The Susan Effect

  Laban looked up at the girl.

  ‘My mother committed suicide when I was eight,’ she said. ‘I don’t think about it that much any more. I just felt an urge to tell you both, that’s all. I feel trust in you.’

  Laban stared at her. From the periphery of my field of vision, people came closer. I knew something of what was happening, and yet it happened so much quicker than I had anticipated.

  An elderly woman stepped in front of the girl, addressing Laban. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘May I share something with you? The doctors have told me I’ve slipped a disc in my spine. At the fifth vertebra. I’m so afraid I shall end up in a wheelchair.’

  I took Laban to be a couple of years older than me. It was obvious that he had already notched up a good deal of practice in dealing with people’s attention. And yet what was unfolding around us was another matter entirely.

  ‘Did you have shooting pains in your legs?’

  A well-known physician, a neurologist, had now joined us:

  ‘I did, and ignored them. Man to the last. Nothing was going to stop me clearing an acre of woodland with my chainsaw. Ended up destroying the nerve. Forced me out of the hospital, my professorship.’

  He demonstrated his limp. His lower leg dragged at every step, orphaned as it were, bereft of will.

  ‘All this is making me so scared! I’ve always been so very afraid of death.’

  This from a younger woman, otherwise hard at work on the leeks, now sucked into the maelstrom.

  Laban looked like a person drowning. I took him by the arm and pulled him towards me, slowly, without turning my back on those addressing us.

  We came by a side room. I drew him inside and closed the door. He stared at me.

  ‘What was all that about? What happened?’

  I would have liked to have introduced the truth to him gradually, employing the kind of pedagogical, step-by-step verifiability that is one of the traits I so love about the natural sciences. But there wasn’t time for that.

  ‘In a room such as that kitchen, in which people are gathered together, normally only a tiny fragment of reality is ever laid out on the table, presented up front, as it were. What happened there was that the rest was starting to come out.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s something that occurs in my presence. It’s always been like that. It’s the bane of my life.’

  The door opened and a waiter came in with a stack of trays. He halted abruptly as soon as he saw us.

  ‘I became a dad this morning,’ he said. ‘Father to a little boy, at six fifteen. Three point eight kilos. I’m over the moon. His mother and I …’

  We withdrew backwards out of the door.

  ‘Never turn your back,’ I said softly. ‘Otherwise they’ll come after you.’

  Reaching the corridor, we closed the door behind us. Laban thought we had escaped and were safe. All I hoped for was a bit of breathing space.

  But we were both too optimistic by half. The stairs up to the ground floor were blocked by a silk dress as expansive as a mandarin’s cloak. The garment enshrouded a female Nobel laureate in chemistry, the revered and respected successor to Brønsted. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. As we tried to get past, she grabbed Laban by the wrist.

  Her grip was tight, it seemed, for Laban stopped as if he’d walked into a door.

  ‘You want to know why I’m crying. It’s because I’ve been unfaithful to my husband. For years.’

  If the look on Laban’s face was anything to go by, it hadn’t been with him. He was sweating cobs. What’s more, it looked like the cold sweat of fear.

  We both sensed the woman’s suffering. That’s the problem with the real world. It’s not a stable chemical combination, but a labile solution, a large amount of which comprises anguish.

  I decided to intervene.

  ‘You’ve got a choice. Either leave him or come clean. Believe me, I’ve been studying men since I was fourteen.’

  As I spoke, I held her tightly by the wrist and released Laban by levering his arm in the direction of her fingertips, away from the muscular insertions, towards the point at which her grip was weakest.

  ‘That can’t be more than a year, surely,’ she said. ‘Since you were fourteen.’

  It was a good rejoinder, but then they’re very picky about who they give the Nobel prize in chemistry to. Nevertheless, I had touched on a point, and something was now clearly sparked inside her.

  Having escaped her clutches we went up the stairs.

  ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘When you’re me,’ I said, ‘it’s the only survival method there is. Good advice and extrication techniques.’

  Between the main course and dessert it dawned on me that Laban was a composer. The source of that realisation was him performing one of his own piano sonatas and two of his own songs, amid breathless silence followed by thunderous applause.

  He stepped down and seated himself opposite me.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Artists and scientists are normally far too fragile just to step down from a stage or a podium and ask for appreciation. But even at this early stage I had the first inklings of what would later be confirmed to me: that Laban Svendsen was an empiricist; that he simply possessed solid experience to the effect that there could only ever be one outcome of anything to which he put his hand. Things could only ever go well.

  ‘I’m more into easy listening, myself,’ I said.

  ‘I was only playing for you.’

  ‘Sorry. It’s all pling-plong to me.’

  I stood up.

  He ducked under the table like a springboard diver and resurfaced at my side, a jack-in-the-box.

  ‘There’s something I must ask you. Are you going out with anyone?’

  And then he realised what it was he’d said.

  People converged on us all of a sudden. A man put his hand on Laban’s arm and leaned forward.

  ‘I’ve had three and a half thousand people through therapy. A lifetime of work. I’m seventy-two. In my experience …’

  A look of panic appeared in Laban’s eyes. He grabbed my arm.

  ‘It’s that Effect! Like you were talking about!’

  I pulled free. He tripped along behind me into the hallway.

  ‘Why are you leaving?’

  ‘I’ve got three kids. I’m still breastfeeding the youngest. I promised their father I’d be back by ten.’

  Andrea Fink was standing in the doorway of the drawing room. Laban was blocking my way out.

  ‘I’d like to drive you home. Say hello to your husband. Sing the little one a lullaby. Of my own composition.’

  I shook my head.

  He stepped aside. The next moment I was free and on my own in the nightfall.

  It was spring, though misty and dark. I’ve always been fond of darkness, and I began to run down the drive. The physical motion and encroaching night gave me a sense of having eluded a genuine peril.

  6

  IN THOSE DAYS, Andrea Fink lived her life in laboratories.

  Her office and what she called her behaviour labs occupied half the top floor of the Department of Experimental Physics on the Universitetsparken natural science campus. Moreover, she had labs installed in the honorary residence. There wasn’t a single room in which a heart monitor had not been casually left or some mobile EEG apparatus set up, or sliding blackboards installed on the wall next to plate racks or the great canvases of Vilhelm Lundstrøm that were even bigger than the boards themselves.

  In front of those canvases, ten days later, I saw Laban for the second time. He was seated next to Andrea Fink and she hadn’t warned me. It was our usual weekly conference.

  At this historic juncture in time, a gravity had arisen in my relationship with Andrea, attributable to certain goings-on between me and members of her family – first her sons and then, more recently, her husband. She and I had yet to tie things up.

  She began, as ever, without circumlocution.


  ‘Susan inspires candour. As yet we have no idea why, though we have been conducting tests for the past nine months.’

  She turned towards me.

  ‘Laban, it seems, has a similar effect. Differently toned, but much the same. I had been entertaining a theory that the Effect might be augmented if the two of you were in the same room. That was why I brought you together. Of course, controlled observations were out of the question. But I kept my eye on you, nonetheless, in the kitchen and the dining room. I am now quite certain.’

  ‘How have you been testing her?’

  Laban was on the edge of his seat. I had remained standing.

  ‘Susan has been conducting interviews for the police, of so-called diehard deniers, people involved in organised crime. Individuals the police had given up on. It was by far the most appropriate line of experiment. In such cases we can be sure of objectified resistance to sincerity. During the course of our studies Susan has interviewed a total of seventeen subjects, each with between twelve and fifty-eight hours of police questioning behind them without having divulged a thing. In our case, twelve of the seventeen came clean after two hours. A further three after four to six hours.’

  He counted on his fingers.

  ‘And the last one?’

  ‘She became psychotic.’

  Laban stared dreamily into space. And then, for the first time, I was confronted with the acuteness of his thinking.

  ‘What about the ethical side of that? Doing physical experiments by questioning criminals?’

  Andrea Fink looked away.

  ‘Funding doesn’t come on its own. The Ministry of Justice and the Defence Command are willing to pay for new developments in interrogation techniques. And we get to investigate an important phenomenon.’

  Laban said nothing.

  ‘It’s humane. The Effect is humane. Unlike many other procedures.’

  Laban still said nothing. His silence drew her up from her chair.

  ‘That’s the problem of physics. It’s always been financed like this. That’s what Fermi meant when he said that regardless of what else the atom bomb might be, it was great physics.’

  They both looked at me. It was my turn.

  ‘You exploited me and Laban as guinea pigs,’ I said. ‘Without our knowledge.’

  ‘I did warn you,’ she said. ‘Right from day one.’

  I collected myself and turned to leave. Laban blocked my exit.

  ‘I’ll walk you.’

  ‘My husband’s waiting for me outside.’

  ‘I’ve looked into that. You haven’t got a husband. And no kids either.’

  I leaned towards him.

  ‘Laban,’ I said, ‘you’ve seen me for the last time. And while that may seem harsh to you at this moment, I can assure you that in the long run you’ll be very, very happy about it indeed.’

  He stepped sideways, but kept looking straight at me.

  ‘Aah,’ he said. ‘So candour’s not the only thing in your repertoire.’

  The door closed behind me.

  There was a briskness in my step as I walked down the driveway. The exchange had left a pleasant taste in my mouth. I’d drawn a line, necessarily so, and put up a warning sign telling people to think again if ever they tried to erase it.

  7

  IT’S QUARTER TO ten in the morning, and the room Harald and I enter is at least 150 square metres in area and illuminated by a flood of slanting light that streams in through great, arched windows extending all the way to the floor.

  I cling to my crutch. Along one wall there is a bar, some thirty children aged between nine and twelve straggled along its length: boys in black tights and white T-shirts, girls in leotards and grey leg warmers. Next to the wall is a piano, and at the piano sits a young man.

  Neither the children nor the pianist pay any attention to Harald and me. Their focus is fully directed towards the woman standing over by the windows.

  Above the soft tones of the piano she guides the children through the barre exercises of classical ballet. And as she speaks, gently and yet insistently, she dances.

  She is sixty-five years old, and throughout those sixty-five years she has driven her constitution to its every limit, for which reason it is not in the conventional, physical sense that she dances.

  But conventional is something she has never been, and dance is at heart not physical at all. Most profoundly, its movements issue from a place far deeper inside us than the physical form, and from that place inside her it flows as yet unhindered, even now, with her physique soon depleted.

  We have seen it so many times before, Harald and I, and still we are transfixed, rooted to the spot by equal parts respect and fascination.

  The windows face out onto Kongens Nytorv, and we are in the great practice room of the Royal Danish Ballet’s children’s school.

  With a gesture she indicates that the lesson is over. The pupils and pianist applaud, darting looks of appreciative adulation in her direction as they leave the room.

  Beneath the odour of perspiration and perfume that lingers in the space they leave behind is a fragrance of fresh apple, and when finally the last of her pupils has closed the door she brings the apples forth.

  They are of the sort called Filippa and have been picked, pressed, fermented and distilled by Aqua Vitae on the island of Fyn, and are now an intense, glassy aquavit of some forty per cent proof. She raises her glass towards us in greeting and knocks back the greater part of its contents. Whereupon she glides across the floor and embraces us both at once.

  She is a head taller than I, and her body is as hard as polished wood: a frightening sight whenever naked, a bit like an illustrative plate in a textbook of human anatomy, devoid of the subcutis, all muscular fibres and fasciae exposed.

  I place my hands against her cheeks, drawing her forehead towards mine.

  ‘Hello, Mum,’ I say.

  She pulls free and raises her glass again.

  ‘Skål, dear. You too, diddums.’

  My mother doesn’t have a cramped little dressing room like the other instructors at the Royal Theatre. She has an office, into which we now step. The window affords a view across the imposing square with the elliptical parterre of the Krinsen at its centre, and in terms of floor space the room is but a few square centimetres smaller than those of the artistic directors of the theatre’s Playhouse and Ballet.

  There are two reasons for such distinguished accommodation.

  The first is that classical ballet, like deep natural science, is taught in the spirit of the apprenticeship. The Royal Danish Ballet comprises a wealth of excellent dancers, but only a select few keepers of the seal whose artistic capacity and phenomenal memory bear forward the essence of the tradition. As such, there is a direct line of descendence from August Bournonville, down through the great dancers of the twentieth century, to Lander and Brenaa and Bruhn, and through them to my mother.

  That’s one reason for the office. The other has to do with the way she is as a person. While she may appear to hover transcendentally – as if, unlike the rest of us, she does not have to contend with gravitational acceleration at all, but floats upon the ether when rising from a chair or seating herself in a taxi – there is a deeper part of her that moves upon the earth. Few people would not go to great lengths in order to avoid getting in her way.

  ‘Who’s Magrethe Spliid?’

  It’s a year since we saw each other last. I don’t know what sort of opening line she might have been expecting, but it was hardly that.

  ‘Never heard of her.’

  I place the photo in front of her. She is seated at her desk. She puts on her glasses. Studies the photo. Puts it down.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t recall ever having set eyes on the woman. If I did it must have been a very casual encounter. You know how many thousands of people I run into all the time.’

  She looks me in the eye. Then she looks at Harald. Then she savours a long sip from her tall, slender glass.

  She’s alw
ays been an alcoholic. Or rather: she’s always been dependent. The alcohol didn’t start until she stopped dancing at the age of forty-five. Before that it was pills. And men. And the attentions of an audience.

  In a way, her relationship to dance has always been a kind of alcoholism.

  ‘We got into some bother in India,’ I said. ‘That’s why we’re home. We’re under charges and risk going to prison. I’m looking at twenty-five years.’

  ‘They’ll reduce your sentences. For good behaviour. I’ll send you parcels, delicacies.’

  Sooner or later all alcoholics proceed to comprehensive ethical collapse, when the sheer weight of wasted life tips the cart. But not my mother. There are those who would incline to believe that in her case all is already lost, that no ethics exist to collapse.

  ‘There’ll be a big court case,’ I say. ‘The press are bound to mention your name. What would that do for your position here at the theatre?’

  She puts the glass down.

  ‘You’re trying to blackmail me!’

  I step up to the desk and lean across it.

  ‘I’m Thit’s and Harald’s mother. Until they’re safe, I’ll blackmail whoever’s around.’

  She picks up the glass and takes another sip. Only this time without the savouring. This time she’s taking her medicine.

  ‘What have they got you charged with, dear?’

  ‘Intent to kill.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘A lover.’

  ‘And what did he do to arouse your displeasure?’

  ‘He tried to rape me. I’d finished with him.’

  The panes of her office windows must be made of a special kind of glass, since hardly a sound penetrates from the eternal traffic outside.

  ‘Where did we go wrong, your father and I? Since you made do with intent?’

  I seat myself on the edge of the desk.

  ‘The goodness of my heart got the better of me,’ I say.

  We look at each other. She sniggers. I likewise. I’m through to her: mother and daughter understand each other. It feels nice.