Christian Jungersen - The Exception

During the lunch hour, Iben fought with Camilla. I’m positive that the reason was that she had caught Camilla chatting to me. Nobody is allowed to talk to me, Iben and Malene will see to that all right.

Every time I’ve been away I forget how appallingly awful it is. When I’m not surrounded by it, I simply can’t believe what it’s like. How can anyone be so evil? I don’t get it!

Iben tosses and turns again. Luckily the two large, empty mugs and the soup plate are on the small table by her bed. She leans back and wipes the sweat off her forehead with the duvet cover. She still hasn’t recovered. It’s quarter past eight in the morning. She hasn’t slept and within the next hour she must be at work, behaving normally.

After getting home on the suburban train, the first thing Iben did was to take painkillers and run herself a hot bath. She drank a mug of cocoa in the bath and then made herself a large bowl of oatmeal, mixed with raisins, nuts and skimmed milk. Then she went to bed.

As far as she knows, she left nothing behind in Anne-Lise’s house that could identify her. No one recognised her — seemingly, no one even realised that the intruder was a woman. But you never know.

She can’t risk seeing the doctor today. If her foot doesn’t get better in a few days, she’ll have to act as if the accident has just occurred. Before then, Anne-Lise will have seen her in perfect shape.

She opens another file, written only a few weeks ago.

I must hold on to the belief that the others aren’t justified. I must remember that. They have no right to decide that I should be eliminated. But when they say I don’t get on with people, it’s true. Or so it seems — I don’t, not with the Centre’s users or my colleagues. It’s all such a mess. Once upon a time I thought I was easy to work with, but maybe everyone was just pretending.

At times I think I should phone up my old library and ask if they really did like having me on the team. They would say yes, of course, but would that too be a lie? I’ll never know.

Iben’s nausea won’t go away. It’s easy to see from the diary that Anne-Lise is sick — probably some form of paranoia, with attendant delusions. Iben decides to phone Grith this evening and discuss the more precise clinical diagnosis. But even if you know that, it’s still shocking to see this distorted view of yourself. The fact that it’s all down in writing, and in such a detailed, elaborate way, makes it all the more persuasive.

After failing to sleep earlier, Iben drops off while she’s sitting on the loo. She calls the office to say she’ll be in late. Just forty-five minutes, she says, and for once she gives in and takes a taxi to work.

As soon as she steps out on the fifth-floor landing, the security camera will pick up her image. They’ll be able to see her and they mustn’t realise that her foot hurts like hell. There must be no hint that she’s feeling sick and hasn’t slept all night or that she’s just read Anne-Lise’s insane ramblings about herself and everybody else in the office. She stares defiantly at the camera and presses the doorbell. They let her in. Iben smiles and says ‘Hello’. The piercing pain in her right heel and ankle makes her reluctant to take a single step, but she can’t just stand there. She walks to the familiar row of hooks to hang up her jacket as best as she can.

Maybe this is how it is for Malene. She endures terrible pain at times and now she also fights to hide the fact that she barely sleeps for grieving over Rasmus. Before his death, Malene would talk to Iben about her fear of being disabled and alone. Sooner or later she could be wheelchair-bound, unable to get to work or to have children.

When Rasmus died, the future Malene dreaded seemed to close in. She stopped speaking about her arthritis. Instead she talks endlessly about how wonderful Rasmus was, contrasting his superhuman qualities with her own shortcomings. It was her behaviour that drove him away. She follows this up with more attacks on Anne-Lise — how she ruined their life together and then drove Rasmus to an early death. It was possible, after all, she argues, that Anne-Lise poured oil on the steps and even gave Rasmus a shove.

OK, it’s not likely — but it’s possible.

Late one night, Iben had slipped and mentioned to Malene that she thought she had heard a woman’s voice in the stairway just before Rasmus fell. Malene returned to this so often and with such fervour that Iben regretted ever having breathed a word about it. After a couple of weeks of these stories, they were becoming just the tiniest bit unbearable.

Crossing the floor, Iben feels that she’s putting on quite a good show, even managing to chat about this and that.

But Malene notices at once that something is up. Her eyes widen. ‘Iben, what’s the matter?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

Iben knows that Malene won’t believe her and twists one corner of her mouth in a small grimace that only Malene will notice, to let her know that she doesn’t want to talk about it right now. Iben has every intention of telling Malene what happened last night, but now something is holding her back, though she can’t think what.

Camilla doesn’t say anything and Anne-Lise is keeping to herself in the library.

‘Has Anne-Lise been out of the library?’

Malene looks at her. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘No special reason.’

Iben sits down and tries to hide her relief — no need to get up again until lunch time. She bends down to take off her right shoe. The lace is already very loose, but it still hurts when she eases the shoe off over the top of her foot. She suppresses the sound she wants to make so that it comes out as a very faint gasp.

Is this really what it can be like for Malene, day after day?

She can hear from the tapping rhythm that Malene is writing and then correcting the same word several times. One more mistake. Malene hits the keyboard. It slides sideways and her fingers hit the corner of the large flat surface of the mouse. It must have hurt, because she pulls her hand away at once and rubs it with her other hand. Iben and Malene exchange a smile.

Next to Iben is a stack of documentation on the Turks’ killing of 300,000 Pontian Greeks between 1914 and 1922. Although Turkey’s extermination of roughly 1.5 million Armenians has eclipsed the mass-murder of the Greeks, the issue of Genocide News on Turkey will be the perfect place to bring attention to the atrocity. Among other eyewitness accounts, Iben will include a description of how Turkish soldiers drove Greek families, women, children and old people away from the coast and into the desert. Once their victims were isolated, the militia left and took all the food and water with them.

Iben sits in silence, staring at the desk. She should keep working, but she’s having trouble concentrating on the material. She can barely respond when someone talks to her. Instead she reads random back issues of Genocide News . A large greasy stain across the top of a front page catches her eye. The headline says ‘The Psychology of Evil II’. It’s her own article: ‘ … in a war situation, men and women who kill at a sufficiently great distance from the victims are, to the best of his personal knowledge, not traumatised later in life. The closer the soldier gets to the victim, the harder it is to kill.’

She thinks of how distant she is to Anne-Lise. If Anne-Lise were to have an accident serious enough to disable or even kill her, Iben’s head would tell her it was a tragedy but her heart would secretly be glad to be rid of her. These new thoughts make Iben interpret her writing differently.

‘The conclusion must be that simple acts, which in themselves appear to cause only limited damage, can lead to psychological changes that in turn make possible even greater and more destructive acts.’