Borderliners (20 page)

he
kept pacing alongside the pipes.
Never
far away, though, only
as far as the rim of
darkness.

I paused, and he
stopped.

"That wasn't what I meant," he said. "Why
did he do it? What
was
the matter with him?"

What was the matter with him? Nothing much, I said. He was
fine, really, until
the incident with the chart locker six months later,
and could we get a move on, there
was something we had to do.

He stayed where he
was. He stood there, touching the lagging.

"Clothes
don't burn well," he said.

No, I said, that was what had saved Axel, and could we go
now,
I tried moving
on with the light, to get him to follow. Then he
turned toward me. He did not look straight at me,
but I could see
there was something he
had to say, it was hard to get it out. At the
Orphanage
you often had hemorrhoids—it was the food that did
it. That was how it felt, like bleeding piles, but
it has to come out.
It hurt, but
there was no alternative.

"I
don't put up with anything," he said, "not from anyone. They
come home, and you're lying on the cot. You could
have run off,
but then he would have
felt cheated. They start to say things. Usu
ally it's about the report
card and the drawings. A pigsty, she says.
Do
something about your son. She eggs him on, know what I
mean?"

I said nothing.

"He tosses lighted matches onto the quilt. You just
have to lie
still,
like you're sleeping. It doesn't catch fire, fabric doesn't burn
well. Then they come. You could
run from them, but he would feel
cheated. It has to be as if . . ."

"An
achievement and a reward," I said.

"Exactly.
You have to let him catch you, or
else there'll be hell
to
pay. He holds you down, but she's the one who does it.
Always
with a coat hanger, down the back.
And then, at the very end, on the
bare arse, you know. I just happened to think of it. Forget it."

We stood there,
saying nothing. He was not finished yet.

"I don't put up with anything," he said.
"I've warned them.
They've done it for the last time."

He had started
shaking.

"I could adopt you," I said, "when I'm
twenty-one. You could
come
and live with us, with me and Katarina."

The shaking came from the inside, but it was much bigger
than
the tiny, skinny body. I set the
lamp down on the pipe and reached
for his
hand.

It happened too fast to do anything about it. I heard the
sound
before I felt anything. It was the
little finger he broke, it made the
same
sound as when you snap a pencil. When the pain came, it
brought me to my knees. He had not let go, he
kept on squeezing.
Now he was looking
straight down at me, I do not think he knew
who I was. The other August had taken over, there was hardly
anything left of the first one.

"No one's
going to touch me," he said.

He
pressed down on my finger and looked me in the eye, to see
the pain.

"D'you
know
what it's like in the
end?" he said. "In the end it's
great.
If she keeps going long enough, it gets so it's lovely, and you
want to ask her to keep going. But by then you can
hardly talk.
And then you
faint."

I could sense that I was going
to pass out, so I pressed my forehead against the floor. When I looked up he
had let go of me and
drawn
back into himself. He was standing over by the lamp, with
his back to me, looking into the
flame.

My plan had been for us to climb out through a vent at the foot of the
south staircase. We found it all right, but it turned out to be
covered over with wire netting.
Normally I could have pulled away
the netting, but, because of my finger, this was now out
of the
question.

So we wandered about a bit. There were more tunnels than
I had
remembered
from the drawing, most were dead ends but some went
around in a circle. At one point
I had to change the candle.

There was no question of giving up, I was responsible for
August.
At one point,
when I changed the candle, I almost lost him in the

dark
, then he took my good hand. And I
let him, though I tried to
watch out for my fingers.
Eventually we came up through the landing pit.

Klastersen taught PE and woodwork. He had been appointed the year before.
He had been trainer of the junior national handball
team, and was highly qualified. He had said that his
training pro
gram would concentrate on
building up the front. In six months'
time we would all have a strong
front. Work on the gym apparatus
was
particularly well suited to this, he said, and most especially the
mastering of high flights and deep landings. So he
had prohibited
the use of the thick
mats. By going barefoot and using the hard
mats or coming down straight
onto the floor you could build up a
very
hard front. But it was not long before several accidents oc
curred. When a boy called Kare Frymand ripped
both of his Achil
les' tendons at one time, the school had been directed
to use thick
mats and install a landing pit.

The pit consisted of a box twelve feet by twelve, and ten
feet
deep, set into
the floor. It had been installed right after the accident and was supposed to
have been filled with wood shavings. This,
however, had never been done, and so, day in and day out,
it just
sat there,
covered up.

And
now we came up through it. It had been built down into the engineering tunnels.
In the bottom, on one side, there was a hatch. We came out of the gym onto the
south staircase, which we then
ascended.

It was very quiet. We had sort of
sneaked up on the school, so
it was not doing its job properly, it seemed to be paralyzed.

And yet it had its eye on us, you sensed it. For the
first time it
struck
me that the very building belonged to Biehl. The walls were
watching us.

With the walls it was like this:
they were not to be touched.
Leaning against walls and door posts was prohibited because of the
wear and
tear,
Biehl himself had announced this at assembly. He
had always protected them, now they were staring
at us.

But we ascended the stairs. I did it for August. I
sensed that the law of reciprocation could not be a law of nature after all.
When people were weak and helpless, like August, for example, then it
might be necessary to do something for them
without getting any
thing in return.
To do anything, no matter what.

And yet you did get something in return. I had descended
and
then ascended to
help and protect him. Now it was as though he
was helping me. As though you could set yourself
free by helping
others.

I cannot put it
any better.

We got in through Hessen's
clinic,
it took some
time to open the
door
into the next room.

I had never been in there before. It was pretty much as I
had
known it would
be.
Small, with shelves where she kept the balls
and jigsaw puzzles used when examining the smaller
pupils.
And a
gray filing
cabinet.

I left it alone. We would not find what we were looking
for here.
Still I
stood there for a moment, running a hand over it. You had
known it was there, but never seen
it.

August
was standing behind me, absolutely still. I turned around
to whisper something, or to motion to him that we
had to keep
going.

And looked straight into the
previous room, Hessen's clinic,
which we had just left.

We had closed the door, August
had done that. And yet we were
both now looking through the wall and into the clinic.
As though
the wall had not been
there.

It was August who stretched a hand out toward it. It was
brought
up short by
something.

"It's
glass," he said.

It was like a big window, but there was no reflection
from the
candle. The glass could not be
seen, only felt.

"It's the back
of the mirror," I said, "it's see-through."

There had been a
few times when I had turned up at the clinic

at
the appointed time and
it was, not Hessen, but one of her assis
tants
who had been there. On those occasions the proceedings had
been a little different. You had talked off the
record about how
things had been
since last time.

Now I realized that, on these
occasions, while you had just been
relaxing and talking to the assistants, who were much
younger than
Hessen, she had been in this
room, behind the mirror. She could sit
in
peace, observing the whole thing. It was brilliant.

Off the corridor on the fifth floor ran Biehl's office and the staff
room and the library and the
assembly hall and the district medical
officer's
clinic. A door led directly from the corridor into Biehl's
office. Those who had been sent up for punishment
had to wait
outside this door. This
saved them from causing any inconvenience in the school office, where the
secretary sat. Then, too, it made the
punishment worse if they had to
stand in the corridor, where they could be seen by passing teachers.

The door came under the general key system, but only
Biehl's key
fitted
it, so the lock took a bit of time, especially since I could only use one hand.
There was just a little bit of candle left. I blew it
out,
we would need the
last of it for finding the papers.

When it went dark
he huddled up against me.

"There's
nothing for us here," he said.

His voice was unrecognizable.

I could not think
of an answer for him.

"I'm going
home," he said.

He started to walk out into the darkness and then to run.
He
must have
forgotten where he was, he was running blind, but very
fast. He hit a doorjamb, but got up and ran on. At the
end of the corridor he ran into the washbasin, I heard him hit it with his
teeth.

I walked over to him. He was lying on his
back,
I could tell by
touch
that his mouth was bleeding. I could not carry him because
of my hand, so I dragged him back. I took off my
shirt and propped
him up against the
wall and got him to hold the shirt up to his
mouth. Then I switched on the light.

It was risky, but
there was nothing else for it.

Andersen—Lemmy, that is—lived in a little house on the
other
side of the south playground. In his
hallway he had a panel of lamps
that
indicated where lights were burning in the school. It had been
installed just after I came, most likely to save
electricity. You could
see it through
his windows.

So I knew that now, when I pressed the switch, a
light would
come on
in his house. But it had to be done.

The cleaning ladies at the school were specially selected
and
highly
qualified. They had been appointed when Biehl started the
school in humble premises on
Jacoby Avenue in Frederiksberg, and
had accompanied it on its rise. They were on familiar
terms with
the management of the school.
They had always reported all traces
of
smoking, burned celluloid, or any other signs of vandalism. They
saw things that other people did not see, it was
very hard to hide anything from them, they would have spotted August's blood
right away,
I
had to mop it up. I worked my way back
along the corridor
using my socks, it
was all I had. Then I put them back on.

When I came back, August was sitting looking at the door
oppo
site, which led up to Biehl's
apartment. He had his private quarters
on
the top floor—this you knew, even though you had never been up
there. The door to the stairs was opposite his
office, with his name on
it. It was
the only door in the school with a name on it.
To show that
the ordinary part of the school stopped here.
August sat there, looking at the nameplate and
holding the shirt up to his mouth. He said
not a word. I switched off the light and let us into the office.

I had been there twice before. The one time had been when
they
introduced me to
August.
The other time, which had been earlier
on, had been for punishment.
That had been the first time I
had
been hit at
Biehl's. I had been late five times in a
month,
it was
at the time that my illness was getting worse.

It had been me and Jes Jessen and
someone else. It was normal for Biehl to take two or three at once—to save
time. There was a
rug
in the middle of the floor. "Stay off the rug," he had said,
"let's
have no
more wear and tear than we can help."