Borderliners (3 page)

Since we were now
both witnesses we should try to make a deal
with them so that we could both get away.

It was as though he did not understand me. He dreamed of being a cook on
the Swedish ferries, I thought maybe he imagined they
had found him a place as an apprentice. He did not
answer me, he
just shook his head. Nor did
he say anything later on, in the office, but he did bring some pressure to bear
on them just by being there.
They
promised they would try to get me into Biehl’s Academy,
which, now and
again in past years, had taken in children with
behavioral difficulties from the homes, and which had a good reputation.

This I told
Katarina during our second conversation in the library,
the one during which they found us and separated us.

"I
can remember when you came," she said. "You were pretty small."

In answer to that, I explained that when I was transferred to Pri
mary Five at Biehl’s Academy,
which meant that I was moved back
a
class, I weighed just over fifty pounds with clothes but without
shoes. I was at that time four feet two inches
tall, and the district
medical
officer declared that I was not defective but that it all had
to do with the meals at Crusty House being less
than adequate.
Besides which, the
pecking order had been such that those who had come to the school last—the
children from the homes—were below everybody else, even the day pupils, and got
served last in the mid
dle of the day, when there was hot food. This, in
due course, made
it hard because this was
the big meal that you were supposed to
survive
on, through the night, too.

At Biehl's Academy, therefore, in
that first year I grew ten inches
and gained thirty-seven and a half pounds. Even though
this re
sulted in a good deal of pain in
my bones and also fever, back then I
was
never absent.

She read aloud from the letter in her hand:
"
'Fleeting
moments that
become like an eternity.'
" She
asked me to
explain it.

Why did it say that?

Well, one had no language of one's own when one came to
Crusty
House. At
Himmelbjerg House and the other homes before that, one had got by with very few
words.

During
the first six months one didn't say a word in class. At the
end of that time one had learned the basics. At
Biehl's they were
well and truly
driven home.

One
adopted their language, that of the teachers and the schools,
one had none of one's own. At first it was like a
release, like a key,
like a road.
The only road in.

Much later one discovers that what one was let into, back
then,
was a tunnel.
From which one can never again escape. Not entirely.
Not in this life.

" 'Fleeting
moments that become like an eternity.' What can
he have
meant?"
she said.
"The one who wrote the letter."

What was meant was that time is something you have to hold on to and the
place where we examined it that first time was where the
Hornbæk
line
ran through the school grounds.

It was Oscar Humlum who discovered it. Back then I
thought it
was a
game, later I understood that he was ill, that we were both
ill.

He played at
letting his mind go blank.

Crusty
House was a school for academically gifted children who
had gotten into difficulties because they had lacked a firm structure.
Because they came from broken homes or maybe alcoholic homes.

The school then established the structure that had been lacking.
Like, for example, the way you
slept in the dormitory, between two
sheets
and a blanket tucked under the mattress; two windows open
all year round and only one extra blanket in
winter.

Most
people could, after a while, put up with the most unbeliev
able things. It kept on, for a long time, being
hard for me because
I was
inadequately fed.

I found out that you could sneak
out to the toilet; there was a
radiator
switched on in there. You waited until the teacher on duty
and the other boys were asleep, then you crept out
and settled
down against the radiator
and went to sleep. One night Humlum
was sitting there when I came out,
he had brought his blanket with
him and he
was asleep. It was the first time I had really noticed
him.

Sometimes
we sat for a bit and talked before we fell asleep. We
sat, each on our own toilet, with a partition between. Still, we could
hear each other even when talking softly. It was
there he told me
that he played at
letting his mind go blank.

We put up a rope in a tree overlooking the railroad tracks, so we
could swing out in front of the locomotive when it
came, and hang
for a moment outside the
windscreen and look in at the engineer
and
get away so late that it was clear that one had only just
survived.

Normally you would, right through the swing, be thinking
how
you had to get
away in time. Now we tried, instead, to let our minds
go blank; to switch off, and feel
the
train,
and the rope between
our hands, and then it became a
very rich moment; then time began
to stretch, so that afterward you could not say how long
it had
lasted. In
the longest moments, those two times when I was brushed
by the train, there had been no
time at all.

Even
then you sensed that it must be a rule. That time could not
be something that passed all by itself but was
something you had
to hold on to.
And that when you let go of it, that moment was
very significant.

In a way this discovery was a help. But, at the same time, that
was, in fact, the illness.

This I told
Katarina while she listened.

At Crusty House no
one had ever listened, at any rate no adults.

No harm intended. The school had established the firm
structure
that people
had lacked. Anker Jørgensen had gone
there,
the school
had reared a prime
minister.

Even though that was not the
norm.
The
norm
was,
that of the
fifteen who came into a new class, approximately
half would have
to
leave within the first four years because they could not cope with
the academic side, or just could
not cope.

I was only twelve when I was moved, but even then it was
ob
vious that, for
most of those who were left, things did not look good. Most of them were lost.

The
Hornbæk
line's own people, together with
the fire depart
ment,
came and cut down the tree. I was under suspicion, but it
was the day before I was to leave
the school, and they wanted to
avoid attracting any attention, so they did not pursue the case.

I dried up there. I felt very empty. It was necessary for her to say
something in return.

At Crusty House we had three kroner a month dished out and
three saved; even so,
you paid what you owed, it was an absolute
rule, even to Gummi, who could go without for a very long
time
and held on to
candy till the end of the month and sold it dear.
The few times it happened that
someone tried to get out of it, they were made to jump from the willow tree
down into the lake. It was thirty feet down, but only three feet of water. You
did not break
anything,
but you sank into mud up to your chest and then you
were sucked down slowly and only
pulled out after your whole head
had been under for a while.

So you always gave something in return and paid what you
owed.
Everybody did.
It was an absolute rule.

Katarina must have known this.
First she waited for me to go on,
but I said nothing, I could not, then she said, "By
the way, both
my
mother and my father died last year."

At Crusty House I had tried to imagine what it was like to be with
a family. You imagined that you
were walking along Strand Drive,
and one of the kitchen maids came bicycling along. She
stopped
and took you up behind her on her
bike, and you talked freely and
openly, and
rode home to where she lived. It was a house, and her
father and mother
were there, and you sat down at the dinner table,
and there was loads of food. That, more than anything, was how you
imagined a family.
That there was enough food.

When Katarina mentioned her mother and father for the
first
time, you
could hear that there was something else, too. At first you
did not understand what.

She
never said what their home had looked like, not one word. Still, I could
picture it. There had been books and lamps and par
quet floors—easily damaged, but no one shouted at you, even if
you spilled something, it was just mopped up,
because that sort of
thing can happen
to anyone.

"They often
talked about time," she said.

They had talked about
time,
there had been nothing strange
about that, it had been
altogether normal.
Although not so much about time by a clock
but more about time out in space.
Katarina
had heard them talking about
whether it passed forward or
backward.

Then
her mother had become very ill. The doctors had said that she had less than
three months to live and it was then that she had become interested in ordinary
time.

"She developed a scientific
theory," said Katarina.

Why scientific?

This was the first time I heard that word used about a
thought
that an ordinary
person had had. Why was it important that the

theory
was scientific, for her mother, and after that for
Katarina,
and after
that for me and August?

Maybe there are
only two kinds of question in the world.

The
kind they ask in school, where the answer is known in ad
vance; asked not so that anyone will be any the wiser but for other
reasons.

And then the others, those in the laboratory.
Where one does not know the
answers, and often not even the question, before one has
asked it.

Questions like what is time, why Oscar Humlum said save
your
self
, and why Axel Fredhøj lay down
beside the lagging.

Questions
that are
quite painful. And that are not asked until
one
is driven to it. Like when they gave her
mother three months.

That was what we meant by science. That both question and
answer are tied up with
uncertainty, and that they are painful.
But that there is no
way around them.
And that you hide nothing; in
stead, everything is brought out
into the open.

"She began to think that time only passed when you were un
aware," said Katarina.

Her mother had begun to believe
that time sort of stole forward,
in jerks, when one's mind was elsewhere. That the bit
about her
only
having three months left was on the assumption that she was not concentrating.
Then she became very aware.

It pretty soon became wearing. She stopped sleeping at
night, and
Katarina
and her father did not sleep much either, but when they
did finally sleep, they would
wake up to find her mother sitting
looking at them, so as not to miss a single second.

When the three months were up,
she had felt sure that she was
now living
a life of total awareness and had more or less stopped
time, and she took Katarina with her on some of her visits to the
hospital.

"The doctors sat," said Katarina,
"and she walked back and forth and told them that the passage of time was
just carelessness. She
weighed less than
ninety pounds and had no hair left on her head."