Borderliners

by Peter Høeg

  And there is another difference. Thinking in terms of space is something you can do just like that. But thinking about time always carries pain in its wake.

  Maybe it is the other way around; maybe the pain is there first. Because that is something one will always try to explain away. Unaccountable pain overwhelms. So one tries to explain it away by means of time. That was what one had to say to oneself when one sat on the bed and August smelled like he was full of gas. One had to say to oneself that it was because it was hard for him to fall asleep. That in itself was not disturbing; it was just a difficult time of the day for him. Time was the problem, one said to oneself.

  As though that explained it.

  * * *

  Sometimes the child comes to see me, even though I am shut away in the laboratory. That is as it should be. It is part of an arrangement we have come to. Sometimes she talks to me; sometimes she says nothing, just comes close, hesitantly, aware, without aversion.

  Sometimes she touches me. She puts out a hand, or leans against me. It is not a caress, like you see grownups exchanging. It is more as though, also through her sense of touch, she wants to confirm that I exist. Or as though she has a message for me.

  * * *

  I stayed by August’s bed until he fell asleep. I hunkered down so that it would not feel as though I was crowding him.

  It took him a while to drop off; even now it took a while. As though part of him needed to sleep, while another part was too scared to give in.

  His hands lay on the quilt. They were clenched tight. Then I had an idea. I lifted one hand and opened it out, and then closed it over mine. He had tiny hands, so I closed it around three of my fingers. That way I would be able to tell when he fell asleep. His hand would fall open.

  Like a message.

  ELEVEN

  At Crusty House, if you had any personal problems you could consult your class teacher. That was Willy Øhrskov, who was popular and respected. He had a red MG and drove like a madman. When I had been there for six months he was killed in a car crash. And besides, talking about yourself to a teacher had always been considered a bit lax.

  A consultant psychologist had been assigned to Biehl’s, an elderly man with whom I had two interviews. He had difficulty remembering my name. After the second interview he said that, on the whole, everything seemed to be in order. After that I never saw him again.

  * * *

  Nine months went by. Then I received word that from now on I would have a regular appointment once every two weeks, during school hours, preferably in a storytelling period. You were fetched by one of the teachers, who let you out onto the south staircase—which was out of bounds. Then the door was locked behind you and you ascended to the fifth floor, and then farther up a narrower staircase, to the school psychologist’s clinic.

  And there was Hessen.

  * * *

  The first time she asked me if I often thought about Humlum.

  “Do you often think about Oscar?” she said.

  * * *

  Normally people just remembered your name, and often not even that. Hessen talked about Himmelbjerg House and the Royal Orphanage and the time the judge ratified an indefinite period at a reform school, and Humlum, as if we had met before.

  And I came close to telling her everything. Even so, I decided to wait.

  * * *

  Normally, you did not talk to her about where all this was supposed to lead. You talked about other things, and you took some tests—Rorschach, projected perception tests, and lots of IQ tests.

  There was nothing in the room except a table and some chairs. Nothing ever lay on the table in front of her, not so much as a pencil.

  And yet she was always prepared, and could remember years and dates. Better than you remembered them yourself.

  * * *

  Together, every quarter, you took stock. You compared your own impressions with hers and the school’s, and whatever supplementary information was available.

  This was where I began to understand her.

  * * *

  It was her questions that gave it away. They were so precise. In all the time I was referred to her she only committed one inaccuracy, and that was when she mentioned Katarina. Apart from that, she was utterly faultless.

  I wondered about how she could know all the things she knew. Finally there was only one possible explanation. She must have had all of the papers, that was it, she was the first person I had met who was in possession of almost all the facts.

  The counselor at Crusty House had known a fair bit, and your class teacher, Willy Øhrskov, had known a fair bit, before his car crash, and at the office especially they had a lot of papers. But nowhere had they had all of them gathered together.

  Hessen had all the statements and all the grades and all of the bad conduct reports from the time at Crusty House. Besides which, she had the file—not just the ordinary one but also the supplements from the child psychiatry clinic at the University Hospital, which I had never seen. Not to mention the district medical officer’s remarks and those from the dental clinic at Nyboder School. Also most of the documents from the Children’s Panel, and a list of all the times I had been late, when I had been monitor, and what chores I had been given, and whether I had performed them satisfactorily.

  In time it became clear that she also knew something about those times when I had been brought in for questioning. To begin with, I could not figure this out. If you were under fifteen you could not have a criminal record. This was a rule. So I could not understand how she knew about that. Later on, when I looked into August’s trial period, I did understand it. Back then I could not figure it out, she just knew.

  A vast amount of information. In many ways she knew more than you did yourself.

  * * *

  She was the first to realize that I had difficulties with time.

  It was when we were taking stock after the third quarter. She must have added up all the times I had been late, or not handed things in on time. She had seen what Flage Biehl had written on my report card, namely, that I did my best but had difficulty in concentrating and organizing my time. And then she had our test results.

  She told me that there were people who were born fast, and people who were not so fast, but that there was no point in being unduly slow, what could we do about that? We agreed that I would try to pull myself together. After that she returned to it every time.

  * * *

  When I visited her toward the end of October, after August had been at the school for three weeks, I expected her to bring up my lack of precision again. Granted, only I knew how bad things were, but there had been no sign of improvement.

  She did not mention it. She asked about August, first it was only about him. Whether he lay awake at night, whether there were difficulties in sharing a room with him, whether he talked about his parents, to all of which I could reply in the negative.

  She was very aware. I tried to figure out what she was getting at, but she gave nothing away.

  Then she said, “You know Katarina from Second Year Secondary?”

  The question was posed incorrectly. It was her first inaccuracy ever.

  * * *

  I had worked out the rule behind her questions long before. She began by inquiring about my growing pains or my general state of health, or whether there was anything that had happened since last time that I would like to tell her about. Questions the answers to which were already known and which were posed simply to get me to say something, which I always did, although never very much. After that came the questions about my past and what I dreamed about at night.

  When she mentioned Katarina, it was different. It was a trap, the first she had set for me.

  She must have known that Katarina and I had been found together during a period. But she asked anyway. To see whether I would reply in the negative.

  “We met in the library,” I said, “twice.”

  She asked me what we had talked about. Then I told an un
truth.

  There was no harm intended, but she had set a trap. One was forced into it.

  “She said she would tell you herself when she comes up here.”

  There was a brief pause before she answered.

  “She has not done so.”

  Thereby betraying the fact that Katarina had been up there, that she, too, had been referred to the psychologist. And that she had not told her anything special about us.

  Then she asked how the conversation had come about. I knew I would have to answer.

  “It was me,” I said, “I wanted to find out what it was like to be alone with a girl.”

  It was not untrue. And you could see that it satisfied her. This was a rule I had discovered about her. Confessing to minor violations could lead to a reward of a sort.

  TWELVE

  At the Lars Olsen Memorial Home they had a book—I borrowed it from the chief physician—about great clocks through the ages.

  In China, before Christ, a clock consisted of concentric circles of incense through which a glowing ember burned its way, thus keeping pace with the day by way of constantly changing scents.

  At the same time, in Egypt, there was a grid—five hundred feet long, etched into rock—over which the shadow of an obelisk traveled with the sun.

  In Europe, in the Middle Ages, there was a brass disk marked with a hypothetical stereographic projection of the heavens across which moved a mechanical model of the celestial bodies in bronze and wood. It was called an astrolabe and called to mind another of the clocks in the book—the Chinese Sung dynasty’s celestial clock: a model of the solar system mounted on a tower thirty feet high and powered by a water wheel as it presented the positions of the planets; the movements of the heavens; the months, days, hours, and quarter-hours.

  The book had pictures.

  * * *

  It seemed so obvious then. That such precise clocks had always been regarded as technical marvels, more than anything else. They had not so much served another end—such as telling the time. They had been an end in themselves.

  At the end of the fourteenth century many major European cities acquired a town clock.

  In 1370, for example, the French duke Jean de Berry paid 70 percent of the building costs on a very grand clock tower for Poitiers. Where Charles Martel had stopped the Moors.

  This may well have been the first instance, anywhere in the world, of a timepiece that registered the passage of the hours being accessible to the general public.

  But even then it was as though the time that the clock measured was not put to any use. For by far the majority of Europe’s population, namely, those living outside of the towns—and, strictly speaking, also for those living in them—the day began at dawn and ended with the onset of darkness, and work was regulated by the changing of the seasons.

  What fascinated people about the measurement of time was not time itself, because that was dictated by other factors.

  What fascinated them was the clock.

  * * *

  The regularity of the clock was a metaphor for the accuracy of the universe. For the accuracy of God’s creative achievement. So the clock was, first and foremost, a metaphor.

  Like a work of art. And that is how it was. The clock has been like a work of art, a product of the laboratory, a question.

  And then, at some point, this has changed. At some point the clock has stopped being a question. Instead it has become the answer.

  * * *

  At Biehl’s, in every corridor, there hung a bell. That way, when the main bell went, it could be heard just as clearly all over the school.

  The bell hung just inside the corridor doorway, so high up that reaching it was out of the question, but still in full view.

  Out of a black box containing an electromagnet jutted a little clapper for striking a bell.

  The bell was chrome-plated and polished regularly by the janitor, Andersen, who was referred to as Lemmy when out of earshot. It bore some sort of decoration, a pattern. It was too far away to make out the details, but you supposed that it must be in keeping with the school’s overall decorative theme. It could have been a meander border or an entwining motif from one of the runic stones.

  The bells looked as though they dated from the turn of the century. Like Biehl’s fob watch. Together they saturated the school with a finely meshed web of time.

  * * *

  In the spring of ’71 the bells were removed. Instead, a loudspeaker was set into the wall of each classroom. Behind the teacher’s desk, beside the blackboard. A ringing tone was now transmitted over this; lower than the old mechanical one but nevertheless quite clear.

  Furthermore, through this loudspeaker messages could be passed to individual classes from a central microphone in the headmaster’s office, and you could answer by speaking in the direction of the loudspeaker.

  And it turned out that, from the office, a line could be opened in such a way that Biehl could hear what was going on in the classrooms, without your knowing it. In this way they could make sure that order reigned even if, for example, a class had to wait a few minutes for a teacher.

  The loudspeaker sat behind a white panel, so that it was, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

  * * *

  The old bells had been polished regularly. The new were invisible. We did not see them being delivered, nor the old ones being removed. We came back to school and the job was done.

  They had done it during the Easter vacation. The same Easter that the teachers’ children were removed.

  THIRTEEN

  After dinner, from 7:00 to 8:15 p.m. there was a study period for boarders in the main hall, supervised by Flakkedam. During this time leaving the hall was prohibited. It was difficult for August. Even during the day he had trouble sitting still, but in the evening it got worse, as the time for his medicine approached.

  I sensed that it was very bad, so I went over to Flakkedam in the duty room and asked for permission for August and me to go outside for a minute. To decline the irregular German verbs together, without disturbing the others. I explained that he had been moved up a class, of course, so he had not had German before. Permission was granted.

  It was dark. You could sense that he felt better outside, but not much. Here, too, he looked for the walls. He would not walk along the paths or across the grass, but made for the fringes of the shrubbery.

  We walked for a bit side by side. He walked along looking up at me.

  “What’s it like in a children’s home?” he said.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “How do you survive?”

  “You just do,” I said, “no problem, and can we get back to the hall now, time’s up.”

  “Not yet,” he said. “First you have to answer, I don’t want to go inside.”

  We continued. He walked slowly, he listened, for the first time since we had met.

  “You have to have a strategy,” I said.

  He shivered as he walked. He had come out without a jacket. I took off my sweater and pulled it over his head, the way you dress a child. If he caught a cold they would ask why I had not looked after him. He put up no resistance. His arms did not go into the sleeves. They just hung there, dangling.

  “I had a friend who ate frogs,” I said. “He was dangerous as well, but that wasn’t the main thing. If you’re alone it doesn’t matter how dangerous you are. The main thing was the frogs. The grownups knew about them, too. It’s hard to touch a man you’ve seen eat a frog. That was his strategy.”

  I did not expect him to understand.

  “If you can’t remember anything,” he said, “if the light in your brain has simply been put out, that would be a pretty good strategy, right?”

  So he had, after all, understood.

  * * *

  We walked back to the annex.

  “Why does she ask,” he said, “why does she write, asking why the teachers’ children were removed?”

  It was early to tell him about it, but w
e were walking together. For the first time we were walking side by side and at absolutely the same pace. So I told him.

  * * *

  It took a month. That was what was so strange. From the time when Axel was found in the chart locker until the children related to the teachers were removed—it took a month. An inexplicable pause between the catastrophe and its consequences.

  It was then, too, that the loudspeakers were installed in the classrooms, and that you were assigned a regular appointment with the psychologist once every two weeks, and when you saw Hessen for the first time, and her two assistants, and then there were other things, too. Somehow, all of this seemed too much to be because of Axel.

  “What sort of other things?” he said.

  * * *

  It was Flakkedam. It was at that time that they had appointed Flakkedam.

  Before that, at Biehl’s, and at the Orphanage, and at Himmelbjerg House, the boarders had always been supervised by a teacher. In other words, it was he who checked that chores were done and sat with them in the dining room and supervised the study period and put out the lights at 10:00 p.m. There might well be others who assisted him, but the person in charge had always been a qualified teacher—it was a rule.

  Flakkedam was not a teacher.

  At the Orphanage and at Himmelbjerg House there had also been people who were not teachers. At the bottom, under the superintendent and the deputy and the department heads and the teachers and the senior assistants and the social workers, there had been aides or porters. These had been gardeners’ assistants, or NCO’s or former accountants who, for one reason or another, had not been able to cope in their previous place.

  It was different with Flakkedam.

  You never saw him drink alcohol, you never saw him hit anyone, never, not once. He just had to appear on the scene and people grew absolutely quiet, out of fear.

  In the corridors he walked only a little bit in front of Biehl. In the yearbook for ’71 it said that, in April, the school had bidden welcome to Inspector Jonas Flakkedam.

  “Inspector.” There was no further explanation.

  * * *

  “He stands on my foot,” said August. “When he’s checking that I take the medicine, he stands on my foot. I can’t move. He’s good.”