Borderliners (27 page)

I ascended to the fifth
floor,
I did not see a
soul. I walked past the
infirmary without
looking in.

The office door was open. From
inside, I could hear the secretary
talking.

The
plan had not anticipated this. Katarina had pointed to the
timetable. "On Wednesdays and Thursdays,
between eleven and
twelve,"
she's out.

At first I stopped dead. You had gotten used to the
school time
table
being infallible. In all my time, changes had hardly ever been
made to classes. Faced with an
alteration, you became helpless.

So I went into the infirmary. I still had a few minutes.
August was lying sleeping, but this time I had to wake him. I shook him
very hard, he woke up pretty
fast. Because of the tube up his nose he could not speak.

"I've
come," I said, "
you'll
need to help
me."

There was no time to explain. I loosened one of his
hands and
handed him
a bottle for peeing into.

"The
phone's going to ring in a minute," I said. "Count to three
slowly,
then
make some
noise, but not too much."

I stepped into the corridor at half-past precisely. There
was not
a soul in sight.
We were moving along narrow tunnels in time and
space that only existed at this moment. In a few minutes the bell
would ring and people would come out and
everything would col
lapse. But just at this moment we had created a
space for ourselves
in the stream of time—in
between the seconds.

Then the telephone
rang. I entered the office.

"Biehl's Academy," she said.

"I think
he's choking," I said.

The secretary had been at the school for some years,
it was said
that she was a distant relative
of Biehl's. Under other circumstances
she would have finished the
telephone conversation and not for
gotten
herself in front of a pupil, but things were different now.
Everything
at the school was a bit out of joint, everyone had the
feeling that something was up. She heard me and stopped short.

At that moment
there was a sound from the infirmary, he had

thrown
the bottle on the
floor. It sounded alarming, without being
too
loud.
Quite precisely administered.

I sensed her panic.
Although she was self-possessed enough to
say, "One moment," into the receiver.
Then she ran out.

I picked up the
phone. It was a man.

"Put me
through to Hessen," he said.

Katarina had described the
switchboard to me. It was to the left
of the desk. She had said that everything was quite
clearly marked,
so you did not have to
think, and she was right. If you had had to
think
I would have been lost.

There were three incoming lines.
I had no idea which one he was
on, so I pulled out all three. At the third pull he was cut off, so I
stuck that plug into the socket
marked "Pupil Telephone." Katarina
had said that it would ring automatically, and
that I was to listen
in
over the headphones. Although she had not anticipated that I would have the
secretary just outside the door.

I heard the telephone
ring,
I
heard it being picked up. Then some
one said, "School psychologist's clinic."

It was Katarina's
voice.

"Baunsbak-Kold,"
he said. "Is Hessen there?"

She answered as
though she had not heard the question.

"As we have already stated," she said,
"we have a serious prob
lem. We would like you to come over at once."

"That is quite
out of the question," he said.

"It's about
August Joon, as we said, there's violence."

"Let me speak
to Hessen," he said.

I remembered him from the presentation at Gladsaxe
Stadium,
he had had a
chauffeur-driven car. Well dressed and brilliant. He might have been sitting in
the office.

What
made it worse was that I could hear something else. I had
my back to Biehl's office door. I heard Biehl's
voice coming from
there. According to the plan, he should not have been
there but,
nevertheless, there he was.

Now I was very exposed, caught
between the secretary and Biehl
and the director of education.

"We can no longer be held responsible," said
Katarina. "It's all
starting to fall
apart."

He had asked for Hessen, and she had not given him an
answer.
It was Katarina's voice, and yet
it was not her. One of the people
living
inside her, whom I would never understand, had taken over.

I could hear his
breathing.

"I'm on my
way," he said. "Put me through to the office."

I moved the plug
back to where it had come from.

"Office," I said.

"Let me talk
to Biehl."

He would not take her word for it. Now
he wanted confirmation.

"He's been
called away," I said. "There's been an accident."

I could hear the secretary running along the corridor.
I replaced
the receiver. She came through
the door.

"He's not
well," she said, "
we
have to get hold of
Flakkedam."

"I'm just on my way down to
him," I said, "I'll ask him to come
up immediately."

She had not really
heard me.

"He's so
thin," she said.

THIRTEEN

T
here could be no thought now of returning to
the classroom or the annex.
Fredhøj had wanted a word with me,
was
possibly looking for me. There was nowhere left in the school
where I could stay for any length of time and feel
safe. I took to
the landing between the ground and second floors, across
from the lower grades. From here I would be able to see if a teacher came
along, and be able to run for cover. When the bell
rang for the
lunch break I mingled
with the stream and let myself be carried out
into the playground. Flage Biehl was on playground duty, but he
did not seem to have been alerted. At one point
Fredhøj appeared
under the archway,
but I ducked down and next time I looked he
was gone. When all the pupils were assembled there were so
many,
all looking so alike that it was difficult to pinpoint one in particular.

But I saw Katarina. While Flage was at the other end we both
made for the center line. We walked side by side, from
the wall to
the school, with the line
between us and without looking at each
other.

"He could be here any time
now," she said. "When the bell rings

you've
got to go around to the south playground and meet him,
instead of going to class."

"They'll be
looking for me," I said.
"You too."

"Not until the
end of the period."

"There isn't
enough time," I said.

Around us they were playing
two-man tag. An uneven layer of
ice covered the asphalt. You ran hand in hand, always a
boy and
a girl
together. The ice made it hard to keep hold of each other, so
you had to take off your mittens.
Which
meant that you held a girl
by the hand.
With no mittens in between.
Then, too, the sense of
disintegration
was intensified by the fact that Christmas was
coming.

We watched them playing. Not long ago we had been among
them, but now, suddenly, they
were remote from us. It was not just
because you had been expelled and would soon be going
away, and
so need not
think anymore about them. It was something else. It
was Katarina, and that I had
kissed her, and August, and that we
were on the point of having understood, and that there
was no way
back.

"There's something I want to
ask you," she said, "
can
you turn
back the school clock, the one
that controls the bell?"

At the Orphanage,
classes were called in and let out by the ringing
of a little handbell. It hung from the roof of a shed next to the
school building. For boarders' mealtimes and
bedtimes there had
been a bigger
bell out in front of the cloakroom. Both bells were a
gift from the royal family. The job of bell ringer
was the most
sought after in the
school and only ever entrusted to a senior who had achieved something
outstanding.

Never, during the time I was
there, had anyone other than the
bell ringer ever laid a finger on the bells. But since
they hung where
they
were readily accessible, the punishment for their unauthorized ringing had
nevertheless been officially determined: instant expul
sion.

There was no such punishment at
Biehl's. You had seen the bells

but
never the clock itself. There was never any thought that
it might
be
possible to get close to it. Before Katarina mentioned it, it had
never occurred to me,
nor
to anyone else.

"The clock is not in Biehl's office," she said.
"And it's not in the
school office either. It has to be in the staff room or behind that door
in the corridor between the infirmary and Fredhøj's office."

"It could be
in Andersen's house," I said.

She shook her head.

"It's
too important," she said. "It would never be hung at ground
level. It'll be kept up in the light.
Close to Biehl and Fredhøj."

I said nothing, I had not answered her. Nor did she seem
to
expect me to. It
was all over. But, for these final moments, we were
in the laboratory and anything was
possible.

She turned toward me. Then she stepped over the line and
came
right up close
to me.

"Turn it back ten minutes," she said. "That will give us
the time
we need. And something will
happen, there's going to be chaos of
some
sort. And ten minutes is not too much. It will be quite pre
cisely administered."

We walked
through the gym together and around to the south stair
case, shortly before the bell
rang,
so as not
to be seen by the teacher
on
playground duty. When we split up she touched my arm.

The director of education arrived just after the bell had rung. He was
driving
himself,
he did not so much as look at me.

I
walked ahead of him up the stairs and opened the door into the clinic. Katarina
was sitting behind the desk, where Hessen usually
sat.

"Where's
Biehl?" he said.

She did not answer him right
away. She stood up and put her
hand out to him, he had to take it.

"Katarina,"
she said. "I'm Hessen's assistant."

At that moment I
saw her clothes in a new light. She was wearing

a
baggy gray sweater. At this moment, behind the desk, she
looked like someone older.

I did not hear what he said next. I went out onto the
landing and
closed
the door behind me.

There were panes of glass in the door from the stairs to the fifth
floor. I stayed where I was until
the corridor was empty,
then
I
went for August. He was very far away, I undid the
straps and got
him out onto the floor, he
kept collapsing,
I
slapped him several
times. He half opened his eyes, it would have to
do,
our
time was
almost up.

It was not clear how he should be presented, but I had a
notion
that it
should be the same as for the school doctor—in other words,
everything off except his
underpants. They had given him a hospital
undershirt
that buttoned up the front and long socks—I took them
off. It occurred to me that the tubes and bottles hooked up to him
might be advantageous, so I let him keep them—the ones hanging
from needles as well as the ones up his nose and
down his throat. I could not carry all the bottles. As well as saline solution
and
glucose there was Ringer lactate—that, too, had been administered
to the girls at Nødebogård. He would have to
carry them
himself,
maybe feeling he had to shoulder some of the responsibility would
help to keep him awake.

I let us in to the little office next to Hessen's
clinic. From there, through the Mensendieck mirror, we could watch Katarina and
the
director.

He had taken a seat and was facing us. He had white hair and
sideburns like Grundtvig, but was
smaller and slicker. His lips were
moving but you could not hear anything. Very carefully I
set the door ajar.

"We've brought him up,"
said Katarina, "so that you can see
him."

One of the tubes had slipped out of
August's nose. There was no