‘And you’d have given them one, is that it?’
‘Too bloody right I would, but you couldn’t, could you? Society bent over backwards for them. That filthy pornography getting legalised. No one was there to stand up for morals, not to mention good old-fashioned decency. It came crashing down like a house of cards, all in the name of tolerance. And then their so-called flower power turned into red terrorism, didn’t it? Drug addiction, noise instead of music, women’s libbers letting it all hang out on those stupid island camps of theirs, while the rest of us were grafting to foot the bill…’
Simonsen interrupted.
‘All right, I get the picture. Let’s try and stick to the point, shall we? The postmaster, was he the tolerant type, as you put it?’
‘Not when I started working there, he wasn’t. It was more like inspection in the mornings to see if you’d washed your ears out. But ten years later, the youngsters were walking in and out of his office without even knocking. Oh, he kept up with the times all right.’
‘What about his son? Was he long-haired and filthy dirty, too?’
The old man paused for thought. It was obvious he was doing his best to deserve his cigarettes.
‘Long-haired, no. Jørgen had a crew cut, I remember that. Filthy, most likely. They all were.’
‘Was Jørgen odd as a child, too?’
‘No idea. I never saw him until they took him on.’
‘Is there anything else you can tell me about him?’
The old man thought about it.
‘Do I still get the cigarettes?’
‘They’re yours.’
‘In that case, no, there isn’t. Or maybe just one thing. He always had to have his holiday in June. Certain days, I can’t remember which. Then he’d go off on some boat trip for a week. Don’t ask me where.’
‘Is that what he said? That he was going on a boat trip?’
‘Not in so many words. It was more the way he was tanned when he got back. Under the chin, for instance. It’s the reflection of the sun off the water.’
‘Interesting. Anything else?’
‘No.’
Konrad Simonsen got to his feet
‘Before I go, was it the police or the postmaster that made you lie the first time?’
‘The police are useless. I was only two centimetres short.’
‘Short of what? A free pass to beat up some hippies?’
‘It’d have been my pleasure. Two bloody centimetres!’
‘Nine, actually. And besides, your school marks weren’t good enough, so don’t kid yourself I’m swallowing that boat-trip story. You avoid eye contact when you’re lying. Page one in the big police textbook.’
The man grimaced and Simonsen left.
On his way back, he tried in vain to shake off the old man’s bitterness, but memories that had been tucked away for years suddenly came flooding back. Flower power turned into red terrorism. In a way, the man was right, though other Western countries had been much harder hit by it than Denmark. But the intentions were there, certainly, among the chosen few, the vanguard, the spearhead of the revolution, or whatever they chose to call themselves. The short-haired hippies. That was his terms for those of Rita’s friends for whom flowers, pot and music were no longer enough. What they wanted was a revolution, and riding on the crest of the wave of a society in turmoil, with Chairman Mao’s little red book in their back pocket, increasing numbers of young people became radicalised. Or more exactly: increasing numbers of young people from an academic middle-class background, who studied at the universities of Copenhagen or Aarhus. Democracy was thrown out with the bathwater, and the magnificent dictatorship of the proletariat was just around the corner… only the corner was a long way off, and in the meantime the flowers withered.
The posters on Rita’s wall were taken down and replaced. She lived in a basement room in her mother’s house in well-to-do Gentofte until moving into student halls. Pictures of her rock idols gave way to propaganda posters for guerilla groups around the world. She explained to Simonsen about mobilising against the bourgeoisie and the fascist state, sounding like she was reading aloud from the phone book. Her guitar had been given away, her songs making way for books he didn’t understand and which she read without pleasure.
One day in June he biked up to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art at Humlebæk in Nordsjælland. He bought a poster of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ there, a symbol of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. On his way home, he was caught by a shower and the poster in its cardboard tube got wet. It couldn’t be helped, and he could hardly afford a new one. Besides, he’d already got as far as Vedbæk and didn’t fancy going all the way back. A couple of days later he gave the poster to Rita as a birthday present. She was glad and put it up on her door, in the place of honour. And there it remained for a fortnight, wrinkled from the rain and all the more interesting for it. But then one day it was gone, replaced by Leila Khaled, the becoming Palestinian hijacker with her keffiyeh and her AK-47, and loving eyes gazing down upon an infant child in a cradle. Rita explained to him that Cubism was degenerate middle-class art that sneered at the working-class revolution, and moreover that the Louisiana Museum that had printed the poster was owned and run by a capitalist Nazi.
‘So when the revolution comes the museum will be torn down, is that it?’ he’d said snidely. ‘Funny, because the place was teeming with ordinary people.’
She had an answer to that, too: the people had been tricked, deceived by bourgeois ideology and brainwashed by a capitalist press. It was the ultimate last resort, an all-purpose claim to wipe the board every time people failed to fit in with their new theories.
They made love.
He suspected it was compensation for her having thrown his birthday present out. Afterwards, as she lay with her head resting against his chest, he ventured a new take on the matter.
‘There’s something I don’t understand, Rita. Why would a Nazi museum director put on an exhibition of Kandinsky and Klee? They were banned by the Nazis, weren’t they? Amazing how cunning the Nazis are getting these days.’
She told him it was called repressive tolerance. He stroked her hair and cautiously suggested she take more interest in Kandinsky and Klee, and rather less in Marcuse and Habermas. She got out of bed and stood there. What would he know about that? The policeman with his elementary schooling?
Later that month she graduated from the gymnasium school.
Dark thoughts from his past kept niggling away at Simonsen until he parked the car in the garage at Søllerød and realised that he hadn’t even meant to drive home. This had happened to him a couple of times before in his life, but never over such a long distance. He found it frightening. Not least because he’d been completely lost in recollections and was could not recall a single thing about the journey he’d just made. He sat for a while in the car, unable to decide whether to go back or not. He ended up getting changed and going for his run, determined to beat his own record, for which reason he overreached himself and clocked his poorest time for weeks. After that, he had something to eat and then headed in to the Teilum Building at the Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, wondering what might be in store for him.
Professor Arthur Elvang had at long last retired from his position in Copenhagen University’s Department of Forensic Medicine and as such was now Emeritus Professor and entitled to come and go as he pleased. The staff informed Konrad Simonsen that the old man hadn’t made much use of the privilege, a fact bemoaned by all, insofar as Elvang was still regarded as one of the best pathologists in the country. His retirement was bad news for Konrad Simonsen, too, since it meant his only way of meeting the man now was to visit him at home. He drove up to Klampenborg, north of the city, feeling somewhat nervous as to how he might be received. He had heard that Arthur Elvang was by no means always the most affable of persons. Indeed, truth be told, he could be positively unpleasant.