headlines, I’ve stopped nodding and smiling every which way. I’ve withdrawn from the community, and people haven’t said hello to me for a long time either.
So that’s how I walk home, in my o
wn little bubble. I wonder: how many of the people I pass have heard rumors—not just about how I was mixed up in the embezzlement, but also before that, about how I tried to kill myself four years ago, and how ever since, I’ve been a millstone around the neck of my husband and his school.
I’m definitely moving to another town. Next summer, when I get my divorce, I’m going to move. And I’ll get a job in another town too, and then I can be 100 percent Bernard’s, regardless of whether I can get him to leave Lærke or not.
Darkness falls early because of the clouds still hanging overhead, and in no time I’m walking the long paths connecting the apartment blocks of Farum Midtpunkt. As soon as I step into this ghetto of mine, my steps slow and I inhabit my body once more. Here, among the rust-clad apartment blocks, I can relax. Here there are fewer people I know my own age. Groups of young immigrant men are standing around. We’ve seen each other before, some of them years ago in the schoolyard, others just because now this is my neighborhood too. We greet each other with a glance or a small nod. Maybe they know that I’m a teacher at a nearby school, but I don’t think they realize a lot of people suspect me of embezzling. And if they did, I wouldn’t mind.
I call Bernard again, since he hasn’t returned my call. He doesn’t answer the phone. His meeting should have been over a long time ago.
Frederik’s made us dinner, and as soon as we’ve sat down and dished out the fried liver and potatoes, he tells me what Bernard thinks about my conversation with Trine.
I’m very conscious not to interrupt the arc of the bite of potato I bring to my mouth. Not too quick, and not too slow; Frederik mustn’t notice anything odd.
“So you’ve talked with Bernard?” I ask in my calmest, my most restrained voice.
“Yes.” And yet he must notice something anyway, for he asks, “What? What? Is there something wrong with that?”
“Not at all, of course not. What’d he say?”
“He thinks that what you’ve done is great. It could make a huge difference—” He stops. “What is it? Now what have I done?”
“Nothing. You haven’t done anything.”
“But what’s the matter then? Why do you look like that?”
“I don’t look like anything.”
“Something’s eating you.”
“I’m just thinking about your case, and that makes me nervous. That’s all.”
We keep eating, while he looks at me inquiringly and I try to appear natural. I already know that I’ll go out for an evening walk tonight in order to call Bernard. Frederik’s gradually gotten used to me needing to go on long walks almost every night.
After dinner, I’m back down among the young dark men between the long dark buildings. At night, the Midtpunkt apartment blocks aren’t brown anymore but black.
How often does someone get raped here? Never, as far as I know. How often are there attacks or shootings? Almost never. The area’s bad reputation is mostly due to teenagers who try to snatch purses or extort money from the sick or elderly in exchange for leaving them alone.
I leave a message on Bernard’s machine.
“Are you sick? Is something wrong?”
Maybe his cell phone’s broken, or maybe he’s left it somewhere.
Still no answer. When I get back home, before I go to bed, I send him a text. I write,
Love you. Do text me tonight if you want.
• • •
Saturday morning, after a miserable night’s sleep, I meet up with Andrea near the local marina. I’ve promised to show her some of my favorite runs, as well as the spot of my atheistic revelation by Lake Farum. As a pedigreed scientist, she’s been much more intrigued by my revelation than I have, and she’s discussed it with the other biologists at work.
Andrea’s not a very experienced runner. She shows up in baggy exercise clothes and her shoes look ancient, though that shouldn’t matter as long as we stick to the soft forest paths.
Right away I can see it’ll be easy for me to talk while she gasps for breath beside me, and while we’re still jogging through Nørre Woods, I’m already telling her that I feel a bit uneasy about Bernard not calling me back. She asks about the last message I left on his machine. I say it was the one that mentioned Sissel.
Andrea snorts. “But Bernard’s been around the block more than any man I know. I thought you knew that.”
“What!” I pull up short.
“He oozes sex,” she says. “No one’s that way unless they’ve had some experience.”
“I simply can’t believe that. I know him really well now, and he’s the one guy who—he’d never—”
“But I’m talking about before the accident.”
It’s like a blow to the gut. “Before the accident?”
“Didn’t he tell you they were both in the car?”
“Yes. Of course he did.”
“Didn’t he tell you he was injured too?”
“Yes.”
“Well? What kind of injury did you think it was?”
“I don’t know.”
I’m drawing a complete blank. I can’t recall anything he said about it, or that I even gave it a second thought. But he did say it was serious. That I remember.
It’s as if I’m taking a final exam in a bad dream; I can’t think straight.
“He lay in a coma for days,” Andrea says. “Just like Lærke. Everyone thought he was going to die, and his parents flew up from Paris.”
I manage to say, “I know they came up, but wasn’t he sitting next to Lærke while she was in a coma?”
“Yes—afterward! He was a totally altered man when he came to. Just like other people who suffer brain damage—their sleeping pattern changes, their body odor changes, their appetite. It’s all hormones. Didn’t he ever tell you how he had to restructure his life, dropping his career and all?”
I don’t answer. I just say, “He isn’t sick.”
I say that even though I know she’s right. Something deep inside me knows that he’s terribly sick, just like Niklas is sick and I’m sick too. Everything’s so fragile. Our brains are all disintegrating, halfway to some alien state—and only maybe is the alien state death.
The sun reflects off something between the trees and hurts my eyes. I feel as if I can’t stand up any longer. Andrea sees this and embraces me, she clasps me to her and prevents me from falling.
“I never heard you could become monogamous from hitting your head,” I say in a small voice, speaking into her neck.
“Nor I. But have you ever met another man like Bernard?”
“No.”
“Me neither. He’s not normal; he’s too good to be true. It’s all something to do with vasopressin and oxytocin. It’s well known that those two hormones in particular are the ones that control monogamy. Compared to a healthy man, Bernard’s hormone profile must be off the charts.”
“But it’s his choice to be kind to Lærke, isn’t it? His own healthy choice?” I ask in a voice that I can hardly hear.
The sun’s reflection from in among the trees. It ought to be raining. If my story had any symbolic meaning, it ought to be coming down in buckets.
• • •
Winnie opens the door of Bernard and Lærke’s house. I cut short my run with Andrea and had her drive me over. Now I stand here in running clothes that never got sweaty, and Andrea’s driven off again.
“Sorry to intrude,” I say, “but there’s something I need to ask Bernard about our case. Really quick, it’ll just take a minute.”
Winnie looks a bit skeptical, but she leads me through the house and into the backyard, which the roses during these last days of August have made even more overwhelming than last time. At a long table on the lawn sit Bernard and Lærke, their two boys who I’ve seen pictures of but never met, and Bernard’s father-in-law.
The welcome’s not the warmest; Bernard’s family doesn’t look as if they like having their lunch interrupted. And perhaps they have a sneaking suspicion, an intuition that I’m not just
here to take their food—that after I’ve raided their Saturday lunch I’ll plunder their house and kidnap their father, husband, son-in-law. That I’m shameless, that like a swarm of grasshoppers I will consume everything.
Lærke’s the only one who gives me a big smile when she sees me, waving her arms enthusiastically. “Why Mille! So lovely that you’ve come. You can sit between Jonathan and Benjamin. There’s lots of room!”
The boys have mousy hair and look sullen. They’re not nearly as handsome as my Niklas, not by a long shot.
Bernard’s on his feet long before I reach the table. “Oh yes, I forgot to give Frederik the documents,” he says in a clear voice across the table. “It’s good you came by to get them.” He turns toward his mother-in-law. “Mia and I just have to pop into the office. I have some charts she and her husband are going to use this weekend.”
He walks quickly around the table.
“The papers should be inside,” he tells me loudly.
“But Mette, you’ll come back out and eat with us afterward, won’t you?” asks Lærke.
Bernard answers for me, saying, “Not everyone has time to sit down and hang out all afternoon like we do.”
“I’d love to,” I say. “Unfortunately, I need to bring these charts back to my husband.”
As Bernard walks across the lawn, it’s as if he’s grasping my arm and dragging me away, though of course he doesn’t actually touch me. We march over to the house. As soon as we’re out of the others’ hearing, he hisses, “You should never come here without calling first!”
“But I did call! I called you again and again!”
We step into the house, and he leads me toward his little office, saying, “What the hell were you thinking of, coming here?”
Looking at him, I can tell he’s not so much angry as afraid; his family’s nearby. My voice is louder than it should be. “You lied to me, you lied through your teeth! You said you’d never been with anyone since you met Lærke, and here I find you were screwing the whole town! You don’t return my calls! And you deceived me! I’m married, and you—what the hell were you thinking, Bernard? What the hell? You deceived me so that—”
You Disappear: A Novel Page 33
