The Exception Read online

  The moment Rasmus steps in through the door, one look is enough to tell her. It’s not food and drink that he’s been missing. He realises that she is in no mood for foreplay on the hall floor and instead they go straight to the bedroom.

  She lies with her head on his chest, sniffing his scent. The hotel’s unfamiliar shower-gel adds a new note.

  He is truly fired up tonight. It seems easy to keep her mind off DCGI and for a while her body tells her that she is succeeding. But then she finds herself looking at a cupboard door that hasn’t closed properly. It juts out from the wall at the same angle as that of the open window. And from the bed it’s difficult to make out the image on Rasmus’s film poster by the door. It looks like a dark rectangle with patches of reflected light from the lamp in the ceiling.

  She tries to concentrate on what they are doing, but it’s not easy.

  ‘Rasmus, no, I’m not with you. Let’s wait a while.’

  He rolls away from her. A muscle in his face twitches irritably, but when he speaks his voice is kind. ‘Malene, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s … nothing. I just don’t seem to be in the mood.’

  He sighs, but is gentle with her. ‘Let me fix you a drink. A bit more lime and no melon – what do you say?’

  She sits up. ‘I’m sorry, forgive me. Somehow it doesn’t seem …’

  She sits level with his belly, looking down over his handsome body.

  ‘Let me help you.’

  ‘I’m not a cow that needs milking,’ he snaps.

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  They go to the kitchen and set out the food. Malene speaks about events in the office, but Rasmus has already heard most of it because she called him on his mobile at Cologne airport.

  Rasmus is the only one from the Film Studies course who has gone into IT. Two years ago, when Malene met Rasmus for the first time, he was still a member of his film group and they were all out shooting an interview in Lake Peblinge, with both interviewer and interviewee up to their chests in water. Malene walked past while Rasmus was shouting directions from the lakeside path. Curiosity made her stop and look and it didn’t take Rasmus long to chat her up. One year has passed since he moved into her flat.

  Listening to her speaking about her day, he seems rather gloomy. She asks him why and after hesitating for a moment, he tells her: ‘Malene, I’ll happily support you – it’s just that it’s all the time, it never stops. There’s always something on your mind. Don’t you ever relax?’

  Malene feels fed up with the way Anne-Lise and the whole office situation has spoiled her evening. It’s been eating away at her. ‘Rasmus! It’s not my fault that someone sent me a death threat. And it’s not my fault that I lost a whole area of my work today.’

  ‘True. Sure.’

  ‘But you sound as if you’re blaming me. Anyone would be angry if he or she were told to hand over important work to a colleague who’s useless.’

  ‘I said it’s true. Look, I know it’s not your fault and it’s really serious. And still you took all this trouble to make great food. And fantastic drinks.’ He starts slicing the tomatoes as he speaks. ‘But you know what I mean. You always have to worry about something.’

  ‘There you go. You still think I’m to blame.’

  ‘No, listen. I had a good time in Cologne. I enjoyed it there, just as I enjoyed my sales trips to Norway and Austria and Portugal. Every time I’m away I have to convince myself that I’ll enjoy returning home to you just as much.’

  ‘Rasmus, don’t start. Not now, with all this happening in my life.’

  He puts the knife down. ‘The last time I came home it was just the same. You were unhappy because your best friend had disappointed you by not writing while she was in Kenya. It mattered to you, I understand that. The time before that you were in the middle of one of your attacks … but that’s OK. It’s not the arthritis that bothers me. But then there was the time you were miserable because you were just back from the trip to your friend Charlotte.’

  His expression softens. ‘It would be wonderful if I could just look forward to coming home and being with you.’ He must have seen that his blows have hit home. ‘Malene, I’m trying to tell you that all this makes what we’ve got together seem so fragile.’

  She has not the slightest wish to co-operate. If he feels he has to talk about how ‘fragile’ their relationship is, then it’s up to him. But she starts to question him all the same, and then she can’t stop the tears from coming.

  Rasmus backs down, saying that he simply meant that their relationship is worth fighting for and they should do everything they can to strengthen it. Slowly, he comforts her, caressing her sore fingers gently. Sometimes she feels as if he too gains some peace by soothing her poor joints. They are both reclining on the new sofa. He massages her shoulders, her head resting in his lap. A little later they laugh about getting so emotional and joke about the way her tears made patterns on the surface of her melon-juice cocktail.

  Malene wonders about Anne-Lise and her husband – if they are ever like this. In a suburban villa, shared with their two children, everything must be different. Are Anne-Lise and Henrik happy tonight? Now that Paul has handed Anne-Lise the responsibility for book enquiries, might they be toasting her success with champagne? Malene finds this scene hard to visualise. Besides, she has never seen Anne-Lise truly happy and at ease. Why should getting the book enquiries change her?

  Rasmus’s massage is making her relax. Her thoughts drift. She thinks about Iben. Imagine: Iben has no lover to be with. How empty the evenings must be for her, alone with her microwaved food. How she must long for someone to love.

  Rasmus has moved on to rub her scalp. The tickly feeling is wonderful. She has filled the room with candles. Rasmus and she don’t speak.

  Maybe Gunnar and Iben wouldn’t be such a crazy match. Iben was obviously attracted to Gunnar, but it hadn’t seemed such a good fit at first. Not that Malene would ever have tried to stop it, naturally.

  She has a glimpse of Gunnar and Iben’s future. They live in Gunnar’s flat, sharing it with his pieces of African furniture, their baby and visits from his two daughters from his first marriage. Without Malene wanting to, she is suddenly part of this set-up. Rasmus has left her and she, like an unmarried, sickly aunt, comes to see her friends often. She shakes the image off almost before it has even formed in her mind.

  A little later she and Rasmus are in bed together and now Malene takes the initiative. She notes the odd scent of hotel toiletries again and does everything she can to make it special for him. His weight on her is just right and she enjoys his strong, healthy hands. She has an orgasm this time, though a small one.

  Rasmus wants to get up and have something more to eat. He is content now, easier to talk to. She is less sure about her own feelings.

  Back in bed they lie and talk. She shows him the printout of the email from revenge_is_near. He says she mustn’t be afraid, she’ll be all right. She tells him about the evening they spent with Grith and about the mental disorder that causes a person’s identity to split and dissociate. This interests him. He is sitting up, eating prosciutto with leftover pieces of melon. There’s a slice of bread with butter and salt on the side.

  ‘What Grith says is, the emailer might behave like a perfectly normal person – not someone obviously violent, that is. It could be anyone who knows us. And whoever it is also knows a great deal about genocides.’

  ‘So how would you go about finding out who it is?’ Rasmus asks.

  ‘Well, it could be someone who is connected to the Centre and whose personality has split to separate out his or her anger – someone we meet often, perhaps every day.’

  Later, when Malene has started her evening finger exercises, using her blue ball, Rasmus still ponders what she has said. His mouth glistens with melon juice.

  ‘Did Grith explain how to find out if a person has parcelled off anger and so on into a separate personality?’

  ‘No
, she didn’t.’

  ‘So you might think Anne-Lise did it, but you can’t prove it? You have to treat her as if she were innocent?’

  Malene smiles to let him know that he has hit the nail on the head. ‘You’re so right.’

  They lie close, comfortable together, and fantasise about how they could trap the sender of the emails. Malene’s head rests on Rasmus’s chest and her arms are around him. She looks out through the window.

  She thinks about Iben and how it has only been forty-eight hours since Iben was too scared to come here to stay the night because she really believed that someone might break in and slay her while she slept. What has changed since then?

  Sometimes you feel deeply sad on the first truly lovely day in spring. Sometimes you feel fresh and alert after a stupidly late night. Now Malene feels exactly the opposite of what she expected: she feels safe. She loves holding her tentative lover close and thinks that she would do anything at all to make him happier about being with her.

  Europe’s Forgotten Genocide

  In May a conference arranged by the Danish Centre for Genocide Information will examine the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their homes in Eastern Europe. It is one of the world’s largest ethnic-cleansing operations, but until recently it was more frequently discussed among Holocaust deniers than among serious researchers.

  By Malene Jensen

  The Second World War was almost over, and the Soviet Red Army was pushing into Germany. The Russian soldiers had fought for two years in German-occupied Russia and Poland, marching through landscapes scarred by the Nazi attempt to conquer the Slav race.

  Even before the declaration of war, Hitler had instructed German army leaders to kill ‘all men, women and children of Polish origin, showing neither mercy nor compassion’. Apart from acts of war, German soldiers took part in this genocide by shooting, executing and enforcing planned mass death by starvation of at least ten million Russians and Poles. Now the situation was reversed. The Soviet soldiers found the German countryside and its villages empty of able-bodied men. German aggression had cost practically every Russian soldier the life of a loved one – a family member, an old friend, a comrade-in-arms – and for four years they had all been hungry, frozen and without women.

  The men went berserk. There are endless eyewitness accounts of how all women, from ten to eighty, were raped. Some died after multiple rapes. Not all the women were shot afterwards, but the Russian officer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, later a Nobel Prize-winning author, wrote about what he had seen in the long, epic poem Prussian Nights: ‘Virgins were made women, and soon the women would be dead bodies, as, sick of mind and with bloodshot eyes, they begged: “Kill me, soldier!’”

  The rapes no one wants to remember

  Afterwards all those involved tried to suppress awareness of these violations. The subject was taboo until a German book about it was finally published in 1992, Befreier und Befreite (Liberators Take Liberties), a collection of papers edited by Helke Sander and Barbara Johr. In his contribution, the statistician Gerhard Reichling estimates that 1.9 million German women were raped during the months of the invasion. The number of actual rapes is many times greater, since it was rare for a woman to be raped only once. A major proportion of the forty thousand written witness accounts held in the German Bundesarchiv – Ostdokumentation (a state archive for documentation about the eastern front, housed in the city of Bayreuth) describes how groups of women were kept captive in cellars to be used by soldiers in any way the men wanted, at any time.

  There are several eyewitness accounts describing what took place in the East Prussian country town of Nemmersdorf, where naked women were crucified on the doors, nails hammered through their hands and feet. Children, wounded soldiers from the German army, and old men who had never been called up were shot in the back of the head or transported to Russian concentration camps or clubbed to death.

  Ilya Ehrenburg, the Stalinist writer, wrote in a leaflet distributed to the Russian soldiers: ‘Count not days, nor the kilometres travelled. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill Germans – this is your mother’s prayer. Kill Germans – this is the cry from the land of Russia. Do not hesitate. Do not stop. Kill.’

  The soldiery was not only Russian, but included Mongolian cavalry and contingents from the other 150, mainly Asiatic, nationalities under Soviet rule. All were let loose to do anything and everything they wanted, except show mercy. Gang rapes were rewarded as if they were heroic acts. Not participating in the killing of German civilians could lead to court martial and was punished either by imprisonment (as in the case of Solzhenitsyn) or execution.

  The winter of 1945 was harsh. The exodus of Germans from East Prussia took place at temperatures of 18 to 25 degrees below zero. The Soviet air force, and later its tank divisions, shot at and bombed the refugees. In a flanking manoeuvre the infantry cut off escape routes to West Germany and many of the refugees chose to walk towards the coast instead, where they tried to board ships. One of these ships, the Wilhelm Gustloff, designed to carry 1,460 passengers, was sunk by a Soviet submarine. Of the 11,000 civilians on board, 9,000 died in that one attack – roughly six times as many as drowned in the sinking of the Titanic.

  Königsberg becomes Kaliningrad

  Many fugitives were stranded in Königsberg, the besieged East Prussian capital. The harbour city of Königsberg was once one of Germany’s finest, cultured and elegant, and full of beautiful old buildings, including a famous cathedral, museums and theatres. Before Hitler’s rise to power, the university in Königsberg was internationally acclaimed. The city boasted seven newspapers and Germany’s biggest bookshop, which catered for – among others – its many scientists and artists. In July 1944 a group of Königsberg officers carried out a failed attempt to kill Hitler.

  Over the seven hundred years of its existence, Königsberg’s population had grown to 380,000, but when it surrendered only around a hundred thousand remained. Many had fled to the city from the countryside to the east of it; others were families on the run from the bombing raids on Berlin.

  The American diplomat and historian George Frost Kennan flew over the deserted East Prussian land. He wrote in his memoirs: ‘The Russian invasion is a catastrophe for this region that has no counterpart in contemporary Europe. In many areas the original population has been decimated so that hardly a man, woman or child remains alive; it is impossible to believe that they all managed to escape to the West.’

  After the defeat of Germany this part of the old Prussian territory came under Soviet rule. This meant that three-quarters of the remaining population of Königsberg died from sickness and starvation. The 25,000 survivors were deported in 1947 to what was to become the newly designated DDR. Some ended up in Nazi-built concentration camps, which were now used by both the Polish and the Soviets. Here, about 75 per cent of the prisoners died, mainly from starvation, typhus and torture.

  Expulsions in the post-war years

  The forced displacement of civilians from the old German provinces of East Prussia, Silesia and Pomerania continued during the post-war years. Stalin, at his meetings with Churchill and Roosevelt, insisted on holding on to the parts of Poland that the Soviet Union had annexed after Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939. Poland therefore had to be compensated. At the Tehran conference in December 1943, Churchill used three matches to demonstrate how this could be done: he put down two matches first, removed the right one and added a new match to the left of the remaining one.

  In the real world, this shift in Polish territory led to the removal of 3 million Germans from their old homeland, which now belonged to Poland, and the relocation of the displaced people. They were left to fend for themselves and make a living as best they could. The emptied rural areas and towns were then to be repopulated by the 3 million Poles deported from the new Soviet territory.

  With callous brutality, Germans were also driven out of German-speaking regions in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and other European countries.
They lost their homes and all property that they could not carry.

  Europe’s largest ethnic-cleansing operation

  More than 15 million Germans were expelled from their native regions. Also, over 2 million German civilians either were murdered or died from starvation, cold or the terrible ordeals they endured during 1945 and the first five years after peace was declared. Sheer numbers make this one of Europe’s largest genocides and it wiped out East German culture.

  No one doubts the correctness of the figures, which are based on documentation in German archives. Despite this, international research has paid relatively little attention to this mass extermination.

  In the Encyclopedia of Genocide, the deportation of Germans is referred to in a table listing the greatest genocides of the twentieth century, but there is no separate article describing it. This work of reference does, however, include long articles about other, numerically smaller genocides.

  Similar weaknesses are found in other standard works, such as Century of Genocide and The History and Sociology of Genocide. Nobody contradicts the fact that the post-war forced displacement of Germans was one of the largest Europe has ever seen, but it is also true that nobody has chosen to write about it at any length. It is not difficult to understand why this should be.

  ‘The Germans started it.’

  No serious researcher would like to be associated with changing the emphasis placed on the German slaughter of Jews, Slavs, gypsies and homosexuals. It was indeed the Germans who systematised genocide and constructed machinery that made killing people more efficient than ever before.

  It follows that the question of guilt is critical. Can German children be held responsible for unimaginable crimes against humanity committed by their older male relatives? The Nazis themselves would have argued that this is the case: according to their principles, whole populations are rightly punished for the crimes of individuals.