Borderliners

by Peter Høeg

  For her, she said, and maybe for everyone, if you went far enough back, the line disintegrated. If you went all the way back to your early childhood it was no longer a line. Then there was a sort of landscape of events. You could not remember their sequence, maybe they had none, they just lay scattered about, as if on a plain. She believed that this plain belonged to the days before time had entered your world.

  She asked me to give it some thought.

  “Is there any way of asking August,” she said, “about what it’s like for him, whether there is a plain, or what?”

  * * *

  When I was sitting on the floor facing the child and she asked me about tomorrow, I realized that she was still on the plain, but that she was on the point of stepping into the tunnels where time is to be found.

  I so much wanted to understand her, I tried to see whether time showed in her face. But there was nothing I could say to her; no answer I could give her. When I myself did not know where tomorrow was.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Then I saw that she did not need an answer, that it was not important. What was important was that I had sat on the floor and listened to her.

  She stayed where she was. I had the feeling that, whatever I said to her, it would never be that important, that she would never evaluate it or pay too much attention to it. That you could afford to be slow, or inaccurate or downright ignorant without being punished; that still she would stay for a moment, and not walk away.

  * * *

  I asked August how he remembered.

  This was one night, a week after I had last been in his room. They looked in on him a few times before lights-out, it had taken me a week to work out their schedule. It had proved to be strictly regulated. Flakkedam and the new inspector took turns; they came once every hour, just around the hour. That was how I was able to steer clear of them—because they were so regular.

  I came just after he had been given his medicine at nine o’clock, which meant we had until nine-thirty, when Flakkedam did his rounds and put out the lights.

  He lay on his back looking at the ceiling.

  “They’ve increased the dosage to three Mogadon,” he said. “If you’ve got something to say you’d better hurry.”

  There was nothing I had to say. I just stood there, looking at him. His skin had a papery look. At the Christian Foundation there had been a reception center for abandoned babies. They had had incubator babies there—tinier than all the others but like old men. Very small and yet very old. That was how he looked.

  I had taped the two outer fingers together—it hurt least that way. I suppose my little finger should have been in a cast, but then they would have grown suspicious. August pretended not to notice.

  He looked feverish. I felt his forehead, keeping one eye on his hands. If anything, he was cold.

  “What happens if you stop eating altogether?” he said.

  “Two days when you feel hungry,” I said, “then two days when it hurts, like you’re ill, after that you feel fine. Until you grow weak and they find out about it and you’re forced to eat something.”

  There had also been girls at Nødebogård, and some of them had suffered from an eating disorder. Sometimes, by wearing two sweaters and padding out their stomachs with cushions, they could put off being caught for so long that they only just had survived. I did not mention this, there was no point in encouraging him.

  He was getting tired. He asked me whether I had seen anything of Katarina and I said that she had wanted me to ask him about something. I explained to him about the way in which she believed you remembered your past, how would he say he remembered his?

  The same way we did, he said, he, too, remembered a line, there was nothing strange about that.

  I felt a twinge of suspicion.

  “Where does it start,” I said, “what’s the first thing you remember?”

  “The first thing I remember is the office,” he said, “I’m in the office and I see you. That’s where it starts.”

  “That’s only two and a half months ago,” I said. “What about before that?”

  “There’s nothing before that,” he said, “just a black hole.”

  I did not feel like asking him anything else. I stayed by his side, saying nothing.

  He was asleep. His eyes were not quite shut. They were like slits, you could see his pupils, but at the same time you could tell by his breathing that he was asleep. With his eyes half-open. It did not seem right. I placed a finger on each eyelid and gently closed them.

  I would have liked to stay longer, but it was not possible. Flakkedam could appear at any minute.

  He was asleep, I am sure of that, and yet some part of him must have been awake, one of the people inside him. I was by the door when he called me. He whispered.

  “If you remember,” he said, “and have a past, then you can be given the blame and be punished. See—if you don’t remember anything, you don’t have time like other people. It’s kind of like being crazy, so you get taken into protective custody. Then there’s a chance.”

  * * *

  The next morning I was summoned to Biehl’s office. Fredhøj was there, too. They said that, subsequent to the receipt of a reply from the Children’s Panel, the school—together with the Child Welfare Services—had come to a decision about my future. Within the next couple of weeks a suitable reform school would be found for me. This decision was final. They had had it ratified by a judge.

  SIX

  Second Year Secondary—Katarina’s class—stood two rows behind our class at assembly. Fredhøj checked the rows before Biehl came in and began. Although people had their set places, it had always been hard to maintain strict order on the perimeter, where one row bordered on the next. Those who came in last could not elbow their way through to their proper places; instead they stayed on the perimeter.

  Nine days after the total separation, Katarina came in at the last minute, though without actually being late. She managed to stand a little in front of me, almost next to Fredhøj. This blurred their awareness. It would never have occurred to them that she would try anything.

  Each pupil brought their own songbook to assembly. Bound editions were compulsory, to save on wear and tear. She opened it in such a way that I could not help but see it, but shielded it from everyone but me. The writing was tiny, to reduce the risk of being caught, it took me the whole of assembly to read it. It said: “What’s the name of your guardian?”

  * * *

  For all orphans and all children who had been taken into care, whose parents had lost custody of them, a guardian was appointed. It was a rule.

  Usually it was a lawyer from the Children’s Panel. I had seen mine once. When the Social Welfare Committee had given me an indefinite period at Himmelbjerg House she gave me the news. She had told me straight out that she was appointed as guardian to between two and three hundred children at a time. So, although technically she was my mother and father, there would be no possibility of us meeting again, unless I wanted to get married before I was eighteen, or had a fortune that had to be administered. I had not seen her since.

  * * *

  This was too long-winded an explanation for Katarina. All I wrote in my songbook was “Johanna Buhl, Children’s Panel.” Three days later I moved back a row and held the book up; no one noticed a thing.

  The next day I was summoned to the telephone to take a call.

  * * *

  The school had two telephones which were accessible to pupils, both of them located in the annex—one in the boys’ wing and one in the girls’.

  Both lines went through the school switchboard in Biehl’s secretary’s office, but they were pay phones, you were free to make calls from them and talk on them during the lunch period, from 11:40 to 12:30, and after close of the study period, from 8:15 to 8:50 p.m. The call for me was received at 12:05 p.m. I was in the playground, a kid from one of the lower grades came to get me. Flakkedam had sent him, he said my guardian was
on the phone.

  The receiver was lying on the little table for the phone books. It was the first time that anyone had telephoned me at Biehl’s, apart from the two calls from the Health and Welfare representative. Nor had I ever made any calls. The telephone was just fixed to the wall, there was no booth. I was glad of that. After the business with Valsang I had not been too keen on small spaces.

  It was Katarina.

  * * *

  I had been at the school for a year when the telephones were installed. Before that, getting permission to use the phone had not been easy. The call had to be absolutely necessary and always had to be made from the school office. You stood there, it was a strain, talking with people walking back and forth. The secretary could hear every word and you knew that you were monopolizing the school line. At assembly Biehl had said that, in principle, telephones were for brief and essential messages only.

  Katarina must have rung the school switchboard from the girls’ telephone and said she was Johanna Buhl. This was the only possible explanation. She had rung the office from the girls’ phone and they had thought it was an outside call and put her through to the boys’ side.

  * * *

  A while went by without us saying a single word. We just stood there, holding the receivers. I could hear her breathing—regularly, clearly, almost like a clock. I had not believed I would talk to her again, not ever.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “But August isn’t.”

  There was no warning, just a click, and we were cut off. Maybe someone had taken her by surprise.

  * * *

  She called me again.

  The next day, after study period. I picked it up myself. I was standing just beside it when it rang, in a way I had been expecting it.

  * * *

  Since the summer vacation it had been my job to empty the garbage from the kitchen into the big garbage cans behind the annex. This was a much-sought-after job. It did not take long and the garbage cans were kept in a shed, so you could hang around there for a bit, out of sight. I had been given it as a reward for two years with no punishment or bad conduct marks.

  After the disaster in the church I had been transferred to odd jobs indoors. No comment was made, but it was a way of keeping me under closer surveillance. It had been a relief. The thing with my fingers had made it difficult to do hard manual work. On the day Katarina rang I had been oiling the door hinges, and had continued to do so after dinner, to be near the telephone.

  * * *

  At the Royal Orphanage outside calls to pupils had been prohibited, unless someone had died or something like that. This was to prevent any weakening of the moral fiber that the school was taking pains to develop.

  So people were only called to the telephone when there was something seriously amiss in their families. Or when the Social Services Department or the police wanted to speak to them—which was worse.

  You had, therefore, gotten used to the telephone playing its part in the surveillance of pupils. And to it being used only by teachers and the school management.

  Suddenly—as I stood there with the receiver in my hand and Katarina on the other end—it was different, almost the opposite.

  Usually there was a line of people, this day there was none. It rang, and I picked it up before anyone could hear it.

  She was out of breath. She must have waited until no one was in sight, and then made a dash for it. She had been working in the garden all through the fall, so they must have moved her indoors, too.

  Again it struck me that her breathing was like a clock, that it marked off this short time when we could be together.

  We said nothing. We just stood there, leaning into the sound of the other’s breathing.

  That was when she told me how you remembered in a line that ended a long way back in a plain. Every now and then the phone beeped and she put in more money. Where had she gotten that?

  “Can we meet?” she said.

  I had thought this all the way through to the end, in case she should ask. There was only one way, I said, and that was at night. I could help her out of the window and down, could she manage that?

  “They’ve moved me,” she said. “I’m sleeping in the same room as the new inspector.”

  She had said it quite quietly, and yet it was as though something big, like a train, had come racing along and then passed by, and with the train had gone the last chance of seeing her.

  “I’m going away in two weeks’ time,” I said. “To a reform school.”

  The receiver was put down. There was no sound, as there had been last time. One minute we were connected, the next we were cut off.

  I stayed by the telephone for a while, but nothing happened.

  SEVEN

  Two days in a row I spent the lunch period in the library.

  Under different circumstances I would have been banned, but the school’s rhythm was altered, because of the snow.

  The snow had fallen gently, but it had fallen day and night, and they had not been able to keep pace with it. Andersen shoveled snow and put gravel and salt down, helped by those boarders with outdoor chores. The playground was a sheet of ice and there were great mounds of snow. This meant that the lower grades were allowed to stay upstairs, people took longer to come into class because of their wet clothes, and, all in all, you sensed a deviation from the timetable.

  Both Fredhøj and Karin Ærø saw me in the library, but nothing was said. Maybe they thought I had already been punished; that no more could be done to me.

  I looked through old numbers of the blue book, the school yearbook. Each volume contained a picture of every class. I looked at the old photographs of her class—from when she started in Primary One and all the way up.

  These days I saw her at assembly, too. It hurt to look straight at her, it was easier with pictures.

  In those days the girls had worn pigtails, and so did she. Otherwise she looked just the same.

  Apart from the fact that she was smiling. There were eight pictures, from 1963 to 1971. In 1970 she was missing. The school photographs were taken in April, which was when she had been absent. In the first seven pictures she was smiling. Not much, but nevertheless it was noticeable. So it was clear to see the kind of home she came from, and what life had been like for her. Then you could see why she had talked about a lighted plain.

  Then came the year when she was missing. And then came the last picture, from this year. In which she was not smiling. And her clothes were different. You could only see her top half, but she was wearing one of the big sweaters.

  I laid the books end to end, to see all of them at once. Like a line of time.

  You could not get the thought out of your head: what if you had known her back then, what would it have been like? Maybe you could have seen something of each other, she might have invited me home, I might have met her parents, and when disaster started to strike I could have helped her.

  That is what I thought, that I could have helped her. I, who had never even been able to help myself.

  I looked at the pictures. Eventually it seemed as though you had grown up with her. As though you had not shot up feverishly only after coming to Biehl’s, but had always been there and had grown up with her, quietly and peacefully, so that now you belonged together.

  * * *

  Before this I had never looked much at photographs. You would have thought that they would have changed when you turned upon them the light of awareness. That they would become weaker, like the fear. This was not the case. Instead they became deeper and deeper. I sat there and looked at them for two days in a row. I would have gone up there on the third day, too, if it had not started to snow again, and we had been sent out for a run.

  EIGHT

  The next best thing—after apparatus work—for strengthening the front was athletics, especially the field events, although, since these were outdoor sports, it was more difficult to practice them in the winter.

  The
only exception was running. Klastersen had taught the national juniors to take winter training runs across the frozen marshes and lakes, and had achieved fine results. It was one of his ground rules: running was something that could be done in all weather.

  So all year round you went for training runs, although he had a marked preference for snow. Then it was a pretty safe bet that you would have to run around the grounds, at least for the first half hour.

  Klastersen himself ran at the head. This meant that if you did not keep up with the leaders, or if you actually let yourself fall behind, then suddenly you found yourself on your own.

  * * *

  She was standing beside a tree, with her back turned. I saw the black coat. The falling snow formed a wall behind her. She broke away from the tree, stepped through the wall, and was gone.

  I turned off the path and came down to the lake. There was one spot on it that always took a lot longer to freeze over. A heron was standing there, and there were swans, too. They seemed not to feel the cold, they were flapping about as though someone had passed that way.

  I thought I had lost her, or maybe it had not been her. The snow kept on forming chambers, you ran through never-ending rows of white rooms. I turned up toward the hill with the statues—icy suits of snow over bronze-green skin. One of them broke loose and moved off. I started walking. We came down to a place where there had been roses in the summer. They had been pruned and covered with fir branches, she had helped with that, I had seen her there not long after I had written the letter. Now everything was covered with snow; just four mounds forming one long, white trench.

  She broke into a run, but did not get far. The snow was deep and she was only wearing thin shoes. She kind of crumpled and hunkered down. I came up behind her. She half turned her face toward me.

  “Go away,” she said, “get lost!”

  She must have shouted, but the snow absorbed the sound. I had seen half of her face. There was hate in it.

  I stayed put, I had nothing to lose. I had nothing to put around her, I had been running in just a sweatshirt. I understood none of this.