Finn came to join them, dressed in torn jeans and a purple sweatshirt. He was a slightly built man, already balding. They smiled at each other. Finn was always kind to Anja’s friends. He sat down on the sofa next to Anja with one foot curled up under him.
Camilla watched them. He was the sort of man her mother would like to see her marry. Anja and Finn were so close that they seemed like two sides of the same person. Talking to them, Camilla wondered if they had a good sex life. They could have had Sunday lunch with her parents week in and week out.
Anja was telling her about the camper van they were saving up for and Camilla kept thinking, Would I be happy with a man like Finn? My life might well be easier. Still, the sex would never be as great. You could never be sure, of course.
When Goran’s friends got together to watch videos in his flat, he always disconnected the aerial from the television. No one wanted to risk catching a glimpse of the news, not even during the brief moment before the video began. The news programmes were full of reports from Yugoslavia, and they upset everyone far too much. They would rage against the journalists’ lies and become aggressive, Dragan in particular.
Dragan watched a lot of television at home and showed more sympathy for the Serbs and their cause than he did when he was with his Muslim friends. Sitting in front of Camilla’s set, he watched the news on TV1 and TV2, as well as the news and current-affairs programmes on the BBC and CNN. He listened to the radio too, even though it often made his blood boil. He’d run around the flat roaring, hitting out, or kicking things.
At times his arguments were very convincing. Camilla believed that he had knowledge and experience well beyond what the journalists could draw on.
‘Journalists know nothing about history! Idiots! They think this is a new war! But we’ve been at war for five hundred fucking years! They’ve got no perspective!’
Camilla learned that she wasn’t meant to answer when he was in this mood. She stayed in the bedroom or went out. If she hid in the toilet, he would stand outside the door and carry on shouting.
‘In your history books about the Second World War, do they write about the Croats forcing us into our churches and setting them on fire? Do they? Why not talk about that on TV? Do we burn them alive? Camilla? Camilla, answer me! Do we burn them alive? No! We’re moving them to protect ourselves! We’re allowed to try to survive, aren’t we?’
Camilla stayed very still, hoping that he wouldn’t break the door down.
He would turn the volume up so the television reports could be heard all over the small flat.
‘But NATO attacks us all the same, Camilla! They’re bombing my country! They’re bombing my home town! What do they want us to do? – commit mass suicide? Do they want us to kill ourselves? Or just let Croats and Muslims kill us instead? Would that please NATO?’
At other times, his frustration at his own impotence would overwhelm him. His emotions seemed to be beyond words and he could only express himself in a mixture of Serbian curses and raw howling.
Apart from in bed, he only ever hit her after having watched the news.
Camilla had twice taken the agonising decision to end it between them. But each time she thought about what he must have been through, experiences beyond her grasp, and felt she understood that it would take a long time for him to become a normal human being again. When he wasn’t reminded of the dreadful situation in his country and of how he had suffered, he was everything she had ever wanted. The war must surely end some time and then the tensions would disappear from their relationship.
Before meeting Dragan, Camilla had been determined that she would never again live with a violent man, but they loved each other so much. She and Dragan agreed that he should only watch or listen to the news and read the papers while Camilla was at work or, at least, not at home. Two hours before she was due he would switch everything off and put away the papers.
It almost solved the problem.
Dragan had been living in her flat for about four months, when he and Camilla spent an evening in a bar with some of their friends. A large group of Yugoslavs from another refugee camp also turned up. She started talking to one of the newcomers while she waited at the bar for her order. The place was crowded and it took some time to be served.
The man didn’t seem drunk, yet he spoke English with an odd drawl and looked at her with his eyes half-closed. Everything about him was somehow very foreign.
He nodded towards her table. ‘Look who’s sitting over there. There’s one who’ll never be forgiven.’
‘What did you say?’
The man didn’t answer her directly, just continued his line of thought without any hint of irony. ‘That man deserves every torment the world can throw at him.’
‘Who? Why are you saying that?’
‘That one, with the square jaw.’ He stared straight at Dragan.
At once Camilla had a sinking feeling.
‘Back home in Banja Luka, he was the leader of a small group of men. They came into my street and raped three sisters. Then they killed them.’
‘Please, you’re wrong. He didn’t. It was his sisters who …’ Camilla stopped and said nothing more. Her eyes were fixed on the man’s face and things began to click into place – little things, from their everyday chatter; little things, for which she had no words.
The man drew back, upset to realise that she knew the person he was referring to.
‘Who are you?’
Camilla thought quickly; she wanted to learn more. ‘I’m a teacher. I teach the people at the table over there.’
The man looked at her suspiciously. ‘You must never tell them what I said.’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Never! You must never tell!’
‘No. I promise.’
The barman brought the man his beer. It was obvious that he wanted to leave there and then, even though he had spent money on the drink. He looked around and tried to explain. ‘He will kill me. Dragan will not hesitate, not for one second. He hasn’t seen me here. But I know him. I know what he’s like.’
Camilla smiled and tried to calm him down. ‘I promise. Really. I won’t tell him anything.’
Dragan got up and looked in their direction. The man made a jerky movement.
Camilla wanted to hear more. ‘But I don’t understand. He told us in a Danish lesson that he was forced to join the militia.’
But the man simply turned and hurried off unsteadily towards the door.
Dragan came over and helped her carry the beers back to their table. Camilla didn’t say anything. But later, when she had a chance to speak quietly with Lena’s husband, Camilla told Simo about what the man had said.
‘Who was he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You can tell me, Camilla. Don’t worry.’
‘I don’t know who he was. Honestly.’
Simo went away.
Moments later Dragan pulled hard at Camilla’s arm to take her over to a quiet corner. ‘Who told you stories?’
‘I don’t know who he was. A man.’
‘Tell me. Now!’
‘Why are you … Look, it’s just something he said. A rumour, a casual …’
Dragan shook her and glared into her eyes. ‘Speak up. Tell me!’
Camilla could tell he was clenching his teeth, the way he did before he hit her. ‘If you beat me up in here, I’ll have you charged with assault.’
That only fuelled his anger and he slammed his fist into the wall next to Camilla. ‘Don’t you threaten me!’
But he didn’t hit her. He knew well enough that just a few words to the police and he could be locked up for years. Or turned into a fugitive once more, spending an eternity in airports around the world.
Dragan returned to his friends. Soon afterwards, Camilla saw some of them spread out through the bar, talking to anyone who might have been standing near Camilla. They pointed to her and the bar stool she had been sitting on.
Five minutes later, f
our of them got up with a determined air, pulled their coats on, and left the bar without saying goodbye.
Dragan didn’t return home until nearly three-thirty. Camilla had gone to bed, but was still awake. She was crying.
Dragan came to lie next to her on the bed, still wearing his clothes. He held her and spoke gently to her. ‘Please don’t cry. You mustn’t. What you heard is not true. But if he tells lies about me in this country, I risk going to prison. Or expulsion. I’ll be sent back. If the two of us are to stay together, that man must be made to stop telling lies.’
Camilla looked at him. She felt like such a little girl. ‘It’s not true then, Dragan? It was all lies, wasn’t it?’
‘Camilla, please. Of course it was all lies.’ His arm tightened around her and she pressed herself closer to him. She wanted to inhale his smell, and pushed her nose against his chest.
‘Lies. All lies. All lies. It’s all lies,’ she repeated to herself.
Dragan broke her litany. ‘Trust me. When I say something is a lie, it is. But you must also understand that you’ll never know what war is like. It’s horrific. It’s hard to live with that knowledge. No one reacts the way they expect to – you wouldn’t either. And I didn’t. But I got away. I risked my life to get out.’
Then he went on to say again what he had told her many times before: ‘I had to put an end to all that. Now it’s over and done. From now on, I want to live a proper life. I want to live here with you and be good, like you.’
Camilla clung to him desperately, hardly letting him take off his clothes.
It frightened her to discover that sex was even better now, with the uncertainty about what he had or hadn’t done; the uncertainty about what he might do next.
The rapturous feeling of being totally free of the past as well as the future lasted longer this time. She was still glowing with euphoria when, later, she examined her body in front of the big mirror in the bathroom for any new bruises.
In the morning Dragan was sleeping so deeply he seemed impossible to wake. Camilla couldn’t go back to sleep. She was tormented by dreadful images about what had happened to the man at the bar. Whatever happened, it would be her fault. What had they done to him?
After eating breakfast alone, she thought she’d wash Dragan’s clothes to get rid of the beer and tobacco fumes. She wanted somehow to make up for having threatened to report him to the police. It was true that she had no idea what had really gone on in that war. All she could be certain of was that Dragan was also one of its victims.
She picked up the clothes he had thrown over a chair and carried them off to the bathroom. When she shook out his brown trousers she noticed there was something in one of the pockets: a small, soft package. It felt like a condom.
Camilla, who was on the pill, had a vision of just how furiously she’d let him have it if it was a condom. She’d fly into a rage and not give a damn if he hit her afterwards.
But it wasn’t a condom. It was a small, transparent plastic bag containing some white powder.
It looked like the cocaine packets she had seen in films. Christ almighty, how could he afford this stuff? Was he an addict? Perhaps he was a dealer and traded drugs to pay for his own habit – sold it to his friends. But that meant they were users too – people like Lena’s husband, and nice, hospitable Goran. Could it be true?
All the time she had thought that Dragan’s friends respected him. Were they actually scared of him? Maybe they owed him money for drugs? Or maybe they feared and pitied him at the same time. Just like herself.
She threw him out. He moved back to the refugee camp.
During the days that followed, she investigated Dragan’s life in Yugoslavia in every way she could. She realised that there were too many corroborating accounts for all of them to be based on lies and misunderstandings. For instance, it was quite clear that Dragan had, together with Mirko Zigic, volunteered for guard and ‘interrogation’ duties in the Omarska camp. Torture was routinely carried out there, as everyone knew by then.
Leafing through a book that Dragan had left behind, a collection of Crnjanski’s poetry, she found a little note stuck between the pages. It began with some writing that contained the word ‘Dragan’, then more incomprehensible words and then the signature ‘Mirko Z’.
She still couldn’t bring herself to report Dragan as a suspected Bosnian war criminal, or even a cocaine-dealer. She didn’t want to charge him with domestic violence either; the consequences for him would have been too drastic.
One day she met Dragan again at Lena and Simo’s place. By now she was much more frightened of him than she had ever been of Morten; yet, once more, they ended up together on his black coat in the shrubbery behind the Frederiksberg block of flats. He moved back in with her. She hoped that she would have been quicker to distance herself from his alcohol and cocaine abuse, if she hadn’t known of his past sufferings.
After a while she threw him out again, only to have it start all over again. When this cycle had repeated itself a few times, she still didn’t know how he afforded his cocaine but decided to try some herself. She discovered that she had an addictive personality. She had already become dependent on his cooking and his sex and now, in no time at all, on his drugs too.
Then, one day, Dragan met another woman. He fell as tempestuously in love with her as he had done with Camilla only six months earlier.
Their affair was finished. Over the following two years, Camilla felt deeply depressed. There was nothing to fill her life, except unbearable visits to see her parents or to Anja and Finn’s place for yet another, altogether too cosy, evening of drinking tea and chatting.
Camilla forced herself to attend choir practice regularly. With the help of her parents and a support group, she forced herself to beat her addiction. Finally, she understood clearly that the shrew who had stolen Dragan away had, in fact, also saved her life.
47
Camilla and the kids get up at the same time as Finn. He is up early, usually at five-thirty in the morning.
She arrives at the Centre about an hour and a half before the others.
The red light on the answering machine glows in the semi-darkness, but it doesn’t blink. No messages. Malene has forgotten to switch her computer off. Camilla quickly turns on the overhead lights. They flicker a couple of times and then everything looks normal again. She turns her own computer on and goes to make coffee.
The offices are silent, the book-lined walls absorbing the noises from outside. It’s still too early for the morning traffic to have started up. Until recently, early morning was Camilla’s favourite time at work, a quiet moment to herself when she could organise her work. But these last few days have changed everything.
Ever since Iben discovered that Camilla has been involved with a war criminal, she’s excluded her. Camilla knows only too well what that means.
She returns to her seat and finds a stack of documents to enter into a database. Before she left home she took two aspirins, but she still feels rotten – especially her stomach.
This is how the mornings were for her a long time ago. In order for her mother to get to work on time, she would drop Camilla off at school about twenty minutes before the first lesson. For years Camilla would start each day sitting with her knees together on the worn old bench in the school yard, speculating about what would happen that day. How would her classmates punish her today?
Oh dear, maybe she shouldn’t drink coffee on an upset stomach. Anyway, it’s probably ready. She goes to pour herself a cup.
Then the others arrive and the first two hours pass just as she knew they would.
Later that morning she decides to change the humming fluorescent light in Paul’s office. Paul has been complaining about it for ages and fixing it gives Camilla a chance to get out of having to be in the same room as Malene.
In the storage room Camilla takes her time pulling out the ladder and finding a new tube. She hurries through the Winter Garden, closes Paul’s office door behind
her and sets to work as slowly as possible. While she’s standing on the top step of the ladder trying to fit the new tube into place, Iben enters briskly and starts speaking without a pause.
‘I’ve been in contact with a Serb journalist, and he told me that a colleague of his was murdered by your old boyfriend about a year ago.’
‘What …?’
‘Dragan pistol-whipped this man to death, Camilla. Someone who had written a critical article about Dragan’s friend Zigic and the Serbian cause. Just as I have.’
‘But …’
Camilla has to get down from the ladder and takes the tube with her.
‘You have to help us. We need more to go on.’
‘But I can’t tell you any more than I already have.’
‘How come I always have the impression you’re lying when it concerns Dragan?’
‘I’m not lying. There just isn’t anything else to say. Look, I feel just like you. I’m scared that he’ll come after us too, but what can I do?’
The muscles around Iben’s jaw are twitching visibly. She stands with her feet planted apart. Brigitte, the vilest of the girls in Camilla’s class, used to stand like that in front of the teacher’s desk. The others would cluster around her. When she found something to throw at Camilla, the others would start throwing things too.
Camilla has to sit down. She sinks onto one of the chairs at Paul’s meeting table and buries her face in her hands, pressing her fingers against her eyes.
Iben’s insistent voice comes at her through the darkness. ‘I’d like to believe you. It’s just that your whole manner won’t let me. You’re such a poor liar, Camilla.’
‘But I’m not lying!’
Camilla can hear her own voice go thin and shrill. Even with her head down and her eyes closed, Camilla can feel Iben silently watching in her warrior’s stance.
Camilla repeats herself. ‘I’m not lying! I’m not lying! I’m not lying!’
She hears Iben turn and walk away.
The Exception Page 45