Iben’s fervour makes Camilla nervous. Maybe she’s making up a blanket of lies about Camilla and Dragan to show Paul when he comes back. What else could it be? Has Iben ferreted out more about them? Is she going to get Camilla fired?
Camilla can’t look through Iben’s wastepaper basket for printed pages, but in the evening the cleaners sometimes tip the contents of their baskets into the huge bag in the printer room. She goes to have a look. The container is full. Perhaps papers from the previous day are still there.
The door of the printer room can’t be locked. What if someone comes in and finds her burrowing in the black bag full of other people’s waste? What’s her story then?
Camilla cannot think of one. She stands still and listens. Not a sound, no approaching steps or voices. But who says she would hear anything? Camilla peeks outside. Just then, Iben looks up from her screen. Camilla smiles stiffly. No response. Iben doesn’t smile back, just carries on writing.
Camilla closes the door and gets on with her search. The first layer is made up of wrappers from books that arrived for Anne-Lise this morning, and the next one is reams of database printouts. Then, almost at the bottom, Camilla finds the contents of yesterday’s wastepaper baskets. Just as she had hoped.
She leafs through several bundles of printed pages without taking them out of the bag. Then she digs deeper. At the very bottom of the waste there are small pieces of torn-up paper. Someone has taken the trouble to tear up her work before throwing it away. Camilla takes some of the largest fragments over to the window, and begins to read:
chology of Evil IX
We are rats! Experimental rats. Only condemned
run in the labyrinth after social psycho
laws we don’t know.
She puts five more pieces together on the window sill.
y interes
gan when I once read in a newspaper abou
vestigation into traffic in a parking area. People took
longer to get out of their slot if another car was waiting
to park there. Men left their places much faster if the
waiting car was a high-prestige brand.
Women were indifferent to the brand and to the
presumed cost of the waiting car. None of the drivers
knew that they were acting according to these rules.
They just did what they did. We are all predictable.
We are rats.
Camilla doesn’t doubt for a second that it’s Iben who has written this. She cannot think what it has to do with herself or Dragan. The remaining bits are too small to make sense
murderers among us who don’t acknowle
Gunnar some time in the future
Camilla dives into the bag again. Plastic ties and edges of cardboard poke into her armpit. But this time, when she backs out, she has a whole handful of torn pieces. Some of them seem to form a text, which she reassembles on the window sill.
logy of Evil X
was also what Primo Levi wrote about the
harsh
ween prisoners when he was in Auschwitz: ‘It is naïve,
absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal
system such as National Socialism sanctifies its victims;
on the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them
resemble itself.’
The style of these fragments suggests an academic article, but it doesn’t seem likely that Iben is writing it for Genocide News or the DCGI website. It’s so incoherent and repetitive.
We are slaves of
predicta
errible! We are nothing but rats! How could a human
break out of being
In the Winter Garden she hears the others calling out: ‘Hi, Paul!’
‘Paul, hello! There you are!’
Then Paul’s voice, loud and cheerful. ‘Party time!’
Camilla hurriedly hides her bits of paper under two boxes and runs out to meet him.
Everyone is there. Paul has stopped just inside the front door. He is grinning broadly and waving a bottle of champagne. ‘Volunteers, please! Who’ll get the glasses?’
But the women are so curious that none of them wants to leave.
‘Hey, Malene! Could you get five glasses from the kitchen?’
And then he starts telling them what has happened.
‘Frederik has left the board! That’s one obstacle to our survival out of the way!’
Iben has to ask: ‘He’s gone? But …’
Paul pats her shoulder and replies before she can finish her question. ‘That’s right, I’m in no position to vote him off. Nor is anyone else, not even Ole. The only way was for him to resign.’
Anne-Lise chips in. ‘He did? And we thought that it might be you who Ole—’
Laughing, Paul interrupts her. ‘Yes, but he can’t. If I’m not here as the leader, there’s no state funding for the Centre. Seems that Ole forgot that momentarily.’
Anne-Lise, who is standing behind Iben, moves up a little. ‘Paul, what do you …’
‘An old friend of mine is a spokesman for this sector in the party that holds the deciding vote. And DCGI receives its grant on his say-so. Or not.’
Iben catches on quickly and starts laughing too. ‘You have a friend who … I see! Of course you do!’
Anne-Lise is not satisfied. ‘Which party is that?’
Paul leans on Malene’s desk. ‘Anne-Lise, guess!’
‘Your old friend is an MP for the Danish People’s Party? That racist lot?’
Paul smiles proudly. ‘Yep. That’s right.’
Then he notices the look on her face. ‘Whatever we’re doing here, we’re doing it to serve our cause. That’s all that matters.’
‘I see. But what happens now?’
‘We carry on as usual. But now we have a new trophy to add to our collection. And the risk that we’ll be put under DIHR is a little less imminent.’
Malene returns with the glasses and tries to catch up. ‘And Frederik, what about him? Is he going to put up with Ole’s decision to let you stay?’
‘No. That he will not do.’
Malene looks around to catch someone’s eye. ‘Aren’t Frederik and Ole friends any more? Is he leaving the board?’
Paul begins to twist the champagne cork. ‘Malene, that’s exactly why we’re celebrating!’
The cork pops and shoots off to land high up on a shelf. Camilla glances at Iben. If she hadn’t seen her anger this morning, or heard the story about her past, or read the fragments from her article — well, she would’ve thought Iben was quite normal. Every time Paul says something meant to be funny, Iben laughs longer and louder than usual. She sounds as if she’s been at the bottle already. Camilla sips her champagne and curses the day she first allowed Dragan into her life. Three years have passed since she learned all the things that Iben has now found out about him. When she looks back at the men in her life, she is so grateful to Finn. After Dragan, marrying someone like Finn is the best choice she could ever have made.
Malene hasn’t touched her champagne and seems uneasy. ‘Paul, we’ve been so worried about you. And about the Centre too. About all of us. You vanished so suddenly and then we thought, maybe Ole would try and …’
Paul watches the bubbles in his glass, tilting it gently sideways to top it up. ‘I was thinking about all of you too, Malene. But the situation turned out to be more complicated than I’d thought because a group of politicians had just left on a fact-finding trip to Iraq. So I couldn’t meet with the people I needed to see — not until they returned. I hadn’t anticipated that.’