“I’ll come down,” Oleg said. “I’ve got a diving certificate. I used to be afraid of water, but…”
Another silence, and for a moment she thought the line had been broken. Then she heard a deep, shaky breath, and when he went on, it was in a voice that was fighting back tears.
“…he taught me how to swim.”
She waited. And when he spoke again, his voice was steady. “I’ll contact Sigdal Sheriff’s Office and ask if I can join the diving team. And I’ll talk to Sis.”
Katrine told him to get in touch if there was anything she could do, gave him her direct office number, then hung up. There. It was done. No reason to fight it anymore, she was alone in her own car.
She leaned her head back and burst into tears.
42
It was half past four. The last client. Erland Madsen had recently had a discussion with a psychiatrist about the conceptual boundary between a client and a patient. Was it dependent upon the professional’s own title, whether they were a psychologist or a psychiatrist? Or did the distinction run between medicated patients and non-medicated clients? As a psychologist, it sometimes felt like a disadvantage not to be able to prescribe medication when he knew exactly what his client needed but still had to refer them to a psychiatrist who knew less about post-traumatic stress disorder than he did, for instance.
Madsen clasped his hands together. He usually did that when he and the client were done with the pleasantries and were about to start what they were there for. He did it without thinking, but when he became aware of the ritual, he had done a bit of research and found a religious historian who claimed it dated back to the time when a prisoner’s hands were tied with rope, so that clasped hands came to be seen as a symbol of submission. In the Roman Empire, a defeated soldier could surrender and plead for mercy by showing his clasped hands. Christians’ prayers for mercy from an omnipotent God were presumably another aspect of the same thing. So when Erland Madsen clasped his hands together, did that mean he was subordinating himself to his client? Hardly. It was more likely that the psychologist, on behalf of his client as well as himself, was subordinating himself to the questionable authority and shifting dogma of psychology, the way priests, the weathervanes of theology, asked their congregations to cast off the eternal truths of the past in favour of those of today. But while priests clasped their hands together and said “Let us pray,” Madsen’s opening line was: “Let’s start where we left off last time.”
He waited until Roar Bohr nodded before he went on.
“Let’s talk about when you killed someone. You said you were…”—Madsen checked his notes—“a freak. Why is that?”
Bohr cleared his throat, and Madsen noted that he too had clasped his hands together. Unconscious mirroring, that was fairly common. “I realised fairly early that I was a freak,” Bohr said. “Because I wanted to kill someone so badly…”
Erland Madsen tried to keep his face neutral, and not show that he was keen to hear the rest, just that he was open, receptive, safe, non-judgemental. Not curious, not eager to hear anything sensational, not keen to hear an entertaining story. But Madsen couldn’t help but admit that he had been looking forward to this appointment, this session, this conversation. But who was to say that there couldn’t be a confluence between a key experience for the client and an entertaining story for the therapist? Yes, after thinking it through, Madsen had concluded that whatever was good for the client ought automatically to trigger curiosity in any serious psychologist who had his client’s best interests at heart. The fact that Madsen was curious depended upon the fact that these questions were important for his client, because of course he was a conscientious psychologist. And now that he had figured out which order cause and effect came in, he not only knitted his fingers, but pressed his palms together.
“I wanted to kill someone so badly,” Roar Bohr repeated. “But I couldn’t. That’s why I was a freak.”
He stopped. Madsen had to count in his head to stop himself intervening too quickly. Four, five, six.
“You couldn’t?”
“No. I thought I could, but I was wrong. In the Army there are psychologists whose job is to teach soldiers to kill. But specialist units like Special Forces don’t use them. Experience indicates that the people who apply to units like that are already so supremely motivated to kill that it would be a waste of time and money to employ psychologists. And I felt motivated. Nothing I thought or felt when we trained to kill suggested I would ever encounter any resistance. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“When did you discover that you were unable to kill another person?”
Bohr took a deep breath. “In Basra, in Iraq, during a raid with an American specialist unit. We’d used the snake tactic, had blown our way into the building where the lookouts said the shots had come from. Inside was a young girl of fourteen or fifteen. She was wearing a blue dress, her face was grey from the dust of the blast, and she was holding a Kalashnikov that was as big as she was. It was aimed at me. I tried to shoot her, but froze. I ordered my finger to pull the trigger, but it wouldn’t do it. It was as if the problem wasn’t in my head, but in my muscles. The girl started firing, but luckily she was still blinded by the dust, and the bullets hit the wall behind me. I remember feeling fragments of brick hit my back. And still I just stood there. One of the Americans shot her. Her little body fell backwards onto a sofa covered with colourful blankets, and a small table with a couple of photographs on it, they looked like her grandparents.”
He paused.
“What did that make you feel?”
“Nothing,” Bohr said. “I felt nothing for the next few years. Apart from abject panic at the thought of finding myself in the same situation and messing up again. Like I said, there was nothing wrong with my motivation. There was just something inside my head that wouldn’t work. Or was workingtoowell. So I focused on leadership instead of active duty, I thought I was better suited to that. And I was.”
“But you didn’tfeelanything?”
“No. Apart from those panic attacks. And seeing as they were the alternative to not feeling anything, it felt fine not to feel anything.”
“ ‘Comfortably Numb.’ ”
“What?”
“Sorry. Go on.”
“When I was first made aware that I was showing signs of PTSD—insomnia, irritability, rapid heart rate, lots of little things—it didn’t really bother me much. Everyone in Special Forces knew about PTSD, obviously, but even if the official version is that we take it very seriously, it wasn’t something we ever spoke about much. No one said out loud that PTSD was for weaklings, but Special Forces troops are pretty self-aware, we know perfectly well that we have higher NPY levels and all that.”
Madsen nodded. There was research that suggested the way soldiers were recruited to specialist units like Special Forces filtered out those with average or low levels of neuropeptide Y, or NPY, a neurotransmitter that lowers stress levels. Some Special Forces troops believed that this genetic disposition, together with their training and strong camaraderie, made them immune to PTSD.
“It was OK to admit you’d had a few nightmares,” Bohr said. “That proved you weren’t a complete psychopath. But apart from that I think we regarded PTSD a bit like our parents regarded smoking: as long as almost everyone had a go, it couldn’t bethatdangerous. But then it got worse…”
