She picked up the clothes he had thrown over a chair and carried them off to the bathroom. When she shook out his brown trousers she noticed there was something in one of the pockets: a small, soft package. It felt like a condom.
Camilla, who was on the pill, had a vision of just how furiously she’d let him have it if it was a condom. She’d fly into a rage and not give a damn if he hit her afterwards.
But it wasn’t a condom. It was a small, transparent plastic bag containing some white powder.
It looked like the cocaine packets she had seen in films. Christ almighty, how could he afford this stuff? Was he an addict? Perhaps he was a dealer and traded drugs to pay for his own habit — sold it to his friends. But that meant they were users too — people like Lena’s husband, and nice, hospitable Goran. Could it be true?
All the time she had thought that Dragan’s friends respected him. Were they actually scared of him? Maybe they owed him money for drugs? Or maybe they feared and pitied him at the same time. Just like herself.
She threw him out. He moved back to the refugee camp.
During the days that followed, she investigated Dragan’s life in Yugoslavia in every way she could. She realised that there were too many corroborating accounts for all of them to be based on lies and misunderstandings. For instance, it was quite clear that Dragan had, together with Mirko Zigic, volunteered for guard and ‘interrogation’ duties in the Omarska camp. Torture was routinely carried out there, as everyone knew by then.
Leafing through a book that Dragan had left behind, a collection of Crnjanski’s poetry, she found a little note stuck between the pages. It began with some writing that contained the word ‘Dragan’, then more incomprehensible words and then the signature ‘Mirko Z’.
She still couldn’t bring herself to report Dragan as a suspected Bosnian war criminal, or even a cocaine-dealer. She didn’t want to charge him with domestic violence either; the consequences for him would have been too drastic.
One day she met Dragan again at Lena and Simo’s place. By now she was much more frightened of him than she had ever been of Morten; yet, once more, they ended up together on his black coat in the shrubbery behind the Frederiksberg block of flats. He moved back in with her. She hoped that she would have been quicker to distance herself from his alcohol and cocaine abuse, if she hadn’t known of his past sufferings.
After a while she threw him out again, only to have it start all over again. When this cycle had repeated itself a few times, she still didn’t know how he afforded his cocaine but decided to try some herself. She discovered that she had an addictive personality. She had already become dependent on his cooking and his sex and now, in no time at all, on his drugs too.
Then, one day, Dragan met another woman. He fell as tempestuously in love with her as he had done with Camilla only six months earlier.
Their affair was finished. Over the following two years, Camilla felt deeply depressed. There was nothing to fill her life, except unbearable visits to see her parents or to Anja and Finn’s place for yet another, altogether too cosy, evening of drinking tea and chatting.
Camilla forced herself to attend choir practice regularly. With the help of her parents and a support group, she forced herself to beat her addiction. Finally, she understood clearly that the shrew who had stolen Dragan away had, in fact, also saved her life.
47
Camilla and the kids get up at the same time as Finn. He is up early, usually at five-thirty in the morning.
She arrives at the Centre about an hour and a half before the others.
The red light on the answering machine glows in the semi-darkness, but it doesn’t blink. No messages. Malene has forgotten to switch her computer off. Camilla quickly turns on the overhead lights. They flicker a couple of times and then everything looks normal again. She turns her own computer on and goes to make coffee.
The offices are silent, the book-lined walls absorbing the noises from outside. It’s still too early for the morning traffic to have started up. Until recently, early morning was Camilla’s favourite time at work, a quiet moment to herself when she could organise her work. But these last few days have changed everything.
Ever since Iben discovered that Camilla has been involved with a war criminal, she’s excluded her. Camilla knows only too well what that means.
She returns to her seat and finds a stack of documents to enter into a database. Before she left home she took two aspirins, but she still feels rotten — especially her stomach.
This is how the mornings were for her a long time ago. In order for her mother to get to work on time, she would drop Camilla off at school about twenty minutes before the first lesson. For years Camilla would start each day sitting with her knees together on the worn old bench in the school yard, speculating about what would happen that day. How would her classmates punish her today?
Oh dear, maybe she shouldn’t drink coffee on an upset stomach. Anyway, it’s probably ready. She goes to pour herself a cup.
Then the others arrive and the first two hours pass just as she knew they would.
Later that morning she decides to change the humming fluorescent light in Paul’s office. Paul has been complaining about it for ages and fixing it gives Camilla a chance to get out of having to be in the same room as Malene.
In the storage room Camilla takes her time pulling out the ladder and finding a new tube. She hurries through the Winter Garden, closes Paul’s office door behind her and sets to work as slowly as possible. While she’s standing on the top step of the ladder trying to fit the new tube into place, Iben enters briskly and starts speaking without a pause.
‘I’ve been in contact with a Serb journalist, and he told me that a colleague of his was murdered by your old boyfriend about a year ago.’
‘What …?’
‘Dragan pistol-whipped this man to death, Camilla. Someone who had written a critical article about Dragan’s friend Zigic and the Serbian cause. Just as I have.’
‘But …’
Camilla has to get down from the ladder and takes the tube with her.
‘You have to help us. We need more to go on.’
‘But I can’t tell you any more than I already have.’
‘How come I always have the impression you’re lying when it concerns Dragan?’
‘I’m not lying. There just isn’t anything else to say. Look, I feel just like you. I’m scared that he’ll come after us too, but what can I do?’
The muscles around Iben’s jaw are twitching visibly. She stands with her feet planted apart. Brigitte, the vilest of the girls in Camilla’s class, used to stand like that in front of the teacher’s desk. The others would cluster around her. When she found something to throw at Camilla, the others would start throwing things too.
Camilla has to sit down. She sinks onto one of the chairs at Paul’s meeting table and buries her face in her hands, pressing her fingers against her eyes.
Iben’s insistent voice comes at her through the darkness. ‘I’d like to believe you. It’s just that your whole manner won’t let me. You’re such a poor liar, Camilla.’
‘But I’m not lying!’
Camilla can hear her own voice go thin and shrill. Even with her head down and her eyes closed, Camilla can feel Iben silently watching in her warrior’s stance.
Camilla repeats herself. ‘I’m not lying! I’m not lying! I’m not lying!’
She hears Iben turn and walk away.
Camilla knows that she deserves everything she’s getting. They are right to punish her. She has been lying, and it has slowed the search for the man who is threatening to kill Iben. What if Iben is killed, or one of the others, just because Camilla hasn’t told the truth? Camilla is still sitting with her face in her hands when she hears Iben’s voice through the open door.