by Peter Høeg
At Biehl’s I saw a chance to get out of it. I went for it in a lunch period. I wrote a letter to myself from my guardian on one of the typewriters they used for teaching starting in the school-leaving certificate class. It said that I was invited to visit her at her home. I presented it and was given permission. I left for Copenhagen on Friday evening, after we had eaten. You could do whatever you wanted—follow people or just walk the streets unhindered—it was brilliant. At night you just went back to the school.
Still, I could not sleep. I do not know why, I just could not. Sometimes a whole weekend would go by without my getting a wink of sleep. On Monday morning one was very tired and it affected the rest of the week.
* * *
It is not true, what I said about those weekends. Often one did not go into town. Often one just stood there, down at the gate, watching the cars driving past. The school and the annex were deserted, people were home, I was the only one left. That was not so good.
The next week one was unprepared and numb inside.
Then came the signal.
* * *
It came in biology class. Biehl explained about Darwinism—the survival of the fittest. It still applies, he said, even in our society, but it is mitigated because we alleviate its consequences.
After he had said that, there was a pause. It was a rich moment.
He had not looked at anyone in particular. He never addressed himself, as it were, to individuals. Still, maybe I was the one, at that moment, who understood him best.
Those who were on the inside, the majority, that is, found it hard to get his point, mostly they were just pleased that they were on the inside, that they were the fittest.
For those on the outside, the fear and the abandonment amount to almost everything, everybody knows that.
Understanding is something one does best when one is on the borderline.
* * *
It was a law, that was what one understood. It selected some, and some it tumbled into perdition. But for those on the borderline, work was being done to alleviate the consequences. For them there was a chance. Biehl’s Academy was that chance.
Understanding that is something one does best when one is designated a borderline case.
* * *
Biehl very rarely came to a halt. But when he had said this, he had come to a halt. It had not been planned. It was an involuntary stoppage. We were close to something crucial.
“Listen to my pauses. They speak louder than my words.”
The covert Darwinism. The plan behind time was selection. Time was a tool that made the selection. One experienced a great sense of relief because everything had been cleared up.
Only much later, when I met Katarina, did the thought strike me that something had been left unexplained.
SIX
What is time? I shall have to try to say, but not yet. It is too overwhelming for that. You have to begin more simply.
What does it mean—to measure time? What is a timepiece?
* * *
Fredhøj had a watch, and looked at it often. Biehl had a fob watch, I never saw him look at it, not once.
Katarina did not have a watch, neither did August, nor did I ever get one. At first, because there was no one to give it to me; later on I never felt like having one.
* * *
I have read that they have never made a timepiece that is absolutely precise. No disrespect to science, but no completely accurate timepiece has ever been made.
In the course of this century, they discovered that the movements of the heavenly bodies were not, as they had previously believed, constant. That the course of the earth’s orbit around the sun varied from year to year.
So they had to select one particular year to provide them with a starting point at least. They selected the year 1900. In 1956 the unit of time was redefined so that one second equaled 1/31556925.9747 of the tropical year 1900.
Unfortunately, that year will never come around again. The earth will never again move precisely as it did in that year, because of earthquakes and other irregularities that have affected its course. This makes it hard to synchronize the world’s timepieces. It is hard to set a watch by an event that took place in the previous century.
Which is why, in 1967, they supplemented this definition with atomic time, in which a second corresponds to 9,192,631,770 radiation periods of a particular cesium-133 transition in what they call a cesium clock. Fredhøj told us about it in physics. Now there were two methods of dating accurately, he said, the one supplemented the other.
Later I read that, unfortunately, these two systems are always out of step with each other, except for just after they have been synchronized, which therefore has to be done continually.
Not to be petty. The most precise atomic timepieces they have constructed so far have shown a day-to-day variation of less than 10−8, which would, over 300,000 years, show up as an error of no more than one second. No one can deny that it is extremely accurate. Everyone has done their best.
But it is not absolutely precise.
It would not have mattered so much if they had not made such a point of this thing about time.
Not that it was ever talked about. Never. Humlum and Katarina were the first people I heard talk about time. But it was at the root of everything. It screwed life down. Like some kind of tool.
It was not just the classes and assembly that began on the dot. There was also a study period and the meals and the chores and voluntary sports and lights-out and when you had to get up if you were to manage a proper wash, and what time every third week the green vitamin pills for the next three weeks were dished out, and what time on Sunday evenings you had to report back to Flakkedam after weekends at home. It had all been allotted a stroke of the clock that was most scrupulously observed. The inaccuracy amounted to less than plus or minus two minutes.
No explanation of time was ever given. But one knew that it was enormous, bigger than anything mortal or earthly. That one had to be on time was not just out of consideration for one’s schoolmates and oneself and the school. It was also for the sake of time itself. For God.
* * *
For God’s sake.
There had always been a lot of praying and singing. But we had never tried to get through to God himself. For that he had always been too close to Biehl or the rector at the Orphanage or the superintendent at Himmelbjerg House. Far too close to let us pray.
To pray is to confess something, to admit that one needs help. We were afraid that any confession, even to God, could worsen our situation and be used against us.
* * *
Grundtvig had written that the day was created for action and the twilight for rest, and that one should, therefore, be precise.
When time itself was so exact, then so ought people to be, that was the idea. Accuracy was a characteristic, and perhaps the most important one, of the universe. At assembly one had to be absolutely precise and absolutely still. Utter time and utter stillness. That was the goal. Achievement was there to bring us nearer to that goal. And to encourage achievement, there was punishment.
One tried to be totally exact, because time and the world were. One tried and tried all the way through one’s adolescence, and one could not, and one came very close to giving up. Yet they had never been able to construct an absolutely accurate timepiece. They had never been able to show that time itself remained constant.
Deep down, they themselves had never managed to be absolutely precise. Nor had they been able to prove that the world is.
SEVEN
For the first week August slept in the sickroom, then he was moved into my room. Since Jes Jessen had been expelled I had had it to myself.
At Crusty House, for a few months, they had had a fox. Lent by Svinninge Wildlife Park as part of the nature study program. Sometimes Humlum and I would stand in front of its cage. It never saw us. It looked straight through us and out at the world as it paced relentlessly back and forth behind the bars. We knew how it felt. How all it
s mortal despair at being cooped up had been compressed into an endless, steady, rhythmic monotony.
August was like that fox.
* * *
He got his medicine at nine o’clock, Flakkedam came with two Mogadon and watched him wash them down with a glass of water, and then checked with a finger to see that he had not hidden them under his tongue.
It usually took about three-quarters of an hour for them to work. During that time he was very restless. He paced along the walls and did not hear you if you spoke to him. Gradually he slowed down; finally he had to lie down, and he would fall asleep without saying anything.
I got through to him because I discovered that the key to him lay in his movements.
On the third day I began pacing beside him, brushing past the bed and the door and the other bed and under the washbasin and the window and past the closet and then around again, and I kept going even after he had tried to shake me off, and even though he looked past me, as the fox had done. At one point, just before he collapsed, I got through to him. By then I had absorbed his restlessness and he had gotten used to me, and the medicine had taken the edge off his nerves.
For my part, there was nothing personal in this. I did not owe him anything. But he had been entrusted into my care. Not that it had been said in so many words, but he had been linked with me. If he survived and was allowed to stay at the school, at least for a while, it would be to the benefit of us both.
At the start of the sixth night, in the last minutes before he fell asleep, he showed me his drawing. He had it tucked in against his stomach. You could not help but see it, but I had not asked about it. Now he showed it to me all by himself.
He brought it out and unfolded it—a drawing, on a large white sheet of paper, of the kind that was not to be removed from the art room.
It was done in pencil. It was a story. Two little men moved from picture to picture like in a cartoon. It was a chain of violence.
In the drawing, several people got shot, among them a man and a woman in a room. It could have been a living room, or maybe a classroom.
It was hard to look at but, incredible as it seemed, it was better than the real thing. So he was not useless at everything.
He would have started along the walls again, but the Mogadon were beginning to get to him.
“I didn’t get any stars,” he said.
* * *
Karin Ærø stuck gold paper stars on our artwork according to merit. Some people got no stars. A lot got one, some got two. A very few managed three. If you got three stars three times in a row you also received the honor of a brown paper bag full of fruit. In the two years for which this system had been running, only Regnar Grasten, who went on to become a film producer and very famous, ever got fruit, and only once.
August was now lying down. He was shaking. I tried to understand him—why was it so important?—but it was inexplicable.
“I’m a habitual liar,” he said, “the police said so.”
“They always say that,” I said, “it’s absolutely normal, that’s what they’ve always said about me, too.”
I did not inquire into what it was he had lied about.
“But the psychologists say I can’t remember,” he said.
I asked him what he himself thought, but he did not answer.
“You should try to fill in the background,” I said. “Karin Ærø doesn’t like blank backgrounds. By the time you’re finished, there should not be too much white paper showing.”
EIGHT
The school was laid out in such a way that the main building—five floors, plus attic apartments—stood between two asphalt playgrounds. The north playground was where you spent recess. On the other side of that stood the annex. Pupils were not allowed in the south playground, which was used as a parking lot by teachers, visitors, and delivery vans.
The school was surrounded by the grounds, on the edge of which were the teachers’ residences. To the south, beyond the gate, was where Copenhagen began.
Across the north playground ran two red lines, one marking thirty feet around the main door and one dividing the playground in two.
The latter was used in the marking out of areas for sports, and also served to separate those pupils who had been forbidden to talk to each other. To prevent them from meeting during recess, each was assigned to one side of the playground. This made it easy for the teacher on playground duty to make sure that they stayed apart.
The thirty-foot zone ensured a clear area in front of the only exit from the playground. Leaving the playground during recess was prohibited. Anyone who tried anyway had to cross an empty area and could not help but be noticed by the teacher on duty.
The school building separated the two playgrounds. Staying in the building during recess was prohibited. Leaving the north playground at that time was also prohibited.
The day after August had shown me his drawing, Katarina came over to me during recess. Until then we had avoided each other in the playground, where so many could see us. Now she came right over to me. “Come down to the gym at half-past,” she said, “I want to show you something in the south playground.”
“That’s in the middle of a period,” I said.
“The gym will be empty.”
She was standing sideways to me, so nobody could see we were talking.
“The door to the ground floor,” I said. “It’s locked.”
“They deliver the milk next period. It’ll be open.”
The bell rang. Flage Biehl—he was Biehl’s brother—was on playground duty. He was looking around, we had to get away from each other.
She had been wearing a blue sweater. Her hair disappeared into its collar. You have to imagine that she has pulled it over her head, and that her hair has been caught in under the fabric. And she has not pulled it free, just loosened it. Between the fabric and her hair was her neck. Very white. It was a cold day.
Over those two weeks when I had not seen her, except for that time on the stairs, I had had a dream. At night, but when I was awake.
It began just after August became calm and before I fell asleep. There was a forest: pretty dark, very cold, absolutely desolate, nothing to eat. Even so, I knew that everything would probably be all right. I had a sleeping bag and a waterproof groundsheet, or more like an oilskin cape. It was getting late, I spread out the oilskin cape.
Then a girl appeared. She was alone, and cold. I waved to her, keeping my distance so as not to scare her. She was quite distinct, but yet she was no one in particular. It would have been too much if she had been someone in particular.
I offered to let her sleep in the sleeping bag while I kept watch. I said it straight out so she would understand that I meant her no harm. She lay down. And then she asked me to lie down beside her. So that we could keep warm. And I did. I lay down beside her, and laced the bag up around our shoulders. Outside, the night was cold and very dark. But we were not cold.
The dream ended there. There was no more to it. Nothing else happened. It surfaced while I was separated from her; I had never had it before. Since then it has never left me. I have never told a soul about it before.
* * *
Under normal circumstances I could not have left the class. From Primary Three up, leaving the room during a class was not permitted. But with August’s coming, things were a bit different. Even the teachers were affected by it. We had Flage Biehl for arithmetic. I put up my hand and asked leave to go to the toilet, and was given permission without any further ado.
Usually, during a period, you were never anywhere but in a classroom. The building was unfamiliar then—it seemed deserted, the sound on the stairs was different, one could be heard from a long way off.
The doors between the staircase and the corridors leading to the classrooms were always locked, but the one on the ground floor was open. She had been right. From the ground floor three steps ran down to the milk cellar, which held the refrigerators for the milk distributed during the lunch period.
<
br /> The gym was empty, as she had said. She was waiting behind the apparatus. There was a door out onto the south playground. She had it standing ajar.
She was edgy. At first I thought it was from fear of being discovered. But it was not. She had something on her mind.
I asked her about the bit with the milk, and the gym being empty—how had she known?
She showed me a piece of paper. It was a sheet like the one August had taken from the art room.
“I’ve written down the timetables for every class in the school,” she said. “There is a schedule for every pupil.”
She looked out the door.
“Whose car is it?” she said.
Fredhøj’s Rover, Biehl’s Volvo, and some other teachers’ cars were parked in the playground. Beside the school secretary’s red Mascot sat a gray Taunus—not a teacher’s car. That was the one she meant.
“Our class has windows looking out onto here,” she said. “He comes every Wednesday. I’ve seen him in the corridor with Biehl. They walk side by side.”
Biehl had a particular way of walking. He let people walk ahead of him—pupils far ahead, teachers closer. Flakkedam closer still. The only one he walked alongside was Fredhøj, and even then it was not exactly abreast.
“It’s probably one of the school inspectors,” I said.
Now and again they came to sit in on a class and listen. Afterward Fredhøj would mention that they had, as always, been pleased by the standard of teaching.
“This is the seventh Wednesday in a row,” she said, “I’ve seen him coming out of the clinic. He talks to both Biehl and Hessen every time.”
Just at that moment he emerged from the south staircase. He got into the Taunus and drove away at once. We only saw him from the back.
I tried to get out of it, but she leaned toward me, there was no way around it.
“I’ve seen him once,” I said, “at Gladsaxe Stadium, when we beat the Catholic school 3–2. I scored the winning goal. He presented the trophy. His name’s Baunsbak-Kold. He’s the director of education for Copenhagen.”
She looked at me, unseeing.
