Part 12 (1/2)

He rolls away from her. A muscle in his face twitches irritably, but when he speaks his voice is kind. Malene, whats wrong?

I dont know. Its nothing. I just dont seem to be in the mood.

He sighs, but is gentle with her. Let me fix you a drink. A bit more lime and no melon what do you say?

She sits up. Im sorry, forgive me. Somehow it doesnt seem She sits level with his belly, looking down over his handsome body.

Let me help you.

Im not a cow that needs milking, he snaps.

I didnt mean that.

They go to the kitchen and set out the food. Malene speaks about events in the office, but Rasmus has already heard most of it because she called him on his cell phone at Cologne airport.

Rasmus is the only one from the film studies course who has gone into IT. Two years ago, when Malene met Rasmus for the first time, he was still a member of his film group and they were all out shooting an interview in Lake Peblinge, with both interviewer and interviewee up to their chests in water. Malene walked past while Rasmus was shouting directions from the lakeside path. Curiosity made her stop and look, and it didnt take Rasmus long to chat her up. One year has pa.s.sed since he moved into her apartment.

Listening to her speaking about her day, he seems rather gloomy. She asks him why and after hesitating for a moment, he tells her: Malene, Ill happily support you its just that its all the time, it never stops. Theres always something on your mind. Dont you ever relax?

Malene feels fed up with the way Anne-Lise and the whole office situation has spoiled her evening. Its been eating away at her. Rasmus! Its not my fault that someone sent me a death threat. And its not my fault that I lost a whole area of my work today.

True. Sure.

But you sound as if youre blaming me. Anyone would be angry if he or she were told to hand over important work to a colleague whos useless.

I said its true. Look, I know its not your fault and its really serious. And still you took all this trouble to make great food. And fantastic drinks. He starts slicing the tomatoes as he speaks. But you know what I mean. You always have to worry about something.

There you go. You still think Im to blame.

No, listen. I had a good time in Cologne. I enjoyed it there, just as I enjoyed my sales trips to Norway and Austria and Portugal. Every time Im away I have to convince myself that Ill enjoy returning home to you just as much.

Rasmus, dont start. Not now, with all this happening in my life.

He puts down the knife. The last time I came home it was the same. You were unhappy because your best friend had disappointed you by not writing while she was in Kenya. It mattered to you, I understand that. The time before that you were in the middle of one of your attacks but thats okay. Its not the arthritis that bothers me. But then there was the time you were miserable because you were just back from the trip to your friend Charlotte.

His expression softens. It would be wonderful if I could just look forward to coming home and being with you. He must have seen that his blows have hit home. Malene, Im trying to tell you that all this makes what weve got together seem so fragile.

She has not the slightest wish to cooperate. If he feels he has to talk about how fragile their relations.h.i.+p is, then its up to him. But she starts to question him all the same, and then she cant stop the tears from coming.

Rasmus backs down, saying that he simply meant that their relations.h.i.+p is worth fighting for and they should do everything they can to strengthen it. Slowly, he comforts her, gently caressing her sore fingers. Sometimes she feels as if he too gains some peace by soothing her poor joints. They are both reclining on the new sofa. He ma.s.sages her shoulders, her head resting in his lap. A little later they laugh about getting so emotional and joke about the way her tears made patterns on the surface of her melon juice c.o.c.ktail.

Malene wonders about Anne-Lise and her husband if they are ever like this. In a suburban villa, shared with their two children, everything must be different. Are Anne-Lise and Henrik happy tonight? Now that Paul has handed Anne-Lise the responsibility for book inquiries, might they be toasting her success with champagne? Malene finds this scene hard to visualize. Besides, she has never seen Anne-Lise truly happy and at ease. Why should getting the book inquiries change her?

Rasmuss ma.s.sage is making her relax. Her thoughts drift. She thinks about Iben. Imagine: Iben has no lover to be with. How empty the evenings must be for her, alone with her microwaved food. How she must long for someone to love.

Rasmus has moved on to rub her scalp. The tickly feeling is wonderful. She has filled the room with candles. Rasmus and she dont speak.

Maybe Gunnar and Iben wouldnt be such a crazy match. Iben was obviously attracted to Gunnar, but it hadnt seemed such a good fit at first. Not that Malene would ever have tried to stop it, naturally.

She has a glimpse of Gunnar and Ibens future. They live in Gunnars apartment, sharing it with his pieces of African furniture, their baby, and visits from his two daughters from his first marriage. Without Malene wanting to be, she is suddenly part of this setup. Rasmus has left her and she, like an unmarried, sickly aunt, comes to see her friends often. She shakes the image off almost before it has even formed in her mind.

A little later she and Rasmus are in bed together, and now Malene takes the initiative. She notes the odd scent of hotel toiletries again and does everything she can to make it special for him. His weight on her is just right, and she enjoys his strong, healthy hands. She has an o.r.g.a.s.m this time, though a small one.

Rasmus wants to get up and have something more to eat. He is content now, easier to talk to. She is less sure about her own feelings.

Back in bed they lie and talk. She shows him the printout of the e-mail from revenge_is_near. He says she mustnt be afraid, sh.e.l.l be all right. She tells him about the evening they spent with Grith and about the mental disorder that causes a persons ident.i.ty to split and dissociate. This interests him. He is sitting up, eating prosciutto with leftover pieces of melon. Theres a slice of bread with b.u.t.ter and salt on the side.

What Grith says is, the e-mailer might behave like a perfectly normal person not someone obviously violent, that is. It could be anyone who knows us. And whoever it is also knows a great deal about genocides.

So how would you go about finding out who it is? Rasmus asks.

Well, it could be someone who is connected to the Center and whose personality has split to separate out his or her anger someone we meet often, perhaps every day.

Later, when Malene has started her evening finger exercises, using her blue ball, Rasmus still ponders what she has said. His mouth glistens with melon juice.

Did Grith explain how to find out if a person has parceled off anger and so on into a separate personality?

No, she didnt.

So you might think Anne-Lise did it, but you cant prove it? You have to treat her as if she were innocent?

Malene smiles to let him know that he has. .h.i.t the nail on the head. Youre so right.

They lie close, comfortable together, and fantasize about how they could trap the sender of the e-mails. Malenes head rests on Rasmuss chest, and her arms are around him. She looks out through the window.

She thinks about Iben and how it has only been forty-eight hours since Iben was too scared to come here and stay the night because she really believed that someone might break in and kill her while she slept. What has changed since then?

Sometimes you feel deeply sad on the first truly lovely day in spring. Sometimes you feel fresh and alert after a stupidly late night. Now Malene feels exactly the opposite of what she expected: she feels safe. She loves holding her tentative lover close and thinks that she would do anything at all to make him happier about being with her.

EUROPES FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE.

In May a conference arranged by the Danish Center for Information on Genocide will examine the expulsion of 15 million Germans from their homes in Eastern Europe. It is one of the worlds largest ethnic-cleansing operations, but until recently it was more frequently discussed among Holocaust deniers than among serious researchers.

BY MALENE JENSEN.

The Second World War was almost over, and the Soviet Red Army was pus.h.i.+ng into Germany. The Russian soldiers had fought for two years in German-occupied Russia and Poland, marching through landscapes scarred by the n.a.z.i attempt to conquer the Slav race.

Even before the declaration of war, Hitler had instructed German army leaders to kill all men, women, and children of Polish origin, showing neither mercy nor compa.s.sion. Apart from acts of war, German soldiers took part in this genocide by shooting, executing, and enforcing planned ma.s.s death by starvation on at least ten million Russians and Poles. Now the situation was reversed. The Soviet soldiers found the German countryside and its villages empty of able-bodied men. German aggression had cost practically every Russian soldier the life of a loved one a family member, an old friend, a comrade-in-arms and for four years they had all been hungry, frozen, and without women.

The men went berserk. There are endless eyewitness accounts of how all women, from ten to eighty, were raped. Some died after multiple rapes. Not all the women were shot afterward, but the Russian officer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, later a n.o.bel Prizewinning author, wrote about what he had seen in the long epic poem Prussian Nights: Virgins were made women, and soon the women would be dead bodies, as, sick of mind and with bloodshot eyes, they begged: Kill me, soldier!

THE RAPES NO ONE WANTS TO REMEMBER.

Afterward all those involved tried to suppress awareness of these violations. The subject was taboo until a German book about it was finally published in 1992, Befreier und Befreite (Liberators and the Liberated), a collection of papers edited by Helke Sander and Barbara Johr. In his contribution, the statistician Gerhard Reichling estimates that 1.9 million German women were raped during the months of the invasion. The number of actual rapes is many times greater, since it was rare for a woman to be raped only once. A major proportion of the forty thousand written witness accounts held in the German Bundesarchiv-Ostdok.u.mentation (a state archive for doc.u.mentation about the Eastern Front, housed in the city of Bayreuth) describes how groups of women were kept captive in cellars to be used by soldiers in any way the men wanted, at any time.

There are several eyewitness accounts describing what took place in the East Prussian country town of Nemmersdorf, where naked women were crucified on the doors, nails hammered through their hands and feet. Children, wounded soldiers from the German army, and old men who had never been called up were shot in the back of the head or transported to Russian concentration camps or clubbed to death.

Ilya Ehrenburg, the Stalinist writer, wrote in a leaflet distributed to the Russian soldiers: Count not the days, nor the kilometers traveled. Count only the number of Germans you have killed. Kill Germans this is your mothers prayer. Kill Germans this is the cry from the land of Russia. Do not hesitate. Do not stop. Kill.