Borderliners (35 page)

All the other days were alike.
Actually, my school days were no
different
from my time in isolation. Apart from the fact that, at the latter
establishment, I had no one to talk to and so reality went to
pieces.

Otherwise there was no difference. The succession of days
was
an endless
line, gray. They ran past you. Yourself, you were held
firmly in place, you stood
absolutely still and watched them running
past, and there was nothing to be done about it.

Maybe, somewhere inside you, you felt that surely it
could have been otherwise. That it had not needed to be so hard and gray and
monotonous. But you saw no way
out.
Until I met Katarina.
But then, of course,
everything fell apart.

When all the days were the same, when they recurred and recurred,
and were planned out ten years
into the future, why did you feel
that
time was passing, that it was linear, that your school days were
a kind of countdown, that time was a train that
you must and ought
to be fit enough
to hang on to?

I think it was because of the insistence on achievement.
Otherwise
it is impossible to explain.

Of course, it was only from the outside that the days seemed the same.
Deep down they were meant to be different. It only seemed
as though the same subjects and
the same classrooms and the same
teachers
and the same pupils came around again and again. In re
ality, the requirement was that you should, with every day, be trans
formed. Every day you should be better, you
should have developed,
all the
repetition in the life of the school was there only so that,
against an
unchanging background, you could show that you had
improved.

I suppose that is why numbers were so important. I
suppose that
is why Biehl was so particular
about the achievements in his memoirs, and why there were marks and timetables
and endless files and
summaries of
people's pasts and proficiency and how many times

they
had been late. They saw the school as some divine
ennobling machine. The numbers were proof and verification of its feasibility,
its efficacy.

I
know I cannot bring anyone to understand this. How our lives
back then were totally saturated by time. Even
those who were
involved back then,
even Biehl and Karin
Ærø
and
all you others
whom I have in mind,
even you would deny it.

I believe we were on the outermost edge. I believe we
were as far
out as
anyone can go with time. We were held down as tightly as
anyone can be held down by a clock. So hard, in fact,
that if your
shell was not very thick,
then
you fell completely or partially to
pieces.

I have felt that
time ran in our veins like blood.

And if you became ill, if you cracked under time, then
you were
suffering
from a disease of the blood.

Now and then—those nights when I
lie awake, when I just listen
to the woman and the child breathing—I grow frightened.
And I
fear that things may not have
changed, out in the world; that time's
grip
will not have slackened.

I hope I am wrong.
This is my greatest wish.
To be utterly wrong.

Of course, there were schools elsewhere, too, this I know.
But surely
no place with a
vision such as Biehl's.

Elsewhere, in other countries, they have held children
in the grip
of
time, for a while they have held them. But, in time, those children
who could not cope, or whose
parents did not have the where
withal, were given up, dropped.

But Biehl would not give up on anyone, that was
the exceptional
thing—maybe
the exceptional thing about Denmark. They would not entertain the thought that
some pupils were down there, in
darkness.
They did not want to know anything about the
darkness,
everything in the universe had to be light.
With the knife of light they would scrape the darkness clean.

It is as though
that thought was almost insane.

THREE

T
hey took me off the medicine gradually, over a
week. It is much harder to come
off medicine than to go onto it.
In all, over those seven days, I did not sleep as much as
eight hours.

The department representative
who collected me was accompa
nied by a policeman and an observer from Child Welfare Services,
this was unnecessary, but they
did not know what had taken place,
they felt insecure. I was also handcuffed.

It took place at the school. This was standard
departmental
practice—as
close to the scene of the crime as possible.

In order to have enough room, they had had to
take over a classroom. In addition to Biehl, Karin
Ærø
,
and Fredhøj, and the rep
resentatives from the Department of Education, Stuus
was there— as chairman of the board of teachers—along with two representa
tives from the parents' association; Aage
Hårdrup
,
B. D.; Hessen; Flakkedam; my guardian from the Children's Panel, Johanna Buhl;
the district medical officer; Astrid Biehl; and a
woman I had not
seen before, but who
might have been the legal representative for
the Department of Health and Welfare. I counted sixteen people altogether,
plus Katarina and myself, the child welfare representa
tive, and the policeman. It was said that the
director of education

for
Copenhagen, Baunsbak-Kold, should also have been there,
but
had sent word to
say that he was unavoidably detained.

They had positioned the desks so as to form a boxed-off
com
partment on either side of the
teacher's desk. Katarina and I
stood,
each in our respective boxes, Biehl and Karin
Ærø
and
Fredhøj sat over by the wall, the department representatives sat by the window,
with the light behind them. When the
proceedings had been under
way for
some time, Humlum came in, ever so quietly, and took a
seat in the back row.

The department's representatives did most of the talking.
They
said this was not a trial or an
inquisition, but merely an informal
hearing,
called to clear up certain points at issue.

They
then summarized the background to the case—with which
we were quite familiar. An experiment in the integration of defective
children into normal schools that had now been
abandoned, following what had occurred, but all particulars of which were still
con
fidential. This last was directed
at Katarina and
myself
. One sensed,
in the room, a bitter, tense
atmosphere—particularly between the
school and the representatives of
the department. You were never
told what had
gone before. But one sensed that it must have been
a disaster, Ragnarok.

First of all, they said, they were interested in hearing
more about something that Peter—they meant me—had kept repeating, when
questioned during his detention: that we had carried
out an exper
iment. What was this about, what
had I meant?

I did not remember having been questioned, to this very
day I do
not
remember it, it must have been after the first three weeks of
isolation, so I could not give them any answers. I was
also having
hot flushes, and spasms, after
having come off the medicine. I stood
with
my arms folded to keep from shaking, but the desk I was
leaning against still rocked. Nor was I used to so
many
people,
they
could see this and gave up on me.

Then they turned to Katarina. You
would not have believed she
could become any paler, but she had. She had difficulty in talking.
We had not seen each other for
six months and eleven days, and
yet I
knew her as easily as though we were linked to each other, as

though
we were connected across time and space. As though
we were twins, unborn twins linked
together in their mother's
womb.

You could see she did not blame me for having mentioned
the experiment to them, she understood that I had been in isolation and
pushed beyond time and reality,
she had nothing bad to say about
me, we were still friends.
Even though
she had maintained absolute
silence for six
months, and I, in a way, had betrayed us.
All of this I saw in her face,
before she answered them.

"I had discovered that there had to be different
types of time," she said. "I discovered it when my father and mother
died. Peter
had seen
it,
too, we did research into the other types."

Everything
went silent for a very long while, and in the silence they became convinced of
what they had always known. That we
were not
in our right minds, not even
she
.

This she sensed.

"Let's just
get it over with," she said.

It was like giving permission. That is how she was. Even
among
these people,
at this moment, she could give permission.

Following her words, a sense of relief settled on the
room. Now
there was no more uncertainty.
Now all doubt was gone. She had
given them
permission to cease doubting. We had been out of our
minds, August,
Katarina, and me, this was the explanation. Not
accountable.

Doubt was always
the worst.

"What is most detestable," Biehl had said,
"is when a child lies
or conceals
something."

In other words, when something
is kept hidden, unclarified.
That
was the worst.

This was what I had tried to explain to Katarina, that
night when
we were sitting on her bed.
That the whole school was like a device
designed to remove doubt.

As with their experiment.
They wanted to raise the
incomprehen
sible, the
dark and dubious children up into the light.