The Exception

by Christian Jungersen

  One full second.

  No more time to think.

  Malene is having such a difficult time these days. Nothing should be allowed to add to her distress. If I humiliate her in front of the others, Iben thinks, our friendship may not survive. She’ll lose every last ounce of trust in me. She might tell Gunnar. That too could change my life. If only Malene and I could have talked about this alone.

  I’m taking far too long. They’re all staring at me. How strange it is. I believe that no group has the right to destroy one individual. It’s an article of faith for us here at DCGI. And now, I must choose: either my ideology or my best friend. An inner voice tells me to agree with Malene. My human instinct, like the instincts of millions of Germans, Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, demands that other people should be eliminated.

  So much would be sacrificed if I were to break with Malene. And how can I be certain that Anne-Lise deserves that kind of sacrifice from me? I don’t want to turn my life upside down.

  The Winter Garden is quiet apart from the slight humming of the computers. Iben looks directly at Anne-Lise. She can’t remember when she last did that.

  ‘We were talking about you, Anne-Lise.’ Iben blinks. The light is so bright. She starts again. ‘You weren’t imagining it. Not at all.’

  Malene slaps the palms of her hands on the desktop. ‘WHAT?’

  Iben repeats it and now her voice is firmer. ‘We were talking about you, Anne-Lise. What you heard was exactly what we said.’

  Iben can see Malene losing her confidence.

  ‘Iben, you don’t mean what you’re saying. Did you really hear what we were talking about? What are you … you’re not saying that …?’

  Iben’s eyes fill with tears. It’s hard to see Malene. Instead she turns to Anne-Lise, whom she can’t see properly either.

  ‘Anne-Lise, listen. You’re not psychotic! You’re right! Everything you heard was said. We talked about you. We’ve talked about you before now too.’

  Iben can hear that Anne-Lise has also begun to cry.

  ‘Are you siding with her?!’ Malene is screaming.

  ‘No! No! I’m not on anybody’s side. I’m just telling her the truth. We talked about Anne-Lise. We did.’

  ‘You’re her friend now!’

  ‘No. I’m only saying …’

  Malene sounds as if she’s hardly able to breathe. ‘I can’t bear it … You’re just …’

  Anne-Lise is still standing at Iben’s side when Malene runs out of the office, slamming the door behind her.

  40

  Iben rushes out of the door after Malene, as fast as she can manage on her sore foot.

  Malene is not on the stairs and not on the pavement outside. Iben calls her mobile. No response. Apart from the endless rows of parked cars, the road is completely empty. The morning air is cold and Iben hugs herself as she leans against the red-brick wall and tries to collect her thoughts.

  Then she phones the Centre. Anne-Lise takes the call and sounds quite different. Iben realises that Anne-Lise is dying to talk about what’s just happened but Iben avoids the issue. All she says is that she has a headache and is going home. She will be away for the rest of the day.

  She takes a taxi and calls Malene’s home number. After about ten attempts Malene finally answers.

  ‘Iben, so you’re backing her up now?’

  ‘No. Malene, I’m your friend, always! But you’re not yourself.’

  Malene interrupts with denials but Iben continues. ‘Look, Malene, it’s obvious why, with everything that’s happened. But I’m worried about you.’

  Malene is shouting. ‘I hate to think what you’re like when you really fucking care!’ She slams the receiver down and doesn’t answer the phone again.

  When Iben wakes up, her bedroom is dark. The clock-radio shows that it’s nine o’clock at night. Nine hours have passed since she lay down on top of the bed.

  She limps along to the kitchen and makes herself a portion of oats, raisins and skimmed milk, and thinks about Malene. Everything has gone wrong. Iben’s foot is painful and she feels emotionally drained. She sits down at her desk, placing her bad foot gingerly on one of the old chairs. The laptop is turned on and Anne-Lise’s CD is still in the drive. She checks through more files while she eats.

  There are collections of photos from summer days in the garden and from a family holiday two years ago in Rhodes. The children are splashing in the sea and Henrik, whose body looks exceptionally pale and thin, is grinning at the photographer.

  Iben knows what she’s after and why, but doesn’t care. Dozens of experiments in social psychology have proven that, after making a complex choice, people often set out to look for reasons to confirm that they were right. The deciding factors may have been marginal, or even random, but in the experiments, subjects would construct arguments and find information to support their eventual decision. By then they would have shut off other considerations and convinced themselves that their choices were significantly different. Put simply: justification after the fact makes life easier.

  Iben has eaten her cereal by the time she gets to older photos of the family, who are visibly happy. Iben feels proud of the stand she took today – her refusal to help destroy this smiling woman. She is well aware that the choices people had to make during the Holocaust were utterly unlike her own. Even so, she thinks that perhaps she might have been part of the small, select group of heroes who refused to obey. In her mind she pictures the survivors in their rooms. She sees a woman at a desk looking at photos of a victim she has saved, her bad right foot resting on a chair.

  Iben scrolls through other entries about the daily misery Anne-Lise endured at the Centre. In bed later that night, Iben thinks about what she has read. How can it be, she asks herself, that I couldn’t see the consequences of what we were doing until I saw them in writing? Somehow, I must have known all along. Malene must have known too.

  She thinks about how, in reality, she and Malene were able to hold three utterly contradictory beliefs simultaneously. First, they felt their actions were OK because they weren’t hurting Anne-Lise – she was too thick-skinned to notice. Second, their actions were OK because Anne-Lise deserved to suffer for destroying the good working environment at DCGI. Third, they knew that their treatment of Anne-Lise was fundamentally wrong, although they never dared put it into words, or even acknowledge the thought. Somehow they sensed that they shouldn’t tell anyone outside the office what they were doing.

  When Iben comes into work the next morning, Paul is standing at Malene’s desk. They are gossiping about some of their German colleagues. Paul looks relaxed and Iben thinks that he has no idea what happened yesterday.

  As usual, Iben greets everyone in the Winter Garden. Then, for the first time, she walks into the library to greet Anne-Lise.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi, Iben.’

  Iben tries to catch Anne-Lise’s expression. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Just fine. Really. Fine. What about you?’

  ‘Oh, fine.’

  Anne-Lise hesitates for a moment. ‘You know, I’m actually feeling happy.’

  Iben nods towards the papers on the desk. ‘What’s all that about?’

  ‘I have to sort out the keywords for this pile of new books.’

  Iben yawns. ‘I guess I’d better get to work too.’

  Anne-Lise says, ‘Yes.’ Then she uses one of Malene’s phrases: ‘We’d better be good.’

  When Iben sits down at her desk, Paul has left. Malene leans across her desk as far as she can and whispers: ‘We need to talk.’

  They go off together to the Small Meeting Room. Iben emphasises how it would have been so much better not to have been forced to disagree in front of the others. Malene apologises for this, and for her words on the phone. Because Paul is at the Centre they can’t spend too much time away from their desks, but they promise each other to have a longer talk later.

  Iben needs to work on the Turkey issue. However, as things stand,
it would probably be best to avoid Anne-Lise for a while. She sends an email to her instead, saying that she’s sure their planned discussion will generate all sorts of exciting ideas, but that she would like to postpone it for a couple of days.

  Anne-Lise has enough understanding of what is going on and emails back a simple ‘Fine by me’.

  Iben turns to Malene and suggests that they work on the delegates’ handouts for the conference about the ethnic cleansing of East European Germans between 1945 and 1950. Iben goes to sit next to Malene so that they can go over her draft together. Iben, who has brought her mug of coffee along, takes a sip and starts scanning Malene’s text.

  The heading strikes her as being in poor taste: ‘Welcome to the International Conference on Ethnic Cleansing of Germans 1945–50’.

  Reading on, the very first sentence also seems odd and inappropriate given the subject matter. The next sentence sounds so heavy you just want to run away. She turns to the next page. It’s no good either. Then she abandons the second page too. This is hopeless.

  Iben tries to recall what she thought of Malene’s previous draft. As far as she can remember, it seemed all right. Why does it look so different now? What can she say?

  She tries to find something positive before she starts to criticise it.

  Iben looks up and sees her best friend watching her. Does Malene sense how Iben feels about their friendship today? Probably not. For the last few months Iben has felt uneasy about it but Malene appears not to have noticed. But then, why should she? It’s not as if Iben has actually said anything.

  Luckily, Iben finds something on the last page of the conference papers that works. Now she can praise it with sincerity.

  ‘Malene, I really like this passage at the end. It’s so inviting. Friendly.’

  ‘I did try to write as if I were writing to a friend.’

  They smile.

  Iben is back at her own desk preparing to review a new book about Yugoslavia for the DCGI website, but once again she has trouble concentrating.

  She creates a new file for notes to herself. Her comments might be part of the groundwork for another article in her series on the psychology of evil.

  At least now she’s not wasting her time at work. Besides, it’s the only subject she can focus on.

  Evil. Psychol III

  Just about everyone must have heard a friend praising her great relationship with a lover only to say, soon after breaking up, that she knew from the start that it wouldn’t last. She will insist she ‘knew’, even when they had bought a flat or had a child together.

  The interesting point is the friend’s claim to have known all along while acting as if she did not. This might be something to bear in mind when trying to understand people who have committed terrible acts that they, at other times in their life, have claimed they could never possibly commit. It could be that we should stop trying to see every human being as a consistent whole. A better image of the human psyche might be a bunch of grapes: each ‘grape’ is a set of characteristics, worldviews and moral codes. Subconsciously, we pick one grape or another at different times.

  Without being an actual clinical case of split personality, individuals are simultaneously able to hold contradictory beliefs, each one developed and honed by years of experience. This, despite the person being aware of only one state of mind at the time.

  Iben adds an NB: ‘Is this too early to insert references to research into DID? Do I have any other examples to base this argument on? There must be something – but where?’

  This interpretation of how people function could explain, for instance, why many Serbian schoolteachers in Bosnia were able to take an active part in the killing of their pupils and their pupils’ parents. Parents who survived in most cases declared themselves unable to grasp how the teacher could bring himself to do what he had done. He had always seemed to be very caring towards the pupils. The only explanation seemed to be that he had been lying to them for years.

  But he didn’t lie. When the war started, he selected another grape from his bunch. And when the war ended, he reverted. This movement might explain why so many war criminals are without remorse. They resume their pre-war life, and everything concerning their actions in the war is hazy. They feel as if it was someone else who went wild, killing innocent children and adults.

  Another NB: ‘Do I lack a good lead-in here? Maybe the next bit should be a different article? Or “The Psychology of Evil IV”? It’s at this point that the perspectives open out.’

  In God, Gulliver and Genocide, the author Claude Rawson (Professor of English at Yale) has analysed Hitler’s pre-war speeches. They are very vague on the subject of what should be done about the Jews. Should they be deported to Madagascar, or some other course of action? Superficially, the Germans were unsure what it was that Hitler wanted – and yet, at the same time, they knew. Hitler was able to blur the appalling implications of his policy, while making its advantages crystal clear to non-Jewish German citizens.

  Similar patterns can be observed in the Rwandan radio broadcasts and the propaganda aimed at German soldiers. No one utters the words ‘kill’ or ‘murder’ outright. But everyone knows what is really going on and the underlying message is clear beneath all the vague and circuitous language that dehumanises the victims. Expressions such as ‘exterminating the vermin’ or ‘cleaning up a village’ allow propagandists to consign the very real suffering of the victims to a partly unconscious ‘mind grape’.

  An important avenue for future research might be to examine if this obscurity of language in the run-up to genocide is something more than linguistic? Usage might reflect the dynamics of a central psychological mechanism that is essential to the catastrophic final result. Could it be that genocide simply would not happen without a critical mass of indistinct expressions to support a convenient distribution of mental processes into appropriate grapes? That is, the process culminating in genocide depends on the coordination of several perceptions at the same time – parallel thinking along multiple lines, rather than the single-mindedness we usually believe to be the rule in making life decisions.

  Such research could also tell us about the way people think and arrive at their decisions more generally – not just in the realm of genocide.

  Iben leans back in her chair. She feels much better now. There is no telling if this piece will ever be published in the magazine, but at least it’s safely stored away in the computer.

  Malene is staring at her screen and Paul is wandering about their office again. It seems he has decided he should show his face more often and chat to his staff. He wants to be inspiring and supportive, but he does have a tendency to pick the wrong moments.

  During lunch he asks Iben what she has been reading recently. Of course, he means articles relevant to her work at DCGI, but she can’t resist mentioning the clinical texts about DID again and tells him about the embryonic article she has just written. After a while she stops, suddenly feeling self-conscious about talking for too long.

  But Paul is appreciative. ‘Fantastic! I mean it, Iben! That’s just the kind of discussion we should be having. It’s wonderful for you to explore entirely new lines of thought.’

  He follows up his comments with a series of criticisms, but constructive ones. His aim is to clarify the bunch-of-grapes hypothesis. How well does it fit actual facts? What are the possible applications?

  When the break is over, he asks Iben to join him in his office. This makes Iben nervous. Paul sits down and gestures for her to sit opposite him. As he leans back on his chair she notes that he is growing a small pot belly. The door to the Winter Garden is open behind her. It can’t be anything serious or he would have closed the door, she tells herself.

  ‘Look, I hate to say it, but I believe that Robert Jay Lifton has already written something similar to what you’re proposing in his book The Nazi Doctors.’

  Iben smiles happily. Clearly all Paul wanted was to carry on talking.

  ‘In it Lifton introduc
es a concept he calls “doubling” to describe what happened in the minds of doctors who would spend their days doing experiments involving the torture and mutilation of living human beings, and then go home after work and behave normally, playing with their children and so on.’

  Iben is familiar with this. ‘But, Paul, Lifton’s theory of doubling is different. It states that under pressure of the special conditions in concentration camps, the doctors developed just one separate personality. And this “other” was independent of their normal selves, which made them perfectly capable of immersing people in boiling water …’

  Her voice grows louder than it probably should in a conversation with her boss. ‘What I’ve tried to figure out is if the situation is more complex than just the splitting of a personality. You see, my “grapes” are not mental strategies created under pressure. They already exist inside all of us.’

  Paul doesn’t reply. He puts his hands behind his head and then removes them again. Iben is afraid that she has said something wrong.

  At last he speaks: ‘I’m not sure I agree with you, but that’s not the point. I want you to know that, should we come under Morten Kjærum and shuffle across the road, I’ll make it my business to fight to keep you. We mustn’t lose you. Taking into account that you’re an information officer and not a paid researcher, I must say that you’re exceptionally talented. And we need talent. I will emphasise that point to everyone.’

  Iben feels both relieved and proud. At the same time, she’s very aware of the open door; the others are undoubtedly listening.

  ‘Thank you … thank you very much. It’s kind of you to say that.’

  The whole morning Paul has tried to create a good feeling by praising each of them in turn, but his declaration to Iben proves that she is now at the top of his list.

  She walks back to her desk. Her foot hurts less now and it’s easier to move without a limp. Camilla, who is right outside Paul’s door, must have heard everything he said. She doesn’t let on, though. Iben tries to catch her eye. Camilla is gazing intently at her computer screen.