The Dinosaur Feather

him, he reacted with surprising equanimity. He seemed puzzled more than anything. He kept saying: I thought you didn’t know who my dad was? As if it wouldn’t sink in that I had lied. Afterwards, we shared a take away and watched a movie. When he went home, he seemed pensive rather than angry. Three days later, he called to say he didn’t want to see me for a while. Then he hung up. Asger had never rebelled, not even as a teenager. He has always been my silly little boy. I was shocked when he put the phone down on me. I called him back, but he didn’t answer. I went to bed. I wanted to sleep on it, not compound the damage by acting in haste. After three weeks I called him. Yes, he was fine. What day was it? Really? He sounded surprised. He responded to everything I said as though he had had a lobotomy. I invited him to dinner, I asked if we should go away this Whitsun but he said no, we wouldn’t be seeing each other. Goodbye. And so it went on. I told myself everything was all right. He was twenty-seven years old and he had the right to create some space between him and his mother. Only I desperately wanted to talk to him, to explain to him once more why I had kept Lars a secret. I wrote him a long letter, begging for his forgiveness. I wrote that I had been nineteen years old when I had slept with my tutor, that I knew nothing and that today I would never have made the choices I did then. I heard nothing, not even on my birthday in July which Asgeralways used to make a big deal of. Not so much as a postcard.’ The tears rolled down Professor Moritzen’s cheeks.
    ‘He didn’t react to anything. To my letters or my calls. He had quite simply dropped me. Last August I started therapy. It was mainly about my relationship with Asger, about my role in his life. My therapist told me to write another letter to Asger, that he definitely read them, that they made a difference even if he didn’t respond. In the letter I was to assure him that I would be there when he was ready. That I loved him and I looked forward to seeing him again. But not until he was ready. That was important, the therapist stressed. He had begun an emancipation process, she said, and I was to leave him alone. Respect him. The therapist insisted it was about time, too.’ She looked embarrassed. ‘So that’s what I did. Wrote a letter, which the therapist read and approved before I sent it to Asger. Then I waited. I heard nothing, but the therapist comforted me. It was quite normal. The longer the period after puberty when emancipation ought to have taken place, the harder it was. She prepared me that it might be years. So I was so happy when he suddenly called last Thursday.’ Professor Moritzen looked earnestly at Søren. ‘I swear it never occurred to me that Asger might be implicated in Lars’s death. I had speculated like crazy whether the parasite might have come from our stock, but in consultation with my colleagues, I concluded that it couldn’t possibly be one of ours. We hadn’t been broken into, nothing had been touched, nothing had been taken. Last Thursday, Asger told me he had watched me through the window. His plan was to make it look like I had infected Helland with tapeworm. We should both be punished, he said. He even foundthe prospect amusing. He knew tapeworms weren’t dangerous, but they frequently aren’t discovered until they’re several metres long and fill most of the intestines. He thought his plan was brilliantly disgusting. He imagined how the tapeworm would grow and take up more and more space, just like Helland and I had gradually taken over his life.
    ‘He also told me he had threatened Helland. Sent him some e-mails in English from an untraceable address. Helland was completely indifferent; he didn’t even take them seriously. He had replied to a couple of them, Asger told me, though he obviously didn’t know to whom he was replying, and he seemed to find the threats amusing. Asger was crushed,’ she said softly.
    ‘Asger heard about Helland’s death on the radio and got very scared. Last Wednesday he visited the institute. It took less than fifteen minutes to catch up on all the gossip. Helland had been riddled with cysticerci. Asger panicked and went home where he spent the next twenty-four hours thinking it over. He couldn’t make sense of it. He called me Thursday night. His voice was small and timid. At first, I couldn’t understand why, after months of silence, he’d called me to talk