Next time she went to the library, she would Google Benjamin’s grandfather. But first she needed to find out who he was. Something in these cuttings had to give her a name. And if she found a name, then she would surely be able to find some trace of this forceful and detestable man. Even in such a forgetful age as the present.
Perhaps she might even talk about it with her husband. Perhaps it might work something loose.
She moved on to a large number of shoeboxes stacked in one of the packing cases. Those at the bottom contained various items of limited interest: a Ronson lighter that worked, oddly enough, cufflinks, a letter opener and accumulated office articles, various indicators of different stages in a life.
The rest were a window on to what seemed to be a quite singular period. Cuttings, brochures, and political pamphlets. Each box revealed new fragments of her husband’s life. Together they formed a picture of a disgraced and damaged individual becoming at once a mirror image and the diametrical opposite of his father. The boy moving instinctively away from the precepts laid down in his childhood. The youngster substituting reaction with action. The man taking to the barricades in support of everything totalitarian that was not concerned with religion. Seeking out the buzz of Vesterbrogade when the anarchists gathered. The sailor suit made way for hippie coat, combat jacket, Palestinian scarf, the latter pulled up in front of his face when circumstances dictated.
He was a chameleon in control of his colors. She saw that now.
She lingered for a moment, wondering if she should put everything back and forget about what she had seen. Collected in these boxes were things he clearly did not care to remember.
Was this not a sign that he was trying to put a lid on his past? Yes, it was. Otherwise he would surely have told her everything. Otherwise all these names would not be scribbled out.
But how was she to stop now?
If she did not immerse herself in his life, she would never be able to understand him. She would never know who the father of her child really was.
And so she turned to confront the rest of his life, put away so meticulously. Filing systems in shoeboxes, shoeboxes in packing cases. Everything labeled in chronological order.
She had been expecting to find periods in which he had ended up in trouble on account of his activism, but something prompted him to change direction. As though he had settled down for a while.
Each period of his life had been given its own plastic folder marked with the appropriate months and years. One year, he had apparently studied law. Another, philosophy. For a couple of years, he had backpacked in Central America, jobbing around hotels, vineyards, slaughterhouses.
Not until he returned home did he begin to emerge as the person she thought she knew. Again, these meticulous folders. Brochures from the armed forces. Jotted notes on the army sergeant school, the military police, the commando forces. After that, all personal records and the accumulation of cherished relics terminated.
There were no names, no specifics of places or personal relationships. Only outlines of the years that had passed.
The last indicator of where he might have been headed was a small collection of printed matter in a variety of languages. Trainee programs in shipping in Belgium. The Foreign Legion recruitment pamphlet with luscious photos of southern France. Copies of application forms for business education programs.
There was no suggestion what path he eventually would choose, only of the directions in which he was thinking at this time of his life.
Somehow, it all seemed quite chaotic.
And as she returned these boxes to their places, fear welled inside her. She knew his work was secret; he had told her so. Until now, the accepted truth had been that he served in a good cause. Intelligence services, undercover police work, something like that. But why had she been so certain that this was the case? Had she any proof?
The only thing she knew was that he had never led a normal life. He was an outsider; he existed on the edge.
Now she had pored through the first thirty years of his life, and still she knew nothing.
At last, she came to the packing cases that had been stacked uppermost. She had rummaged in a few already but by no means all. Now, opening them systematically one by one and sifting through their contents, the shocking question came to her: Why, of all his boxes, had these been left so accessible?
The question was shocking because she knew the answer.
The reason they were stored on top was that her prying in them had been deemed unthinkable. It was as simple as that. What could be more indicative of the power he exerted over his wife? She had accepted without question that this was his domain, and that her presence here was prohibited.
She realized just how completely he controlled her.
She opened these boxes with trepidation and dread, her lips pressed tightly together, breathing deeply and shakily through her nose.
They were full of files. A4 binders in all colors, though their contents were as black as the night.
The first bore witness to a period in his life when he had apparently sought to atone for his ungodliness. More printed matter, this time from all sorts of religious movements, meticulously filed away in plastic pockets. Flyers that spoke of the afterlife and the eternal light of God, and how it could be attained with guarantee. The pamphlets of new religious movements and sects, all absolutely certain that they alone possessed the definitive solutions to the tribulations of man. Names such as Sathya Sai Baba, Scientology, the Mother Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, God’s Children, and the Community of the Eternal appeared alongside the Unification Church, the Fourth Way, the Divine Light Mission, and a host of others of which she had little or no knowledge. All of them claiming to be the only true path to salvation, harmony, and benevolence. The only true path, as sure as fate itself.
She shook her head. What had he been looking for, this man who had striven so hard to finally rid himself of the darkness and dogma of his childhood? As far as she was aware, none among this diversity of religious tenders had found favor in her husband’s eyes.
No, the words “God” and “religion” did not easily find their way into their redbrick home in the mighty shadow of Roskilde Cathedral.
After she’d collected Benjamin from the day care and played with him for a time, she put him down in front of the television. As long as there were bright colors and the picture moved, he was happy.
She went upstairs and then wondered again if she ought to stop, put the remainder of the packing cases back without opening them, and leave her husband’s tortured life alone.
Twenty minutes later, she was grateful not to have followed this impulse. Grateful, but scared. In fact, such was the extent of her distress that she now found herself seriously considering whether to pack a bag with some essentials, take the housekeeping money from the tin, and get on the first available train.
She had known that the last of the boxes might contain things that concerned the present period of his life, the one involving their marriage. But she was aghast to discover herself to be a project in her own right, the subject of one of his files.
He had told her that he had fallen head over heels in love with her the first time they had spoken. She had felt the same way. Now she knew that to be a deception.
How could their first encounter in that café have occurred by chance when here in his binder were cuttings from the show-jumping competition at Bernstorffsparken where she had won a place on the podium for the very first time? Months before they ever met. Where had he found these cuttings? Wouldn’t he have shown them to her if he had got hold of them at some later date? Not only that, but he also had programs from competitions she had taken part in long before that one. He even had photos of her taken in places she knew they had never been together. He had been keeping her under surveillance right up to the time of their first meeting.