The Susan Effect

by Peter Høeg

  ‘We could go back,’ I say.

  Laban shakes his head.

  We split up and take different entrances. The doors aren’t locked, there’s no one here. We converge on the church interior.

  Everything is just as it was when I was here this morning. The boxes, the bazooka on the wall. The only difference is the colour of the water. And the slight ripples on its surface.

  Laban raises a finger in the air, indicating he wants me to listen. The only thing I can hear is the distant sound of traffic rumbling across Bagsværd Torv.

  ‘There’s something dripping.’

  We follow the pool, and then I hear it too: a faint, rhythmic plop of droplets as they strike the water. The ripples we noticed are remnants of concentric rings spreading out across the surface.

  We look up.

  Kirsten Klaussen is hanging suspended from the vaulted ceiling, beneath her kinetic sculpture. Its steel wires have been twisted around her throat, legs and arms. Her mouth and eyes are wide open, arms spread out as if she were some angel of death, a hundred-plus kilos coming in to land from outer space.

  We get back in the hearse, Laban behind the wheel.

  ‘I still trust the politicians, Susan. All this must be some kind of mistake. A short-circuiting somewhere further down the lines of administration. I shall have a word with Falck-Hansen. He was minister of culture when I made my breakthrough.’

  He starts the engine. I have a feeling of things coming to an end. It tells me that if there’s something he and I need to have said, then now’s the time.

  ‘Laban,’ I venture, ‘what’s been worst about being with me?’

  The reply comes without pause, as if he’d been waiting twenty years for me to ask.

  ‘The affairs have been the worst part.’

  He follows the road between the two lakes, Lyngby Sø and Bagsværd Sø. It’s the wrong way if he wants to go into town. And yet we both know it’s right for us to take time out for a moment.

  ‘You had one every year, Susan, on average. I counted. When a woman has been with another man, she comes back with his entire energy system brimming all over. His smells, his sperm, his resonance. I could sense the presence of each one of them for a year, even after you’d stopped. And when the resonance was gone and I began to hope that you and I would finally join together, a few weeks would pass, a couple of months at most, and then it would all start again.’

  His words are without reproach, spoken in the knowledge that altering reality is a hopeless fiction.

  ‘To begin with I thought maybe I could do the same, make it work for me. And believe me, I tried. Only I couldn’t do it. I’m not made that way. The wounds you left could not be healed by any other, Susan.’

  We pass through the outskirts of Lyngby.

  I put my hand on his arm. There’s nothing to apologise for. I did what I had to. We’ve got fewer choices than any of us imagine.

  ‘That hurts,’ I say.

  He accepts the acknowledgement. The Effect is active between us. It allows each of us to sense the other’s pain without filter. At this moment, I haven’t merely the knowledge of hurting him. I can feel it, too.

  ‘What about me, Susan? What did it cost you to be with me?’

  ‘The attention you draw,’ I say. ‘The fame. The way you couldn’t live without it.’

  It doesn’t need explaining. We both know what I’m talking about. Laban never had affairs. But he always had to have seven women sitting around his piano ready to pounce. Whatever the occasion – in the concert halls, music conservatories, TV studios and ballrooms – barely a moment ever passed before I was trampled underfoot by people clamouring to be in his presence.

  And besides the vanity there was his extravagance. Cars we couldn’t afford, holidays, the summer house by the sea at Hornbæk, the other one in Jutland, the yacht we suddenly had moored at Rungsted, despite the fact that both of us felt seasick just looking at it bobbing there. Then came the compulsory sales by order of the courts, the emergency loans, the last-minute stays of execution.

  ‘Most self-obsessed alpha males,’ I tell him, ‘are fortunate enough to find a woman to support them. The woman behind the man. But you were unlucky. You got one like me. And to make matters worse, I humiliated you.’

  We turn onto the motorway and head back towards the city.

  ‘Still,’ he says with a sigh, ‘I don’t regret a moment. Not a single one.’

  I think I must have heard wrong.

  ‘You’re … fresh as the dew, Susan. That’s what you are. Fresh as the dew.’

  ‘I’m forty-three.’

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with it. It’s the way you always woke up in the mornings. No matter how hard the day before might have been, even if we’d been fighting, even if you’d been up six times in the night to breastfeed the twins, and Harald with his colic – by the time you woke up, you’d shaken it all away. You were indefatigable, Susan. That’s what you were. Indefatigable.’

  For a brief, fleeting second, I may even understand what he means. That’s one of the inherent potentials of honesty – that for a moment another person may reveal to us a true mirror image of ourselves.

  And then a flash of recollection appears in my mind. At first it embeds itself in the outer extremities of my perception. Then, a moment later, it engulfs me like a river bursting through a dam. I point to the side of the road. Laban instantly realises something’s wrong. He pulls onto the hard shoulder and stops the hearse.

  ‘The taxi driver,’ I say. ‘The maths taxi. It was Jason, the man in grey.’

  Laban shakes his head vigorously. But not because he wants to argue with me. He’s trying to get rid of reality.

  My phone rings. I answer it.

  ‘Susan?’

  I can’t speak. My voice has gone.

  ‘Susan. I’ve got your kids.’

  ‘Jason …’ I stutter.

  ‘Listen, Susan, you’re the one I want to talk to.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Not yet. Not until I’ve finished with your lovely daughter.’

  And then he is silent. I can sense him as if he were sitting next to me. He is absorbing my fear through the phone.

  In the silence that now shrouds him, far away in the distance, is a sound – a sound I recognise. A whispering movement of air. I know it, but am unable to identify it.

  He hangs up.

  Laban and I sit for a minute. Inside me it’s as if all my powers have been taken away. Something else assumes control.

  ‘Drive,’ I say.

  9

  LABAN STOPS THE hearse 100 metres along Strandgade. Outside the swing door of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the parking spaces are full.

  Once inside we come to an immediate halt. Another reception desk to negotiate. The lobby is busy, a huddle of people seem to be waiting for something.

  There have been too many reception desks in my life and I’ve always been on the wrong side of them. Always, there was a form that should have been filled in, an application made three weeks in advance to gain admittance. It’s as if my every endeavour was about trying to pass through to the other side of the desk. I’ve never succeeded. In any other circumstances this would have made me rather fatigued. But not now. Now I am governed by a state of inner emergency.

  The huddle parts, and the foreign minister emerges from its midst. He’s on his way out.

  Andrea Fink once told me there are three kinds of politician: those who could just as well peddle some other commodity, those with an extraordinary hankering for power and finally the statesmen.

  Falck-Hansen is a statesman. Everyone knows he could be prime minister if only he wanted. But his interest in foreign policy won’t allow it. His intense passion for development aid, disarmament, international cooperation.

  The first time I saw him in the flesh I was still in my early twenties and he was giving a lecture in the ceremonial hall of the university. What struck me then was his natural demeanour. He sp
oke openly, as if he were sitting at home in your room in student halls. And with such charisma that every woman present wished he could have been just there, in their room in student halls, preferably on the edge of their bed.

  That was the first time I heard a politician who did not exploit the opportunity of presenting his own opinions to slag off his opponents. He was quite without aggression, affable and forthright.

  And so he is now. He recognises Laban right away and smiles. I step in between them.

  ‘The reason we were in the archives was to gain access to the files of the Future Commission. We’re in grave danger. Hegn and his organisation are out of control. Our two children have been abducted.’

  The mood in the lobby takes a turn. One shouldn’t underestimate the minister’s entourage. They’re not political groupies. There isn’t one of the ten people surrounding us who wouldn’t take a bullet for him in the event of an assassination attempt. And that includes the women at reception. Now, suddenly, they view me as a potential threat.

  Falck-Hansen and I look at each other. I sense no dismay. He knows all about the Future Commission. He registers and understands the state I’m in.

  He takes us by the arm, both at once. His attention feels so intense the rest of the world seems almost to dissolve. It’s as if only the three of us exist.

  He leads us away along a corridor.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he says.

  His office faces out onto the harbour approach – which from here seems smaller than one would anticipate – and moreover comprises two secretaries’ offices as well as a modest conference room.

  He gestures towards a pair of chairs and we sit down. On a small table, a Japanese teapot of cast iron rests in a frame, its contents kept warm by some tea lights. He pours green tea into small cups of wafer-thin porcelain. Neither of us will be able to swallow a drop, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is his concern.

  ‘The Future Commission foresaw global collapse,’ I say. ‘But they kept the details to themselves. Hegn hauled us back to Denmark to get hold of them. We’re experienced in techniques of questioning. But something went wrong. Someone’s killing off the members of the commission one by one. Our children could be next. Hegn kept us interned at a government research centre in southern Sjælland. We got away last night, the children followed on today. A few hours later they were abducted. What we need is for a search to be initiated right away. And Hegn needs to be taken in and questioned. He’s collaborating with an international security firm, SecuriCom, with links to organised crime. The man who’s got our kids works for them. He’s a lunatic.’

  Few people are truly able to listen. But Falck-Hansen is one. He does so in the way only Laban, the twins and Andrea Fink are able. He understands everything, and can accommodate it all.

  ‘There’s a plan,’ I tell him. ‘It’s secret, for the evacuation of four thousand citizens in the event of military or civil disaster. To a place called Spray Island. You know it, we just watched some footage of you there. Other Western governments have purchased other islands. Maybe the plan is transnational, a collaboration designed to protect a minimal section of the political, scientific, economic and artistic elites. There are wide-reaching arrangements for the transport of these people, and for the cultivation of the island, energy provision and security. The whole apparatus is about to kick in. Someone must think that disaster is imminent. Was that what your meeting was about the day before Christmas Eve, when we bumped into you in the archives?’

  He puts his tea down in front of us and pulls up his chair. This is a man who changed the way I look at our democracy. He lives for a cause, the same way as Desmond Tutu, Mikhail Gorbachev, Kofi Annan, Nelson Mandela. Perhaps justice exists, and common sense too, in spite of everything, if only we look high enough up the ladder. Soon the twins will be returned to us. In a moment we’ll be cleared, on our way home to Evighedsvej, back to normal.

  ‘No such plan exists. It’s unthinkable. I would know about it. In any case, it wouldn’t ever happen here. But Susan, imagine Denmark were a ship, a big ship, and you were on board with the twins. I saw that front cover of Time. The most delightful children. Suppose you were told the ship was sinking and the lifeboats only had room for certain privileged members of the crew. What would you do?’

  I say nothing.

  He gets to his feet. Goes over to the window. Looks out across the harbour.

  ‘Consider this. You’re on that ship. There’s a chance you can save the twins, and yourselves as well. You, Laban, are one of this country’s finest composers. If such a list existed, you would be on it. Susan would be too, and the children. Would you be able to turn that opportunity down? Would you even have the right to say no?’

  He’s not looking at us. I must address his Grecian profile.

  ‘Suppose it did exist, that list. Would it still be possible for our names to be included?’

  ‘You have my word.’

  We sit quietly, all three of us. He turns to face us.

  ‘As for these very serious problems society is now up against, we are governing a nation of the deaf. Those who can read saw the writing on the wall a long time ago.’

  He goes towards the door.

  Even now, with everything lost, I feel the urge to press myself against his paternal integrity, his authority.

  ‘Let me bring in some people. They’ll look after you while you consider the matter.’

  ‘The twins,’ I say.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve a balloon to catch. When I get back …’

  The door closes behind him. Laban is about to say something. I gesture for him not to.

  I take the crowbar out of my bag. And a folded tissue.

  The desk drawers are locked. I place the tissue between the wood and the crowbar’s metal, apply a small amount of pressure and lift the catch from its recess. The top drawer contains keys, fibre-tip pens, paper clips, USB flash drives, and two wedges of yellow plastic, the kind used to keep doors open. In the next I find writing paper, envelopes, sealing wax and an official seal. The third contains a folder. In the folder is a list, fifty-odd pages, perhaps a hundred names on each. I put it in my bag. That and the two plastic wedges.

  I close and lock the drawers again using the crowbar and the tissue.

  The minister returns. There are four men with him. Two of them remain at the door.

  These are not ordinary men. They are sharks who have come ashore and been clad in tailored suits. They have learned to walk upright and to utter sounds of politeness. Their movements are economical. They step aside and allow us to go first.

  On our way out, I pause in front of Falck-Hansen.

  ‘That balloon ride. Does it start from the old Radiohuset concert hall?’

  He says nothing. But no words are required. The Effect and I have already registered his system’s affirmative reply.

  ‘I hope to repay you for this someday,’ I say.

  Falck-Hansen is a man with forty years’ experience of weathering force-ten gales from the bridge. And yet I sense his unease.

  Then, in a moment, we’re gone.

  The sharks patrol about us. I can feel Laban’s tension. But also his readiness. He, too, has been plunged into a state of emergency. We are no longer humans. We are biological machines that will do anything to make sure our progeny survive.

  We’re almost at the swing door. One of the men cuts in front of me. I prod his shoulder.

  ‘Ladies first.’

  He stops in mid-movement. Even sharks once had a mother, who somewhere inside them remains, even after they’ve grown into very big fish indeed. His mother inside him prompts him to stop.

  I enter the rotating space of the door with Laban right behind me. The moment I feel the fresh air on my face I wheel round, bend down and ram a yellow plastic wedge under the door with a swipe of the crowbar.

  The merry-go-round comes to an abrupt halt. I step right, where there’s a regular door for wheelchair users. It opens outwards. I hamm
er the other wedge into place beneath it.

  We run for our hearse. Laban weaves through the traffic, ruthless as an ambulance driver.

  We pull up at the kerb outside the Radiohuset. There are lots of cars, and police too.

  Two security guards wearing headsets check the guests. One is in uniform, the other, in a suit, is the man in charge.

  The uniformed guard steps towards me. For a second, reality and all the plans I have for it are jarred out of place as though by some hallucinogenic intervention. Standing in front of me is the handsome young man from the Defence College car park at Svanemøllen.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he says. ‘After your kiss. I lay there all night, floating above the mattress.’

  One must be prudent with one’s kisses. It may well be that one dishes them out in the manner of gratuities. But to a romantic heart, a single one may be as good as the overture of Romeo and Juliet.

  A couple of police officers approach. The situation is slipping from my hands. But then the mood changes. Subtly, yet unmistakably. Thorbjørn Halk is standing next to us.

  Thorbjørn Halk is more famous than Bohr was in his day. Bohr never had the benefit of massive media coverage. Even if he had, it wouldn’t have interested him. Thorbjørn Halk is the first great quantum-physical celebrity of the information age.

  I take him by the arm and hold on tight. He tries to wriggle free, but cannot. We move forward. The throng parts, the doors open and we are inside.

  We step into the lift. Only now do I realise that my ballet prince is with us. We ascend, and when the door opens Thorkild Hegn is standing a metre away from me.

  He is surrounded by henchmen. Not two or four, like at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Ten or twelve.

  He doesn’t look surprised.

  ‘Susan. You’ve been making things difficult for me.’

  ‘We would have been taken away,’ I say. ‘But by whom?’

  ‘By me.’

  His voice is luxurious, now as then. Warm, vivid, sonorous and deep.

  Hegn moves aside and my father steps into view.

  He takes off his hat. His hair is reddish-blond, with not a hint of grey in sight. He must be seventy, but looks twenty years younger. At least.