Christian Jungersen - The Exception

Iben has put her mobile in front of her on the table. It blinks but doesn’t ring. Iben gets up and tries to leave discreetly, but she’s carrying her computer bag and has to push past a whole row of people. The scraping of chairs makes quite a racket. She waves her mobile apologetically at Anita, who seems unfazed and carries on talking.

The Centre isn’t putting on a good show today. The chief is playing truant, the staff can’t keep their mouths shut, and the information officer gets up and leaves in the middle of Anita’s presentation.

Why is the call so important? Something to do with Dragan Jelisic? Even so, couldn’t it wait? Ever since Iben came back from Kenya she has been quite paranoid, on and off. By now she’s probably imagining all kinds of horrors about Camilla’s ex-lover.

There is an interval after the first speaker finishes debating Anita’s thesis with her. Crowds of people slowly drift out of the hall and at the door, Malene finds herself standing next to a couple of university lecturers with whom she worked on a project investigating Danish immigration policy during the 1930s. She feels it’s only polite to talk to them. Once she reaches the corridor, Iben and the others are already out of sight. She pops her head around the door to the reception area, where wine, cheese and assorted tapas are waiting to be served. The others aren’t in there either. Mikala, another historian, says that she’s helping Anita by setting out the party food.

They chat for a while and suddenly Ole and Frederik turn up. Ole has a Coke in his hand. He turns to Malene, who notices there’s a minute crumb of chocolate stuck in his beard.

‘Where’s Paul?’

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘He’s avoiding me. I couldn’t get hold of him on his mobile either.’

‘That’s odd. He usually keeps his mobile on all the time.’

Malene doesn’t care for the way Ole and Frederik seem to be in cahoots.

‘Maybe his battery has run down.’

Ole and Frederik exchange a strange glance.

‘Oh, I hope he hasn’t had an accident,’ she adds.

Frederik smiles at her. ‘No, that’s not it.’

‘What do you mean?’

Frederik makes a face and Malene senses that she mustn’t ask him any more. She can usually make him tell her everything. Maybe it’s Ole’s presence that’s stopping him.

The talking outside the room has grown to a roar.

Malene manages to slip through the crowd and follows the corridor to the end. No luck. She returns through the crowd and goes to the opposite end. No one here either. Then she turns a corner and hears voices from behind the closed door of a seminar room.

Iben is shouting. ‘How do you explain this?’

Malene opens the door just as Iben starts to read from the screen of her laptop: ‘It is a well-known fact that the life-long trauma affecting people who have survived severe torture will include vivid, intensely painful flashbacks in which they re-experience all their past suffering. Such recall phenomena are triggered every time they see something that reminds them of the torture. The militiamen entering the Omarska camps manipulated the flashback phenomenon with endless inventiveness. Mirko Zigic, now wanted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, and one of his soldiers, Dragan Jelisic …!’

Iben stops dramatically and stares at Camilla, who can’t seem to stop crying. She continues to read: ‘And one of his soldiers, Dragan Jelisic, thought up the trick of placing bottles of Coca-Cola within sight of prisoners being tortured. For decades to come, survivors of their torture will relive the full terror of the destructive pain they were once subjected to every time they see a bottle of Coke. And, where in the world can they hide from the occasional sight of a bottle of Coca-Cola?’

Anne-Lise, who has been perched on the edge of a table, gets up. ‘This man was your lover!’

Camilla somehow looks like a scolded schoolgirl. ‘But I didn’t know it back then.’ She looks up at them. ‘It was dreadful when I found out. That’s why I went for the job in the Centre. You know me. I think things like that are terrible and surely you know me better than that!’

‘How long were you and Dragan together?’ Iben asks.

‘Four months.’

Camilla is weeping even louder now, her head in her hands. Iben makes a move to put her arms round her, but Camilla angrily waves her away.

Now they can only stand and look. They’re at a loss. No one has switched on the lights despite the grey day. The dull daylight turns the walls the colour of damp cardboard and makes the table tops look like pools of stagnant water. Iben and Anne-Lise are drained of colour too.

Iben puts down her computer on a table and Malene walks over to it. Iben was reading from an emailed selection of scanned book pages from Days of Blood and Singing and the source is someone working for the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. The email arrived during Anita’s lecture.

Camilla wraps her arms around herself. Her eyes have a distant look and she speaks in a soft, low voice: ‘He wasn’t at all like the way they describe him in that book. I was with him before I got together with Finn. Dragan cared about me even though I’m so fat. He didn’t mind my body.’

Malene looks from the computer screen to Camilla’s body, which doesn’t appear to be overweight at all.

Anne-Lise takes up the questioning. ‘Where did you meet?’

‘At a party. He was such a little guy, almost weedy. He looked like he’d never hurt a flea. I felt sorry for him. He was a refugee, chased out of his own country. He said that his three sisters had been raped by Bosnians. They killed the girls afterwards. He told me all that, and he seemed so unhappy that I … I don’t know. Anyway we met afterwards and then again.’

Camilla wipes her face on her sleeve. ‘And he says everything about him in that book isn’t true.’

Iben is still clearly agitated, but her voice is quieter. ‘Did it ever occur to you that a man like Jelisic, who has killed hundreds of human beings, might lie to you?’

Camilla doesn’t answer. They are all silent.

After a while Camilla speaks again. ‘He admitted that he had done bad things. Countless people did, that’s true. But he wasn’t at all like that when I met him. And he didn’t want to talk about it. He was so torn up inside.’

‘Do you still see him?’ Iben asks.

‘No, I don’t … of course I don’t.’

‘Have you seen him since you read this book?’

‘No.’

‘But you did ask him if what the book said was true — isn’t that what you’ve just said?’

It’s strange to see Camilla like this. She always seemed so sensible. Now it’s as if she were someone else. Her crying and transparent lies remind Malene of what Grith had told them about women with DID, especially the part about them being subjected to abuse as children. Often one of their identities tends to be a distressed child.

Iben takes a deep breath. ‘Are our views of this man really so far apart? When you believed he had sent you that hate email, you seemed terrified. More frightened than we were — and you still are. Why?’

Camilla doesn’t answer.

Anne-Lise asks, ‘Is he still in Denmark?’

Camilla’s head is lowered. She pinches her arm in several places. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But you believe that he sent these emails?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you thought he had sent the one to you?’

Camilla doesn’t reply.

Iben takes over. ‘Do you think that he was responsible for the blood and for exchanging the medicine?’

Camilla looks down again. ‘I get confused when you’re like this, Iben. I just can’t … It’s just that …’