The Serbian Dane (2 page)

‘Hello, Vuk, I’ve been expecting you,’ said the woman who had opened it. She was very young, with long black hair and beautiful dark eyes that seemed somehow lifeless.

‘Hello, Emma,’ he said and kissed her on the lips.

‘I was watching for you,’ she said. ‘It’s been on the news already.’

Vuk made no response.

‘About the Croatian writer,’ she went on.

‘It’s best that you know nothing.’

‘Come in, Vuk. Are you staying the night?’

‘I’ll cross the river later tonight.’

‘That’s a pity. But…he sent a message, the Commandant. He needs to speak to you as soon as possible.’

For the first time Vuk smiled. His face lit up. The tense lines seemed to melt away, and he became the boy he was beneath that stony face.

‘Come on in, Vuk. Let me wash your hair,’ Emma said, and she too smiled.

The living room was simply and tastefully furnished with a dining table and a bookcase full of hardbound books. There were pictures of the Bosnian mountains on the walls, and in one corner a lamp shed a warm light over an armchair and a small table decked with a crocheted mat. A book and some sewing lay on the table. It was a very neat feminine room. Beyond it a tiny kitchenette was visible. A pot of water steamed on the hob. A short hallway led to a bedroom containing a double bed. Over the bed hung an Orthodox crucifix.

Vuk’s eyes followed the movement of Emma’s slender legs under the thin stuff of her dress, as he took off his leather jacket and his shirt. His body was slim but muscular. A scar ran across his left shoulder: it looked like an old knife wound. Emma took one of the chairs from around the dining table and set it
on some sheets of newspaper spread out in the middle of the kitchenette’s tiled floor.

‘Sit down, Vuk,’ she said.

She picked up a ladle and poured the hot water from the pot into a bowl on the kitchen bench. She added cold water and tested it gingerly with her elbow before dipping a sponge into the warm water and wetting his black hair.

He sat with his eyes closed while she gently soaped his hair. He savoured the feel of the strong soft hands slowly massaging the soap into his scalp. The suds turned black and ran down onto the newspapers as she rinsed his hair, then lathered it again. By the third rinsing his hair was a light blond. Very carefully she dampened his moustache. He sat perfectly still. Then, with one quick tug she ripped it off, like a mother removing a plaster from a child’s knee. Vuk opened his eyes. Emma’s face was very close to his. He smiled.

‘Hello, lover,’ she said.

He kissed her.

‘Stand up,’ she said.

He stood up. Emma undid his belt and pulled down his trousers. He had closed his eyes again, merely lifted one leg, then the other. She ran her hand down the back of his boxer shorts and pulled them off too. He stood quietly with his eyes shut. Another scar from yet another knife wound undulated across his hip like a little snake. She touched it lightly, and his skin broke out in goosebumps as he recalled the pain of the Croatian’s knife. She poured the water down the sink and ladled more warm water from the pot into the bowl, before dipping the sponge into it again and slowly washing him down. She started at his shoulders and ended with his feet. He stood there naked and perfectly still. His fair skin reddened easily, and she could see that she was having an effect on his penis, but she could also sense his self-control. She wiped off the soap with a freshly rinsed sponge. Then she pulled her dress over her head and lifted a clean towel that she had left lying on the kitchen bench next to the bowl.

Vuk opened his eyes when he heard her pulling her dress over her head. He smiled, and the smile spread to his blue eyes. She dried him all over, slowly and sensually. Rubbed him down gently but firmly. Again beginning with his
face and shoulders and working her way down. When at last she softly stroked his balls, his cock rapidly swelled, she pushed him back onto the chair and settled herself on top of him.

They stayed quite still. She tipped her head back slightly. He cupped his hands around her buttocks.

‘Stay with me tonight, Vuk,’ she said.

‘I’ll stay with you.’

‘What about him?’

‘He can wait. The war’s lost anyway. The treachery has begun. One day more or less won’t make any difference.’

‘Stay tonight and keep the demons away,’ she said.

‘I’ll stay with you tonight,’ he said and held her close.

The demons would visit her anyway, he knew. They came in the mornings, in the cruel grey dawn, before the light broke through. Ghosts, skeletons, spirits and ethnic purgers. Shadows from the land of the dead that had visited her family and wiped it out in the first year of the war four years earlier, when she was only fifteen. Now they returned every night in her dreams, but the nightmares were more real to her than her waking life.

Vuk envied her. Emma could feel pain and guilt. Vuk could feel her body.

The rest was coldness.

T
hese days, when Lise Carlsen woke, it was always with the shade of some stupid dream on the fringes of her still more or less slumbering consciousness. She woke up panic-stricken, feeling somehow outside of herself. As if she were hovering over the double bed in the light of a late August morning, looking down on herself and her husband, who lay there curled up in a ball or on his back, his lips straining, as though he were struggling to say something. She never remembered her dreams. They faded as soon as she heard the sound of the radio. Music or voices. It woke her just before the news: she had no wish to wake up to death and destruction; better to start the day with pop music or the latest traffic update. For thirty-four years she had taken sleep and the waking from it for granted. As far as she could remember, at any rate. She had been such an easy baby too. Slept soundly at night and woke up cooing and smiling, content to lie there on her own for a while, playing with her fingers or toes. Or so her mum said. But this summer sleep did not come easy, and she woke up with the flat taste of unresolved dreams lingering at the back of her mind.

Lise Carlsen rolled onto her back and gazed at the ceiling while listening to the closing strains of the Take That number that was being played constantly on Radio P3 that summer. It was going to be another scorcher, she could tell. The curtain barely moved in the soft breeze. Ole groaned and turned over onto his side with his back to her. Time was when he would have slipped his hand into hers and snuggled up to her. Or she to him. Her heart sank still further at the thought that the only memory she had of their lovemaking the night before was a stickiness between her legs; there was no recollection of pleasure. They were both naked. There was nothing else for it
in this heat. She longed for rain and cool air. The hot weather generated sweat and lust and moved one to reach for the nearest body. And it didn’t really matter if one’s feelings were lying dormant. The heat craved release. It caused the hormones to run riot. She slid the duvet down to her waist, folded her hands behind her head on the damp pillow and listened to the radio that had woken her. She could not really have said why she greeted the coming of each new morning by listening to the seven o’clock news. She didn’t remember a word of it afterwards. Not until she heard it all repeated an hour later. But she derived a certain comfort from being reminded that her own troubles were as nothing compared to the horrors with which the smooth neutral tones of the newsreader brought her back to reality each morning. Maybe it was because Ole hated being woken by music and chatter. Could it be that what she was really trying to do here was to drive him out of the marriage bed? Or out of the marriage? She was a journalist, earned her own living, could buy her own clock radio,
had
bought it, plugged it in and used it. So there! Was that what she’d said? Was it perhaps also a sign of her own lack of resolve that she had turned the volume down so low that she could hardly hear it herself? It would have taken a bomb to wake Ole, so it really didn’t bother him at all. While the slightest sound could wake her. These days, at any rate, when every nerve ending seemed to have been dusted with itching powder.

There were all the usual stories: an incipient stage battle over the forthcoming budget, the never-ending war in Yugoslavia and the continuing drought. She wasn’t listening; instead she was trying to figure out why she felt so miserable and why she always seemed able to shake off this feeling once she’d had her shower. Then she heard Santanda’s name mentioned. She pictured the writer: a pleasant little woman with a round face, brown eyes and the ability to speak about difficult, life-and-death issues without making one feel uncomfortable. She didn’t catch what it was all about. Only the mention of both Sara Santanda and Iran. And the Danish foreign minister, speaking on a sluggish phone link, deploring the fact that the crucial dialogue with the clerical government in Teheran had not given the expected result. Well, she would catch the story again at eight o’clock. If it was big enough. Otherwise she would just have to wait until she got to the newsroom.

She nudged Ole and got out of bed. He sighed, but she noticed that he opened his eyes before she disappeared into the bathroom. He smelled faintly of stale alcohol.

‘Turn off that radio, for Christ’s sake,’ she heard before she shut the door.

As always, a shower helped. First the hot water then the cold. Once out in the spacious open-plan kitchen, with the light cascading through the window and the faint hum of the Østerbro morning traffic in the background, what she herself would have called her black waking thoughts disappeared. Then she no longer longed for rain and cold. They would return soon enough to Denmark, where grey seemed to be the most constant hue. She loved the warmth and sunshine. She poured water into the coffee machine, set the table, boiled eggs and sliced bread for toasting, while making up her mind yet again that she would speak to Ole about
it
. I mean, if you couldn’t talk to your husband about a little bout of the morning blues, who could you talk to? And he was a psychologist. He was paid to listen to people with serious psychological problems. Maybe that was why he was so bad at listening to her? Maybe she didn’t conform to his textbook theories? Maybe the problem was that she only ever told him half of what she was thinking and feeling.

Lise collected the newspapers from the hall. Her own paper,
Politiken,
and
Berlingske Tidende
, so that she could check out the competition’s arts pages. She opened
Politiken
straight away and found that her piece on the new gallery had been given quite a decent space under a three-column headline, but
Berlingske
Tidende
had used a picture as well. And those dummies at Rådhuspladsen wondered why circulation was dropping! She turned to the foreign news and ran a quick eye over the headlines. She would read each report in depth after she had had her breakfast, or once she got to the office. She preferred to get out of the apartment quickly at this time of day. Somehow she found it hard to concentrate here. She dumped the papers onto the big, scrubbed-oak table that dominated the kitchen-cum-living room. The coffee machine gave a little hiss. Outside a bird was singing half-heartedly.

Ole came in and kissed her on the cheek before settling himself with the main section of
Berlingske Tidende
. Once he had been a radical socialist, now he had his own practice.

‘D’you think you could switch off that radio or at least turn it down?’he said.

‘I want to hear the news. It’ll be on in a minute.’

‘Surely it can’t make any bloody difference whether you hear it now or in an hour’s time.’

‘I’m a journalist.’

‘So?’

‘So I need to know what’s going on, Ole.’

‘You can do that at work.’

‘We have this same conversation every single morning.’

‘Well, there’s a reason for everything…’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

He looked up from his paper. The two slices of bread popped out of the toaster. Instinctively she turned to take them.

‘That we seem to put all our energy into arguing about little things instead of having a serious talk about why our marriage appears to be in trouble.’

For a moment she stood there saying nothing, holding the hot slices of bread. Then they burned her fingers, and she almost threw them onto the table, wafted her fingers and said ‘Ow’. She really did not want to talk about this right now.
She
wanted to be the one to say when the time was right.

‘There’s no need to exaggerate. Are you going to tell me you didn’t have a good time last night? Just because I like listening to the radio in the morning.’

He turned back to his newspaper.

‘I’ve got a long day ahead of me,’ he said.

‘Well, didn’t you?’

‘You’ve always been hot-blooded, Lise. I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘God, you’re a hard nut.’

‘It was meant as a compliment.’

‘It didn’t sound like one,’ she said, and he looked back down at his newspaper.

‘Maybe I could book an appointment with you?’ she added. She didn’t mean to say it; it just came out.

He glanced up again. Regarded her with those wise, weary eyes that watched all the folly of mankind pass in review while his secretary wrote out the bills. Depression measured in kroner and øre. Solutions on the National Health. Help doled out in carefully measured doses. Why had she fallen for
him? He was good-looking, even if he was ten years older than her. Intelligent, articulate, a good listener, well read, an idealist, good in bed, funny, a keen traveller. Can a person change so much in eight years? Or was it her?

‘You can have all the time you want, Lise,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

‘I just want to hear the news,’ she said, placing butter and cheese on the table before picking up
Politiken
and proceeding to flick through it to see what sort of treatment her friends’ – and her enemies’ – pieces had received.

‘Good morning, Lise,’ he said, making her smile in spite of herself. And then they were able to eat in silence until she heard the jingle announcing the news, followed by the mellifluous tones of the newsreader:

Lise felt the usual sense of helplessness like a sharp pang in her stomach. How could they? How could such fanaticism exist in a modern world? How could her own government be so weak? How could they sentence a writer to death simply for writing a novel that described the way in which women in Iran were oppressed by those bloody ayatollahs? First Rushdie, now Santanda. Who would be next? The western nations had never taken the defence of Rushdie seriously. So the oppressors were left to pursue their ruthless policies. She was seething inside but couldn’t bring herself to share her thoughts with Ole. They had been through all this so many times. He listened with interest, but he had no time for politics these days. Whether on the international scale or closer to home.

She looked across at him. He was reading his
Berlingske Tidende,
absorbed in the latest Danish tittle-tattle. What had become of the dedicated campaigner whom she had married? What had happened to them over the years? Could love, desire, joy die without you being aware of it? She felt depression creeping over her again. She feared it, fought it. She was afraid that one day she might succumb and embrace it. She refused to give in to it. She had to pull herself together.

There must be some bond between them still, because he looked up as if picking up vibrations from her.

‘Is something the matter, Lise?’ he said.

‘No. It’s just this thing with Santanda. It’s so appalling.’

‘Yeah, you’re right there.’

She sighed and stood up.

‘Is that all you have to say? Didn’t you hear what they said on the news?’

He glanced over at the radio, as if only noticing it now.

‘You know I hate listening to the radio in the morning. You insist on having background noise, so I’ve learned to switch off. Block it out… I simply don’t hear what they say, or the ghastly music they play. It’s just a lot of gibberish to me. I prefer to read my paper. I can’t do two things at once.’

‘Okay.’

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘I’m off, Ole. Have a good day!’

She tried to sound sarcastic, but either he didn’t hear it or chose to ignore it.

‘You too, love,’ was all he said.

The sunshine made her feel a bit better. It had been such a long hot summer. Just one glorious day after another, and Copenhagen had sizzled and simmered like some Mediterranean harbour town. Lise loved her city as only an incomer can do. She had joined
Politiken
as a cub reporter, and they would have to carry her out of the apartment in Østerbro. She was never going to move back to a small town again or even to the suburbs. She zoomed along with her head held high on the snazzy scarlet bike with masses of gears that she had treated herself to in the spring. She was well aware that she drew a few glances. She knew that she and the bike were a good match. Not bad, she thought to herself, getting looks like that from young guys when you’re in your mid-thirties. It’s the summer weather that does it. People simply feel better when the sun shines. With every turn of the pedals her mood lightened. Her spirits rose with every flutter of her skirt. It would all work out all right. For Ole and her too. If not, then they would have to try living apart. That needn’t be such a bad thing either: a bit of a breathing space. And maybe he would discover that he couldn’t do without her. Or she him. She wasn’t going to think any more about it. But at some point they really would have to sit down and talk things through.

She took a roundabout route to Rådhuspladsen, across Fælledparken and Sankt Hans Torv, which she loved now that it had been done up. Then along the lakes. She wanted to put off having to face the mess in Rådhuspladsen. This time the council had made a real job of digging it up. They did the same thing every summer, but this year the whole square was being repaved and a hideous, new black bus terminal had been erected at one end of it. Inept politicians, rotten architects, burger joints and ugly shop fronts, exhaust fumes and litter – none of this would be allowed to kill her delight in her city. Not today anyway, with the sun shining from a clear blue sky. Oh, the Danish summer, how I love you. And this year you haven’t let me down!

‘Tagesen wants to see you right away,’ the receptionist told her as she was picking up her mail.

She stepped into the corner office. Tagesen, the paper’s editor-in-chief, turned to face her. His office was even more of a shambles than her own. Books, letters, papers and clippings scattered all over the place. He had been gazing down at the chaos and dust in Rådhuspladsen. The sound of chugging machinery and grinding car engines penetrated the windows. Tagesen had only recently taken over the corner office. Lise liked him. And so she should. He had brought her and a number of other journalists with him from his old paper. That had given rise to some muttering in corners among the old hands at
Politiken
. But Tagesen didn’t care, nor did Lise for that matter. The staff of
Politiken
were no different from journalists anywhere else in Denmark. Generally speaking, they constituted the most conservative section of the Danish workforce. They hated change, and they hated new bosses.