Borderliners (2 page)

"How come?"

It was early to start
initiating her into the inner truths, but I d
it anyway. There was a law, it was
Karin
Ærø
who had given this
away, that dated from antiquity. When
gilding a surface it was not
desirable to
cover it 100 percent with gold. On the contrary, one
achieved the best effect if one covered just over
60 percent. A vari
ation on the law of
the golden mean.

So it was, too, with the relationship
between time and punish
ment. Of those
violations that were proven, only just over half
evoked punishment.

Sort of like a golden mean of violence.

How many times had I, personally, been hit?

To this I was able
to reply in the negative, as far as my time here
at the school—that was, two years and
two months—was con
cerned; in all that time, until recently, I had never once been hit or
been given
detention, nor, until I became ill, so much as a reprimand
or an "L"
for Late.

"No," she
said, "when you are scared enough, maybe it is even a sort of freedom not
to be punished."

She did not mean any harm by it. It just
slipped out. It was more
or less directed at
herself. But it gave away the fact that she felt,
for me, an instinctive aversion. And since I had
nothing to lose I remarked that—before Biehl's, in my past life, especially at
Him
melbjerg House and the Royal
Orphanage—I had taken and dished
out more than most. She would maybe
have been hard put, here at
the school, to
find a greater expert in the field of rattled jaws. Short
of having gone
to Biehl himself.

She asked what he would have said to that.

There had been a case at the school a year earlier. A pupil—it was
Jes Jessen, with whom I had shared a room
and who, later, was
expelled—had
allegedly sustained a hearing impairment after being punished by Biehl.

It was never proved that the two things
had anything to do with
each other, but on
that occasion Biehl was under such pressure that
he was brought very
close to an explanation. He had said that the
school,
as far as was possible, respected the ban on corporal punishment generally in
force in Danish primary schools, but, in his
experience, a cuff around
the ear had never done anyone any harm.

It was said so deeply
that everyone breathed a sigh of relief. He
certainly did have experience, after all he
had been hitting children
regularly
for forty years.

At the same time, it was not untrue. It
was not the blow itself
that was of primary importance but what happened around
it, just before and just after. But which was not usually visible, not to the

naked
eye. Because it was over so quickly.
But still went on for a
very
long time afterward.

To describe this fleeting but profound effect she suggested the word
"abasement,"
which I accepted. So she had, after all, understood.

TWO

T
he external data, I mean that outside of the laboratory, were at
all times easily accessible.

In the month of May 1971, after almost two
years at the school,
two years during which
no one was able to point the finger at me
for anything, when it had been recorded in my file that I was well
adjusted and of average intelligence, all of a
sudden it became hard
for
me
to be on time in the mornings. On
Saturdays and Sundays,
when the others were
at home and I was alone at the school, I slept during the day or not at all,
and was awake at night, and it affected
the rest of the week.

I consulted the school
doctor, so as not to arouse any suspicion
of laziness or lack of zeal, and so that it
might be established that
this was an illness one could not, personally, do
anything about,
not even with two alarm clocks, one of which was very big.

The school fell under the jurisdiction of
the district medical of
ficer. He prescribed
that I should be woken every morning by Flak
kedam, and for a while I did turn up on time, but very tired. At
that point I had seen the grand plan, and I began
to fear a
catastrophe.

That is why I sent
the letter. It was the first letter of my
life
;
there
had never been anyone
to write to.

I had seen her in the playground,
with Biehl, under Soli Deo Gloria.
Biehl always stood under the inscription
over the archway in the
morning, to greet those who turned up on time, and to
identify those who came late. From the moment one started to wake up,
one remembered that
he would be standing there. So that, in a way,
he was already present, between one's dreaming and one's
waking.

One had no contact with the other
classes; the senior classes, es
pecially, were far away, she was two years ahead of me. At
one
point she had been absent,
for six months maybe. When she came
back
she was a boarder, no one knew why. At that time I had seen
her, but still only from afar.

One morning I saw
her in the playground, she was late, it seemed
wrong, she was not the type.

When she was there
again, a couple of days later, I began to
count; over fourteen school days I counted
her six times. Then I
knew that something was wrong.

The sixth time, Biehl had drawn her aside.

He had taken her over to the wall, and
allowed everyone else to
slip past. He was
bending over her. He was concentrating hard.
This offered the possibility of getting close, so one could see their
faces. She was leaning forward a bit, toward him,
and she was
looking straight at him. I was close enough to see her eyes.
It was like she was looking for something.

Then the thought came that we might be of benefit to each other.

A long time passed without my hearing
anything. In the end I was
close to giving up. I had found her in the class pictures
in the school

yearbooks
, her name was Katarina. One day, on the way to assem
bly, she was right behind me on
the stairs.

"Library,"
she said.

It was the first
time I heard her voice. She said just the one word.

Being anywhere else than down in the playground after the bell had
rung was prohibited, the only
exception was the library, which was
next to the staff room. One could sit there in the lunch
period if
one wanted
to improve one's mind.

Now it was empty,
apart from Katarina and me.

She sat for a long while trying to bring
herself
to say some
thing.

"I do it on
purpose," she said. "I come late on purpose."

That had been obvious back in the playground. When Biehl
closed in on anyone, they would try to lean away. It
just happened,
it was a rule. She had leaned
toward him, and looked him in the
eye.
As if to make the most of the moment.

She read aloud from
a piece of paper. It looked like a letter.

" 'Apart
from the bit about sleep and
about concentrating, there
are also other things that have not been mentioned to anyone.
Whole days that disappear, and
fleeting moments that become like
an
eternity.'

"Tell me
about it," she said.

Now, not that I wanted to deny anything, but whoever had
writ
ten that letter, I said, was
definitely taking a big risk, admitting to
being
so ill. What do you suppose we could do to reduce this risk?
Might he perhaps receive some information in
return?

"I am
conducting an experiment," she said.

That is how she
spoke.
Conducting an experiment.

"Can one be sure that one will turn up on time
afterward?" I
said.

To this she
replied in the negative.

If she had promised anything I would not have believed
her, and
so it would not have been possible
to proceed. But now she was
speaking
the truth, so I tried.