Borderliners (13 page)

I had looked after people before; looked after some of the ones you
went to school with. That had
been easier. They had been a bit
older, and most of them were having a pretty bad time of
it. You
had known
that no matter what you did, things could not get much
worse for them. Even with August
it had been simpler, all you could
do for him was try to find the last resort.

With the child it is different. You have this idea that
maybe there
is a
chance for her. That no one has ruined anything for her yet.
That she can eat what she wants
and she has the woman and is
with a family, and she has never been hit.

Then comes a time when you are alone with her, and then
it is
difficult to
know what you are supposed to do.

You know that the only thing in her life that means
anything is the woman, and now she has gone. The only one left is you. Who
are pretty much
worthless.
And who have nothing special to give
to other people.

It was
unnerving,
you have no
idea what you are supposed to do. I grew pretty uneasy.

To begin with I
said nothing, did
nothing.

She had walked over to the door through which the woman
had
left. She called
to me from there. I went over to her.

She was very grave. The skin of her face seemed very thin,
ready
to split, like
paper. Beneath it
lay
an unfathomable sorrow.

But she did not
cry. It was like she was trying out something.

"We'll wait
here," she said.

We sat down, with our backs against the door. The hallway
was
cold. We sat side
by side. Then she looked up at me.

"Mommy's
coming back soon," she said.

Soon.
It was the first time she had
ever referred to time.

Then I understood
the message in her lists.

It was order. The message was order. What she had told me was
that she was trying to put the
world in order.

On the floor, when
I had sat down beside her, I had seen
,
as if

through
her eyes, how the world seemed to her.
Big.
Overwhelming.
Through this chaos, by way of the
words, she tried to lay tunnels
of order.

To organize is to recognize. To know that, in an endless,
un
known sea, there is an island upon
which you have set foot before.
It was
islands such as these that she had been pointing out. With
the words she had created for herself a web of
familiar people and
objects.

"Mommy's
coming back soon."

She had introduced order into the chaotic sorrow at being
sepa
rated from the
woman by explaining that there was a time limit,
that this was temporary,
that
it would come to an end. She had
used time in order to cope with the pain of separation.

Around a child, people come and
go, objects appear and are
taken away,
surroundings
take shape and disintegrate. And no ex
planation is given, because how can you explain
the world to a
child?

So she had used the words. Words call forth and secure
that
which has gone
away. With her lists she had ensured that whatever
she had once known would come
back.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were full of tears, but she
was not
crying, it
was like she was coping with the sorrow.

Wordlessly her face told me that we belonged together.
That we
both knew something about
loss.
Even she—who had so much
more than I had ever had—even she already knew that this was a
world where people and things were taken away from
you; where
you are shifted from where you
want to be; where someone switches
off
the light and you tumble into fear. There may be no harm in
tended, but it is unavoidable.

I suppose that, up until that moment, I had not really
understood
that she
was a person. I had thought of her, rather, as something
especially precious that you
could protect in the way that you had never been protected.

Now I saw that in a way she was like me. Much more
pure and
precious, but still, in a way, like
me.

Then the thought occurred that maybe I could be of benefit to
her anyway, that I still might be
able to reach her.

I do not know how long we sat there. It came to the point where
she slowly curled up and went to
sleep. I carried her to bed. I sat
down and looked at her. I thought about what she had
said, and
why.

She had said it to conquer her sorrow at the woman's
absence.

But she had said it to me.

I waited in the
grounds for several hours. It was very cold, even
though I had the blanket. Flakkedam came before it was light, he let
himself out of the entrance and left it open, then he started on
his tour of the rose bed. When he had gone I
slipped inside. August
was fast asleep. The window had been left open.
The smell of gas
was gone.

FIFTEEN

      
K
atarina let three days go by after my visit. I
knew she had not forgotten us or
given up. I did not see her when
she came. Suddenly she was just there, behind me, in the
playground.

"Don't look
around," she said.

I checked out the
teacher on duty anyway.

"They're
forgetting us," she said.

I had had the same thought. That was the way of the
rule. They
had so many to keep an eye on. As
long as you kept a low profile, in time you would be forgotten. It was the best
thing that could
happen.

"You two have third period
free," she said. "We can meet at the
clinic."

The clinic was Hessen's clinic.
Which was out of bounds and
impossible
to get at.

"It's Wednesday," she said. "The door on the ground floor
will be
open,
they'll be bringing in the milk."

During free periods you could do homework or read a book of your
choice, but you could not leave
the classroom. I let fall a remark
about having to go to the toilet, just in case the
channel to the office
was
open. And August had to come with me, since I had been
ordered never to leave him behind
in the classroom.

Outside, I did not say where we were going, he would
have re
fused. I just
twisted his arm up his back and frog-marched him
along. He put up no resistance.

The door to the south staircase was open. We ascended to
the
fifth floor
without meeting a soul.

The clinic was not locked, it could not be locked. I had
talked about this to Hessen—we talked openly about things like that, as
part of my personal insight into
my illness. When the clinic was set
up
she had expressly requested that the lock be removed, so that
people would not feel cooped up. She had said that
this should be the one place in the school where you felt most free and
welcome.

I opened the door and went in. Katarina was sitting on a
chair
over by the
window.

There was a big mirror on the wall, between the door to
the next
room and the loudspeaker panel.
Hessen had told me that she had
been an
instructor in Mensendieck gymnastics. Now and again we had rounded off my
visits to her by my having to take off my shirt
and my undershirt. Then
we would stand side by side facing the
mirror
and I had to move my arms and shoulders and head in
different ways. She had explained that this
could, in the long run, correct my bad posture. Now the mirror seemed like a
hole, or like
some thing, watching
you. It had curtains. I drew them.

I took off my shoes and socks, removed the panel over the
loud
speaker, and laid
the socks over the membrane. It was not 100
percent safe, but it would muffle the sound.

It would not have done to sit at
the table where one had so often
sat with Hessen. I took the chair over to the window and
set August
on it. I
remained standing.

He sat there, looking out the
window. It did not seem possible
that she
would ever get through to him. I had had three weeks, but no more than a few
minutes of contact. The rest of the time he had

been
cooped up inside
himself. Besides which, it was the first time
they
had met.

"There is a plan behind the school," she said,
"so many things
happen,
you're never given any explanation. We are going to
study
it scientifically, like in a
laboratory."

She did not look straight at him. She must have sensed
that he
could not
bear that. Nor did she look at me, who, in fact, was not
all that keen on it either. She
looked at a point between us, she had
spoken pretty softly. She unfolded two pieces of paper.

"This is the teachers' timetable," she said,
"and Hessen's. I copied
them down."

She spoke to August
without looking straight at him.

"I was late five times. For that you get sent to
Biehl. I came early
on
purpose and waited in the secretary's office. The timetable is
stuck up on the wall. When the
secretary went out I copied it
down—as much as I could manage. The rest I worked out by asking
around the other classes. Once I
had it I could draw up a plan of when the rooms were in use.
These
two timetables, together with
the pupils'
one that I had already made up—they give the complete
schedule for the
entire school.
That's all I wanted to say. You can
go now if you don't want to be in
on this."

At first he was quiet. Then he pulled up his shirt. He
had some papers tucked in against his stomach, he unfolded them. It was the
two drawings—the one that was rewarded and the first
one, where the background had not been filled in. He did not throw his drawings
away like other people.

"You draw something," he said, "and you
get nothing. Then you
do
the same thing again, but this time you get a star and are praised,
how come?"

He said it casually, without looking at her. He was
testing her.
If she
got it wrong she would have lost him.

She looked at the drawings. It
was as though she were listening
to them, in the same way that she had listened to
me—then I knew
that
she would reach him.

"It's something to do with time," she
said. "You got a star be
cause you had spent more time on the second drawing. And spent

the
time in a particular way. We think they have a plan, and
that it has to do with time."

"So the
second one wasn't any better?"

Now he was looking straight into her face, she was
careful not
to meet his gaze.

"There's no such thing as 'better,' " she said
. "
The second one just fitted in better with their
plan."

How could she know that? She was only sixteen, how could she
know that and say it?

When is one thing better than another? It is a crucial
question.

Although, usually, what one has in mind is that
something is not
good
enough. Oscar Humlum, for example, was just not good
enough. Axel Fredhøj did not think he was either.
Nor I.
It said in
the
record: "of average intelligence," but right from the start they
had acknowledged that that was probably stretching
things a bit.

That, even so, it is I who am left, and able to ask
questions, here,
in
the laboratory, and not Humlum, for example, is not because I
was better—I have never said that.
I just wanted so bad'v to live.

At Crusty
House, in a 400-meter race, it was always possible to
determine who could run
better
than everyone
else. And pretty often
in soccer, you could say that one pass was better
than another. But
it was actually less
common than you might imagine.
And mainly
in straightforward situations offering very few
openings.

In Biehl's classes
it was obvious when an answer was correct.

With Karin
Ær
ø
things were a little less precise but, on the whole,
there was never any serious doubt
as to who sang true enough to
be in the choir.

One has to be left with the
impression that this thing about as
sessing the merit of a person's singing or answers or
soccer was
something straightforward,
something strictly regulated.