The ad filled half a newspaper page. It was in full color and had been expensive.
At the top was a photograph of an eight-year-old boy. The grainy quality and the boy’s long, blond hair, which grew past his ears, indicated that he had been captured for posterity in the seventies or eighties. Apart from that there was nothing special about him. He was smiling self-consciously into the camera and it was not hard to imagine that he wished the picture taking would be over soon so that he could get out and play soccer. At the very bottom of the ad was another portrait, this time of a presentable man in his midthirties who stared straight at the reader. His gaze was steady and decisive, his expression serious, except for the smile, but also angry. It was tempting to compare the two faces, but for the trained gaze there was not much of a likeness.
The text between the two pictures was in an old-fashioned-typewriter font that emphasized the raw and immediate message. Four short paragraphs written in the first person declared that the boy had been sexually abused. That those who should have been his protectors had failed him and that the man had always felt shame and kept his childhood story secret. Until now. The final paragraph was made up of a series of questions: How many children are growing up like this? How many children in Denmark will be raped this evening? Ten? One hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? What is your guess? Or don’t you care?
At the Roskildevej County secondary school, class 3Y was reading the notice. One of the students in the class had passed around a photocopy of it as a precursor to something she wanted to tell. Now she was standing next to the teacher’s desk and waiting patiently while the teacher sat on a chair in the corner of the room. The girl was one of his star students and it had not taken many pretty smiles to persuade him to let her have the first ten minutes of the lesson for her own purposes. Apart from being clever, she was also unusually attractive, and he looked her up and down stealthily with a gaze that contained more than pedagogical interest.
When everyone was done reading, the girl told them calmly about her childhood. Without hatred or pathos. She was gripping, and never before had 3Y been so quiet. Each word soared, every sentence perfectly formed, and she affected them like no one before her had done, with a story that could coax tears from a stone. Her issue. Their issue. Everyone’s issue. Every one of them felt it—for the first time in his or her life.
What none of them knew was that the girl had spent a long time preparing her speech. She had known that the notice would one day appear, and that she would then stand ready with her own story. Many, many times she had stood in front of the mirror and rehearsed until everything had been perfected: her tone, phrasing, the lump in her throat, the spontaneous blush—even the curl of hair that accidentally fell over one eye at a certain moment. Inside she felt nothing except a glowing vanity at living up to her role as fire starter. Even though she knew that this was only the rehearsal and that a bigger scene was waiting for her.
She was done in ten minutes. She ended her speech with a tear glittering in the corner of her eye, pleading with her classmates to help her spread her story. Just like the man in the ad, apart from the fact that she could not afford expensive media interventions. Seconds later, her request had been fulfilled as her classmates’ thumbs hammered like drumsticks over their cell phone keys and sent her story into circulation. Two friends who were gifted in practical matters talked briefly and found that they were on the same page. The shopping trip was canceled. The diesel pants could wait. Without further ado, they piled money on the desk, as a way of speaking for the less affluent. And others also consulted their wallets.
And the spark caught. Like a fire in a haystack, the confessional narrative spread among Danish secondary-school students.
CHAPTER 30
Konrad Simonsen was looking at Helmer Hammer’s house. It was a pretty villa in its original condition with tall mahogany paneling and ornate crown moldings. The floors had been sanded smooth and polished white with pipe clay. He peered out the window until he caught sight of a jogger his own size making his way around the lake, which gave him a bad conscience. He left the window and inspected the pictures on the opposite wall. They were four original lithographs of Hans Scherfig’s naivistic elephants. They were striking and fit very well into the decor.
“You know, of course, that he was a communist?”