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First published with the title Effekten af Susan in Denmark by Rosinante in 2014

ALSO BY PETER HØEG

WHOEVER MIGHT WISH to put in for the Carlsberg Honorary Residence in Valby, 850 square metres with a full cellar and a park, free and for life, may profitably begin by securing the Nobel Prize in Physics. Andrea Fink did so at an early age and was therefore able to take on the house after Niels Bohr sometime in the 1960s, and to go on living in it for over fifty years.

Most of us approach death reluctantly. Personally, I will face it screaming and with thrashing limbs. Andrea Fink proceeds towards it like an operatic diva might approach her final performance.

It is to be a charity event. She has given everything away. The room into which I enter is utterly bare, save for her hospital bed. All that is left on the walls are cream-coloured oblongs where paintings hung.

‘Susan,’ she says, ‘what are you going to do to get your children back?’

She unfolds a translucent hand resting on the covers. I put my palm to hers. She has always needed to touch whoever she is speaking to.

I can feel her empathy quite physically. Bohr once said of her that she was the only celebrity he had met whom fame had not corrupted.

Something is pressed against the back of my thigh, a chair mysteriously produced from nowhere. The magician withdraws in a wide arc to safety, on the other side of the bed.

What he believes in is having the best of tailors and the strongest possible apparatus of government. His name is Thorkild Hegn, and apparently he was once Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Justice. It is the second time he and I have met.

The first time was two weeks ago, in the Tula prison in Manipur on the border of Burma, in what they referred to as the visiting room, a windowless burial vault of concrete.

The first thing that strikes me as they seat me opposite him is that this is a man who has succeeded in suspending the second principle of thermal dynamics. In a city and a room in which everyone and everything perspires, he is cool and comfortable in white shirt, jacket and tie.

Of course, he is not from the Embassy at all. His complexion is pale and delicately opaque. He has come directly from Denmark.

‘Your son is under arrest in Almora, a small border town close to Nepal. Charged with attempting to smuggle antiquities. Your daughter seems to have run away with a priest from the Kali temple in Kolkata.’

He places something on the table between us. The visual disturbance I’ve been experiencing means that, to begin with, I can’t see what it is. Then a copy of Time emerges into focus.

Four people are on the cover: a man seated at a grand piano, against which two children lean, each with a violin. Slightly behind the man, with her hand on his shoulder, stands a woman who callous individuals have talked into donning the academic regalia of cape and mortarboard.

The children are flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, and look as if they are winning everyone’s hearts and are about to receive disbursements to study at the finest conservatories abroad. The man has warm, rather sorrowful eyes, and a smile that suggests that whatever might burden his soul it is certainly not scant self-confidence.

The children holding the violins are my children. The woman in the mortarboard is me. The man at the piano is Laban Svendsen, my husband. The family my eyes are struggling to keep in focus is mine.

‘Your husband has gone off to Goa with a maharaja’s daughter. Aged seventeen. With the entire southern Indian mafia on his heels. How are the standards of comfort in this place?’

‘Impeccable. Fifteen square metres to thirty women. A pedal toilet in the corner. Rainwater in a barrel, and a bowl of rice a day to go round. They fight with razor blades in the night. I haven’t seen a solicitor in three weeks. I’ve been passing blood for a week.’

‘We can supply medicine. We can take the girl into our custody. We’re working on having the boy released. We may even be able to find your husband before the mafia gets to him.’

He talks of performing Vedic miracles. Of neutralising the prevailing chaos of Indian case law. Circumventing extradition agreements, finding a person who has disappeared in the great ocean that is India. And yet the question that imposes itself is not whether he can do so, but why he would wish to.

That tiny part of the Danish population that has yet to serve time in prison believes such institutions to be silent places, weighed down with remorse and self-examination. The theory is false. Prisons are as raucous as the cages of predatory beasts at feeding time. But the walls of the visiting room are solid and thick, a barrier against any high-frequency modulation. Here, the noise is more vibration than sound.

In this relative silence he ought to have stood up and gone already. But he has not. Something he cannot quite gauge is keeping him.

‘The charge against you is assault with intent to kill, an assault carried out with your bare hands. An assault upon a man who, if the police report is anything to go by, is one metre and ninety centimetres tall and every bit as athletic as a Greek hero. How would that make sense?’

It’s no wonder he’s bemused. I’m more astonished myself. If I manage to regain what the last few months have taken out of me, I might just make the sunny side of sixty kilos.

The shift inside him is made plain by the fact that he is unable to conceal his curiosity.

‘The casino have told the police you tried to purchase chips by promising them his organs.’

At that moment he realises he is losing his grip. That he is revealing to me a part of himself he would prefer not to. The shock of encountering an unfamiliar weakness in his constitution passes fleetingly over his face. Then he gets to his feet.

Here in the honorary residence, two weeks later, that shock has yet to fully recede. Moreover, Hegn is not a man to make the same mistake twice. He makes sure he has the hospital bed between us.

In his hand is a cardboard folder. And the same issue of Time he showed me in the prison.

The head of Andrea Fink’s bed is pushed up against a wall of glass. On the other side of the wall, trees and shrubs brought home from foreign climes stand in ten centimetres of grubby, melting snow, looking as if they might, like the rest of us, be wondering what on earth they’re doing in a place such as Denmark at this time of year. From somewhere in the park comes the sound of children’s voices. Her face lights up. Perhaps it’s her grandchildren, perhaps she is gathering the family around her for the home stretch.

It’s an irrational feeling, rather than a response to any physically quantifiable stimulus. I get to my feet and crutch my way across the room to a pair of double doors and push them open.

Thit and Harald, the twins, are the first thing I perceive. But they are not the first thing I look at. The first thing I look at is the man at the piano: Laban Svendsen, my husband, the children’s father.

Regarding his singular first name – rascal or scamp to any Dane – a good many opinions have been voiced over the years. I know the authoritative explanation. His mother told me she had given him the name because from birth he so closely resembled a Baroque angel that her maternal instinct informed her of the necessity of thrusting a well-directed stick into his wheel at the earliest possible age.

He still looks like an angel. But now he is forty-five and has had the Indian mafia after him.

I’m pleased to note the experience has marked him, though sorry it has failed to mark him more.

The fact that I look at him first is down to a very firmly entrenched agreement. Even before the twins were born, both he and I knew we ran the risk of being consumed by them. So we set out some rules. Rules by which we still abide, no matter that the family is disintegrating. The first of those rules is this: in any encounter between us at which the children are present, we adults will first acknowledge each other’s presence.

In a distant past we did so with kisses and hugs. Now it’s with pensive glances signalling lifelong resentment and everlasting sanctions.

The twins are standing next to the piano, albeit without violins. And the violins are not the only thing they have lost since posing for Time. Something else that is gone is part of the innocence some might claim was visible in that photo.

They run forwards, I stagger, and we meet in the middle of the floor and hold each other tight.

Our reunion is on the outside only. Inside, I lost them a long time ago. Perhaps already at birth. Which, though brief, was difficult. The doctor wanted to give me something for the pain. I must have said something to him, because when I saw him again on the ward forty-eight hours later, he was still pale. But I wanted the whole experience.

As soon as I put the twins to my breasts, the bubble in which we had been living during the pregnancy burst. From the moment they enter the world, children are deserting their parents. They turn towards the nipple, but somewhere deep inside their nervous systems they are already in the process of leaving home.

Nevertheless, I feel tremendous relief. And overwhelming anxiety. Most laws of nature may be formulated as energetic equilibriums. Anyone who gives birth to a child will thereby be dealt a meticulously measured balance of love and fear of losing. And anyone who has twins will be dealt double. On both sides of the equation.

The exhaustion I have until this point suppressed is now suddenly released. The room spins, and the twins ferry me to a chair.

Thorkild Hegn is standing in the doorway. With his grey folder. And his copy of Time.

‘To a great many people the two of you are a symbol. The artist and the scientist. Cultural ambassadors to UNESCO. Co-responsible for the largest EU-funded educational project ever implemented outside Europe. We will endeavour to protect that symbol. We believe we can appease the Indian police. Avoid trial in Denmark. Prevent the oriental demons whose sensibilities you have offended from tracing you here. It will take some weeks. We have turned on the heating in your lovely house. We have stocked the fridge. And we have a car waiting outside to drive you home.’

Laban and the twins acknowledge him with gratitude. They think he’s the good fairy.

But this is an error of judgement, on account of their upbringing. Laban was born to be fêted and loved, and massively sponsored from the cradle to the grave. The twins have reached their sixteenth birthday suffering no harder blows than the odd gentle pat to their powdered bottoms. They have yet to suspect. They think life is a gift shop and everything in it is free. Even Laban, who ought to know better, thinks so.

It’s always been me who has managed the family’s finances. Not only because I’ve got a flair for figures, but also because I’m the only one among us who actually knows what things cost.

‘There is a small favour we should like to ask in return, Susan. We want you to put a question to someone.’

The room falls quiet, apart from the distant children’s voices and the spiritualistic interference that always whispers in the vicinity of a piano. Now even the twins are cottoning on to where we are headed.

Thorkild Hegn remains silent. He does not threaten us, or pressure us in any way. Without saying a word, he merely allows reality to bear down.

‘There’s a telephone number on the inside flap. For when you’ve good news.’

He withdraws, stepping back through the door and closing it behind him. At the other end of the room another door opens. We look out into a hall with a glass exit. Through the glass we see a waiting car. The Svendsen family’s audience in the Carlsberg Honorary Residence is over.

I’M STANDING AT my cooker, preparing a cream of tomato soup with fresh herbs. It’s a small industrial cooker that runs on natural gas. I converted it myself to attain an operating pressure of twenty-nine millibars, thirty per cent above the legal maximum. I like the flames to hiss.

I won’t have induction in the house. If Maxwell had known what misuse would be made of his equations he would have kept them to himself. The home fires do not consist of a magnetic field, but of open flame. I want to see the flame’s blue kernel of vaporous hydrocarbon. I want, as now, to hear the wood-burning outdoor pizza oven whistle in the drizzle.

The twins are sitting on the sofa, Laban at the piano. Three-quarters of an hour have passed since we stepped over the threshold and we have yet to say a word to each other.

It was Laban who envisaged it, I who made it real. That was the division of labour. It consists of 300 square metres framed by rendered, whitewashed walls and enclosed by an arching zinc roof whose underside is clad with timber like an aeroplane hangar from the First World War.

The feeling that it all may fly is reinforced by large expanses of plate glass from floor to ceiling, opening out onto a green jungle.

We built it from materials that, like our marriage, were going to last five hundred years, preferably into eternity. The floors are solid oak. Laban cut the plugs, while I levelled the joists. And we built it in such a way that the solidity of the place would not compromise our sense of freedom. From inside, it looks like the whole structure is suspended somewhere above the treetops in a temperate primeval forest.

It isn’t. The address is Evighedsvej in Charlottenlund – Eternity Street to those unversed in our singular tongue. Fifteen minutes from the centre of Copenhagen. On a good day.

The idea that houses are living organisms is a strategic research axiom I have yet to present to the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. But I shall. I’m waiting for the time to be ripe.

Our house breathes, though only just. We’ve been away for six months. That fact in itself lends a sense of abandonment to the place. And then there is what we have brought back to it. An atmosphere no building material on earth could withstand in the long run.

Some people believe a felicitous family life comes of successful compromises. This is not true. Love is without compromise. Happy families come from solving koans. Or rather: dissolving them.

I should have known better. Nothing in the world is for good. The laws of nature are temporary. No sooner has physics contented itself with one picture of the world than the picture dissolves and turns out to be an exception in some greater paradigm. One of the first things Andrea Fink told me was that she had heard John Bell say at a seminar at Amherst College that in its very foundation quantum physics holds the seed of its own demise.

Thus, the Svendsen family’s good years have now revealed themselves to be but a temporary state of harmony in a much wider chaos.

At least we tried. And one of the puzzles we solved was the issue of how four extreme individualists, all of them solitary creatures by nature, may live together in the same house.

Like, for instance, the kitchen and the lounge, which are one big room. Without a single argument we agreed on the furniture, the piano and the white walls. And we concurred that the only picture that should hang on those walls was a photograph of Andrea Fink.

Some would consider this to be an encouraging start. But not us. Ever since kindergarten her friends have approached her with caution. Introductory sweetness is often followed by something more caustic. Like now.

‘I was collected by a woman from the police. Her name was Irene. She took me all the way on the plane. She said Harald’s looking at eighty years, Mum at twenty-five, because the man’s a famous Bollywood actor. I think we need to look around us. Not think of the family we used to be. More the family we’ve become. Without really having noticed. Mum’s interested in young men.’

I make no comment. In purely biological terms, she’s right. ‘Dad’s interested in young girls. Harald wants money. And I …’

‘I want a house by the sea. Six horses to ride. And people to do the cleaning for me.’

We breathe out again. Respectfully. Not many girls of sixteen have the courage to peer so deeply inside their souls.

I lift the dough from the mixing bowl. My Mettler weighing scales have measured the flour to within one hundred thousandth of a gram. Few housewives would be able to outshine me there. Water and mechanical manipulation have created elastic peptide chains.

The worktop is Corian, made from stone that has been crushed and then glued together again. The textural quality is once again a koan solved, an impossible task, a physical paradox: the unification of marble, plastic and porcelain.

I’ve had the edge rounded. I let the dough hang down over it and stretch itself wafer-thin. We experimental physicists do not merely picture our formulas, we feel them with our fingers.

OVER TWO DECADES have passed since I stood face to face with Andrea Fink for the first time.

It was in the main auditorium of the H.C. Ørsted Institute of the University of Copenhagen. Her visits to Denmark were seldom, her lectures more seldom still. The auditorium seats eight hundred. Two thousand had turned up. People were standing in the corridor.

She spoke on Riemann’s geometry. When she finished she disappeared in a split second, as though she had dissolved on the spot. Later I found out it was to avoid the hordes wanting to give her a letter, shake her hand, kiss a corner of her cape. Or tear off a button for that special souvenir.

No one could leave the room even though she was gone. They weren’t going home.

After three-quarters of an hour the place had reluctantly emptied. Everyone was gone except me, I was the last one there. And then she appeared in front of the blackboard.

The auditorium’s acoustics are such that two individuals placed at any random distance from each other will at any time be able to conduct a whispered conversation. When Andrea Fink spoke, she did so softly, and yet I had no trouble picking up her voice on the back row.

‘You wrote to me. I’ve read your letter. And your thesis. Interesting. But I’m afraid I don’t accept mentees.’

‘I especially noted the bit where you say that what makes you most happy is the knowledge that natural laws exist. Quite a statement for such a young woman. At that point I asked myself: Is a girl who would say such a thing not simply neurotic? Is she?’

‘You’re in touch with the body. That’s something I look for. The deep insights never come from the brain alone. You’ve a flair for mathematics and physics. You’ve got looks. So what’s the problem?’

‘They’re scrumptious. Like apples. It’s hard for me to stop myself. Afterwards it’s a mess.’

‘I want to get into physics. The university is a prep school, a waiting room. I don’t want to sit in a waiting room, I want to go inside, where you are. I must. I’ve known all along, ever since I started reading the first articles. When I was twelve someone showed me the periodic table and I understood it immediately. It was the happiest moment of my life. I understood the existence of natural laws. The way they balance out the chaos. But I don’t want to understand physics from the outside. You can open the door.’

She put a hand on my arm. It was the first time I experienced the touch I, with time, would come to realise was indispensable to her. It was not merely a gesture of kindness, it was explorative. Her fingers were trying to orient themselves in my system.

‘You say you’re preoccupied with group field theory. And that you have personal experiences. What do you mean?’

‘When I’m waiting for the bus, it only takes a few minutes and the man in front of me in the queue starts telling me about his wife’s illness. Once I’m inside, the woman on the seat next to me tells me how much she loves her dog. The boys getting off at the same stop as me tell me how worried they are that they won’t make the first team, and then all about the girls they’re secretly in love with.’

She unbuttoned my sleeve, rolled it up and turned my arm over. Her fingers explored the scars.

As soon as the words left her, she stiffened. The sentence was completely out of place. As was my reply:

People who experience it for the first time are usually taken aback. But not Andrea Fink. Her astonishment was mild. Beneath it lay an intense curiosity.

‘I didn’t intend to say that,’ she said. ‘Nor to roll up your sleeve. It was something inside me. Something strange.’

We looked at each other. When she spoke, her words came out slowly. Inside, she was scanning her own system.

‘It feels like losing one’s footing. As though we are no longer supported by the conventions that govern ordinary conversations. Do you have a word for it?’

‘It’s not normal research. Nothing will be published. All results will be confidential. Funding will come from a separate grant. It would be an odd direction for your career.’

She leaned her head back and laughed. Her laughter was a joy to her surroundings, even to the empty auditorium.

‘Come and see me next week. I’ve got three sons. You’re to leave them alone.’

We looked each other in the eye. Deep sincerity is always accompanied by a feeling of the future emerging. Perhaps she and I both sensed that within six months I would have been to bed with all three sons. And a year later with her husband.

Perhaps we both knew that, given the forces that were now activated between us, I would suppress anything that might stand in the way of getting closer to her.

‘Consider it carefully, Susan. And whatever you do, don’t burn your bridges.’

I said nothing. Speech was unnecessary. There was no return. Not because the bridges behind me were burned, but because they had lost their relevance.

THERE ARE WOMEN who know five years before they get pregnant that they’re going to have two girls and a boy, and that these offspring will attend the International School and grow up multilingual and be voted Face of the Year in 2027 and study law and marry members of the Council of Ethics.

The only thing I knew was that I would have children and that I would end up cooking for them.

We eat in silence. It may be our last meal together. Even so, I assume it’s okay to enjoy it.

I never enforced mealtimes. When the twins were little and thought of meals only as fuel replenishment, preferably to take place in mid-air so as not to be compelled to put feet to the ground and interrupt their games, I tended to wait and let them get on with it, to come to the table when it suited them. I think they were nine before we had the kind of immersion we’ve got now.

Together we savour the light tang of the salad. The sharp bite of the dressing. The pizza base, so thin it’s no longer bread, just an intense taste of grain from the Italian flour, an ethereal crispness beneath the stable-like aroma of melted cheese, the tartness and sweetness of scalding-hot tomatoes and the corpulent bitterness of olives.

I will never admit it to any living person, but every time I serve the family food I feel a slight contraction of my womb. The same as when I breastfed the twins. In a way it’s as if I’m still doing it. And it’s not just the children, it’s also the solar eclipse that is Laban Svendsen.

It’s a prehistoric sensation, with a hint of something Precambrian. It has evolution and millions of years behind it, every single instance of a mammal giving milk to feed its young.

Soon we’ll be a family no more. But right now we’re together, and no matter how bad the situation may seem, we need nutrition.

Laban wipes his hands on his napkin. We have always used our fingers to eat pizza. Taste is not just a process localised to the palate, it’s in the hands too. He opens the grey cardboard folder and lays it out in the middle of the table.

Uppermost is a black-and-white photograph. Of a woman, perhaps in her early sixties. Her hair is thick and wavy, a light shade of grey, her dazzling features striking in the Scandinavian way, a Nordic goddess straight out of Valhalla.

If it hadn’t been for the clothes. And the jewellery. Around her bare neck hangs a string of large pearls that even on the photograph shimmer with the kind of resplendence produced only within the largest oysters at depths the word imitation cannot penetrate. Her dark woollen jumper hangs silk-like from her frame as only cashmere can.

Underneath the photo is an envelope. Laban hands it to me. I fetch a knife and slit it open. It contains one folded sheet of A4. I read the words out loud:

Magrethe Spliid. Born 1942. MA in History, employed at the Royal Danish Defence College, Department of Military History, since 1964. Consultant for NASA from 1970. US resident 1968–71. Affiliated to Yale and Cornell; US Military Academy; US Air Force Institute of Conflict Research, Michigan. Professor at the Royal Danish Defence College, Second Section, Department of Strategic and Operational Forecasting, from 1971. Permanently affiliated consultant following retirement in 2014.

Danish Parliamentary Future Commission – minutes of two final meetings?

List of Commission members?

I open my computer and type Magrethe Spliid’s name into the browser’s search field. All it yields is a long list of her published articles. And three small newspaper notices on the occasions of her fiftieth, sixtieth and seventieth birthdays. She is now seventy-six, but looks at least fifteen years younger.

Thit and Harald come and stand next to me. Laban remains seated. To him, a computer is a waste product. He doesn’t care to touch them, won’t even look at one. Most of all, his sophisticated ear cannot listen to a thing they utter.

I pick up our landline from the table. It’s probably one of the last remaining in the country. There’s a phone number on the Defence College website. I dial the number and switch on the speaker.

The voice at the other end belongs not to some junior office girl, more like a warrant officer of the women’s reserve.

‘My name is Susan Svendsen. I’m a professor at the Department of Experimental Physics, Copenhagen University. Can you give me her direct number?’

One of the great advantages of landlines, and the real reason I’ve kept ours, is that you can slam down the receiver. Which is what I do.

Laban shakes the envelope. And listens. He has always listened his way through life.

Onto the table he tips out a small photograph. It’s a snapshot, in colour, though it must be around fifty years old, from the dawn of the technology. It looks tinted, bleached by the march of time.

But the scene it depicts isn’t at all faded. Two women are seated on the terrace of the Café a Porta on Kongens Nytorv, the sun is shining, they are sharing a bottle of pink champagne and have such an air about them that even though the camera has failed to capture the queue of admirers, one instinctively knows it to be there, just outside the frame, and that it reaches all the way along Lille Kongensgade.

The first of these women is Magrethe Spliid. The way she looked in her early twenties. Rather less grave, and without the authority. But her beauty is the same.

To begin with, I don’t think I know the second woman. Yet something about her face makes me uneasy.

I glance up at my family. They look surprised. Surprised that the woman is who she is. And that I have failed to recognise her.

‘It’s Grandmother,’ says Harald. ‘All sails to the wind, and afterburner ignited.’

‘That girl,’ says Laban. ‘Laksmir, the one I went away with. She was actually a student of mine. At the conservatory.’

Thit delivers him a smile, the kind that goes straight through tissue and bone and embeds itself in the wall behind its recipient.

‘So what you’re saying, Dad, is that your relationship was in actual fact mostly of a musical nature?’

Laban says nothing. He’s run out of road. An unfamiliar position for a man whose self-image involves the world lying at his feet.

The question is Harald’s. He likes exactness. Economy with information offends him.

I see Hegn in my mind’s eye. In the prison. In the honorary residence. The curiosity he was suddenly unable to restrain.

‘He’s testing us,’ I answer. ‘Testing me. He doesn’t believe in the Effect.’

THE FIRST TIME I laid eyes on Laban’s face it was partly concealed behind twelve kilos of freshly excavated potatoes that Andrea Fink had commandeered him into peeling.

I was nineteen and had known Andrea Fink for a couple of years, and at that point in time her home was as yet open and convivial. But the dinner parties she held in her honorary residence were not the kind at which one handed one’s fur to a servant before sitting down at a resplendent table, unfolding the starched cloth napkin into one’s lap and digging in.

Andrea Fink invited people for four thirty, thrust them a pinny in the hallway and led them downstairs into the scullery, in the middle of which was a wheelbarrow full of muddy leeks, and on the table a quarter part of a calf awash in its own blood. Besides the twelve kilos of potatoes Laban Svendsen was busy peeling.

The language has no adequate terms for what occurred inside me when I saw him. In a way I suppose I recognised him. Without ever having seen him.

Sometimes recognition has nothing to do with having seen each other before. Sometimes, as then, it is a sombre feeling of falling victim to an inexplicable and already existing intimacy, the origins of which cannot be pinpointed.

I turned to make myself scarce, but Andrea Fink was standing behind me. She pressed a potato peeler into my hand, and edged me around the table and deposited me opposite Laban. I was stuck.

The potatoes were small, thick-skinned and scabby, with lots of little black eyes that stared at me as if in trepidation at the fact that they were soon to be gouged out. Our hands were reddened and numbed by the cold water. We stood there facing each other, toiling without a word.

And then a young girl came up to us, sixteen years old perhaps, one of the serving staff, in uniform. One should not mistake Andrea Fink’s motives. The fact of her guests being made to prepare dinner was not a matter of thrift, for Andrea was nothing if not well staffed, both in her laboratories and at home on the domestic front.

‘My mother committed suicide when I was eight,’ she said. ‘I don’t think about it that much any more. I just felt an urge to tell you both, that’s all. I feel trust in you.’

Laban stared at her. From the periphery of my field of vision, people came closer. I knew something of what was happening, and yet it happened so much quicker than I had anticipated.

An elderly woman stepped in front of the girl, addressing Laban. ‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘May I share something with you? The doctors have told me I’ve slipped a disc in my spine. At the fifth vertebra. I’m so afraid I shall end up in a wheelchair.’

I took Laban to be a couple of years older than me. It was obvious that he had already notched up a good deal of practice in dealing with people’s attention. And yet what was unfolding around us was another matter entirely.

‘I did, and ignored them. Man to the last. Nothing was going to stop me clearing an acre of woodland with my chainsaw. Ended up destroying the nerve. Forced me out of the hospital, my professorship.’

He demonstrated his limp. His lower leg dragged at every step, orphaned as it were, bereft of will.

‘All this is making me so scared! I’ve always been so very afraid of death.’

This from a younger woman, otherwise hard at work on the leeks, now sucked into the maelstrom.

Laban looked like a person drowning. I took him by the arm and pulled him towards me, slowly, without turning my back on those addressing us.

I would have liked to have introduced the truth to him gradually, employing the kind of pedagogical, step-by-step verifiability that is one of the traits I so love about the natural sciences. But there wasn’t time for that.

‘In a room such as that kitchen, in which people are gathered together, normally only a tiny fragment of reality is ever laid out on the table, presented up front, as it were. What happened there was that the rest was starting to come out.’

‘It’s something that occurs in my presence. It’s always been like that. It’s the bane of my life.’

The door opened and a waiter came in with a stack of trays. He halted abruptly as soon as he saw us.

‘I became a dad this morning,’ he said. ‘Father to a little boy, at six fifteen. Three point eight kilos. I’m over the moon. His mother and I …’

‘Never turn your back,’ I said softly. ‘Otherwise they’ll come after you.’

Reaching the corridor, we closed the door behind us. Laban thought we had escaped and were safe. All I hoped for was a bit of breathing space.

But we were both too optimistic by half. The stairs up to the ground floor were blocked by a silk dress as expansive as a mandarin’s cloak. The garment enshrouded a female Nobel laureate in chemistry, the revered and respected successor to Brønsted. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. As we tried to get past, she grabbed Laban by the wrist.

Her grip was tight, it seemed, for Laban stopped as if he’d walked into a door.

‘You want to know why I’m crying. It’s because I’ve been unfaithful to my husband. For years.’

If the look on Laban’s face was anything to go by, it hadn’t been with him. He was sweating cobs. What’s more, it looked like the cold sweat of fear.

We both sensed the woman’s suffering. That’s the problem with the real world. It’s not a stable chemical combination, but a labile solution, a large amount of which comprises anguish.

‘You’ve got a choice. Either leave him or come clean. Believe me, I’ve been studying men since I was fourteen.’

As I spoke, I held her tightly by the wrist and released Laban by levering his arm in the direction of her fingertips, away from the muscular insertions, towards the point at which her grip was weakest.

‘That can’t be more than a year, surely,’ she said. ‘Since you were fourteen.’

It was a good rejoinder, but then they’re very picky about who they give the Nobel prize in chemistry to. Nevertheless, I had touched on a point, and something was now clearly sparked inside her.

‘When you’re me,’ I said, ‘it’s the only survival method there is. Good advice and extrication techniques.’

Between the main course and dessert it dawned on me that Laban was a composer. The source of that realisation was him performing one of his own piano sonatas and two of his own songs, amid breathless silence followed by thunderous applause.

Artists and scientists are normally far too fragile just to step down from a stage or a podium and ask for appreciation. But even at this early stage I had the first inklings of what would later be confirmed to me: that Laban Svendsen was an empiricist; that he simply possessed solid experience to the effect that there could only ever be one outcome of anything to which he put his hand. Things could only ever go well.

He ducked under the table like a springboard diver and resurfaced at my side, a jack-in-the-box.

People converged on us all of a sudden. A man put his hand on Laban’s arm and leaned forward.

‘I’ve had three and a half thousand people through therapy. A lifetime of work. I’m seventy-two. In my experience …’

‘I’ve got three kids. I’m still breastfeeding the youngest. I promised their father I’d be back by ten.’

Andrea Fink was standing in the doorway of the drawing room. Laban was blocking my way out.

‘I’d like to drive you home. Say hello to your husband. Sing the little one a lullaby. Of my own composition.’

It was spring, though misty and dark. I’ve always been fond of darkness, and I began to run down the drive. The physical motion and encroaching night gave me a sense of having eluded a genuine peril.

Her office and what she called her behaviour labs occupied half the top floor of the Department of Experimental Physics on the Universitetsparken natural science campus. Moreover, she had labs installed in the honorary residence. There wasn’t a single room in which a heart monitor had not been casually left or some mobile EEG apparatus set up, or sliding blackboards installed on the wall next to plate racks or the great canvases of Vilhelm Lundstrøm that were even bigger than the boards themselves.

In front of those canvases, ten days later, I saw Laban for the second time. He was seated next to Andrea Fink and she hadn’t warned me. It was our usual weekly conference.

At this historic juncture in time, a gravity had arisen in my relationship with Andrea, attributable to certain goings-on between me and members of her family – first her sons and then, more recently, her husband. She and I had yet to tie things up.

‘Susan inspires candour. As yet we have no idea why, though we have been conducting tests for the past nine months.’

‘Laban, it seems, has a similar effect. Differently toned, but much the same. I had been entertaining a theory that the Effect might be augmented if the two of you were in the same room. That was why I brought you together. Of course, controlled observations were out of the question. But I kept my eye on you, nonetheless, in the kitchen and the dining room. I am now quite certain.’

‘Susan has been conducting interviews for the police, of so-called diehard deniers, people involved in organised crime. Individuals the police had given up on. It was by far the most appropriate line of experiment. In such cases we can be sure of objectified resistance to sincerity. During the course of our studies Susan has interviewed a total of seventeen subjects, each with between twelve and fifty-eight hours of police questioning behind them without having divulged a thing. In our case, twelve of the seventeen came clean after two hours. A further three after four to six hours.’

Laban stared dreamily into space. And then, for the first time, I was confronted with the acuteness of his thinking.

‘What about the ethical side of that? Doing physical experiments by questioning criminals?’

‘Funding doesn’t come on its own. The Ministry of Justice and the Defence Command are willing to pay for new developments in interrogation techniques. And we get to investigate an important phenomenon.’

‘That’s the problem of physics. It’s always been financed like this. That’s what Fermi meant when he said that regardless of what else the atom bomb might be, it was great physics.’

‘You exploited me and Laban as guinea pigs,’ I said. ‘Without our knowledge.’

‘Laban,’ I said, ‘you’ve seen me for the last time. And while that may seem harsh to you at this moment, I can assure you that in the long run you’ll be very, very happy about it indeed.’

There was a briskness in my step as I walked down the driveway. The exchange had left a pleasant taste in my mouth. I’d drawn a line, necessarily so, and put up a warning sign telling people to think again if ever they tried to erase it.

IT’S QUARTER TO ten in the morning, and the room Harald and I enter is at least 150 square metres in area and illuminated by a flood of slanting light that streams in through great, arched windows extending all the way to the floor.

I cling to my crutch. Along one wall there is a bar, some thirty children aged between nine and twelve straggled along its length: boys in black tights and white T-shirts, girls in leotards and grey leg warmers. Next to the wall is a piano, and at the piano sits a young man.

Neither the children nor the pianist pay any attention to Harald and me. Their focus is fully directed towards the woman standing over by the windows.

Above the soft tones of the piano she guides the children through the barre exercises of classical ballet. And as she speaks, gently and yet insistently, she dances.

She is sixty-five years old, and throughout those sixty-five years she has driven her constitution to its every limit, for which reason it is not in the conventional, physical sense that she dances.

But conventional is something she has never been, and dance is at heart not physical at all. Most profoundly, its movements issue from a place far deeper inside us than the physical form, and from that place inside her it flows as yet unhindered, even now, with her physique soon depleted.

We have seen it so many times before, Harald and I, and still we are transfixed, rooted to the spot by equal parts respect and fascination.

The windows face out onto Kongens Nytorv, and we are in the great practice room of the Royal Danish Ballet’s children’s school.

With a gesture she indicates that the lesson is over. The pupils and pianist applaud, darting looks of appreciative adulation in her direction as they leave the room.

Beneath the odour of perspiration and perfume that lingers in the space they leave behind is a fragrance of fresh apple, and when finally the last of her pupils has closed the door she brings the apples forth.

Peter Høeg

The Susan Effect

TRANSLATED
FROM THE DANISH
BY
Martin Aitken

CONTENTS

ALSO BY PETER HØEG

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Peter Høeg

The Susan Effect

TRANSLATEDFROM THE DANISHBYMartin Aitken

CONTENTS

ALSO BY PETER HØEG

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

TRANSLATED
FROM THE DANISH
BY
Martin Aitken