Borderliners (28 page)

probe
inside it, so it was probably meant for something else,
oxygen
maybe, they
had usually prescribed that at Nødebogård. I used this
tube to tie his hands behind his
back, not tightly, mainly for
show.

"That won't be necessary," said Baunsbak-Kold,
"I've read the
file."

I put on the white coat. This was my own
idea,
it was not part
of
the plan. Then I opened the door, pushed August in, and posi
tioned him in the middle of the room.

The director of education got to his feet and stepped back
a bit.
I need not
have worried about him seeing the splatters of paint on
the coat, he did not look at me at
all.

"Hello, young man," he said to August.
"My name is Baunsbak-Kold."

To this August made no reply. He
seemed to be sleeping standing
up.

"I've tied his hands together," I said, "
there's
no risk. And he's
been given four Mogadon."

"I hear
you're feeling better," he said.

August made no
reply to this either.

"Take him
away," he said.

He had not looked directly at August. He had not been
able to bring himself to do it.

"He
has attacked a teacher," said Katarina. "He will not eat. We have had
him admitted on a red form. He broke two of Inspector
Flakkedam's fingers when we brought him up here. We have him under
around-the-clock surveillance. We can no longer be held re
sponsible, we need authorization."

He had turned to face the window. From there you could
look
across the
grounds to Copenhagen.

"It must be all over town by now," he said.
"I suppose Hårdrup was informed long ago?"

Aage Hårdrup, theologian and
educator, was the state inspector
assigned to the school. You had seen him at close
quarters just once,
when
he made a speech at the inauguration of the annex and the
new toilets.

"You're the first to hear of
it," said Katarina. "We feel the less
that's said about it the better."

"Parliament sits less than two miles away as the
crow flies," he
said. "This is all
going to rebound on me."

He stuck his hand into his pocket—for a handkerchief, I
thought—but it was a comb. Unaware of what he was
doing, he
combed both his hair and his
sideburns.

"This has gone too far," he said. "I told
Biehl so months ago.
This
boy has to go back to Sandbjerggård. The worst of the others must be sent back
where they came from, I'll attend to that person
ally. Although, of course, we cannot altogether
put a stop to this.
Too
much is expected of it.
At the highest level."

I had not so much listened to his words as sensed him. He
had worked himself up, I knew
that it was about to come to a
head.

"What does
Biehl have to say?" he said.

Katarina did not get the chance
to reply. There was no transition.
One moment he was speaking, the next he was yelling like
a
madman.

"What in hell's
name does Biehl have to
say!
"

Never before at the school had
an adult sworn or used abusive
language, never, this had been a cast-iron rule.

"Sorry,"
he said, "I'm sorry . . ."

I led August from the room and pulled the door to behind
us,
but did not close
it. Very gently I set him on a chair, took off the tape, and removed the drips.
He started to pull the tube out of his throat by himself.

Baunsbak-Kold sat
down opposite Katarina.

"It is, of
course, my responsibility," he said.

He
looked straight at the
mirror,
I knew he could not see
us. He seemed very tired now.

"I've read his file," he said, "I just
cannot conceive of it.
Such
brutality.
Violence.
And between children and parents."

"Have you
never hit your children?" said Katarina.

At first he just clammed up,
then
he answered. Slowly, as though
he was surprised by the question,
and perhaps by his own reply.

"I've spanked them," he said. "Well, one
does. But they've never
hit back."

He closed his eyes. I knew he was picturing the
photographs from
the
police report.

When next he spoke,
his voice was weak as a child's.

"One
has seen it in the newspapers. It has drawn closer.
The
unaccountable children.
Now he is on my desk. How can such a thing
happen?
The brutality.
Why does it happen? Isn't that
your
field? Isn't that what you're
paid to do—to explain it?"

She did not answer
him.

"It's beyond
my powers," he said.

I remembered the clock. Since Katarina had given me the
wrist-
watch I had
regularly remembered the time.
As though I were be
coming less ill.
Now, when it
was all too late, anyway.

I had seven minutes.

"There was no opposing Biehl," he said.
"From the first meeting
at the ministry
it was a fait accompli. Surely you noticed it, too?"

"I was not
there," said Katarina.

"No. True enough. Hessen was. 'Man is a divine
experiment
which proves how spirit and
dust can merge.' Fascinating, isn't it?
Grundtvig—in the
preface to
Norse Mythology.
He had built his speech around
it. We were only going to continue this experiment.
Turn the school into the 'Workshop of the Sun'—that, too, is
Grundtvig,
from
New Year's Morning.
It sounds so plausible when
he says it. 'We act in the hope of future glory.'
You must have seen
that, after all it
turns up several times in his writing."

"Where?"

"In
the applications?"

"Where are
they?" she asked.

He did not get her
drift.

"They are arranged in the same way as the Ministry
circulars, by
date. They cover November
and December 1969. They're all there,
in
the office, on those shelves. I've referred to them myself several
times."

For a moment he had been on the
verge of coming unstuck. Now,
gradually, he regained his composure.

"It was an idea that seemed
born to succeed. He carries everyone
with him.
Me, the minister, the
department, the Charity Schools
Foundation,
the Institute of Education,
Hårdrup
.
The money is
there. The wheels start to turn.
It all bodes so well. And then these
breakdowns start to occur. At least in the residential
schools they
were out
of the way. But this is a reputable school, a model, on the outskirts of the
capital. And now the grants have been awarded and partially spent. There's no
stopping it now, the forces that have been
set in motion are too great,
too
much is at stake."

I got up. Four
minutes to go.

"If that were all there was to it," he said.
"But then there are the
children's interests to be considered. Like that one, that little boy.
What burden is he carrying?"

He buried his face
in his hands. I went over to the door.

"I must
go," he said.

The corridor was deserted. The staff room door was at the far end. I
opened it and stepped inside.

Pupils had no
business in the staff room. I had never been there.

It was big. There were sofas, and fabric on the chairs. In
the
classroom you
sat on wooden chairs or at a desk. The teacher's
chair had a leather seat but nowhere else was there
upholstered
furniture.

It smelled of coffee and good food. Not packed lunches,
nor like
what came
out of the kitchen in the annex. Good food.

One of the kitchen staff, in her overalls, was in the
room, and
two of the
new teachers were sitting there, marking some papers.
Fredhej was standing by one of the
windows.

"Excuse
me," I said, "I was sent with a message for Hessen."

Then I closed the
door.

There had been pictures on the
wall, you noticed them right
away. Sticking things up on the classroom walls was not
permitted—to save on wear and
tear. There had also been a big electric clock.
But nothing
that could have been the school bell.

I ran along the
corridor to the door next to Fredhøj's office—the

that
such unhygienic and downright disgusting habits would
not be countenanced in this school. He would now ask the two girls stand
ing beside him to go home and
give this some careful thought. And
they need not come back until they felt that they had
understood.

I remembered this now. It meant that I had to force
myself to set
foot
on the walls. Never before had you so much as brushed against
them. Yet here you were, and with
bare feet besides.

"Bürk" it said, on the clock. I wedged myself
tight and opened
the
cover.

It was lifeless. It moved, but it was not alive—that is
what I told
myself.
But still I could not cope with touching it.

Electrical
cables ran into the casing, but not to the works. The works were hand-wound.
Two keys lay on the floor of the casing,
and
there was a pawl in the face. Above the pawl sat a small dial that shifted once
every second. One minute to go.

There were labels stuck to the back of the casing, with
warnings printed in German. I could read these only with some difficulty. But
I could tell, from the exclamation marks and the
underlining, that
these were the directions
for winding the clock. Besides the keys,
on the floor of the casing, there was a box of 250 ma fuses and a
slip with details of when the works had been
adjusted. An adjust
ment of about a
minute had been made at the end of each month.

I tried pushing the big hand back.
Impossible.
It seemed to be
stuck
fast,
there was nothing to be done about it.

The
gear wheel below the works was connected to a fair amount of machinery, it was
impossible to figure it all out in such a short time. What was clear, however,
was that it had to be connected to
the bell
mechanism, which was electric. Inside the casing there was a relay marked
"Tradania, Denmark." The works themselves were German, so the clock
was, in fact, the result of German-Danish
cooperation.

The gear wheel was divided up
from 1 to 24, with twelve small
perforations for every hour. In the perforations
corresponding to when the bell rang sat a very tiny screw. The clock had,
therefore,
a built-in
accuracy of better than plus or minus a couple of minutes.

Also on the casing
floor was a little screwdriver. I used this to