Authors: Peter Høeg

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Dystopian

Borderliners (21 page)

BOOK: Borderliners

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You had to stand with your hands
behind your back, so you
would not try to protect your face. He walked back and forth while
getting into his stride—on the
rug, too. You had not heard the
words, it
was more as though I had noticed the color of his skin,
I
had known when the blow was coming. Still
it had taken you by
surprise. Jes had
fallen down, but I had stayed upright.

So now you automatically walked around the rug, and over
to
the desk. August
went off into a corner. After he hurt himself he
had calmed down, you could see he was very tired,
which was be
cause he
had not eaten.

It was a fairly simple matter to open the chest—it might
never
have been
locked. Never, ever had they expected anyone to attempt
such an
offense.
There were so many things they had thought of,
they had safeguarded themselves against almost
everything, but not
against
this.

Nor, under normal circumstances, should this have been
done. By opening this chest you were abusing your schoolmates' trust;
you were acting in an underhand
manner. The ravens on the lid reminded you of this. That there was a justice
from which nothing
could be hidden.

But at the moment
the object was to protect August.

I did not switch on the light, the moon was bright. I
could see
the letters on the folders
containing the documents. They were ar
ranged
alphabetically, like a telephone book but not packed so close
together.

"The bell
doesn't ring at night," said August.

Until he said it,
it had never occurred to me.

"It's
like she says," he said. "When it doesn't ring there's another
time in this place. It's as if there is no
time."

I pointed to the
moon.

"Time's built into the world," I said.
"The moon rises and sets,
there's a
system, like a clock."

"But it
doesn't ring a bell every fifty minutes," he said.

The folder was
thick, I lit the candle. He did not come any closer.

"Whose business
is it anyway," he said, "right?"

One folder held his school record.
He had gone to a normal
school on Slotsherrens Road in Rødovre. I flicked past them. Then
came
the test results from the
examinations by the school psychologist, and the case sheet from the school
doctor. Then came some
thing
from the Social Services Department and two folders from the child psychiatry
clinic at the University Hospital—they had examined him twice. I did not look
at any of this. Last but one came the
papers from Biehl's—a number of letters. First time around
I let
them pass.
Last of all came some typewritten sheets and some pho
tographs.
Of
his parents.

In a way I was already familiar with the pictures—from
his draw
ings. Time
and again he had drawn the whole thing, very precisely,
so I must have known. It had been
buckshot, you could not help
but see it,
you
had seen it before, albeit
never like this. They lay
close together, dressed in evening clothes. They had probably been
out and had then come home and had
then gone over to him on
the cot. And he had been lying there, waiting for them.

"Now they'll
remember," he said.

He
had not looked at the pictures,
nor
at me. He had
looked out
the window, at the moon.

"How
come?"
I
said.

"Now they
know I don't put up with anything."

We were running out of time, you had to
be clear and forthright.

"They look
pretty dead," I said.

"They're
perfectly okay," he said, "
it
was just a
reminder."

The typewritten sheets contained the police report, along
with
the statement
from the legal representative from the Department of Health and Welfare, who
had to be present whenever you were
questioned, if you were
under
fifteen. I had had that, too. There
was no time to read those now. That left the papers from
Biehl's.

There were a number of letters,
from different authorities. I tried
to
read them, it was no good. We were running late, the cleaners
would be here soon, and the business with my hand
did not make
it any easier. Besides,
it was a difficult language to read against the

clock
. It left you with the same feeling as the standardized
reading tests; made you aware of how slow you were. But mostly it was
difficult because of August.

He stood beside me looking out the window. He had seized
up.
Looking at the
papers was like seeing inside him.

But there was something I could not help but notice. Two
of the
letters were
from Baunsbak-Kold, director of education for Copen
hagen. That was one of the things
I saw. The other was what we
had come for. It was about August's trial period. I read it several times
so as to memorize it.

"You're here for an indefinite period," I said,
"you're in preven
tive
detention."

I read it out to him: " '. . . after consultation
with the Department of Health and Welfare, the Ministry of Education, the
Danish In
stitute of
Education, the Copenhagen Board of Education, and the Danish Teacher Training
College, the department hereby assents to
August Joon being boarded at the school, under preventive
deten
tion, for an
indefinite period.' '

"Why did they ask so many people," he said,
"what was the point
of that?"

I did not answer
that, there was no time to wonder about it.

"Your trial period won't ever end," I said,
"
you've
got to stick
it out. We'll make it, you'll
see. We'll think of something."

Then I noticed something else. It looked like an extract
from a
police record,
in August's name. This was not possible, there was
no way you could have a record if
you were
under
fifteen. I knew
all about that, it was a rule.
Then I saw where it was from. It was
a transcript from the court records, giving a brief
account of Au
gust's
case.

That should not have been
possible. The only people who had
access to the court records were the observer from Child
Welfare Services and the police, who used them in conjunction with police
records. Where no notes could be
made against a record—for ex
ample, with those of us not turned fifteen—we were entered in the court
records. Like, for example, with all those times you had been
brought into a police station for
questioning, even though you had

never
been charged. It was supposed to be strictly
confidential. But
still,
there was a transcript about August.

I
put the file back. I switched on the light, just for a second, to
make sure that he had not dripped on the floor or
the rug. Then I saw that one of the desk drawers was fitted with a mortise
lock.

This was absolutely normal. Biehl was the head of the
school,
there had
to be a locked drawer in his desk for stamps and maybe small sums of money.
There was no good reason for taking a look,
and besides, we were in a hurry.

But I did it anyway. I took a paper clip from the desk and
used
the sheet-metal
key as a wrench. I do not know why I did
it,
I
suppose it was out of habit.

And yet maybe it had not been habit. Maybe it was an
attempt
to see
inside Biehl.

All the papers in the school had been about everything
but him.
Always.
No exceptions. And he had never said a word about
himself.

Which was why you read his
memoirs.
There
were four copies
in
the
library,
they could be borrowed for a week at a
time. They
had been
out on loan constantly for nine months, even to people
who usually did not read
anything except what they were given as
homework. And yet not even in those had there been one
word
about him
personally.

It was not a deep drawer. In it
lay a pile of blank school note-
paper. Under the pile were two sheets of the same
notepaper, but
written
on.

I looked over at August. He had
sat
down,
he was very close to falling asleep on the
chair. He had already started to twist and turn
the way he did when his nightmare was on the way.
When I was
sure that he could not see
anything, I took the two bottom sheets.
Then
I closed the drawer.

I picked him up, but because of my
hand I could do no more
than support him. His legs moved
,
the rest of
him was asleep.

“W
here's tomorrow?"
This is what she has asked me.

When
children cry you talk to them about tomorrow. If they hurt
themselves and are inconsolable, even though you
pick them up, then you tell them where they are going tomorrow, who they are
going to visit. You move their awareness on a day,
away from their
tears. You introduce
time into their lives.

The woman has the knack of doing it gently, somehow.
Without
promising anything specific,
without trying to deny the pain, ten
derly
she draws the child with her into the future. As if to say, we
all have
to learn about time. That even so, it is possible to grow up
without being damaged.

For my part, I never talk to the child about time. We
talk about other things—though not about anything much—and never about
tomorrow. For me that is impossible. Tomorrow we
could all be
wiped out. You think back upon all the promises you did not
man
age to keep. Talk about time and you
will always end up making
promises.
Then it is better to say nothing at all, no matter what.

And yet, quite often, she comes
to me. Seldom to have anything
explained, but often to tell me something.

When
she comes over to me I sit down on the floor. It does not
seem right to tower over her when she is talking
to
me.
Instead I
sit down,
then
our heads are on a level.

"Where's
tomorrow?"

I
knew what she meant. She had grasped the concept of changes in space, that
places are different from one another. Now time had
been introduced into her life, but she could not grasp it. So she tried
to explain it in terms of space, which she had
grasped.

Katarina said the same thing, over the telephone, after the total
separation. She did most of the
talking, because for her there was
less risk.

She said she had been thinking about the way you
remembered
your past. What you
remembered, she said, was a string of events
and
years stretching back from the point where you now found
yourself.
In other words, a line
of time.
This might be colored dif
ferently, depending upon what
had happened to you. For example, if you had lost someone, then it would be
black. Other spots might be lighter. On some sections of the line time would
have passed
quickly, on other sections more
slowly. But, for a long way back,
it
would still be a line.

Though not all the way back—at any rate not in her
case—and
what about me, she asked me to
think about it.

For her, she said, and maybe for
everyone, if you went far enough
back, the line disintegrated. If you went all the way
back to your
early
childhood it was no longer a line. Then there was a sort of
landscape of events. You could
not remember their sequence, maybe
they had none,
they
just lay
scattered about, as if on a plain. She
believed that this plain belonged to the days before
time had entered
your world.