by Peter Høeg
Above the inscription stood the school crest. The ever-watchful ravens.
The ravens seemed to be looking down upon the inscription. As though they were the birds of prey, gazing down upon the chicks.
At first you understood neither text nor image. Then it was explained to you and for a while you thought you understood it.
Then the thought occurred that the school seemed to be both the protective hen—God, that is—and the birds of prey—the ravens; God’s messengers; who preyed on the chicks.
You wound up understanding none of it.
* * *
Behind the podium, and therefore above and behind Biehl when he was speaking, hung a large painting of Delling, the god who unlocks the gates of morning. A young man opens a great gate, and out across the podium and into the hall springs a white horse, Skinfaxi—the steed of Light. The painting also shows a black horse, Hrimfaxi—Night—moving out of the picture.
Biehl explained all of this. It was a metaphor, both of assembly and of enlightenment and knowledge.
The man, Delling, in the picture was slightly built, like a child. Actually, he looked just like August. Not to make a big thing of it—there was no way it could be a painting of him; after all, it was from the last century. It is just that, after we became separated, it struck me that it looked like him.
So: the door is opened and knowledge washes over you, like sunlight. That was the explanation that was given. Meaning that enlightenment is something that already exists. The only achievement necessary from your side is that of being open to it.
* * *
At Biehl’s Academy, natural science was seen as the supreme branch of learning. The same was true of the Royal Orphanage, and, in fact, as far back as Himmelbjerg House, mathematical giftedness was considered the highest level of intelligence.
Biehl himself had an M.Sc. in biology. Fredhøj taught mathematics and physics.
It was not that the other subjects were not worthwhile. Biehl also taught history and mythology.
But natural science ranked above all.
* * *
This had to do with the fact that it was not subject to human uncertainty.
The other subjects—even written and oral interpretation, for which there were strict rules—even these were subject to a degree of uncertainty. Even Diderichsen’s grammatical tables did not hold good 100 percent of the time.
But with the periodic table there were no exceptions. Step by step you ascended, from the simplest base elements to the precious and complex and rare. Like climbing a stairway; each step corresponded to an established increase in the atomic weight, and another element.
It was never said in so many words. But you could not help thinking that it resembled the evolution of the species. The ascent from simple, primitive organisms to the complex and highly developed.
It was never said in so many words. But that is how things were arranged on the charts. An outline of the evolutionary process resembled the periodic table. At the bottom: oxygen, hydrogen, and amoebas. At the top: gold and mankind. And between them ran the links, like steps on a stairway.
Alongside and up through this stairway flowed time. The final elements in the periodic table were to be found only in the laboratory, produced by man. Whom it had taken evolution all this time to produce.
As a rule, in physics and mathematics, you were working with things far removed from yourself. Because they were very big or very small. Like atomic weights or the great astronomical discoveries. Now and again, though, science could get very close to you. As with the covert Darwinism, and the golden mean of violence, and the law concerning the guiding importance of the beginning.
Regarding the great scientific discoveries, Fredhøj had told us that these had been made by great mathematics and physics geniuses who had not yet turned thirty. It was something he returned to again and again. His favorite example was Einstein, who was twenty-five when he published his special theory of relativity; when he had his annus mirabilis in 1905. Fredhøj said, if you are to achieve anything in your life, you have to do it before you turn thirty.
When he said that you could not help but think of his own son, Axel. That if he was to have any chance of achieving anything, then he had better get a move on. Since he was already thirteen and had, as yet, not really said anything.
* * *
Time and numbers.
Katarina wrote to me about them. She wrote about the experiments. Which were not something she was carrying out. But which were being carried out upon her.
TWO
Two weeks after we had become separated it was announced that the school would be offering a certain number of children in each class the opportunity of being examined by the school psychologist. By this they meant normal pupils. And, in addition, a number of those for whom special circumstances came into play and who were already going for examinations or checkups.
The announcement was made in a letter that was sent to pupils’ homes.
With pupils under fifteen—if they had no home, or if there was no way of contacting the family—no warning was given. They were simply advised that they had been selected for examination.
With pupils over fifteen years of age, the letter was addressed to them personally. That must have been how Katarina knew about it. She must have received a letter about it.
The contents of letters from the school were not something you talked about. It was a rule. Even so it was impossible, in the long run, to avoid word getting out. Absence from class was very rare and only on production of a note from home. But now you could tell that something was up. You noticed straight away when absolutely normal pupils were suddenly absent during certain periods.
Rumor had it they were up seeing Hessen.
But even before the rumor had spread, I knew. Katarina had written to me about it.
* * *
“Binet-Simon?”
That was her first letter. That was all it said. She handed it to me between the ground floor and the second floor after the bell had rung, when we were making our way up the stairs. It was the only possible place.
* * *
That is true. It was the only place. Those thirty seconds from when we left the playground and ascended toward the second floor, where we would separate and she would climb higher up; that was our only chance, in space and in time.
* * *
There was also the lunch period. But then the risk was too great.
It lasted from 11:40 to 12:30. For the first twenty minutes you sat in the classroom and ate your packed lunch. Lunch was supervised by a teacher only up to and including Primary Six. From Primary Seven on, there was no supervision. So it would have been possible to see each other then.
But we never chanced it, we would have been seen, people would have seen us. Sooner or later we would have been reported.
* * *
Tale-telling was frowned upon at Biehl’s. But all pupils were encouraged to report any serious irregularities to the office or to their class teacher. Under the heading of serious irregularities came stealing—like if a pupil actually stole from other pupils’ schoolbags; vandalism in the toilets—the only places not under constant supervision; smoking; and breaking school rules—like, for example, when people had been forbidden to talk to one another.
At the Royal Orphanage you were also encouraged to report things. But there it almost never happened. Those few times when it did, you waited for a bit, until the teachers relaxed their awareness, and then made the informer jump from the willow tree into the lake, and did not haul out the person concerned until the point where he had only just survived.
This rule did not exist at Biehl’s. But then, most of the pupils came from caring families, and ran no special risk of being reported for anything. They had never needed to protect themselves, the way you do when you are on the borderline.
You never saw anyone being reported, it was done anonymously. Even so, you sensed that it happened pretty often. August and Katarina
must have sensed it, too. We did not talk to one another in the corridor.
* * *
On the stairs she had managed to drop behind the rest of her class. You could not say that she touched me. But I knew there would be a letter.
She always kept her back very straight, even going upstairs. I knew I was no shorter than her. One year and eleven months and four days younger—I had looked it up in the yearbook—but not shorter. Taller, more like. At least, if I straightened up. I had tried but it did not feel good—like cramps—so I had abandoned the idea.
She was past me even before I was really aware of her. She was wearing a black duffel coat.
Before we became separated, when I saw her in the courtyard with Biehl and then later on, I had never given a thought to the clothes she wore—other than that they were brilliant. Since then, the past few weeks, after we had become separated, perhaps never to talk to each other again, I had noticed how, more often than not, she went around in old clothes. Like grownups’, but secondhand. Big sweaters with leather patches on the elbows. Or the black duffel coat.
One day I noticed that there were some men’s things among them. And then I knew that some of these clothes must have belonged to her father; her mother too, maybe.
I could not get the idea out of my head. Every time I saw her. The straight back and the too-big clothes. Which had been her father’s, who had hung himself. That strength, and yet something lost. It was an inexplicable contradiction.
Maybe it is wrong to imagine that contradictions can be explained.
* * *
“Binet-Simon?”
She had written these words at the top of a sheet of paper, beneath them there was space for a reply.
I wrote: “Yes.”
Then two days went by before I had a chance to pass the note to her. I came up behind her on the stairs and slipped it into her duffel coat pocket. No one noticed anything. At first I thought she had not noticed. Then she put her hand up to her hair and pulled it free of her sweater and let it fall down her back. Then she waved to me. With the same hand that had touched her hair she waved to me, without turning around.
* * *
Two days went by before she sent me a reply. The reply was yet another question. She had written it on the same sheet, under my “Yes.” It said: “Why is it not available?”
* * *
Before this I had never tried exchanging notes with anyone. I had seen others do it, but had never, personally, been involved.
Sometimes people had passed notes to one another in class. Maybe because they could not wait, maybe because it was hard to find a place where you were not being watched, maybe because they were bored. I had purposely avoided looking at what was in them.
One of these had been confiscated, by Fredhøj. No punishment had been meted out. Instead he had read the note out loud. It had been about love. You felt so ashamed, even though it was not your note. You felt like you could have beaten up the person who had written it.
So now I felt uneasy. But I answered her anyway.
* * *
“Why is it not available?”
She had done what several others had done. She had looked up Binet-Simon in the school’s card index, which was in the library, right out in the open. You were encouraged to use it. It provided a complete listing of the school’s collection of books and other printed matter. In the card index, just like at Crusty House, it said: “Not available.”
* * *
Binet-Simon was an intelligence test; the one most commonly used in Denmark, and maybe in Europe as a whole. It was French but adapted for the Danish system. On the front cover it said: “Danish standardized revision of Binet-Simon’s intelligence tests by Marie Kirkelund and Sofie Rifbjerg. Revised, 1943.”
Underneath this it said: “These tests are confidential. Publication, even in the form of extracts, is forbidden.”
Which was why, in the card index, they were designated “Not available.”
* * *
I knew this because it so happened that they had given them to me several times.
The second time was when they came out from Århus Social Services Department to check whether it could be recommended that I take the entrance exam for Crusty House.
The only way you could get into Crusty House was by having a mother who was a single parent, which I did not, or by being academically gifted—which, before now, no one at Himmelbjerg House had ever been. So, when it was mentioned to the Social Services Department, they came out personally to check. And they brought Binet-Simon.
I had been given it some years earlier, in connection with the first escape attempts. They tested me then. This had not been entered in my file.
So I was already familiar with the test. And when I was waiting in the office and they went out to fetch a stopwatch I opened their briefcase. This was before the days of combination locks, it was a standard lock. I was hoping I could manage to memorize some of the answers, it had become very necessary to get out of there.
Just after that they came back. I did not get to see the answers, but I did manage to see the cover.
Since then I had been tested with Binet-Simon at Crusty House and by Hessen. Maybe they did not know I was familiar with it, maybe they thought that it made no difference. There was a test for each age level, which meant that each year you were given new, and unfamiliar, questions.
I tried to put some of this in my letter to Katarina.
* * *
Writing to her took a long time. One was not used to it, and it was hard to do it without being spotted. I did it at night. I tried to write precisely and accurately, but still it was upsetting to see one’s own handwriting under hers. After a while I stopped trying and just answered her.
She kept asking about the tests.
* * *
At Crusty House they had started giving pupils their test results shortly after I was admitted, in 1968. Until then they had been kept secret. You solved the problems and you knew you were being evaluated, but you were never told anything.
I had been there six months when we started getting the results. It was at this time, too, that I was given partial insight into my file. They explained that it was part of a new teaching method.
The result you were given consisted of a figure and a classification. Different from test to test. Binet-Simon told you how many percent below the national average your intelligence lay. Jepsen’s speech and language test told you how fluent you were—they used a tape recorder and afterward they wrote down what you had said and counted your pauses, and measured the length of the words you used. In this way they could measure how complex your language was—the fewer the pauses, the longer the words, the greater your fluency. In the Danish Institute of Education’s standardized reading proficiency tests they measured the number of mistakes and the reading speed. This gave two figures, which could then be compared with the national average for that particular age level.
At Crusty House you never talked about the tests, only ever about the results.
Katarina did not write about her results, not once. She wrote about the actual problems.
* * *
She wrote: “Are they all timed?”
To this I could reply in the positive. Binet-Simon had six tests for each age level. The last three were timed. You had ten or fifteen minutes to read a story—about a grasshopper, for example. You had to insert the missing syllables. But even with the first three, lesser, problems, they kept an eye on the clock.
At Himmelbjerg House and Crusty House they had had a special psychologists’ clock in the room where they did the tests. Big, a bit like the ones they use in ball games. They set it going when the test began, it was turned away from you, only the psychologist had been able to see it. Hessen used a combined wristwatch and stopwatch. It took a little time for me to realize this. She could start and stop it and read off the time, in such a way that you almost missed it.
In Jepsen’s speech and language test you had two
minutes in which to talk about a picture. In the standardized reading tests classification was by your year.
This is what I wrote back to her. I also asked her to destroy this sheet of paper. We were still using the same one; with all that was now written on it, if it was confiscated, it would mean the end.
* * *
Binet-Simon was used to calculate the intelligence quotient. They started with tests just below your age level and worked downward until you could solve all the problems. Then they worked upward until you could not solve any of the problems. In this way they could calculate your mental age. In Hessen’s, mine had been 12.9—one year and one month younger than I actually was. This figure was then divided by my actual age and multiplied by 100. So mental age divided by actual age multiplied by 100 equaled intelligence. Mine was just over 92, in other words, average intelligence. From 90 to 110 you were of average intelligence.
* * *
The limit for being transferred from Himmelbjerg House was set at 75. If you had an intelligence quotient of less than 75 but more than 70 you were sent to a residential school for the mildly retarded. If you had less than 70 you came under mental retardation services and were sent to the loony bin.
* * *
So the test results were always related to time. Thus producing a new figure—a measurement of intelligence. A calculated figure, and hence quite objective. All the psychologist had done was let the children read and answer the questions, record them on a tape, note the times, double-check the figures, and refer to the evaluation table. Everything clear and obvious. So that the result was, by and large, exempt from human uncertainty.
Almost scientific.
* * *
A week went by, and no letter.
In the afternoons, during free time, I would walk down through the grounds to the gate and watch the cars go by. There were children in some of them, on their way home with their parents. From the gate you could see the girls’ wing in the annex.
Other than that, I just stayed in my room, over in the corner, with the light out. You felt a bit like an animal in its lair, like a fox.
