Christian Jungersen - You Disappear

I rush after her, shouting, “Trine! Trine!”

She stops and lets me catch up with her. She speaks to me slowly, enunciating each word with great deliberation. “I trusted him more than any other person in the world.”

“But that’s the way I felt too. I also trusted him more than …”

My despair at this moment is completely genuine. I have nothing ! Nothing except a clandestine lover and a hope of maybe rescuing my husband from prison.

Perhaps that’s what she sees now. She peers calmly into my face, and I see how the muscles around her eyes have gone slack; how she’s abandoned them.

The first raindrops strike us and we look up into the sky. And she says, “I know that it was at night that he gambled away the school. Maybe his brain was sick when he was tired … I have no way of knowing. But during the day, when we were together? Then he really wasn’t sick! He wasn’t! Why didn’t he say anything during the day? We had meeting after meeting. Parent conferences, him and me alone looking through correspondence together, all those trivial things. And yet it was during the day he went to the bank and forged the signatures.”

Then the roar starts. Not of thunder, but of water sluicing down upon the pavement. Everyone around us is fleeing toward driveway ports and shop doorways, and we run under a tree. From there we look out silently on the rain.

Frederik often said that if Trine had had another degree, she could have had a stellar career as an administrator. But that was not to be. Instead, in her job as school secretary, she had a crucial part in why Saxtorph became a refuge from the world outside — the refuge it once was. And she knew she played a linchpin role. Everybody knew.

It isn’t possible for us to walk out into the rain. I see her weighing how wet she’d get if she left the tree behind and ran into one of the nearby stores.

She says, “Frederik and I were sitting in his office, going through the teachers’ scheduling preferences—”

Her sentence grinds to a halt.

I say, “Yes?”

The sound of the rain lashing the city. Pedestrians standing everywhere motionless, under every kind of shelter. She says, “It took almost the entire day, but it was important — or so the rest of us thought. And later I saw in the documents that on that very morning, he’d been in the bank, defrauding the school of another eight hundred thousand crowns. He knew that it would destroy the school. He knew it. Why didn’t he say something?”

“He’d become a completely different person, Trine. And now the tumor’s removed.”

Oops; that just slipped out. Did I just suggest what her opinion should be in court? Can she tell that our meeting might not be totally random? I know she’s as smart as a whip.

“We felt kind of sorry for you,” she says. “It was clear that Frederik didn’t especially want to spend time at home.”

“I know that.”

“He said he was bored.”

“He said that, did he?”

“Yes. You just weren’t much of a match, he said, intellectually or emotionally.”

I answer calmly. “But that changed, didn’t it? The last years before he was diagnosed, he was perfectly fine staying home with me.”

She doesn’t say anything, which must mean she concedes the point.

But can I take that to court? Your Honor, my husband’s secretary felt that when he was healthy, he found me boring. At the time of the crime I was no longer boring him, so therefore he must have been severely mentally impaired .

“There was also the suicide thing,” Trine says. “He had to stay home with you.”

“What suicide thing?”

“I mean your attempt. In the kitchen.”

“I didn’t attempt suicide in the kitchen!”

“The … you know, four years ago. In the kitchen.”

“Trine, I didn’t try to commit suicide! Did he say that?”

She regards me skeptically. It’s obvious she doesn’t believe me. “I don’t know if he said it. But it’s something everyone knew.”

“Everyone knew — everyone thought that I tried to drink myself to death in my kitchen?”

“Yes, and then the pills—”

“There weren’t any pills!”

She doesn’t say anything.

“Does Laust also think I attempted suicide? And that that’s why Frederik needed to spend more time at home?”

No answer.

“Well it isn’t true! There weren’t any pills! There weren’t any pills! No pills at all! There was one single evening when I ended up drinking too much. Four years ago! That’s it. That’s all there was!”

A drenched little woman shuffles in under the tree with us. Sopping wet, foreign-looking, perhaps a beggar … southern Europe. She doesn’t look like she understands Danish.

Trine remains quiet. I manage to recover some of the calm in my voice. “So you do think Frederik changed dramatically four years ago?”

“Yes. A lot. An unbelievable amount.”

“But you thought it was because of me? You thought he got tired and unfocused and weird because he had problems with me?”

“Everyone knew it was you. Your marriage.”

“Did you have to help him so he could make it through the day? Did he start getting forgetful and disengaged?”

She won’t answer.

“You thought it was my fault? That I took your beloved headmaster away from you? Such a remarkable, responsible person — even toward his boring wife — that he had to take care of me? Even though it meant all of you at Saxtorph had to suffer? And that’s why he became different?”

But she just holds her tongue.

“Does anyone know how much extra work you were doing at the office, Trine? Did you keep it a secret?”

The shadows and reflections of the rain quiver upon her face, as if her abandoned eyes were staring into a blue-grey fire.

“Trine, did you know that in cases of slow, insidious brain damage, it’s completely normal for a secretary to cover for her boss so that their workday will function?”

Still silence. But I can see I’ve hit home. I can see that that’s exactly how their days had been during these last years. Her mouth grows smaller, it sort of sucks into itself. I’ve gotten to her, I’ve gotten through!

“He was brain-damaged!” I shout into her ear. “That’s what it was! Brain damage. He was sick, sick, very very sick!”

She emits a plaintive moan as if I’ve struck her, hiding her face by pressing it against the trunk of the tree and raising her arms above her head. The little beggar-woman gives me a dirty look.

And I know that Trine isn’t crying because her husband and her best friend have been fired, or because no one can say whether the school will even survive another year. I know she’s crying because now she understands why Frederik withdrew from her, and from everyone else at school. Because she understands why her hero deserted her and left the empty husk of his body sitting behind in the headmaster’s office.

For he really did have a luminosity — at least until he began to stay home with me in the evenings and on weekends. An ardor, an idealism, a passion for doing his utmost for the school. A light that made me resign myself to his always being gone, though it went against everything I’d dreamt of for my life and our marriage, light that drew teachers and students together in a vision of making Saxtorph something extraordinary. Until a tumor extinguished it all.

I look out from the tree’s grey-green shadow onto the glistening streets, a great flat-bottomed lake everywhere stippled with the impact of raindrops. I’ve gotten Trine to remember who the real Frederik was, how utterly different he was. Her perm’s going flat, as if tears were oozing out of her scalp as well. In a couple of places the water has found a path through the crown of the tree, one thin jet falling right behind her heel. The water that envelops us and continues to intrude on us, flowing toward us over flagstone and cobblestone, the water that, a few nights ago on the web, I read could symbolize grief in an old-fashioned psychological novel.