Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

“But that’s the way it was!”

“Then Frederik will go to prison for four years, and you’ll lose your house, your pensions, everything.”

He shoots Vibeke a quick sideways glance and then he says, “We have to go now.”

“How old were you when you first came here?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Did you meet a Danish girl, perhaps?”

He laughs. “Everyone knows that all the foreign men here immigrated because of Danish women.”

“No, but I didn’t think—”

“And you’re right! Lærke was an au pair for my parents in Paris. I followed her when she went back home, and it changed my life.”

Two weeks have passed since Frederik was arrested and released. I’ve taken the day off work, and Bernard and I are in the living room, waiting for the school’s new lawyer to show up with an assessor, who will appraise the sale value of our house, car, furnishings, pension savings, et cetera.

Bernard shows me a picture on his cell phone. “Here we are on vacation together.”

In the photo he looks much younger, but it must have been taken within the last ten years — around the time of the accident — because his twin boys look pretty big.

“She’s really lovely,” I say. And she is: she has big blond curls and a broad happy smile. Bernard was dark-haired then, lean without being quite as thin as he is now. They stand with their arms around the two boys in some southern European village, with peaks and forests in the background.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “I’ve aged a lot in the last eight years.”

“Was it on that vacation you had the accident?”

“No, that was two weeks later, back here on Lyngby Road. Fortunately, the boys weren’t with us in the car.”

I get goose bumps from looking at her; now she uses crutches and goes to a handicapped center all day because she’s mentally incapacitated. While he’s marooned in a foreign country, without the support of his family or boyhood friends. What’s prevented him from leaving her? How can he stand it?

“Her disability is general,” he says. “Bodily control, speech, thought, energy.”

I look into his dark eyes but he doesn’t return my gaze.

“The odd thing is that she’s still the same. She’s still my Lærke.” He almost looks proud when he says it.

I don’t understand him. I shudder to think of what his days and nights have been like for the last eight years. And yet the very moment I think that, my own spouse lies brain-damaged and our house is being taken from us.

It’s been one week since Bernard called and warned me about the assessor’s visit. “In accordance with Danish law, Frederik will have to pay back as much as he possibly can of what he embezzled — regardless of whether the court finds him criminally responsible for his acts or not. So the school will seize all of Frederik’s possessions — and half of what you own in common.”

“But why don’t they simply look at everything we own and take half?”

“No, we need to have receipts for everything. Whose name is on which receipt? Where did the money for each purchase come from? Did you receive any large gifts from Frederik that were paid for with embezzled funds — or with his income? Are there things that are in reality yours, even though his name’s on the receipt? Things like that.”

Phone in hand, I’d closed my eyes and let myself fall back in the armchair. There was a hollow under my right buttock and a nick in one arm; it was my chair. No doubt they would take it too.

Could he hear me fall?

“It’s awful, I know,” he said. “Really awful, but you’re going to have to do it.”

Around me stood the furniture I had bartered and haggled for and restored and pampered over the course of fifteen years, starting from scratch. They’d probably take the coffee table that my feet rested upon. The carpet beneath the table, the lamp that lit it. Everything. Every thing.

I needed to clear my throat, but Bernard cleared his first.

“Mia, I know you can do it.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it isn’t as hard as supporting your sick husband — and you do an amazing job of that.”

When I spoke on the phone with Helena, she became quite insistent. “At the very least, you’ve got to hide the Wegner sofa at my place before they come. You need something you can count on. Some thing in your situation. Would anyone blame you if you hid a couple pieces of furniture?”

“Actually, I think a lot of people would.”

“Just let me come over and get something. The lamp! The Arne Jacobsen lamp, I can take it with me in the car.”

Again I had a desire to flop down in my armchair, land on the hollow under my right buttock, finger the nick in the arm. But I was sitting there already.

• • •

They are nothing if not precise. At the stroke of nine, Bernard and I receive two men out in the scorched front yard. The sofa and the lamp are still both in the living room, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m honest or because I’m tired. The school’s new lawyer is young and dark-haired, with a broad jaw and a shiny pink tie. He couldn’t be more different from the previous one, the chubby man whom I danced with for years at Saxtorph parties.

The assessor is someone I could run into on the street a couple of days from now and not recognize. His clothes, his features, his haircut — everything — run together in my mind with those of other men who don’t want to be noticed or remembered. He probably picks up hookers , I think as I proffer my hand. The papers always say that johns are completely ordinary men, and he’s so without character as to be almost striking.

“Is this your car?” It’s just about the first thing the lawyer says, extending his hand toward the blue Mercedes parked in front of our house. I can already see the delight in his eyes.

“No, ours is over there.” I point down the street.

We start walking over to our little orange-red Alfa Romeo. It’s sunk down to the asphalt, the tires flat and spreading out to the sides.

“What happened?” asks Bernard.

“Somebody slashed the tires.”

“Did you report it to the police?”

I don’t answer.

“You should report it,” he says. “You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“We’re married.”

“That’s no crime. You don’t deserve this.”

Perhaps I feel a fury somewhere inside myself. I think I do. And I wonder whether it’s kids who slashed the tires, or a teacher — maybe one of our former friends. But I observe the fury with an overwhelming exhaustion. Lazy and passive, as if I had one of the brain injuries I’ve read about, just a notch higher up behind my forehead than Frederik’s. The car’s stood this way for a week, and I haven’t done anything about it.

Frederik no longer cares about the car, despite the progress he’s been making. The interval between angry outbursts is getting longer, yet he still weeps a lot — and what makes him most unhappy is that he no longer derives any pleasure from music. The notes don’t add up to melodies for him; they’re simply sounds, without any glint of beauty.

Which is why he’s become obsessed with the principles of speaker construction and with building speakers that are better than the ones we have. I took him over to the neighbor’s so he could hear that the problem doesn’t lie in our stereo system. But he just ran their system down while they stood there and listened. Niklas also tried to play music for him on his computer headphones, but Frederik thought they sounded terrible too.

In the evenings, I enter the access code to our computer so he can visit online forums where they discuss optimal crossover frequencies and the control of impedance curves — and more generally, how to construct the ultimate speakers. Meanwhile I sit next to him and correct math assignments or fill out new forms from public agencies about his illness. In this way I can monitor him and make sure he doesn’t go onto sites where he can make investments or other kinds of trouble.