Borderliners (4 page)

Eighteen months later she was dead. She had refused to
take pills.
Said
that they took the edge off, that, instead, one should turn upon
the pain the light of awareness.

Katarina
had started to walk back and forth in front of the windows. She may have meant
to tell me about her father, too, but no
longer
felt up to it.

"I saw them both afterward," she said,
"there was only six
months between
them. It was not them. It was them, but there was
no more life in them. That was gone. It isn't something you nor
mally think about, that there is life in a person.
But when you know
them
and how they ought to be, then you understand
something. That life cannot just go away. That it must have gone somewhere. So
I formed a hypothesis."

She walked over to me.

"She tried to stretch the seconds by sort of
staring at them. And
he
tried, afterward, to shorten them, to make them pass more
quickly. They cannot have been
living in the same time. They must
each have had their own, different from the one that the
rest of the world went by. Afterward, time became different for me, too. Often
I thought: Now things are as bad as they can get, and
will stay that way forever.
Like you wrote: 'Moments that
become like an eter
nity.'
When I saw them lying there, I knew it. That
there is not just one time, that there must be different sorts of time, all
existing at once."

She was now talking so quietly
that I had to lean forward. It was
not out of fear—I think she had forgotten how close we
were to
the staff room—it was because
this was so important to her that it
was hard
to say.

"I want to study it scientifically," she
said. "We're going to try
to touch time."

To
touch time.
That, I suppose, is what life for me has been about
since then.

This is the laboratory. It is next to the bedroom, where the child and
the woman are sleeping. I am afraid.

Once I thought what I feared was that something would separate
me from the child. But it is not that. What I am
afraid of is that
the world and the
child will never be part of each other; I
mean,
that the child will die.
Or the
world.
I would do anything, no matter
what, to avoid that.

That sounds so totally
inadequate. But I cannot put it any better.

The fear for oneself, that one can do something about.
Upon it
one can turn
the light of awareness. But when one is no longer worrying about oneself, then
the fear comes for other people and,
after that, for the world.

There
are no fearless people, only fearless moments.
Like those
here in the laboratory.
During and after the work there is a kind of
peace.

Katarina would have told me about her father, too, but she did not
get the chance.

We must both have missed hearing the bell, and this time
word
had gone out to
look for us.

It was
Fredhøj
who
came. He remained standing for a while in the doorway, absolutely still, and
looked at us. Then he stepped aside and we walked out.

      
B
iehl's Academy had a good name. It had always
been said that the school set a
high academic standard.
• Even so, now and again, they took in the odd backward pupil w
ho, for example, required
special tuition. In due course, these pu
pils were raised up to the same standard as the rest.

This was common
knowledge,
it was part of the thinking behind
the school.

In recent years they had, moreover, taken in pupils for
whom
special
circumstances came into play. For this there was no explana
tion.

That was how I got
in.
And August, too.

He started on October 3. By that time Katarina and I had, as a
precautionary measure, not spoken for one week and
two days.

I saw him in the
morning, in first period, at Biehl's office. I had
been summoned. Biehl was there,
and
Fredhøj
and Flakkedam. Au
gust was standing in front of
Flakkedam. He was a head shorter
than me.
"This
is August," said Biehl.

Then Flakkedam
ushered him out.

Biehl was holding
his file.

"He has had an accident," he said,
"since which he has trouble
remembering
things. He will be in your class. You will sit next to
him."

Something was
afoot, their faces were very aware.

"He lost his father," said Biehl, "his
mother is still in the hospital.
It is not to be spoken of."

Just as I was
going out of the door, he put the file back.

You knew that the files existed, and that there was one for each
pupil. But you did not know where
they were kept, nor would I have known now, but you could not help but see it.

A
wooden chest, with the school crest carved on its lid—Hugin
and Munin, Odin's ravens. Each morning they fly
out from Valhalla
and in the evening return to perch on Odin's shoulders
and whisper
in his ears of all that they have
seen.

The open lid of the chest was facing me as I stepped
through the
doorway. You could not help
but notice that it had only a straight
forward
three- or four-tumbler furniture lock.

One's eye was caught, too, by the ravens. They had
taken on the
look of birds of prey.

That was not the intention. The intention had been that
one
should think of the ravens as being
like children and young people
of school
age, gathering knowledge and experience, which they
would then practice faithfully in their
relationship to their superiors.
Then,
too, there was the birds' flight and the Nordic myths. It was
a brilliant image.

Still, one could not, at that moment when Biehl put
August's
papers back
into the chest, help but think that these two ravens
stood also for surveillance and control.
And, in due course, punish
ment
or reward.

That very day I came into contact with Katarina.

There were 240 pupils at the school. No more. This was in order
to maintain the academic standards and to ensure close
contact be
tween teachers and pupils.

This
meant that most of the teachers knew almost all of the
pu
pils,
it was very difficult to escape notice. Even at a place like Him
melbjerg House, where there had been a
superintendent and a
deputy and six
assistants and a social worker and a nurse and a janitor for twenty-four
pupils, because we were so damaged, not even there had the supervision been as
good as at Biehl's. It was
very difficult to be alone.

The
only time when it was hard for them to avoid disintegration
was when you were going from one place to another.
Like just after
the bell had gone.

Two teachers monitored the ascent to the classrooms; one under
the archway and one halfway up
the stairs between the second and third floors, from where they could see
almost everything—not,
however, the staircase between the ground floor and the second
floor. There I met Katarina.

On the landing, in one corner, there was a
seat—triangular,
screwed
onto the wall. If you stood up against it you were invisible to the guards, and
did not get swept along in the stream of pupils
making their way upward.

"I
have to talk to you," she said. "You were about to tell me about
the Orphanage."

She was talking as though we had just been interrupted.
We stood
close together, there was
nothing special to tell about back then,
I
just shook my head.

She leaned toward me. Around us people were making their
way
up. The noise was
overwhelming. She did not let it bother her.

"There was
the bit about my father," she said.

I did not want to hear it, but she told me anyway.

"He could not bear the fact
that she wasn't there anymore. He
hung himself. Well?"

I wouldn't know what to say about that, I said, but
what about
those
you leave behind, what about them, how are they to manage,
who's going to think of them?

"Have you never left anyone?" she said.
"Your friend from back
then, do you ever see him, why didn't he come here, too?"

She meant Humlum. We were alone on the stairs now, soon
we would be missed.

I did not mean to tell her, but I did anyway, for no
special reason.
Other
than that she listened, and that it just came out. There was
nothing to be done about it.

At the Orphanage, after school, we had our set tasks, that is,
kitchen duty, emptying the
garbage cans, odd jobs in the house and
in the garden, as well as special duties. One of the
special duties
was cutting Valsang's
grass.

As a rule one was not offered this until Primary Six. He
asked
me halfway
through Primary Five, six months before I was
transferred.

Up there one was allowed to take stuff from his
refrigerator, it
was
absolutely legit. One went up after school and cut the grass and ate out of the
refrigerator.

The
next thing that happened was that he said one could stay the
night there, and one accepted.

It was never talked about, not even among the pupils.
One stayed
the night
up there. No one had ever come to any harm.

At first I did not want to, but it was something everyone
had to go through.

He
was a Danish teacher. In the evening he played music for me on his record
player,
then
I went into the spare room where he had
made up the bed.

The cramps started while I was
lying
waiting for him to come,
they had been there before, just
not so bad.

Then time began to float. I did
not know whether a minute or
an hour had passed. It was there it became clear to me that I was
ill.

In the end I left before he came. He had locked me in,
but it was
only an
inside lock, the kind that a piece of bent wire will open.

From then on I knew that I was
too weak to make it at the school. After that he was very much on the alert.
Not angry, just very often
near at hand. Twice, in the showers, he very nearly got me.

There was no one to talk to about
it,
it was not the sort of thing
you could bring up. All the others had been there, Humlum, too,
and none of them had come to any
harm.

I'm getting to it
now.

I was passing the telephone booth. It was on the
second floor. It
was in the afternoon. He
opened the door and pulled me in and
pushed
me up against the shelf with the telephone books. He asked
me to look up a
number,
he
had forgotten his reading glasses.

It's no
good.
Going on.
It was no good, not even with
Katarina. I
cannot say it—not just yet—I
have to say something else first.

We struggled to get top marks for
discipline, that
was the ultimate
goal, better than getting onto a school team, better
than being seen
with one of the kitchen
maids.

For most people, the school was their last
chance,
they knew they
were all but lost. They had no family, or they had been
latchkey
kids from
the age of five, or they were like Gummi, who had not
even been given a key but had to
sleep on the doormat and had
had
pneumonia so many times that sports and standing up for him
self were now out of the question, so he only
survived because he could hide his candy and sell it dear at the end of the
month. Crusty
House was the last
resort, after that came a treatment home, and
that was that.

They had been given the chance
because they were academically
gifted.
Now it was a matter of hanging on. So you sat there, with
graph paper and two drafts, even when it was just
sums done in
ink. What you were
mapping out was the structure that had not