The Exception

by Christian Jungersen

  Anne-Lise looks past the stack of books on the coffee table at the engraving of the Lyngby Central Library, speculating what the next day might bring. She thinks about Henrik – how incredibly good and how protective he is of her.

  Once, halfway through a skiing holiday in Austria, Henrik took a phone message saying that Anne-Lise’s aunt had fallen seriously ill. He made sure that several members of Anne-Lise’s family knew his mobile number, so they could get hold of him if the aunt’s condition worsened. But he didn’t mention anything about it to her. They enjoyed the week and then, afterwards, he told her and added that there had been no point in ruining the holiday for her if the illness wasn’t as bad as it had at first seemed.

  ‘Henrik?’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘About the emails …?’ She tries to sound as gentle as she can. He mustn’t take this the wrong way. She puts her hand on his thigh where it’s still warm from her cheek. ‘Look, I think it was sweet of you to send them. You did it to help me, I know that. And things really did get better. Well, for a while.’

  ‘I didn’t send the emails.’

  ‘Look, I think it was sweet of you. Honestly.’

  ‘Listen, I did not send them.’ He puts down his papers.

  She peers into his face, trying to read any sign that, yet again, he is protecting her. If he is, he is fantastically good at hiding it.

  ‘If you look at the text of the emails, they say different things. Iben is called “self-righteous”, Malene is told she is “evil” and Camilla that she is a “collaborator” who believes she’s innocent. Who, apart from you and I, know that they really are like that?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘No, neither do I.’

  She smiles, wanting to persuade him to share his secret with her.

  ‘Come on, you can tell me. I love you for it.’

  His expression is growing colder. ‘And do you believe that I exchanged the pills as well?’

  She is taken aback. ‘No. Of course not.’

  He sees through her. She hadn’t foreseen this. The last thing she wants is to sour the air between them.

  ‘Only you’ve said so often that you truly hate them. And of course I’d understand if you had done it.’

  ‘But …?’

  The muscles around his mouth and eyes have tensed up. It’s such a small change, but Anne-Lise cannot bear seeing it.

  He puts his hands on her shoulders and speaks slowly. ‘Anne-Lise, I did not do those things. Neither one, nor the other.’

  ‘No, I see. I believe you. It’s just … you know how you can be.’

  ‘What if there is some truth in the idea about dissociated identities?’ Anne-Lise and Henrik are brushing their teeth together.

  ‘I agree that it looks as if it was an inside job. It’s unbelievable, but who else could have done it? Everyone knows Malene’s bag. No one could have thought it was my bag or that it was my tablets they were swapping.’

  ‘There’s Camilla. She’s the only one who could have sent the emails and exchanged Malene’s tablets.’

  ‘But that doesn’t fit at all. I didn’t think she was like that.’ Anne-Lise drops the toothpaste tube. A line of white paste ends up on the tiled floor. She picks up the tube. ‘But, it could be why she stayed at home for so long after receiving an email herself. Everything had become too much for her. The story about her ex-partner could just be a cover-up. Oh, I don’t know. It still doesn’t make any sense. She just isn’t like that!’

  ‘Did Iben say anything about how you find out if someone has a split personality?’

  ‘Well, sort of. Camilla could be hiding a bitter hatred towards Iben and Malene … That, I would find easy to believe. They don’t behave well towards her, but you don’t notice it so much compared to the way they treat me. There would be times in her life which she can’t or won’t remember. But then, that’s true of most people.’

  The top of the toothpaste tube won’t screw back on properly. Anne-Lise stops trying and puts it down.

  ‘Dissociated personality is a very serious mental illness and Iben says that the patient has usually had a terrible childhood, they’ve been abused, physically or sexually. That’s something they seem to have in common.’

  ‘OK. What was Camilla’s childhood like?’

  Anne-Lise takes her time before replying. ‘I can’t remember if she ever said anything about it. She’s not like Iben or Malene –they won’t stop telling us about that kind of thing.’

  ‘I thought she talked a lot during your lunch breaks?’

  ‘Oh, she does. She speaks about her choir and how much she enjoys singing. And going to Norway and Sweden on family camping trips. And how much they save at the Metro Hypermarket …’ When Anne-Lise thinks about it, there hasn’t been one single instance of Camilla saying anything more revealing about her past. ‘Not a word about where or how she grew up. I have simply no idea.’

  ‘Four women having lunch together every day and you don’t know anything about her childhood? What next? There’s something very odd about that!’

  He cackles away at his silly joke, but Anne-Lise can’t be bothered with it.

  ‘I can’t recall Malene or Iben ever saying anything about having the kind of childhood that would cause them serious mental problems now. But judging by the way they’ve been behaving, they must have had a terrible time.’ Anne-Lise sits down next to Henrik on the edge of the tub. ‘But then, probably no worse than most people.’

  When they are finished in the bathroom, Henrik wanders off to his study to enter a few notes on his personal organiser. Anne-Lise looks out of the bedroom window. Apart from a few trees close to the street lamps, the garden is almost invisible in the darkness.

  When they are in bed together Henrik continues to speculate: ‘If the others have got it into their heads that you’re the one who sent the emails and interfered with the medicine, then it’s only a matter of time before they make Paul and the board believe it too. You don’t have much time to find proof that Malene mixed up the tablets by mistake. Or that Camilla did it on purpose. If you don’t, you’ll be out on your ear.’

  Anne-Lise knows Henrik is right.

  Some nights, in the dark quiet of the bedroom, Henrik’s familiar smell wafts across from his side of the bed. Anne-Lise remembers it from way back, when she was at college and they lived together in her small student room. It isn’t a strong scent, but it makes her feel comfortable and safe.

  Henrik is thinking aloud. ‘Now, her husband is in the plumbing business, isn’t he? Maybe I should ask him to fix something for us and make him talk while he’s working?’

  ‘Henrik! That’s out of the question.’

  ‘OK, OK. We’re brainstorming, aren’t we? What about finding out who their friends are and getting them to talk?’

  Neither Henrik nor Anne-Lise can figure out a way to do this. The only hope is that Anne-Lise can persuade Camilla to open up about herself during work.

  Anne-Lise is doubtful. ‘She doesn’t speak openly with anyone and tomorrow they’ll be furious with me.’

  ‘They will. But remember, they’ll be frightened of you as well. If they really believe you have a split personality and that you’re a psychotic basket case, they’ll be at a loss about how to handle you. In situations like that, people cope by sticking to routine. You’ll see. I suspect that a stranger entering the office tomorrow wouldn’t notice a thing out of the ordinary.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  But Anne-Lise still thinks that the so-called plan is absurd. Does Henrik truly believe that with such a terrible atmosphere at DCGI, she can say, out of the blue, ‘Listen, Camilla, we’ve never had a proper heart-to-heart, have we? Why not start today? Tell me a bit more about yourself.’

  28

  The following morning Malene phones the office to say that she is still ill and won’t be coming in to work – this is something Anne-Lise has not foreseen.

  Paul is out of the office too. He
is at a conference in Odense and will be there all day. Anne-Lise is alone with Iben and Camilla, who behave exactly as Henrik predicted. They may well be on edge, but they aren’t letting it show. Nobody can prove anything. Anne-Lise thinks that the Winter Garden is a little quieter than usual, but Malene is away, of course.

  Like the other two, Anne-Lise throws herself into her work. Her next task is to extract the best database keywords for a collection of eyewitness accounts from the 1971 genocide in what was then East Pakistan. The killing started up suddenly – and unexpectedly – in the aftermath of Pakistan’s 1970 parliamentary election, which was won by the oppressed Bengali majority. The ruling minority, drawn from the Punjabi and Pathan tribes, rejected the election result and took over after a military coup. The Bengali population protested by staging a non-violent general strike, but the army crushed it. Its orders were to kill, loot and rape. Punjabis and Pathans traditionally believed Bengalis to be an inferior race.

  The Pakistani soldiers drove about 40 million of their countrymen into exile, flattened several provincial towns every day, raped some 250,000 women of all ages and killed, in total, about 3 million people.

  Anne-Lise has read piles of witness reports from those nine terrible months. At the moment she is reading about a Bengali woman, twenty-five years old, married to an officer and mother of three children. The soldiers took her husband away, despite her pleas. She threw herself on the ground in front of their house, begging for his freedom. They brought him back to her later, disfigured by torture and close to death. Another group of soldiers broke into the family house the following morning and raped the woman in front of her husband and children. They tied the husband down and beat the children when they cried. In the afternoon, the soldiers took her to a cellar, where they locked her in and raped her night after night until she lost consciousness. Three months later she returned home. She was pregnant.

  Families often rejected violated Bengali women on their return, because they were regarded as a dishonour to their relatives. This woman was fortunate; although her husband refused to take her back, her neighbours showed her some compassion. When they pressured the husband to accept her back as his wife, he hanged himself.

  After reading this account, Anne-Lise goes through it again to find the best descriptive words for the library database, but grinds to a halt after a few paragraphs. She tries to start from the beginning, but it’s no use. I need a break, she thinks after the fourth attempt.

  As Anne-Lise steps into the brightly lit Winter Garden, Camilla is on the phone, saying that she must cancel her rehearsal session with the choir tonight because she has to attend a parent-teacher meeting at her daughter’s school. The fluorescent light above the shelf of Dutch publications is on the blink. Camilla puts the receiver down and now Anne-Lise can talk to both of them.

  ‘I’m off to the kitchen to make myself a mug of tea. Does anybody else want one?’

  To her surprise Iben says that she wouldn’t mind some tea, thank you. And her face seems more relaxed than usual; she even looks friendly. But then, Malene is away. Anne-Lise still has serious doubts about her chances of getting to know Camilla better. Everything here would be so much easier if Iben changed her attitude and encouraged everyone to work together. Especially after Iben’s accusations yesterday.

  Anne-Lise pours water into the electric kettle and waits for it to boil.

  Obviously, Camilla is worried about her figure. Her colleagues try not to comment on the rather odd things she has for lunch. Currently, she’s eating almost nothing but cucumbers. During the past year Camilla has tried three contradictory diets, all of which have failed to produce a result. At Lyngby, two of Anne-Lise’s colleagues also ate erratically, but they would joke about their fad diets. Camilla’s problem is that she takes her weight issues far too seriously, even though she is nowhere near as large as Anne-Lise’s former colleagues. Camilla is small and on the plump side, but no more than one might expect of a forty-year-old woman with a child. Couldn’t Camilla’s obsessive relationship with her body fit with the kind of upbringing that might also cause DID?

  Despite being about the same age as Camilla, Anne-Lise feels she looks younger than her colleague. One reason is Camilla’s hairdo, an out-dated perm that has dried out her ash-blonde hair. The overall effect is dull and matronly.

  Anne-Lise recalls the dramatic story of Camilla’s friend who died from uterine cancer, and the way Camilla stepped into her friend’s life to live with her husband and care for her daughter. Apart from that, all Anne-Lise has to go on is her observations of Camilla’s behaviour.

  The day after Iben and Malene received the emails Iben had been speaking about what made people commit war crimes. She had argued that, in one sense at least, they too were victims of forces they could not control. Anne-Lise had never seen Camilla so upset. Was that significant? And if so, what did it mean? Why couldn’t she discuss forgiveness for such crimes? Then there was her strong reaction to receiving one of the emailed threats herself. All she had wanted was to lie down and be alone. Was that a typical reaction or was it a sign of a disturbed person?

  The water is about to boil when Iben turns up in the kitchen and leans against the fridge. ‘I’m aware,’ Iben begins hesitantly, ‘that my tirade on the phone yesterday was unreasonable.’

  It sounds closer to an apology than anything Anne-Lise has ever dared hope for.

  ‘I had no good grounds for being so convinced that you were the one who’d exchanged the pills,’ Iben continues, looking away timidly.

  Anne-Lise realises that she should try to be receptive to Iben’s attempts at conversation or she’ll never be able to persuade Camilla to give her secrets away. She must control her anger. ‘You were very upset, naturally. You weren’t yourself. I understand it must have been terrible for you.’

  ‘It really was.’

  Anne-Lise thanks Iben once more for her suggestion about phoning Tatiana. The call went very well – so well, in fact, that she almost got the impression that Tatiana had been expecting it.

  ‘It was so good of you. Let’s see if Tatiana will use our library more after this.’

  Anne-Lise has an impulse to phone Henrik, but discreet conversations are impossible now that the door is open all the time. It wouldn’t look right if she were to shut it again, even for a short while.

  Over lunch they discuss the changes in the lives of university students in East Pakistan after 1971. The Indian army had intervened in support of the Bengalis to stop the genocide and establish East Pakistan as the independent state of Bangladesh. Part of the contempt felt by the Pathans and Punjabis for the Bengalis was related to the fact that they were not a warrior race; indeed they were regarded as unfit for military service. However, the genocide wrought many changes and the effects were perhaps especially marked in the universities.

  One of the top priorities of the Pakistani soldiery had been to kill off university staff, students and other intellectuals to stop them from becoming leaders. In 1971 the universities became slaughterhouses and, after the secession, the students were so used to carrying arms that conflicts between opposing student factions were frequently settled with shoot-outs. This made universities amongst the most dangerous places to be in Bangladesh. The extreme violence of the students undermined the whole academic system.

  Anne-Lise cannot concentrate. She thinks about the change in Iben’s behaviour. The peaceful morning has been like a breath of fresh air. She watches Camilla pause before covering her fourth slice of crisp-bread with fat-free cottage cheese and slices of cucumber. The three of them seem quite at ease with each other. Perhaps she can persuade Camilla to reveal something that would show her emotional volatility and prove that she is the one who should be under suspicion.

  As Anne-Lise tries to muster the courage to ask Camilla a question, Iben interrupts: ‘Isn’t it amazing how little we know about each other, even though we work so closely together?’

  ‘It is.’

  Iben has alway
s been pale, but recently she’s had dark rings beneath her eyes from lack of sleep. She looks at Anne-Lise and smiles.

  ‘So I was thinking, Anne-Lise, now that we’re just sitting here: why don’t you tell us a bit more about yourself.’

  29

  It is raining hard when Anne-Lise parks in a dark street, well away from the post office building. She walks quickly. Under the golf umbrella she always keeps in the trunk of the car, not even her shoes get wet. When she has passed the entrance to the Tivoli Concert Hall, she turns left at the Central Station.

  Anne-Lise is scared. She has never done anything like this before and it goes against her nature, but her back is against the wall. If she is sacked, she may never work again.

  She has to find out more about Camilla.

  The edifice in front of her is not so much a single building as a mass of concrete blocks all joined together: Copenhagen’s Central Post Office.

  Outside one of its doors waits a group of women, mostly in their fifties. Anne-Lise introduces herself: ‘I’m Brigitte.’

  They seem pleased that she is joining them this evening. One of the women unlocks the door with a magnetised ID card and leads the way down a steep metal staircase.

  A woman in a long black dress explains where they are going: ‘The room we use is actually next to the reception area, but in the evenings so many of the alarms on the doors have been set that we have to go via the basement.’

  They negotiate a maze of corridors lined with doors, almost all of them closed. The walls have a fresh coat of white paint and a great many doors are closed. They walk up another metal staircase and into a large, plain room that looks like some kind of conference hall. Three of its walls are painted white and the fourth is made of glass. Behind the glass you can see the reception area. The whole place seems designed with space in mind: there is plenty of standing room and just a few pieces of colourful designer furniture. Near the door, about twenty women of all ages are talking and laughing. The air smells of damp coats.