You Disappear: A Novel

by Jungersen, Christian

  “But you can’t anymore?”

  “No, and it’s really too bad.”

  “Yes.”

  I keep discovering new aspects of the garden. An azalea bed in a far corner blossoms in several colors, and when I look back toward the house I catch sight of three camellias. I certainly haven’t seen many of those in Denmark. I once tried to get one to grow in my yard.

  “Have you been to the day-care center today?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “And you like going there?”

  “Yes, I like it a great deal.”

  “So what did you do today?”

  She sits silently for a long while before she answers. “Imagine, do you know what? I can’t remember.” She laughs. “ ‘Do you know what,’ that’s a good pression, isn’t it? I love good pressions. Our language is so rich! It’s rich in good pressions, in … ex- … ex-pressions.”

  “Yes, it is. I really like good expressions too.”

  “ ‘Do you know …’; ‘do you know …’—what was it now?”

  “ ‘Do you know what?’ ”

  “Oh yes. Ha-ha! I said, ‘Do you know …—what …?’ And you said, ‘Do you know what?’ ”

  “Yes, that’s funny.”

  “Ha-ha! Language is so rich.”

  Winnie comes toward us from the house, bearing a tray with a pitcher of juice and four glasses. When she’s still some distance away, she calls out, “You’ll have to pardon me! I was delayed.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say. “We’re sitting here enjoying your lovely yard. I could stay all day.”

  “Thank you, we like it a great deal. Actually, I was in the middle of playing mah-jongg online with my sister in Sydney. She was sitting there waiting for my next move, so I just wanted to—”

  “That’s fine, you should go back in then and finish playing.”

  “Thanks, I’d actually like that. Just give a shout if there’s anything I can do.”

  She leaves again, and Lærke says, “You and Bernard are going to talk about your son Nelkas, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Tumor.”

  “Yes.”

  Through the bushes at the bottom of the yard, I glimpse a couple running past in sweat suits. There must be a path back there. So Bernard and Lærke used to be able to go running in the woods right from their yard.

  Bernard’s suddenly standing behind us. He’s in a suit, and when he bends over to kiss his wife, his white-grey hair catches the sun.

  After embracing her and exchanging endearments, he glances over at me. “You’ll have to excuse me. I try to always be punctual, but sometimes when I’m in court …”

  “Of course.”

  He looks at Lærke again and touches her shoulder. “Why isn’t Winnie here? Is she in her room?”

  “She’s mah-jongging.”

  Bernard explains, “My in-laws have their own room here, with a computer and everything. So they can overnight when we have a special need for them.”

  As I nod, smiling, I try to imagine Vibeke and Thorkild keeping a room in our house. It sounds horrific, but I suppose not everyone feels that way about their mother-in-law.

  “We’ve been sitting here enjoying ourselves,” I say. “Lærke told me about the Cévennes.”

  “Ah, Aumessas. Every year we set a few days aside so we can be there on our anniversary.”

  “Such a romantic couple!”

  “Yes. In recent years, Lærke’s parents have come along too. It’s more practical that way.” He must see something in my face, for he immediately adds, “But in the evening on that day, we go out and dine without Winnie and Knud!” His voice rises on without Winnie and Knud; those few hours, on that one evening, must be a high point of their year.

  This time I think I manage to disguise my pity.

  “We like it a great deal,” Lærke says, and Bernard gives her shoulder one last squeeze before leading me to their living room to talk about Niklas.

  It wasn’t dark when I passed through here before, but now it strikes me as almost gloomy. Of course, that’s only because we’ve been sitting in the backyard soaking up the sun.

  Bernard waits for me to sit down on the sofa, and then he sits at the other end.

  “Some people find it difficult to be with her in the beginning,” he says. “Naturally, that’s only until you get to know her and see past the surface. For she’s still got a great sense of humor and is just as loving as in the old days.”

  He grows lost in thought staring at my empty glass, while I think that he’ll never get his old Lærke back. No matter how much he dreams and lies to himself, there’s no rehab that can bring her back after eight years.

  With a start, he catches himself. “Sorry about that! Would you like something more to drink?”

  “Please. I seem to be just pouring it down my throat.”

  “Come out to the kitchen with me and we’ll see what we can find.”

  On the way through the door to the kitchen I go a little too quickly and catch his heel, falling into him. We laugh and find some elderflower cordial in a cupboard.

  The ice cubes clink as he tips them into the glass, and I see before me how he sits wedged in the car, screaming with pain and horror as the love of his life lies unconscious at his side, blood soaking into her fair hair, the color disappearing from her cheeks. The scent of blood and burnt rubber rises around me and presses against my palate.

  I have a strong urge to ask, Was she unconscious? Did you think she was dead? Were you trapped there beside her?

  I know I shouldn’t, but my inhibitory mechanism must be impaired, and of all the things I want to ask, one piece slips out. “Were you injured too, that time in the car?”

  “Yes.” He stares deeper down into the elderflower juice than need be. “Is it okay if we don’t talk about it?”

  “Of course! Of course, that’s totally okay!”

  We walk silently back to the living room.

  I start telling him about Niklas. “Often, I try to get him to tell me how he thinks things are going. But with a teenage boy, actions say more about how he’s doing than words, don’t they? And then when his father has him stealing from the school … It’s also incredibly difficult when you have to set limits …”

  I know I’m talking about everything at once.

  “Yesterday Frederik set some fiberboard sheets on the floor in his office and then drilled through them,” I say. “He knew he would make holes in the floor, but he didn’t care! I swallowed my anger, because it was so trivial, in comparison to the embezzling. And it’s all due to his sickness. But then what about when Niklas leaves a plate on the coffee table after eating something? Isn’t that even more trivial? And I only yell at Niklas! So of course he gets grumpy.”

  Bernard talks about his boys. No answers to what I’m asking him, if I could even say what that was, just personal experiences.

  It’s a weird sensation: a glimpse of how it could be to raise kids as a couple. I hear myself speaking more calmly now, and my thoughts become clearer; only now do I realize how jumbled they really were.

  After listening to me talk some more about Niklas, he leans forward. “I don’t know why, but I was just wondering: has Frederik met some of Niklas’s friends, or perhaps a girl your son is interested in? Maybe he behaved inappropriately toward her?”

  “No way! How could you—”

  I don’t finish; he sees something through the window and hurries soundlessly to the back door, where he stands concealed in the edge of the doorway, as if he’s caught sight of a deer that’s come up from the woods to graze in the yard.

  Instinctively I know we mustn’t spook the timid creature. Cautiously, silently, I sidle toward the window.

  But I don’t see anything but Lærke, who’s lurching across the lawn on her crutches.

  “Winnie should see this too!” whispers Bernard, his eyes boyishly wide with
excitement.

  He heads toward the hallway, and only when he’s by the hall door does he turn around and whisper, “She hasn’t walked that steadily on the grass since the accident! Look at her! What willpower! She’s getting back her will!”

  Then he’s gone.

  She does look lovely out there. She struggles, and her hat’s flown off, while behind her lurks brush, thicket, woods, bog. Yet I don’t see anything other than her slow lurch across the lawn. I don’t see what he’s seeing.

  Headmaster’s wife still not charged

  EMBEZZLEMENT. Every week brings new revelations in the case against headmaster Frederik Halling, who was charged with embezzling from Saxtorph Private School one month ago.

  Halling’s wife, Mia Halling, has not been charged in the far-reaching embezzlement case, although the tabloid Ekstra Bladet reported yesterday that she was in jail and had confessed to transferring 4 million crowns to a private bank account in Spain. That report turns out to be false.

  There has been widespread speculation in the media about Mia Halling’s role after it was revealed that her signature appears on several key documents in the case.

  The lawyer for Saxtorph Private School, Tom Jørgensen, has stated that his client finds it indefensible that neither of the Hallings has been detained while the investigation is still ongoing. Several independent legal observers have said that it is indeed highly unusual for a defendant to avoid pretrial detention in such a large embezzlement case. But they also emphasize that there may be mitigating circumstances that are not public knowledge, including details of a serious operation that Frederik Halling underwent recently.

  In addition, Frederik Halling’s lawyer, Bernard Berman, succeeded in convincing the court that Mia Halling’s signature on key documents was, beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt, falsified by the defendant himself.

  Laust Saxtorph, chairman of the board for the bankruptcy-threatened school, said in a press release that while the school cannot at present prove that Mia Halling signed the documents herself, he awaits the results of further investigation. (MT)

  15

  My cousin’s husband, the younger sister of the hardware store owner, the neighbor’s ex—everyone, everyone. Every single one of them has their own unpredictable reaction. I get to the point of being antisocial, then I open myself up to them anyway, only to regret it when they find some new way to catch me out.

  The former treasurer of our homeowners’ association is suddenly standing next to me in front of the fish shop in The Square. She smiles, and I think that of all people she at least will say something kind. She’s been fond of Frederik, who helped her out at one point with the accounts.

  She’s wearing a short red jacket, with a belt strap dangling from either side and a gaily colored scarf around her neck. “That was terrible what happened to Frederik—and on top of his illness!” she exclaims.

  “Yes, it’s been rather awful.”

  “It’s so obvious it wasn’t him. I can’t understand how they don’t see that.”

  The fishmonger points to me, but I wave another customer forward.

  The treasurer grasps me by the arm. “But surely they’ll find whoever really did it soon, won’t they?”

  “Whoever really did it?”

  “Yes, the person who embezzled from the school. Since it wasn’t Frederik.”

  “But it was him, you know. It’s just that he was ill, and not himself.”

  “Who?”

  “Frederik, yes. But he was ill. Very ill.”

  She lets go of my arm and glances around quickly, as if she’s suddenly not sure she wants to be seen with me. “But it couldn’t be Frederik. I told all my friends that I knew it wasn’t Frederik.”

  “No, it wasn’t Frederik—not the real Frederik. When it happened, his tumor had already changed who he was.”

  “What! So it was him? But I mean—has he confessed to it?”

  “Yes, he—”

  “What! That can’t really—”

  “It’s complicated. He’s had a brain tumor that’s been growing for many years, and each year it’s made him less and less himself, and as a result it’s not—”

  “But he was still running the school, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes, he was able to do that well enough.”

  “But he was too sick to keep from stealing from the till?”

  For the thousandth time, I try to summarize in a few seconds all the books and articles I’ve been poring over for months. But she hurries off, and it’s clear that I’ve yanked the rug out from under her. She’ll be talking about it for the rest of the day to her husband and all her friends.

  • • •

  Before our case, I never realized that sometimes a verdict isn’t decided by a judge or jury. Frederik’s will be determined instead by a small group of state-approved psychiatrists, and it can’t be appealed.

  We’ll still go to court all right, months from now, but the proceedings will be essentially pro forma. For the judge knows that he doesn’t have a clue about neuropsychology, and he’ll let everything hang on the psychiatric report. If the report says that Frederik embezzled the funds of his own free will, the judge will sentence him to a minimum of three years in jail. If however the report says it was the illness that drove him to it, Frederik will have to undergo treatment instead. Since the treatment is actually the operation he’s already had, he’ll be able to leave the courtroom a free man who doesn’t have to feel guilty about having destroyed an entire school.

  It’s possible to find “experts” who will say anything for money, so to avoid that American state of affairs, the government has established a special group of forensic psychiatrists. It pays them to keep abreast of the latest findings in forensic psychiatry, maintaining a level of knowledge that judges, lawyers, and ordinary psychiatrists cannot.

  Frederik’s psychiatric report was prepared by the Clinic of Forensic Psychiatry in Copenhagen. It was based on four examinations: two by psychiatrists, one by a social worker, and one by a psychologist. In the waiting room before each exam, I was as nervous as if we were about to appear before a judge—and with good grounds, it turns out. For the four of them have been compiled into a psychiatric report that goes against Frederik.

  You can’t appeal a psychiatric report, nor even register a complaint about it. But Bernard requested that Frederik’s report be submitted for approval to the Medico-Legal Council, which is as high in the system as you can go. In Danish law, there’s no other body above it.

  Today, nearly two months after Frederik’s arrest, and plenty of phone conversations with Bernard later, Frederik and I are sitting in the waiting room of neuropsychologist Herdis Lebech. The council has appointed her to conduct a new psychological examination before it makes its final ruling.

  Between Frederik’s operation, his rehabilitation, and his embezzlement case, I’ve become a seasoned user of the waiting rooms of neurologists, neuropsychologists, neurosurgeons, and neurological clinics large and small. I always take along a bag of required reading for the wait, but this particular appointment is too important to let me read. I get up from my chair and sit down again with an agitation that’d make a casual observer think that my calm husband had accompanied me here and not vice versa.

  The man in the chair next to me is in his sixties, slim and dressed in an elegant suit. It’s easy to imagine he keeps a yacht in some expensive slip north of Copenhagen.

  “I want to go home now,” he says.

  His wife is tanned and slathered in some odd glistening grease, and she answers him dully, like a tired receptionist.

  “But you can’t.”

  “But I want to go home.”

  “Yes, but you can’t.”

  “I’d like to go home now.”

  “First we have to have the exam.”

  “But I want to go home.”

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  “Now I think we should leave.”

  “You have to see the doctor
first.”

  “But I want to go home.”

  She falls silent and gazes straight in front of her. It isn’t for long.

  “Erica! You could answer me when I speak to you! It’s the least one could expect!”

  “But you can’t go home now.”

  “But I want to.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I think we should go now.”

  Twenty minutes of listening to them, while I alternate between sitting and standing with a cramp in one leg, and I’m ready to go round the bend.

  “Now I think we should go home.”

  “Just wait here a bit.”

  “Let’s go home now.”

  “We have to go in for the exam.”

  “But I want to go home.”

  I smile at her and try to pass the time by making a little amateur diagnosis. He must be suffering from a frontal lobe injury too: he’s got the deficient apprehension of how much time he spends continuing to do the same thing—perseveration, of course—and then the absolute lack of initiative. After all, he could just get up and go. Nobody’s forcing him to stay.

  I’m only beginning to form a vague sense of how the brain functions, but I wonder if his extreme lack of initiative doesn’t mean that his injury lies more dorsolaterally than Frederik’s. In addition, his cheerless monotone makes me think that the damage extends farther to the left.

  Perhaps I should have taken Niklas along to one of these examinations, so that he could see what I have to put up with for our family’s sake. On the other hand, I’d like to spare him this world.

  Frederik slumps in his chair with eyes closed; perhaps he’s asleep. He’s storing up for the exam, I think. I can’t even stand still anymore but have to shuffle about with annoyingly small steps because my calves keep cramping up.

  Like an old lady who’s peed her pants, I toddle down the long corridor, with all its identical closed doors. When I glance back at the waiting room, I note that the elegant yacht owner is sitting motionless in the same position as when he first sat down. He reminds me of a story Birgit told during support group last night. A week ago, when she went to fetch her husband from the day-care center, the staff couldn’t find him. It turned out that he was still sitting on his stationary cycle in the workout room, even though he had finished biking two and a half hours earlier and everyone else had left the room. His initiative has been affected to an unusual degree. If no one tells him to get off the bike, he’ll just keep sitting there. And he doesn’t say anything because no one asks him. He probably would have sat there all night long if Birgit hadn’t found him.