“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.
Gene makes rodents faithful
RESEARCH. For the first time, scientists have succeeded in altering behavior among individuals of one species by giving them a gene from another species. The journal Nature reports that the gene, which was transplanted from prairie voles to meadow voles, changed the latter from polygamous loners to monogamous herd animals.
After the transplantation, researchers at Emory University in Atlanta found major changes in the behavior of male voles when they were placed with females.
While the male meadow voles had previously spent only 5 % of their time with females, they now — just like male prairie voles — spent fully half their time with females, and they took good care of their offspring as well. In addition, the males now remained with only one female each, whereas before they had mated indiscriminately.
In the experiment, only a single gene was transferred between the two species — the gene for what is known as the vasopressin receptor. Many other animals, including humans, have their own version of this gene. (KS)
31
“There’s something you should know.”
Helena’s on the phone, and she sounds alarmed. I’m in Nørreport Station, heading up the escalator from the metro.
“Yes?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe we should talk about it when I see you instead. It’s to do with Bernard.”
“Well now you have to tell me.”
I hear how my voice gets hard-edged and clipped. I’m not very good at this, I think. Have we been found out? By Vibeke? Frederik? Who? I’ve known the whole time that this was coming.
“All right,” Helena says. “Where are you?”
“Nørreport Station. On my way home from meeting with Frederik’s old secretary.”
“Oh, that’s right. How’d it go?”
“First tell me what’s up with Bernard.”
“Are you sitting down?”
“No, I’m walking. Stop it already — spit it out!”
“Umm …”
I’ve reached a packed throng of people in the granite-walled passage between the first and second escalator.
She hesitates. Then she says, “My friend Sissel slept with him.”
Helena says this as if it’s supposed to be some sort of sensational shock, and then the line goes completely quiet.
I let out a big sigh of relief. “I know that’s not true.”
“Sissel says he sleeps with loads of women. He’s a real lothario. He’s not at all what you think.”
“Sissel must be mistaken.”
“I just thought I should let you know.”
“All right.” A harried businessman with a big briefcase bumps into me. “You’re right to tell me, but when you meet Bernard, you’ll see that she’s definitely got the wrong man. You just have to see him for two seconds around his wife.”
“Yes, I know you’ve said …”
I put the ridiculous notion out of my thoughts, and then I ask, “Did you tell Sissel about me?”
“No, of course not.”