No Jelisic at the Vibenhus roundabout or in Tagens Road or Nørrebro Street.
She practically flies along, one street after another, running to get away from Jelisic and from the evil she senses in everyone she overtakes. She knows that at one time in their life, each person she passes has done evil things towards another person, but they no longer think about it. They all pretend they’re so innocent.
If they thought it would benefit them, they would knife the next man in the back, each and every one of them. Only lack of opportunity determines if they become genocidal killers or not. If their community leaders pressed the right buttons, these people would be off on the hunt straight away.
When she gets to Nørrebro, there are more people about and it is harder to keep her distance.
Iben can smell the evil inside a young man cutting in just ahead of her. He is wearing a long coat and carries a briefcase, but she has a vision of him inside a Russian army helicopter throwing out mined toys to kill children in Afghanistan. Ruthlessness oozes from his pores and the smell prickles inside Iben’s nostrils, like the drinks of freshly opened lemonade she remembers from childhood.
She veers to pass him, steps into the cycle path and hears the bells as two cyclists come up from behind. She leaps back onto the pavement.
She lands near a young woman walking her old bike with a child-seat on the back. She is the type of person who, as a trained nurse, helped eliminate invalids in gas chambers well before the Second World War. Her brand of evil stinks like the raw meat left in a plastic bag that you forgot to throw out before going away on a holiday.
I’m like a rat, Iben tells herself. My sense of smell is a rat’s. A lab rat’s.
When they tickle one tiny bit of my brain with an electric current I’ll run one way and when they try another bit, I’ll run in the opposite direction. Like everyone would. Social psychologists can predict what I’ll do next. And when a researcher puts me in a cage with another rat, we will tear and bite each other until one of us dies.
That’s what we do, never mind what intellectual ideas we use for display. Razor-toothed rats without free will.
A little boy is strapped into the bicycle child-seat. He is asleep and his head in its little helmet is drooping. His romper suit is open at the neck and the smell of evil rises from him like the reek of burning grass.
I am sick, she thinks. It’s obvious. It isn’t normal to smell people like this. Or to think in this way. The next moment she is sweating copiously under her thin jacket. Her whole body becomes damp and cold.
She knows why. And she knows that she doesn’t want to think of what is to come. Her nausea grows, until at last she throws up. Leaning against a board advertising a kebab place, her stomach contents pump out of her and into the gutter.
Didn’t I have one of these attacks in the office one night? The others had left. I remember how furious I was with myself then. And with Malene. What was I doing there? It was something that eased the pressure. Some people smash china or cut themselves. What did I do?
What was I doing? I know I was writing. When I freak out, I write or I read.
She weeps.
I’m sick in the head. I don’t want to be sick. It’s hateful. I want to be able to work at DCGI. And to live with Gunnar.
I want a life.
I won’t have one much longer. The others will realise soon enough that I’m the one who’s abnormal. I’m the only one in the office who has been in a psychiatric ward. The only one who Frederik called ‘Batgirl’, because he — like the rest of them — can tell that I’m different. I’m the only one who’d willingly walk around for four months with a knife tied to my leg.
She wipes her mouth with the back of her glove and cleans off the vomit. She is still leaning against the board. She remembers that after the evening in the office she had a headache cycling home.
I was sick then. Like now. When I rode along St Kjeld Street I kept telling myself: ‘I’m not like that. I didn’t do that.’ Nevertheless I recalled what it was that I had done. But by the time I had turned into Jagt Street it had become very distant, like hearing about it late one night at a party. Once I reached Tagens Road and home, I had even stopped saying, ‘I didn’t do that.’
Her ability to think is gone. She wants to lie down, but can’t do that on the pavement. The next-best thing would be to sit on a bench for a while or maybe go into a shop to rest, but that’s out of the question too. She feels safer from Jelisic while she’s on the move. Now she has to hurry, or he’ll find her.
I had such a sense of writing the truth. It felt so right: ‘You, Malene Jensen, have sworn to your secret evil …’And then: ‘You, Iben Højgaard, are for your actions recognised as self-righteous among the humans.’
She strides along, her muscles seeming stronger now that she has thrown up.
Outside Nørrebro Station she stops. Now where should she go? She’d like to go to Gunnar’s flat. He knows about danger. He’ll know what she should do to protect herself from Jelisic. But he mustn’t see her this way. At least she has the presence of mind to see that.
The other thing she’d like to do is go to Malene’s and tell her how sorry she is. It’s a good thought, even though she can’t imagine that Malene will ever forgive her.
It has become dark. Lights in shops and cars make a shifting pattern around her. She needs to tire out her brain, dampen down her emotions. Other people might take tranquillisers or splash cold water on their faces, but she gets the same kind of effect from working intensely. She must concentrate now to distract herself from all these emotions.
She will formulate an entire article in her head, leaving no room for any other thought. Later, all she’ll have to do is write it down.
The Psychology of Evil XXII
Here, the previous articles in Genocide News are followed up with an account of processes, uncovered by social psychologists, that allow perpetrators to reach the stage where they are capable of carrying out one murder after another.
By Iben Højgaard
The social psychologist Albert Bandura recruited a group of students to help him with ‘an experimental study of learning’ that also involved a group of students from another university …
She thinks about Omoro in that hut in Kenya.
I’ll never have a chance to ask him to forgive me. He died because I hesitated. And I hesitated because I saw an advantage for myself in holding back. He is dead now.
She tries once more:
The Psychology of Evil XXII
Here, the previous articles in Genocide News are followed up with an account of processes, uncovered by social psychologists … Two young women step out from a clothes boutique. Their aura of evil smells of pickled gherkins and rotten fish.
Iben’s concentration is going. She leans against a wall and tries to take up the thread.
The social psychologist Albert Bandura recruited …
His ‘helpers’ were to assist him in an experiment by administering electric shocks to members of the other group when they didn’t do well enough in tests. Just as they were ready to start, the helper group ‘accidentally’ overheard a senior assistant speak about the ‘pupils’.
I know why everybody praised me, she thinks: because I ran back to the policemen from Nairobi and tried to make them help the hostages. The press, as well as my friends, kept going on about how I put my life on the line to save the others. It’s because they need to hear such things — to be reassured that goodness exists. They dream of it. They watch it on television. But it’s all a lie! Those few seconds only proved that I couldn’t conceive of the possibility that the police would beat up or kill a white woman. I believed I was in no danger. My whiteness made me invulnerable, or so I thought.