by Peter Høeg
“Could you get into that car without a key?”
I did not answer right away, my mouth was dry. A person who 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 background. Karin Ærø 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 guardian appointed, and my case put before the Social Welfare Committee 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 corridor, 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.
NINE
Often 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, “Excellent.”
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 history, 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 anything 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.
&
nbsp; The rule was: the Battle of Poitiers, 732.
At Poitiers the Frankish king Charles Martel beat back the advancing Moors and thus saved Europe. A brilliant personage executed an appropriate deed at exactly the right moment. This was the pattern behind Biehl’s questions. From then on I knew what I had to look for. Which of the overwhelming number of words one should remember. Columbus, 1492; Luther at Worms, 1521; Grundtvig’s Kirkens Gienmæle in 1825—in which it is established that truth is based not on books but on the spoken word from God’s own lips at christenings and communions, expressed in the Apostles’ Creed.
From then on I could, quite often, answer correctly. It gained me some time. It meant that it took longer for him to notice me.
TEN
After 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 finished. 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—something 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 below us. Generally speaking, you never heard him say a word except if a teacher asked him a question, and even then only what was absolutely necessary.
Fredhøj taught physics and chemistry. He used a number of charts: the periodic table, Bohr’s atomic theory, means of propulsion from the steam engine to the V6 engine, the major scientific developments. They were kept in the chart lockers—boxes of white-painted wood five feet high, five feet long, and fairly shallow, with a puny furniture lock.
Fredhøj always went around with his keys in full view, hanging from the ring finger of his left hand on a good-sized key ring. The keys lay across the back of his hand. The keys to the chart lockers were on this ring.
It came out of the blue. It was a period no different from any other; the unfortunate incident in the engineering tunnels lay six months back.
Fredhøj asked one of the bright girls, Anne-Dorthe Feldslev, who was physics monitor, to fetch the periodic table. The class had its own ordinary monitor, who fetched the milk. It was something you took turns at, it was nothing special. But then there was a physics monitor who helped with the setting up of experiments and the like, whom Fredhøj selected from among the mathematically gifted. Just then it was Anne-Dorthe. She was not very strong and was excused from gym, so at first you did not notice anything. Fredhøj asked her to fetch the periodic table and gave her the keys. She went out into the corridor and opened the locker. Then she closed it again and came in and took her seat and put the keys down. Then she threw up. She did it all over the desk, where others might have tried to reach the sink or the wastepaper basket. But she never got up without permission.
Fredhøj must have realized that something was wrong. He stepped outside and lifted the lid. It was just outside the door.
In the locker sat Axel, looking up as though he had been waiting for someone to come and lift the lid. He had tried to cut out his tongue with a razor blade. He had got pretty far. The details did not come out until later, and then only some of them, but we saw the razor blade. Later on, somebody said he had doped himself up beforehand.
What happened was that Fredhøj acted with assurance and precision, as with anyone else who hurt themselves, or needed first aid and an ambulance at once. Only our class was sent home, and as early as the next day it was announced at assembly that Axel was out of danger.
We never saw him again. There was no inquiry of any kind, it was never mentioned again. But everybody knew, three weeks later, when it was Easter and the teachers’ children did not come back to school after the vacation, that this was the reason. It was absolutely obvious.
I told August about this, in the toilets, to explain the letter.
“If it was so obvious,” he said, “then why is she asking?”
* * *
He was a head shorter than me, besides which he was always hunched up, like now. All hunched up, he looked up at me, across the toilet. He smoked a little bit at a time, then he put out the cigarette by very carefully pinching the tip and removing it, so as not to waste any tobacco. A little while later, he lit it again.
He smoked the way you only ever saw grownups smoke, and then only very seldom. Hungrily. It was a weird sight. The tiny body, and the hunger.
He was two years younger than me, one year younger than all the others in the class, because I had been moved back a class when I came from Crusty House. They had never said where he came from. It was clear that he had trouble keeping up, even though he picked everything up fast. Even so, they had moved him up a class.
There was no chance to answer him. The outer door was opened, slowly, as if by a teacher. We had been in there awhile and maybe we had been missed. We brushed away every speck of ash, flushed, and left the toilets.
* * *
That evening he asked for an extra Mogadon but it was refused.
He said nothing and only walked around for a short while, then lay down as though he was sleeping.
It was not convincing.
Even so I almost did not hear him. We had been lying there for an hour—I could see by the alarm clock—when the door opened. Not that you could hear anything, but you felt the draft. He had moved very softly.
The exit was left unlocked at night. He made his way along the corridor to the basement stairs. The kitchen was in the basement. I thought he must be hungry, in which case he need not have bothered. There were padlocks on the refrigerators and freezers.
But that was not it. He did not switch on the light. I
t was as though he could see in the dark, like an animal. I stood at the top of the stairs. First there was silence, then the oven was opened. Then I went down after him and switched on the light.
He had opened the oven door and stepped up onto it. He looked like he was asleep, with the side of his head resting on the grille over the stove top. He supported himself with one hand, gripped the knob with the other. He had closed his eyes. At first he did not notice the light. While I stood there, watching, he turned on the gas, just a little, and sort of drank from the tap. Then he shut it off again.
He opened his eyes and looked at me.
“I couldn’t reach,” he said.
“It’s an industrial stove,” I said. “It’s eighteen inches taller than household ones.”
His legs would not carry him. I gave him a piggyback. He was so light, even going up the stairs. There was a smell of gas from his mouth.
I put him down on his bed.
“I’ve got it taped,” he said. “I sleep in the living room. When they’ve fallen asleep I go into the kitchen. You just have to have enough to get to sleep. But not so much that you can’t get back to bed.”
* * *
For some time the child has been talking about the space around her. She uses words like “in there” and “outside,” “inside,” “underneath.” She goes into detail about her surroundings. She is twenty months old.
But not about time. As yet “tomorrow,” “yesterday,” “in a month’s time” hold no meaning for her. She says “someday,” by which she means all forms of future.
We grasp the idea of space before we grasp that of time.
But soon she will begin to talk about time. And then she will say of it that it passes.
We say that time passes. That it flies. That it is like a river. We picture it as having a direction and a length; that it can be described in the same way as space.
But time is not space, is it? What I am doing now, in the laboratory, I also did yesterday. The two events belong in the same place, they are not separated in space. But they occupy different times.
