Borderliners (41 page)

me—
two pairs of pants, two
corduroy shirts, underwear, socks, a
sweater,
a raincoat. What Fredhøj brought were personal effects
that had been in my locker—slippers, sneakers, PE
clothes, school-
bag, and pencil case.
There should also have been some comic
books
and a Stiga table tennis bat. They were not there, I did not
mention them,
they must have
been stolen the day after I was taken away, the contents of the pencil case,
too—it
was completely empty.
I
said nothing either about the stitching of the schoolbag having
been
slit
open
, whoever had done it had tried to repair it,
albeit clumsily, so I said nothing.

In
addition, Fredhøj had brought me three books, the only three
that, as a pupil, you had to purchase for yourself
and therefore
owned. Mine had been
paid for by the Social Services Department, which had bought them secondhand.
The books were:
Primary and
Lower-Secondary
Biology,
A
Pocket Flora,
and the
Folk High
School
Songbook.

More times than you could remember,
Fredhøj had questioned
you, up at the blackboard. Or you had sat and listened while he
read stories about the great
criminals. I had been in the class when
Anne-Dorthe
Feldslev found Axel in the chart locker. And yet now
it was all he could do to look at me.

It was not
indifference, it was distaste.

"I want to be adopted," I said. "I can't
stay here, I'm going
insane.
Do you think I could have a statement from the school to
the effect that I am fit to be
with a family?"

He
opened the
door,
the officer came in and signed a
receipt on my behalf for the clothes and books. When you were in care you
could not sign for yourself until you were
sixteen. Not until he had
gone out and
closed the door did
Fredhøj
answer.

"No one believes you're a bad lot," he said.
"There's nothing
anyone
would like better than to see you make good. There's been
some talk about it at the school.
Everyone, including your guardian,
Child Welfare Services, and the police, agrees that this
is the best
place for
you."

It
was well put.
As though he himself had no part in it but had
merely been given the task of delivering the message.

"Personally, I can well understand you,"
he said, "but after
what has
happened, I think it's highly unlikely that anyone else at the school could be
persuaded to recommend
your
getting out of
here."

I waited until
nighttime,
there was really no
place where you could be alone in the daytime. You slept three to a room, when
the other
two were
asleep I slipped out to the toilet.

The
toilets were the same as at Crusty House, there was a radiator and the light
was left on all night. You could not lock the door but everything was quiet.

I slit the spine of the
Folk High School Songbook,
I
had taken a
new
Stanley knife blade from the workshop, even with that it was
a slow job, you could feel how the
binding had been made to last
as long as ten or twenty years. In the front the previous owners had
written their names and the years, the first was from
1960. Tucked in next to the pages printed with the songs were the papers I had
taken, long ago, from Biehl's locked drawer.
Still glued in and
intact.

The following night I wrote to my guardian. It took half the night.
I wrote in detail about how I
needed to get out, just for a few hours one afternoon,
to see
where August had been buried, would that be
possible?

I
received no reply. When a week had gone by I rang her office,
the minute you heard her voice you could tell
that it was out of the
question.

"He's in an unmarked grave
in Bispebjerg Cemetery," she said,
"at the family's request, there's nothing to
see."

"I still need
to see it," I said.

The guard looked at me.
Permission to leave was very rarely granted, and then only with the consent of
the guardian and the
Department
of Health and Welfare and if accompanied by an
officer.

"You just don't seem to
understand your situation," she said.
"Not for six months, at
least."

The next day I sent her another letter. I wrote asking her if she
would take three photocopies of the enclosed sheets,
in which case
I would be forever in her
debt, and would she be so kind as to send
them to me in a Children's Panel envelope?

Her
letter arrived two days later. Maybe she had wanted to make
up for not being able to arrange permission to
leave for me, I think
she had. In a
small way she had wanted to ask for forgiveness.

Usually, all private mail was opened and checked for
drugs before being handed over, but because she had sent an official envelope I
received it
unopened.

The next evening I
left the home for a short while.

It was
Friday,
there was a dance, with a band.
They had invited
Ravnsborg
assessment center for young girls. Fifteen girls turned
up, and about twenty female staff
and assistants. It was the first
time in the history of the home that girls had been
admitted, it was
part
of the new educational policy of the time.

All their attention was focused on the assembly hall
where the band was playing, and on checking whether anyone was drinking
or breaking any other rules. It
had not entered their heads that anyone would try, right now, to run away from
the school.

The gate was manned, but there was no problem. Normally
the
fence was lit
up, but they had used the searchlights to light the stage,
everything was in darkness, I had
the time I needed.

There were doors in both the outer and the inner fences,
both
fitted with
standard padlocks, and reinforced with chains. To make
absolutely certain, I had borrowed a small drill from
the workshop,
I drilled through them.

I walked from the home to the
Kalundborg highway and hitched.
Taking the
bus would have entailed too great a risk, the home had an arrangement with West
Zealand Transportation Company, who

reported
anyone looking like an inmate who got on near Ravns
borg.

I was given two good rides and a bad one. When he put his hand on me I
just said, "I'll stick my finger down my throat and throw up in your
car." That made him keep his distance, it usually does. I was dropped off
on Ålekiste
Road,
from there I walked the rest of the
way along the side of Damhus Lake.

It was not cold—mild, more like.
It had stayed light for a long
time and even though it was now dark the light had not disap
peared, but lay sort of enfolded in the night. That is
what I thought.
I suppose there have always
been light summer nights in your life,
but
there comes a time when, for the first time, you tell yourself
that this is so. For me it came that night.

The gate to the grounds was locked, but not the little
door. I
came up past
the storehouse, it had been rebuilt and freshly painted,
and the trees closest to it were
still scorched—apart from that there
was nothing to be seen.

All
the lights in the annex were out, including the one in Flak
kedam's room and that of the new inspector. In the
main building a solitary light burned, right at the top, in Biehl's apartment.

There was a new lock on the door under the archway, I
tried
using my sheet
metal copy, it did not fit, so I drilled through the
lock, at the join of the tumbler and the cylinder
casing, it took less
than five minutes. On
the way up the stairs I tried a few of the
doors onto the
corridors,
the entire lock system had been replaced.

Clearly this was because of what had happened with us.
They had replaced them in order, somehow, to make it easier to forget us and
make a fresh start.

I ascended to the fifth floor and let myself into the
corridor with
the drill, and from there
into the assembly hall. I came past Delling, who unlocks the gates of morning,
and from there through the little
door that led to Biehl's office, the
one through which he entered in
the mornings
and ascended the podium.

The room was as I
remembered. But there was a key in the

wooden
chest now. I felt inside, it was empty. Now it was only
for
show, the papers had been moved to a
safer place. A wise move, I
had never
understood why they had been kept in such an exposed
position.

I sat down at his desk. Not in his chair, but in the one
kept for
adult visitors, it had arms and
was upholstered. I had carried the
papers in
my shoe, between the insole and the
sole,
I took them
out
and placed them on the desk. There was enough light from outside
to read by.
From the moon and the
stars and the night-enfolded
gleam of
daylight.

There were two sheets of notepaper, closely written and
three-
quarters
covered, in black ink. It was Biehl's handwriting, he always
wrote with a fountain pen and
black ink.

The paper was made exclusively from
rags.

There was no way of telling this—it felt like ordinary
paper, but
thicker—it
was something we had been told. Biehl had said that
this was one of the signs of the
current state of decay, that the
quality of paper grew steadily poorer. For especially
important documents—diplomas, end-of-the-year report cards, recommenda
tions and reports on pupils and
teachers—the school used rag paper
with a
watermark, both for the originals and for the copies. The
Ministry of Education required that these be kept
on file, along with
examination
returns, for at least ten years after the person concerned had left the school.
Rag paper, Biehl had said, does not
yellow.

When you held the sheet up toward the window you could see
the watermark—Odin's
ravens, Hugin and Munin.

Across the ravens flowed the black lines of
writing—figures, let
ters, and symbols. On
the whole sheet there was not one single
complete
word. The figures were obviously dates. Against each date
there were several letters and a symbol, a
diagonal stroke or a cross
or, very
occasionally, a circle. The first date was August 4, 1970.

At another time in your life you
would not have grasped the significance of this
list,
you would have looked at it and not made
head
or tail of it, and then forgotten it. It obviously had something
to do with the past two school years, the first
date was less than a

week
after the first day of school last year. Apart from that
it would
have held
no meaning. And yet I had understood it the moment I
saw it, that first time, under the blank sheets of
school rag paper,
while August sat on a
chair, half-asleep, when he was still alive.

It was because it came into my hands at a time when I was
con
stantly thinking
about time. When I remembered all the dates that
I had been late, or had handed in work
late,
and when I had seen
Katarina in the playground, and when August came
to the school
and
started attracting the wrong sort of attention.

All
of this I had tried to remember, because that is what you do
when time threatens to slip away from you. You
try to remember
everything so as to
hold on to it. In my desperation, many dates
had entered my head and some of them had stuck. On Biehl's sheet
of paper I saw my own initials. I recognized them
because they were
set against the two
dates when I had been summoned to his office.
I saw August's and
Katarina's initials, too, and the times when they
had been to the office—Katarina's twice, the two times she had had
to
make use of in order to understand Biehl and to see where the
switchboard sat and work out where the clock was.

Against her and August's and my names, every time, there
was a
diagonal stroke, apart from in one
place, September 9, where there
was a cross
against mine. That had been the first and only time that Biehl had hit me, at
that point I had been registered as having been
late six times in less than twenty school days.

After each set of initials he had noted which class the
pupil was
in, I found
"C.S." for Carsten Sutton, there were a lot of entries
for him,
it
looked like a record. Every time, against his name, there
was a cross. You knew that he had
never been summoned to the office for less than a cuff around the ear.

He had been expelled at the beginning of November 1970, for the incident
with the paint thinner and what followed. The day
before, I had seen him coming from Biehl's office, it
was the first
time I had seen him cry,
you
would not have thought him capable
of it. Biehl had a slim fiberglass pointer that he
brought along when
ever he needed to
point out something on the maps of the world.
It had a cork handle like a fishing
rod,
he
preferred this to the stiff