“Needless to say, Asger was far from content. He languished. His life had changed for the worse. He traveled regularly to southeast Asia, he classified animals, wrote papers, and helped out in my department. But it wasn’t what he really wanted to do. He didn’t want to be a gofer at the University of Copenhagen. He wanted tenure, his own office, to teach, to contribute to growth and debate in the world of research. He didn’t want to be an ultimately insignificant freelancer. I asked him if he still saw Erik Tybjerg, though I knew he didn’t.
“In the end I hated Lars Helland.” Professor Moritzen suddenly looked straight at Søren. “Hated him because…”
“He refused to be Asger’s father,” Søren said.
“He was Asger’s father,” Professor Moritzen said, defiantly. “And I hated him for not acknowledging it. But the person I truly despised was myself. Research grants are to us what steroids are to athletes. Whoever gets the most, gets the furthest. And I made sure I got plenty for myself.” She gave Søren a remorseful look.
“Last April I was made redundant and given three years to conclude my research. The Department of Parasitology at the University of Copenhagen will be shut, and the Serum Institute will take over our work. It happened during the Easter break. In contrast to Asger, I received a letter and a telephone call from the head of the institute. He apologized profusely. They had to make cuts. The government had the knife to the institute’s throat. When I returned after the break, I went looking for Lars. He seemed to have vanished, and his door was locked. I called, I e-mailed, but he didn’t reply. Finally, I called him at home and his daughter answered the telephone. Her voice was bright and happy. She was Asger’s sister, they shared genes, how could she sound so happy? My dad’s abroad, she said. At a dig. He wouldn’t be back for another ten days. That weekend I told Asger. After years of deliberation, when I had sworn to myself I would never tell him in anger, I told Asger that Lars was his father. Because I was hurting. Because I had been laid off. Because the money had run out. Because it would no longer trickle down to Asger. Because I was bitter that Lars’s daughter sounded so happy. For all the wrong reasons,” she said, wearily. She fell silent and stared at her hands.
“Why didn’t Anna know you had a son?”
Professor Moritzen looked up.
“She asked me the same question a few hours ago.” She smiled weakly and fidgeted with her clothes. “She was angry with me because I had kept it a secret. She shouted at me, in fact.” Another feeble smile. “But we didn’t see each other outside work. We met at a summer course where I taught terrestrial ecology. We started talking, and I was fascinated by her. She was so different from Asger, from my own child, and she reminded me of me, when I was a young biologist and a single parent. We had lunch together, maybe five times. It was lovely sitting in the cafeteria with her. It made sense. Anna’s life isn’t easy, is it? Living on a student grant with a young child. She never told me her story outright, but today she admitted she felt ashamed because her boyfriend had left them. And do you know something?” She looked up at Søren. “I, too, felt ashamed. I was ashamed of Asger.”
Søren tried to get his thoughts in order. “And then, last Thursday, Asger told you he had infected Professor Helland with parasites?”
“Yes.” She looked wretched. “But it’s my fault. I should never have told him Helland was his father. But I did. The night I told him, he reacted with surprising equanimity. He seemed puzzled more than anything. He kept saying: I thought you didn’t know who my dad was? As if it wouldn’t sink in that I had lied. Afterward, we shared takeout and watched a movie. When he went home, he seemed pensive rather than angry. Three days later, he called to say he didn’t want to see me for awhile. Then he hung up. Asger had never rebelled, not even as a teenager. He has always been my sweet little boy. I was shocked when he hung up on me. I called him back, but he didn’t answer. I went to bed. I wanted to sleep on it, not compound the damage by acting in haste. After three weeks, I called him. Yes, he was fine. What day was it? Really? He sounded surprised. He responded to everything I said as though he had had a lobotomy. I invited him to dinner; I asked if we should go away for Easter break but he said no, we wouldn’t be seeing each other. Good-bye. I told myself everything was all right. He was twenty-seven years old and he had the right to create some space between himself and his mother. Only I desperately wanted to talk to him, to explain to him once more why I had kept Lars a secret. I wrote him a long letter, begging for his forgiveness. I wrote I had been nineteen years old when I had slept with my tutor; I knew nothing, and today I would never have made the choices I had made then. I heard nothing, not even on my birthday in July, which Asger always used to make a big deal of. Not so much as a postcard.” The tears rolled down Professor Moritzen’s cheeks.
“He didn’t respond to anything. To my letters or my calls. He had quite simply dropped me. Last August I started therapy. It was mainly about my relationship with Asger, about my role in his life. My therapist told me to write another letter to Asger, that he definitely read them and they made a difference even if he didn’t respond. In the letter I was to assure him I would be there when he was ready, and I was to tell him I loved him and I looked forward to seeing him again. But not until he was ready. That was important, the therapist stressed. He had begun an emancipation process, she said, and I was to leave him alone. Respect him. The therapist insisted it was about time, too.” She looked embarrassed. “So that’s what I did. Wrote a letter, which the therapist read and approved before I sent it to Asger. Then I waited. I heard nothing, but the therapist comforted me. It was quite normal. The longer the period after puberty when emancipation ought to have taken place, the harder it was. She said it might take years. So I was so happy when he suddenly called last Thursday.” Professor Moritzen looked earnestly at Søren. “I swear it never occurred to me that Asger might be implicated in Lars’s death. I had speculated like crazy whether the parasite might have come from our stock, but in consultation with my colleagues, I concluded it couldn’t possibly be one of ours. We hadn’t been broken into, nothing had been touched, nothing had been taken. Last Thursday, Asger told me he had watched me through my office window. His plan was to make it look like I had infected Helland with tapeworm. We should both be punished, he said. He even found the prospect amusing. He knew tapeworms weren’t dangerous, but they frequently aren’t discovered until they’re several feet long and fill most of the intestines. He thought his plan was brilliantly disgusting. He imagined how the tapeworm would grow and take up more and more space, just like Helland and I had gradually taken over his life.
“He also told me he had threatened Helland. Sent him some e-mails in English from an untraceable address. Helland was completely indifferent; he didn’t even take them seriously. He had replied to a couple of them, Asger told me, though he obviously didn’t know to whom he was replying, and he seemed to find the threats amusing. Asger was crushed,” she said softly.
“Asger heard about Helland’s death on the radio and got very scared. Last Wednesday he visited the institute. It took less than fifteen minutes to catch up on all the gossip. Helland had been riddled with cysticerci. Asger panicked and went home where he spent the next twenty-four hours thinking it over. He couldn’t make sense of it. He called me Thursday night. His voice was small and timid. At first, I couldn’t understand why, after months of silence, he’d called me to talk about the life cycle of parasites. Surely he could look it up in his own reference books? But he insisted. Slowly, the pieces began to fall into place and, in the end, I asked him outright: Are you involved in Helland’s death? He thought so, he whispered. Then he told me everything, though he still didn’t fully understand what had happened, all he had wanted to do was give his loser dad tapeworm. I connected the dots myself.”