Redemption aka A Conspiracy of Faith

20

When he and Eva were children, they had inhabited another world. Their father closing the door of his study gave them peace. They could be in their rooms and let God take care of Himself.

But there were other times, too, in the obligatory Bible study lessons or during worship amid the outstretched hands, the cries of joy, the grown-ups in transports of ecstasy, when they turned their gaze inwards and retreated to their own reality.

They each had their own ways. Eva stole glances at the women’s shoes and dresses and preened herself. Ran the pleats of her skirt between her fingers until they were crisp and neat. She was a princess inside. Free from strict looks and harsh words. Or else she was a fairy with gossamer wings that even the slightest breath of air could lift above the gray reality and imperatives of their home.

And there she hummed to herself. Hummed with glee in her eyes, her feet shuffling on the spot, their parents convinced that she was safely in the hands of God and that these fussy movements were her own form of praise.

But he knew better. Eva dreamed of shoes and dresses, and a world of adoring mirrors and loving words. He was her brother. He knew.

He himself dreamed of a world full of people who could laugh.

In the place where they were, no one ever laughed. Laughter lines in faces were something he saw in the town, and he found them displeasing. His life was without laughter. Without joy. Not since he was five years old, when his father had told them about a pastor of the Church of Denmark whom he had frightened away from his church amid curses and oaths, had he heard him laugh. And for that reason it took years for his soul to grasp that laughter could be something other than taking pleasure in hurting another person.

When finally he discovered that, he became deaf to his father’s taunts and admonitions and learned to be on his guard.

He kept secrets that could make him happy, but they were also dangerous. Underneath his bed, in the farthest corner, underneath the mount board of a stuffed weasel, lay his treasures. Weekly magazines-The Home and The Family Journal-with the most marvelous illustrations and stories. Mail-order catalogs from Daells Varehus in Copenhagen, with photographs of women almost without clothes on, staring out at him from the page and smiling. And comic books, too, so insane they made him hoot with laughter: Humor Half-hour, Daffy, Donald Duck. Magazines that tickled and challenged the senses, but which demanded nothing in return. He found them in the dustbins of the neighbors when he crept out of his window after dark.

And he would lie beneath his duvet in the night and chuckle without a sound.

It was during this period of his life that he learned to pull the doors ajar, so he knew where everyone was inside the house. He learned to wait for an opening so that he might bring his trophies back home without risk of being caught.

He learned to listen like a bat on the hunt.

No more than two minutes passed from the moment he left his wife downstairs until he saw her sneak out through the patio door with the child in her arms. As he had expected.

She wasn’t stupid. Young and naive and easy to read, perhaps, but not stupid. She knew he was on to something, and so she was scared. He saw it clearly in her face, heard it in the tone of her voice.

And now she was trying to escape.

As soon as she spotted an opening, she would react. It was only a matter of time, he had known that. That was why he stood now at the window upstairs, tramping his feet on the wooden floor so she’d know she could get away, stopping only when she was almost at the hedge.

It was so easy to make certain of her. He felt a wrench inside him, though he had long since grown accustomed to the faithlessness of others.

He looked down at the woman and the child. A life was about to close. In a moment, they would be gone.

The hedge had grown thick. He waited for a moment before descending the stairs in two bounds and following her out into the garden.

So conspicuous she was, this young, beautiful woman in her red dress with the child in her arms. It would be a simple matter to follow her from a distance, though she was already down the road by the time he squeezed through the hedge.

At the main road, she turned the corner, passed a single side street, then slipped back into the peaceful residential area once more.

It was a move he had not expected.

“Stupid woman,” he muttered to himself. “Are you making a cuckold out of me on my own turf?”

The summer he turned eleven, his father’s congregation erected a hired marquee on the town common when it was time for the annual fair. “If those godless socialists can do it,” he declared, “the free churches can, too.”

They labored all morning to make it ready. It was heavy work, but there were other children, too, bullied into lending a hand. And when they were finished putting down the floor, his father patted all the other children on the head.

His own children received no thanks and were instead deployed to put out the folding chairs.

There were a lot.

The fair opened. Four golden halos shone above the entrance of the marquee, and a guiding star swung from the center pole. Embrace The Lord-Let Him In implored a banner that ran along the side.

And they were there, in numbers, his father’s flock, and they praised the good work that had been done. But despite all the colored leaflets he and Eva ran around handing out to people, not a single outsider came.

His father’s anger and frustration was taken out on his mother when no one was around to see.

“You brats get out there again,” he hissed. “And do things properly this time.”

They lost each other by the stalls at the edge of the fair. Eva dallied over some rabbits that were on show, and he went on alone. It was the only way he could help their mother.

He held out his leaflets with beseeching eyes, ignored by everyone. If only they would take some, perhaps she might not be beaten when they got home. Then she might not cry all through the night.

He scouted around for a kind face, for someone who might share their fear of God. He listened out for a voice as mild and gentle as Jesus preaching.

That was when he heard children laughing. Not the way he had heard before, passing a playground, or on a television seen in the window of the electrical shop. These children were laughing as though their vocal cords would snap, and no one could resist their appeal. They laughed as he had never laughed at home beneath his duvet, and the sound of it drew him on.

The voice inside him could whisper for all its might about anger and repentance. He was simply unable to walk past and ignore the sounds he heard.

A small crowd had gathered in front of a stall, grown-ups and children together. On a banner of white linen, a child had written GREAT VIDIO FILMS HALF PRIZE ONLY TODAY, and on a makeshift table of planks was the smallest television set he had ever seen.

The children were laughing at the flickering monochrome images running across the tiny screen, and he soon found himself laughing with them. Laughing until it hurt inside, right down in the pit of his belly and in the part of his soul that was only now allowed to flourish.

“No one compares to Chaplin,” one of the grown-ups said.

And everyone laughed at the little man as he boxed and danced his pirouettes on the screen. They howled when he twirled his cane and lifted his bowler hat, and when he pulled faces at the fat ladies and the men with blacking around their eyes. And he laughed, too, and the cramp in his belly and all that was delightful and unsuppressed and unexpected overwhelmed him, and no one slapped his neck or took the slightest notice of him because of it.

This experience would, in its own singular way, change his life, and that of a great many others besides.

His wife did not look back. In fact, she didn’t see much at all, her legs propelling her and the child forward along the pavement as though invisible forces determined her route and speed.

And when someone becomes removed from reality in this way, the slightest little thing will often be enough to trigger catastrophe.

A nut loosening from the wing of an airplane. A drop of water short-circuiting the relay of a respirator.

He saw the pigeon settle in the tree above his wife and son as they were about to cross the road, and he noted its excrement splattering into ghostly fingers on the pavement. He saw his son point to it and his wife look down. And at the very moment they stepped out into the road, a car turned the corner and seemed almost to target them.

He could have shouted out. He could have yelled or whistled to warn them. But he did nothing. It wasn’t the moment. Emotion didn’t kick in.

The brakes of the car squealed, the driver behind the windscreen yanked at the steering wheel, and the world stood still.

He saw the frightened faces of his child and his wife turn in slow motion. The vehicle skidded and careered to the side, leaving tire marks on the road behind it like charcoal on drawing paper. And then it straightened out, the rear end found purchase again, and it was over.

His wife remained transfixed in the gutter as the car hurtled past, and he himself stood as though paralyzed, arms hanging limply at his side. Feelings of tenderness struggled against an odd rush of excitement inside him. He recognized it from the first time he had killed a person. It was a feeling he did not welcome.

He allowed the air compressed inside his lungs to escape and felt a warmth spread through his body. And he remained standing there just a moment too long, because Benjamin caught sight of him as he turned his head and clutched at his mother. He had clearly been given a fright by her reaction. But the sight of his father put him at ease again: he waved his arms and chuckled.

And then she turned around and saw him, and the look of terror from seconds before became fixed.

Five minutes later, she was sitting in front of him in the living room, her head turned away. “You’re coming home now without a fight,” he had said. “Because if you don’t, you’ll never see our son again.”

And now her eyes were full of hatred and recalcitrance.

If he wanted to know where she had been going, he would have to force it out of her.

These were rare and joyful moments he and his sister spent together.

If he started in the right place in the bedroom, he could walk ten short paces before reaching the mirror. His feet splayed out, his head rocking from side to side, the cane twirling in his hand. Ten paces, and he was someone else in the world of the mirror. No longer the boy without a friend. No longer the son of the man the people of that small community held in such esteem. No longer the chosen one of the flock who was to carry the weight of the word of God and turn it like a thunderbolt upon the people. He was the little tramp who made everyone laugh, not least himself.

“I’m Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin,” he said, and wriggled his lip beneath the imaginary mustache, and Eva almost fell off their parents’ bed laughing. She had reacted in exactly the same way the other times he had put on his act, but this time would be the last.

After that, she never laughed again.

A second later, he felt the prod on his shoulder. The touch of an index finger was all it took for his breathing to cease and his mouth to turn dry. As he turned, his father’s fist was already on its way toward his abdomen. His eyes were wild with anger beneath bushy eyebrows. There was no sound but the sound of the blow and the ones that followed.

He felt a burning sensation in his colon as gastric acid welled in his throat. He staggered backward, then stood still and looked his father defiantly in the eye.

“So the name’s Chaplin, is it?” his father spat, glaring at him with the same look he employed on Good Friday when recounting the weary path of the Lord Jesus on his way to Calvary. All the grief and suffering of the world lay upon his willing shoulders. Of that there was no doubt, not even for a child.

And then he struck again. This time a lunging haymaker of a punch, for otherwise he would not have been able to reach, and no defiant child would ever have the pleasure of forcing him to step forward so that he might deliver his punishment.

“Who put such ungodliness into your head?”

He looked down at his father’s feet. From now on, he would answer questions only when it suited him. His father could beat him as often as he wished, but he would not answer.

“Answer me, or I shall be forced to punish you!”

He was dragged by the ear back into his own room and hurled onto the bed. “You stay here until we come for you, do you understand?”

This question, too, he ignored. His father stood for a moment with a look of puzzlement in his eyes, his lips parted as though this child’s defiance marked Judgment Day itself and the coming of the all-consuming Flood. And then he composed himself.

“Gather your things together and put them outside,” he commanded.

At first he didn’t grasp what his father meant, though his intention would soon become plain.

“Leave your clothes, your shoes, and your bedding. Put everything else outside.”

He removed the child from his wife’s gaze and left her sitting alone with the slats of pale light the Venetian blinds laid across her face.

Without the child, she would be going nowhere. He knew that.

“He’s asleep now,” he said when he returned from upstairs. “Now tell me, what’s going on?”

“You want to know what’s going on?” She turned her head deliberately. “Shouldn’t I be the one asking that question?” she replied with darkness in her eyes. “What do you do for a living, exactly? Where do you get all that money from? Is it crime? Do you blackmail people?”

“Blackmail? What makes you think that?”

She turned away from him again. “It makes no difference. I want you to let me and Benjamin go. I don’t want to stay here any longer.”

He frowned. She was asking questions. She was making demands. Was there something he had overlooked in all this?

“I’m asking you, what makes you think that?”

She gave a shrug. “What doesn’t? You’re always away. You never tell me anything. You’ve got boxes piled up in a room like a shrine. You lie about your family. You…”

It wasn’t because he interrupted her. She stopped of her own accord. Stared down at the floor, unable to retrieve the words that should never have passed her lips. Scuppered by her own overweening confidence.

“So you’ve been through my boxes?” he asked calmly, though the realization seared his flesh as though he were on fire.

She knew things about him, things she wasn’t supposed to know.

If he didn’t get rid of her now, he would be done for.

His father looked on as he gathered his belongings in a pile outside his room. Old toys, books by Ingvald Lieberkind with animal pictures in them, odds and ends he had collected. A good stick to scratch his back with, a jar full of crab’s claws, fossilized sea urchins and belemnites. He put everything into the pile. And when he had finished, his father pulled his bed away from the wall and tipped it onto its side. And there lay all his secrets beneath the moth-eaten mounted weasel. The weeklies, the comic books, and all his hours of carefree pleasure.

His father surveyed them briefly. Then he gathered them together in a stack and began to count, wetting his finger occasionally to facilitate the process. Each magazine was a voice of dissent, each voice one lash of the belt.

“Twenty-four. I won’t ask where you got them from, Chaplin, because I don’t care. Now you will turn your back to me and I shall lash you twenty-four times. And when we’re done, I wish never to see such filth in my house ever again, do you understand?”

He did not reply. He simply stared at the pile in front of him and bade farewell to each and every one of his magazines.

“Failure to reply. That doubles the punishment. Perhaps it might teach you a lesson.”

It never did. Despite the weals all down his back and the bloom of bruises at his neck, he uttered not a word before his father again fastened his belt. Not a whimper.

The hardest part was not to burst into tears ten minutes later when he was ordered to set fire to his possessions in the yard outside the house.

That was what really hurt.

She cowered in front of the packing cases. Her husband had spoken as he dragged her up the stairs, an incessant flow of words, but she was saying nothing. Nothing at all.

“We need to get two things straight,” he said. “Give me your phone.”

She took it out of her pocket, safe in the knowledge that it would provide him with no answers. Kenneth had shown her how to delete calls.

He pressed some keys and studied the display, only to find nothing incriminating. She was glad that she had outwitted him. What would he do now with all his suspicions?

“You’ve learned to delete your calls, haven’t you?”

She did not reply, but twisted the phone from his hand and returned it to her back pocket.

And then he gestured toward the small room in which his packing cases were stacked. “Very neatly done, I must say.”

She breathed rather more easily now. He would find nothing here to give her away. Eventually, he would have to let her go.

“But not quite good enough, I’m afraid.”

She blinked twice as she scanned the room. Weren’t the coats put back in place? Was the dent in that one case really noticeable?

“Look at the marks here.” He bent down and pointed. On the front edge of one of the cases a small notch had been made. And one exactly the same on another. Almost aligned, but not quite.

“When you remove boxes like these and then restack them, they’ll settle in a different way.” And then he indicated two more notches that weren’t aligned. “You took the boxes out and put them back again. I can see that you did. And now you’re going to tell me what you found inside them, do you understand?”

She shook her head. “You’re insane. They’re just cardboard boxes, why should they interest me? They’ve been there ever since we moved in. They’ve just settled some more, that’s all.”

It was a clever move, she thought to herself. A neat explanation.

But he shook his head. Not neat enough.

“OK, so let’s check, shall we?” he said, pushing her back against the wall. Stay there or else, his frigid eyes told her.

She glanced about the landing as he began to remove the first of the boxes. There wasn’t much for her to make use of in the narrow space: a stool by the door of their bedroom, a vase on the windowsill, the floor polisher against the sloping wall.

If she could deliver a clean blow to his neck with the stool, then perhaps…

She swallowed and clenched her fists. How hard was hard enough?

And as she stood there, her husband backed out of the doorway and dropped a packing case at her feet with a thud.

“Right, let’s have a look, shall we? In a moment, we’ll know for sure if you’ve been poking your nose in.”

She stared as he opened the lid. It was one from the front, almost in the middle. Two cardboard flaps revealed the burial chamber of his innermost secrets. The cutting of her at the show-jumping competition in Bernstorffsparken. The wooden filing box with the many addresses and information on all those families and their children. He had known exactly where it was.

She closed her eyes and tried to breathe calmly. If there was a God, then He would have to help her now.

“I really don’t see what all this is about. What have all those papers got to do with me?” she said.

He planted one knee on the floor, took out the first pile of cuttings, and put it to one side. He didn’t want to risk her seeing the cutting about herself in case he was unable to prove her guilt.

She had worked him out.

Then, carefully, he took out the filing box. He didn’t even need to open it. Just lowered his head and said in the softest of voices: “Why couldn’t you leave my things alone?”

What had he seen? What had she overlooked?

She stared down at his spine, glanced at the stool and then again at his spine.

What was it about, the information in that wooden box? Why did he clench his fist so that his knuckles showed white?

She drew her hand to her throat and felt her jugular throbbing.

He turned toward her, his eyes narrowed to slits. A terrifying glare. His contempt so ferocious it almost prevented her from breathing.

The stool was three meters away.

“I haven’t touched any of it,” she said. “What makes you think I have?”

“I don’t think. I know.”

She moved slightly in the direction of the stool. He didn’t react.

“Look!” He turned the front of the wooden box toward her. She didn’t know what she was supposed to see.

“What?” she asked. “There’s nothing there.”

When snow falls as sleet, you can see its flakes evaporate in their descent toward the ground, their beauty absorbed back into the air whence it came, their magic gone.

She felt exactly like such a snowflake as he lunged at her legs and swept them from underneath her. Falling, she saw her life disintegrate and everything she had ever known turn to dust. She never felt the crack of her head against the floor, only that she was locked in his grip.

“Exactly! There’s nothing there. But there should have been,” he snarled.

She felt the blood trickle from her temple, but it didn’t hurt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she heard herself say.

“There was a thread on the lid.” He thrust his face into hers. “And now it’s gone.”

“Let go of me. Let me get up. Couldn’t it have fallen off by itself? When did you last rummage around in those packing cases? Four years ago? All sorts of things can happen in four years!” And then she mustered all the air in her lungs and screamed as loud as she could: “LET GO OF ME!”

But he didn’t.

She watched the distance between herself and the stool increase as he dragged her into the room with all the boxes. She saw the trail of blood she left behind on the floor. She heard his oaths and his grunts as he held her down with his foot against her spine.

She wanted to scream again, but she couldn’t find the breath.

And then he raised his foot, took hold of her roughly, and threw her into the middle of the floor. And there she lay, helpless and bleeding in the valley of cardboard.

Maybe she could have reacted, but what happened next took her completely by surprise.

She registered only his legs stepping quickly to one side and the packing case as it was raised high above her.

And then he slammed it down hard against her rib cage.

For a moment, all air left her. But instinctively she twisted her body slightly onto her side and drew one leg up on top of the other. Then the second case descended, forcing her lower arm against her ribs and rendering all further movement impossible. And then, finally, a third on top.

Three full packing cases, weighing all too much.

She could see the landing beyond her feet, but then he closed off the space with another stack of boxes on top of her lower legs, and then another up against the door.

As he did so, he said nothing. Neither did he speak when he slammed the door shut, trapping her tight.

It was done so quickly that there had been no time to shout for help. But if she had shouted, who would have come to her aid?

She wondered if he would simply leave her there. Her chest felt immobile, and she was breathing from her abdomen now. All she could see in the remaining chinks of light from the skylight above her were brown surfaces of cardboard.

When finally darkness came, the phone in her back pocket rang.

Chimed until it stopped.