Christian Jungersen - The Exception

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, four 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.