Borderliners (8 page)

could
ask something like that ran the risk, any minute, of
tumbling
into
perdition.

"No," I
said.

This was not true. The car was a Taunus—wafers in both
door
and ignition
locks. I said no to protect her, it was for her own good.

"The new
boy," she said, "why did they take him?"

The first
time August had a drawing handed back I had not been
there. But the second time it happened in the middle of a class. I
had
had the feeling that something was going to happen, and had
stayed close.

He must have listened to what I said. He had filled in
the back
ground.
Karin Ær
ø
handed him the drawing. A star
had been stuck
to the
bottom left-hand corner. She said he had improved.

He took a step
toward her.

"It's been
colored in," he said, "that's all."

I was right behind him. It was only two days since
Flakkedam
had
stopped sitting behind us in class, and this was the first day he
had not accompanied August up and
down the stairs, or been in
the
playground during recess.

August and I had not talked about his situation, but even
so we
had an understanding. One evening,
after I had paced around with
him and just
before he dropped off, he had asked about me, and I
had told him how
things stood: no parents, a scholarship, a guard
ian appointed, and my case put before the Social Welfare Commit
tee of the local authority, which had sent me for
an indefinite period
to Himmelbjerg
House, and had it ratified by a judge.

"So that's why they let you
into the cage," he said. "They've
nothing special to lose."

While saying this he had slumped
forward and laid his head on his knees. And then he had smiled.

It was the first time I saw him smile.
It made him seem so small.

Karin
Ærø
had stayed where she was when he moved
toward her.
She must have been warned, but
maybe she thought he looked so
harmless.
And one had to hand it to
her,
she never had been
scared,
no matter what. I had seen her hit Carsten Sutton before he was
expelled. Hard, in the face, with a big paintbrush, out in the cor
ridor, where there were other pupils and teachers.

August very nearly got to her. I grabbed his upper
arms. They
were skinny, but like steel.
He shook as though he had a fever, but
he
was, in fact, cold.

I
pulled him into the room where the pottery was put to dry. He
stopped shaking and became much calmer than usual.

He had started
waking me in the mornings. We had never talked
about it, but he must have seen what a hard time I had waking up
on those mornings when I had not slept at night.
And then he had
started sitting on my bed and shaking me, so that I
could be sitting up before Flakkedam came.

Flakkedam woke you by the tube
method. He started at your
feet, chopping with the side of his hand, and worked his way up
your body until you were on your
feet. But now I was half up when
he came, thanks to August.

Up to this point I had believed that the August who
woke me in
the morning was the only one. Now
you could see that there was
another.
Facing up to Karin
Ærø
,
and
when I grabbed hold of him
and pulled him away, he was someone else.
There had to be two
people living inside
him, at the same time and yet taking it in turns.
One could not help but think that because of the
other one—the one I had pulled away—both of them were lost.

      
O
ften I do not reach the child. I watch her
playing—it is a girl—I hear her
calling. But I cannot reach her.

I am afraid that my own fear will be transmitted to
her, that she
will become every bit as
scared as I am. So I thrust the woman
between us, like a protective
filter.

Can one protect a
child from the world?

At
any rate, one cannot teach it about the laboratory. Only those
sucked into it can learn about the laboratory.

When the woman sings to the child you grow calm. Sometimes there
are moments almost free of fear.
I have been on the point of telling
her; I have wanted to say it; have leaned over.

Karin
Ærø
sometimes leaned over, behind
those who sang, on
her
rounds of the singers. And then she would say, quite softly, so
that only the one to whom it was addressed should hear
it, "Ex
cellent."

It is called
praise. It is supposed to be a small act of kindness.

Next time she came past, and was
right behind you, you could
feel the fear from the one she had praised. Not a big fear, physical

punishment
did not enter into it. But a subtle little fear that
would
perhaps only be obvious to someone
who had never received much in the way of praise.
The fear of
not being just as good as last time;
of not
being worthy this time as well.

You knew that, always, when Karin
Ærø
came up behind you,
so, too,
came
a judge.

Behind the woman I remembered Karin
Ærø
.
So I said nothing.

To
judge and assess.
This was very
important for the grand plan.
Which was why you could not help but ask yourself whether Karin
Ærø
knew what she was doing.
Did she know? That when one praises, one also judges. And then one does
something that has a
profound effect.
How much did they know? What did Biehl know?

The spoken word had been one of Grundtvig's principles. It meant
that you were given very few
books before Primary Six. Instead, the
teachers recounted Danish history, Scandinavian history,
world his
tory,
Greek and Norse mythology, Bible stories, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
to us—every day, five days a
week.

It was a great many words. It called for the greatest
awareness.
Often,
near the end of the day, it was impossible to remember any
thing except that someone had been
talking at you.

Ever since I came to the school I had been looking for
the rule
behind the words, and at last I
found it. It happened when August
had
been at the school for two weeks.

Biehl taught world history, he knew it by heart. Normally
you kept quiet. Normally the spoken word was a stream that flowed
down from the teacher's desk to
the class. Until, suddenly, he asked
a
question.

They came without warning—a handful of curt
questions—and
then it was very important that
one could answer. When he asked
a question it was as though, together
with him, one closed in upon
something
crucial.

The questions always concerned an
event and a date. Those on
the inside could often remember
them,
those on
the outside put their
hands
up out of fear, without remembering anything, and sank
deeper into the darkness.

Personally, I had come close to
giving up. I had tried to write down the dates he mentioned, but it was
difficult, one could not
know which ones would be the important ones, and taking notes
in his classes was forbidden.

I would not have discovered it without Katarina.
Even though
we had not spoken to
each other very often, and particularly not
over the past few weeks.
But she had been looking for something. When you
meet a person who is searching, you postpone giving up.

And then there was August. He had a lot of trouble
remembering
things.
During the first two weeks, not once had he been able to
put up his hand. It seemed
necessary to support him. If you want to support others you have to stay
upright yourself.

I hit upon the rule by sensing Biehl. I had tried before, just after I
came to the school, but with no luck. One could
observe him only
by letting go of time just
a fraction; by ceasing to listen to what
was being said and instead observing the voice and the face and the
body. And then you ran a big risk. Then you took
on a faraway look and lost all sense of time and did not hear what was being
said
and could not be on the ball, just like that, if you were spoken
to. That first time I had lost heart. Since then
I had seen Katarina
looking for
something, so I gave it another try.

As Biehl approached the key points it was as though he
became
condensed.
There was a brief pause. Then it came, without any
special emphasis, almost casually.
But
condensed.
Once I had felt
my way to
this, it was unmistakable. Then I understood.

The rule was: the
Battle of Poitiers, 732.

At Poitiers the Prankish king
Charles Martel beat back the advancing Moors and thus saved Europe. A brilliant
personage exe
cuted an
appropriate deed at exactly the right moment. This was the pattern behind
Biehl's questions. From then on I knew what I

      
A
fter Katarina had asked me about the car, I
took to avoiding her; avoided
even looking at her in the playground.

At the beginning of August's third week at the school she
came
up beside me on the stairs. Once she
had passed, there was a letter in my pocket.

It
was the first letter I had ever received. There had been others
but they had been printed.

It did not say who it was to, or who it was from. There
was just a question: "Why were their children removed?"

A prohibition had been imposed on August—in the playground he
was not to go any farther away from the wall than
where he could
touch it with an
outstretched arm. The first week, Flakkedam had
walked on his outside,
then
the teacher on
playground duty had
taken over. Now
it was no longer necessary, he kept to the wall by
himself. No one said much to him either.

The only time he was allowed to leave it was to go to the toilet,
and then I had to go with him and wait outside
until he was fin-

ished
. That day I went in with him. There was barely room. We
stood on either side of the toilet
bowl while he smoked.

"I've had a
letter," I said.

I showed it to him. He did not ask
how I could be sure it was
for me. He believed me. If I said it, it must be true.

Nor did he ask who it was from. He probably thought that
would
have been
prying. All he said was "What does she mean?"

In April 1971 all those pupils who were related to teachers were
taken out of the school. Before
that, Vera Hofstætter, who taught German, had had two boys in Primary Two and
Primary Four and
Biehl had had two
grandchildren in Primary One, and Stuus, who taught Latin, had a daughter in
Third Year Secondary and Jerlang
had two
children in First Year Secondary and Primary Seven and a girl, Anne, in our
class. And then of course there was
Fredhøj
's son,
Axel.
Nine
pupils
altogether. They did not come back after
the
Easter vacation, nothing was said
about it. Everyone assumed it was
because
of what had happened to Axel
Fredhøj
.

Fredhøj was the deputy head, and well liked. His easy sense of
humor made people open up, even
those who had broken school
rules. In
this pleasant atmosphere they tended to give themselves
away. After which Fredhøj was always ready with a remark—some
thing good and quick—then the incident was
forgotten. A couple
of days later
those who had forgotten themselves were summoned to Biehl's
office,
or their parents were summoned to an interview,
or suddenly they were no longer in the class. They never saw what
hit them.

Not
once did I ever see him punish someone himself, all he did
was
pass
the buck. It was
brilliant.

It was hard, if not impossible,
to see how Axel could be his son. You never saw them talking to each other,
particularly not after the
incident in the engineering access tunnels. Axel was in the class