Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

17

There had been a time when their morning phone calls had given her a boost. Just the sound of his voice had been enough to see her through days without human contact. The thought of his embrace could see her through anything at all.

But it wasn’t like that anymore. The magic was gone.

She had promised herself she would call her mother and patch things up with her. The day had passed, and morning came without her getting around to it.

What was she supposed to say? That she was sorry they had drifted apart? That perhaps she had been wrong? That she had met another man, and that he allowed her to see things in a new light? That he filled her with words that made her unable to hear anything else? She couldn’t tell her mother any of this, that much was plain to her. But all of it was true.

The unending vacuum in which her husband had left her had now been filled.

Kenneth had been to the house more than once. He would be waiting there when Benjamin had been delivered to his day care. Always in a short-sleeved shirt and tight summer trousers, despite the vagaries of March. An eight-month tour of duty in Iraq, then ten months in Afghanistan had hardened him. The cold winter tamed a serviceman’s hankerings for comfort, he explained.

It was quite irresistible. And quite terrifying.

Over the mobile, she had heard her husband ask after Benjamin and sensed his doubt that he could have fully recovered from his cold so quickly. She had also heard him say that he loved her and was looking forward to coming home. That he might be back sooner than expected. And she didn’t believe the half of it. That was the difference now. Compared to when his words had dazzled her. Now she realized she had been blind.

She was frightened, too. Frightened of his rage, and of what he might do. If he threw her out, she would have nothing. He had made sure of that. There might be a little, but still nothing to speak of. Perhaps not even Benjamin.

There were so many words in him. Clever words. Who would ever believe her when she claimed Benjamin would be better off with her? Was she not the one leaving? Had her husband not devoted himself entirely to the family, made the sacrifice of long periods away from home in order to ensure their livelihood? She could hear them already. The local authority, the regional state administration to whom divorce applications were sent. The arbiters who would take note only of his responsible nature and her own misdeed.

She just knew.

She would call her mother later, she told herself. She would swallow all her pride, and the shame of it, and she would tell her everything. She’s my mother, she said to herself. She will help me. I’m certain she will.

And then the hours passed, and her thoughts weighed down upon her. Why did she feel like this? Was it because in the space of only a few days she had come closer to a stranger than to the man to whom she was married? For this was a fact. The things she knew about her husband were the things they shared in the few hours they were together in the house. What more did she know than that? His work, his past, the packing cases upstairs, all of it remained closed to her.

But losing her feelings for him was one thing; justifying it was quite another. Had her husband not been good to her? Was her own fleeting infatuation preventing her from seeing things rationally?

These were the thoughts that preyed on her mind. And they were the reason she once again found herself drawn to the first floor of the house, to the door behind which his packing cases were stacked. She stood, considering it. Was this the time to seek out knowledge? Was this the time to transcend the boundary? Was this the point of no return?

Yes. It was.

She dragged out the packing cases one by one and arranged them in reverse order in the corridor. When she put them back, they had to be exactly as before, properly closed and with the pile of coats on top. It was the only way she could feel in control of the project.

That was her hope.

The first dozen boxes, from the rearmost row beneath the roof window, confirmed what her husband had told her. They contained old family items handed down. The same kind of clutter her own grandmother had left behind: a jumble of documents, porcelain, cigar cutters, lace tablecloths, watches and clocks, a twelve-piece set of cutlery, woolen blankets, bric-a-brac.

The picture of a family life long gone and consigned to memory. Just as he had described to her.

The next dozen added detail that seemed only to lay a confusing veil over this picture. Here were the gilded photo frames. Scrapbooks of cuttings. Albums prompting memories of events and occurrences. All of it from his childhood, and all with the strong undertone that lies and deceit are the silent attendants of reminiscence.

Because contrary to what he had always insisted, her husband was not an only child. There was absolutely no doubt that he had a sister.

One photo showed her husband in a sailor suit, his arms folded against his chest as he stared into the camera with eyes that were sad. No more than six or seven years old. His skin soft, the thick shock of hair parted at the side. Next to him was a little girl with long plaits and an innocent smile. It might have been the first time in her life she had been photographed.

It was a fine little portrait of two vastly different children.

She turned it over and considered the three printed letters. EVA. There had been more, but they had been crossed out with a pen.

She sifted through the other photographs, turning each one over. More words obliterated.

No names, no places.

Everything scribbled out.

Why would anyone do this? It was like willing people to disappear.

How often she had sat with her mother and peered blankly at old photos of people without names?

“That’s your great-grandmother. Dagmar, she was called,” she heard her mother say, though the name was nowhere to be seen. What would happen when her mother died? Where would all the names be then? Who would know who had given life to whom, and when?

But this little girl had a name. Eva.

She was definitely her husband’s sister. The same eyes, the same mouth. In two of the photos in which they were pictured on their own together, she was gazing at her brother with admiration in her eyes. It was touching.

Eva looked like any other little girl. Fair and pure, and, with the exception of the very first photo, facing the world with a look that contained more trepidation than courage.

When brother and sister were pictured with their parents, they stood close together, as if to shield themselves from the world around them. Never touching, just standing close. Always the same tableau: children at the front, arms hanging limply at their sides; mother behind, her hands resting on the shoulders of the girl, and the father’s hands on those of the boy.

It was as if those two pairs of hands were pressing down on the children, keeping them on the ground.

She tried to understand this boy with the weary eyes who would later become her husband. It was no easy task. There was a gulf of time between them, and she sensed this now more clearly than ever before.

Eventually, she returned the photos to their boxes and opened the scrapbooks, now with the certain conviction that everything would have been better if she and her husband had never met. That in fact she had been put into this world to share her destiny with a man such as the one she had now chanced upon and who lived only five streets away. Not the man she saw in these photos.

His father had been a pastor. He had never told her, but it was plain from the photographs.

He was an unsmiling man with eyes that exuded self-importance and authority.

The eyes of his wife were different. They were empty.

In these scrapbooks, she could see why. The father dictated everything. In the parish newsletters, he thundered against ungodliness, preached inequality, and renounced those who did not conform. There were pamphlets about holding the word of God in one’s hand, releasing it only to hurl it into the face of the infidels. And all these outpourings made it clear to her that her husband’s upbringing had been very different from her own.

Too different by far.

Throughout, this hateful torrent was infused with a nasty undercurrent of nationalist sentiment, malevolent opinion, intolerance, deep-rooted conservatism, and chauvinism. Though she acknowledged that this was the work of her husband’s father and not of her husband himself, she nevertheless sensed, both now and, on reflection, in their daily life together, how the blight of the past had left within him a darkness that was assuaged only when he made love to her.

This was not what she wanted.

Something had been terribly wrong in that childhood. Whenever a name other than Eva’s occurred, it was obliterated. And always it seemed with the same pen.

Next time she went to the library, she would Google Benjamin’s grandfather. But first she needed to find out who he was. Something in these cuttings had to give her a name. And if she found a name, then she would surely be able to find some trace of this forceful and detestable man. Even in such a forgetful age as the present.

Perhaps she might even talk about it with her husband. Perhaps it might work something loose.

She moved on to a large number of shoeboxes stacked in one of the packing cases. Those at the bottom contained various items of limited interest: a Ronson lighter that worked, oddly enough, cufflinks, a letter opener and accumulated office articles, various indicators of different stages in a life.

The rest were a window on to what seemed to be a quite singular period. Cuttings, brochures, and political pamphlets. Each box revealed new fragments of her husband’s life. Together they formed a picture of a disgraced and damaged individual becoming at once a mirror image and the diametrical opposite of his father. The boy moving instinctively away from the precepts laid down in his childhood. The youngster substituting reaction with action. The man taking to the barricades in support of everything totalitarian that was not concerned with religion. Seeking out the buzz of Vesterbrogade when the anarchists gathered. The sailor suit made way for hippie coat, combat jacket, Palestinian scarf, the latter pulled up in front of his face when circumstances dictated.

He was a chameleon in control of his colors. She saw that now.

She lingered for a moment, wondering if she should put everything back and forget about what she had seen. Collected in these boxes were things he clearly did not care to remember.

Was this not a sign that he was trying to put a lid on his past? Yes, it was. Otherwise he would surely have told her everything. Otherwise all these names would not be scribbled out.

But how was she to stop now?

If she did not immerse herself in his life, she would never be able to understand him. She would never know who the father of her child really was.

And so she turned to confront the rest of his life, put away so meticulously. Filing systems in shoeboxes, shoeboxes in packing cases. Everything labeled in chronological order.

She had been expecting to find periods in which he had ended up in trouble on account of his activism, but something prompted him to change direction. As though he had settled down for a while.

Each period of his life had been given its own plastic folder marked with the appropriate months and years. One year, he had apparently studied law. Another, philosophy. For a couple of years, he had backpacked in Central America, jobbing around hotels, vineyards, slaughterhouses.

Not until he returned home did he begin to emerge as the person she thought she knew. Again, these meticulous folders. Brochures from the armed forces. Jotted notes on the army sergeant school, the military police, the commando forces. After that, all personal records and the accumulation of cherished relics terminated.

There were no names, no specifics of places or personal relationships. Only outlines of the years that had passed.

The last indicator of where he might have been headed was a small collection of printed matter in a variety of languages. Trainee programs in shipping in Belgium. The Foreign Legion recruitment pamphlet with luscious photos of southern France. Copies of application forms for business education programs.

There was no suggestion what path he eventually would choose, only of the directions in which he was thinking at this time of his life.

Somehow, it all seemed quite chaotic.

And as she returned these boxes to their places, fear welled inside her. She knew his work was secret; he had told her so. Until now, the accepted truth had been that he served in a good cause. Intelligence services, undercover police work, something like that. But why had she been so certain that this was the case? Had she any proof?

The only thing she knew was that he had never led a normal life. He was an outsider; he existed on the edge.

Now she had pored through the first thirty years of his life, and still she knew nothing.

At last, she came to the packing cases that had been stacked uppermost. She had rummaged in a few already but by no means all. Now, opening them systematically one by one and sifting through their contents, the shocking question came to her: Why, of all his boxes, had these been left so accessible?

The question was shocking because she knew the answer.

The reason they were stored on top was that her prying in them had been deemed unthinkable. It was as simple as that. What could be more indicative of the power he exerted over his wife? She had accepted without question that this was his domain, and that her presence here was prohibited.

She realized just how completely he controlled her.

She opened these boxes with trepidation and dread, her lips pressed tightly together, breathing deeply and shakily through her nose.

They were full of files. A4 binders in all colors, though their contents were as black as the night.

The first bore witness to a period in his life when he had apparently sought to atone for his ungodliness. More printed matter, this time from all sorts of religious movements, meticulously filed away in plastic pockets. Flyers that spoke of the afterlife and the eternal light of God, and how it could be attained with guarantee. The pamphlets of new religious movements and sects, all absolutely certain that they alone possessed the definitive solutions to the tribulations of man. Names such as Sathya Sai Baba, Scientology, the Mother Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, God’s Children, and the Community of the Eternal appeared alongside the Unification Church, the Fourth Way, the Divine Light Mission, and a host of others of which she had little or no knowledge. All of them claiming to be the only true path to salvation, harmony, and benevolence. The only true path, as sure as fate itself.

She shook her head. What had he been looking for, this man who had striven so hard to finally rid himself of the darkness and dogma of his childhood? As far as she was aware, none among this diversity of religious tenders had found favor in her husband’s eyes.

No, the words “God” and “religion” did not easily find their way into their redbrick home in the mighty shadow of Roskilde Cathedral.

After she’d collected Benjamin from the day care and played with him for a time, she put him down in front of the television. As long as there were bright colors and the picture moved, he was happy.

She went upstairs and then wondered again if she ought to stop, put the remainder of the packing cases back without opening them, and leave her husband’s tortured life alone.

Twenty minutes later, she was grateful not to have followed this impulse. Grateful, but scared. In fact, such was the extent of her distress that she now found herself seriously considering whether to pack a bag with some essentials, take the housekeeping money from the tin, and get on the first available train.

She had known that the last of the boxes might contain things that concerned the present period of his life, the one involving their marriage. But she was aghast to discover herself to be a project in her own right, the subject of one of his files.

He had told her that he had fallen head over heels in love with her the first time they had spoken. She had felt the same way. Now she knew that to be a deception.

How could their first encounter in that café have occurred by chance when here in his binder were cuttings from the show-jumping competition at Bernstorffsparken where she had won a place on the podium for the very first time? Months before they ever met. Where had he found these cuttings? Wouldn’t he have shown them to her if he had got hold of them at some later date? Not only that, but he also had programs from competitions she had taken part in long before that one. He even had photos of her taken in places she knew they had never been together. He had been keeping her under surveillance right up to the time of their first meeting.

He had been waiting for the right moment at which to strike. She had been selected, and the fact was anything but flattering in view of how everything had panned out since.

The thought made her shudder.

She shuddered again when she opened a wooden filing box from the same packing case. At first glance, there was nothing special about it. Just a box containing lists of names and addresses unfamiliar to her. But on closer inspection of these papers she started to feel uneasy.

Why was this information so important to her husband? She was in the dark.

For each name on the list, a page of systematically ordered data was attached concerning the person in question as well as their family. First the religion they subscribed to. Then their status within their church community, followed by length of membership. More personal details followed, especially concerning children: names and ages and, most disturbingly, more intimate observations such as Willers Schou, 15 yrs. Not his mother’s favorite, but father extremely attached to him. Headstrong. Participation in church meetings erratic. Suffered colds most of the winter, twice confined to bed.

What did her husband want with such information? And how did the listed incomes of these families concern him? Was he some sort of a spy working for the social authorities? Had he been selected to infiltrate religious sects in Denmark to uncover incest, violence, and other atrocities?

The uncertainty of it preyed horribly on her mind.

Seemingly, his work took him all over the country, so he would hardly be in the employment of any local authority. Yet neither did it seem likely that he was in the service of any government agency. Would data like this be kept in packing cases at home?

What, then? Private investigator? Was he on the payroll of some wealthy individual, charged with digging up dirt on religious communities?

Maybe.

Her uncertainty was compounded when she came to a document at the bottom, on which, beneath the details concerning the family, were printed the words: 1.2 million. No irregularities.

She sat for a while with this piece of paper in her lap. As in the other cases, the information it contained concerned a family with a relatively large number of children and that was associated with a religious sect. This particular document was no different from the others apart from this last line and one additional detail: one of the children’s names had been ticked. A sixteen-year-old boy about whom it was stated that he was loved by one and all.

Why had his name been ticked? Because he was loved?

She chewed on her lip and felt utterly lacking in ideas and initiative. All she knew was that everything inside her was screaming for her to get away. But was it the right thing to do?

Maybe this could give her leverage? Maybe it was how she could make sure Benjamin stayed with her. But as yet, she had no notion how.

She put the final two packing cases back inside the room. They contained nothing of consequence, only a few odd things of his they had found no use for.

Finally, she laid the coats carefully in place on top. The only sign of her indiscretion now was the indentation in the lid of one of the packing cases from when she had been looking for the phone charger, and even that was barely visible.

He won’t notice, she told herself.

And then the doorbell rang.

Kenneth stood in the dwindling dusk with a gleam in his eye. As they had agreed, he held in his hand a crumpled edition of the day’s paper, just as he had done the day before, ready to inquire as to whether their copy had arrived today. Prepared to deliver some spin about having found it in the road outside and how newspaper boys didn’t seem to care less these days. All just in case her face signaled alarm when she opened the door, or if, against all expectations, her husband should answer.

This time she had no idea what expression to wear.

“Come in, but only for a minute,” she said.

She glanced out across the road. It was getting dark now, and all was quiet.

“What’s up? Is he on his way home?” Kenneth asked.

“No, I don’t think so. He would have called.”

“What, then? Are you not feeling well?”

“No.” She chewed her lip again. What good would it do to involve him in all this? Wasn’t it best to leave him out of her life for a while so that he wouldn’t get mixed up in what was bound to come? Who would be able to prove any relationship between them if they broke off contact for a time?

She nodded to herself. “No, Kenneth, I’m not quite myself at the moment.”

He remained silent, scrutinizing her. The keen eyes beneath his blond eyebrows were skilled in detecting danger. They had registered immediately that something was amiss. They had observed that whatever it was might impact on the feelings he no longer wished to keep in check. His defense instinct was awakened.

“Tell me what’s wrong, Mia. Please tell me.”

She pulled him away from the door of the living room where Benjamin sat happily in front of the television as only small children can. It was on little Benjamin she needed to concentrate her resources.

She would have turned to face him and told him there was nothing to worry about, but that she would have to go away for a while.

But at that same moment the headlights of her husband’s Mercedes dissected the dusk in the driveway outside.

“You’ve got to go, Kenneth. Back door. Now!”

“Can’t we-”

“NOW, Kenneth!”

“OK, but my bike’s in the drive. What do you want me to do?”

Perspiration seeped from her armpits. Should she run away with him now? Just walk out through the door with Benjamin in her arms? No, she couldn’t do it. She was too scared.

“I’ll make something up. Just go! Through the kitchen, so Benjamin won’t see!”

And then he was out, milliseconds before the key rasped in the lock and the front door opened.

She was sitting on the floor in front of the television with her legs out to the side, her arms around her son in a tight embrace.

“There you are, Benjamin,” she said. “Daddy’s here. Now we’ll have lots of fun, won’t we?”