Borderliners

by Peter Høeg

  “He’s been called away,” I said. “There’s been an accident.”

  I could hear the secretary running along the corridor. I replaced the receiver. She came through the door.

  “He’s not well,” she said, “we have to get hold of Flakkedam.”

  “I’m just on my way down to him,” I said, “I’ll ask him to come up immediately.”

  She had not really heard me.

  “He’s so thin,” she said.

  THIRTEEN

  There could be no thought now of returning to the classroom or the annex. Fredhøj had wanted a word with me, was possibly looking for me. There was nowhere left in the school where I could stay for any length of time and feel safe. I took to the landing between the ground and second floors, across from the lower grades. From here I would be able to see if a teacher came along, and be able to run for cover. When the bell rang for the lunch break I mingled with the stream and let myself be carried out into the playground. Flage Biehl was on playground duty, but he did not seem to have been alerted. At one point Fredhøj appeared under the archway, but I ducked down and next time I looked he was gone. When all the pupils were assembled there were so many, all looking so alike that it was difficult to pinpoint one in particular.

  But I saw Katarina. While Flage was at the other end we both made for the center line. We walked side by side, from the wall to the school, with the line between us and without looking at each other.

  “He could be here any time now,” she said. “When the bell rings you’ve got to go around to the south playground and meet him, instead of going to class.”

  “They’ll be looking for me,” I said. “You too.”

  “Not until the end of the period.”

  “There isn’t enough time,” I said.

  Around us they were playing two-man tag. An uneven layer of ice covered the asphalt. You ran hand in hand, always a boy and a girl together. The ice made it hard to keep hold of each other, so you had to take off your mittens. Which meant that you held a girl by the hand. With no mittens in between. Then, too, the sense of disintegration was intensified by the fact that Christmas was coming.

  We watched them playing. Not long ago we had been among them, but now, suddenly, they were remote from us. It was not just because you had been expelled and would soon be going away, and so need not think anymore about them. It was something else. It was Katarina, and that I had kissed her, and August, and that we were on the point of having understood, and that there was no way back.

  “There’s something I want to ask you,” she said, “can you turn back the school clock, the one that controls the bell?”

  * * *

  At the Orphanage, classes were called in and let out by the ringing of a little handbell. It hung from the roof of a shed next to the school building. For boarders’ mealtimes and bedtimes there had been a bigger bell out in front of the cloakroom. Both bells were a gift from the royal family. The job of bell ringer was the most sought after in the school and only ever entrusted to a senior who had achieved something outstanding.

  Never, during the time I was there, had anyone other than the bell ringer ever laid a finger on the bells. But since they hung where they were readily accessible, the punishment for their unauthorized ringing had nevertheless been officially determined: instant expulsion.

  There was no such punishment at Biehl’s. You had seen the bells but never the clock itself. There was never any thought that it might be possible to get close to it. Before Katarina mentioned it, it had never occurred to me, nor to anyone else.

  “The clock is not in Biehl’s office,” she said. “And it’s not in the school office either. It has to be in the staff room or behind that door in the corridor between the infirmary and Fredhøj’s office.”

  “It could be in Andersen’s house,” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “It’s too important,” she said. “It would never be hung at ground level. It’ll be kept up in the light. Close to Biehl and Fredhøj.”

  I said nothing, I had not answered her. Nor did she seem to expect me to. It was all over. But, for these final moments, we were in the laboratory and anything was possible.

  She turned toward me. Then she stepped over the line and came right up close to me.

  “Turn it back ten minutes,” she said. “That will give us the time we need. And something will happen, there’s going to be chaos of some sort. And ten minutes is not too much. It will be quite precisely administered.”

  * * *

  We walked through the gym together and around to the south staircase, shortly before the bell rang, so as not to be seen by the teacher on playground duty. When we split up she touched my arm.

  * * *

  The director of education arrived just after the bell had rung. He was driving himself, he did not so much as look at me.

  I walked ahead of him up the stairs and opened the door into the clinic. Katarina was sitting behind the desk, where Hessen usually sat.

  “Where’s Biehl?” he said.

  She did not answer him right away. She stood up and put her hand out to him, he had to take it.

  “Katarina,” she said. “I’m Hessen’s assistant.”

  At that moment I saw her clothes in a new light. She was wearing a baggy gray sweater. At this moment, behind the desk, she looked like someone older.

  I did not hear what he said next. I went out onto the landing and closed the door behind me.

  * * *

  There were panes of glass in the door from the stairs to the fifth floor. I stayed where I was until the corridor was empty, then I went for August. He was very far away, I undid the straps and got him out onto the floor, he kept collapsing, I slapped him several times. He half opened his eyes, it would have to do, our time was almost up.

  It was not clear how he should be presented, but I had a notion that it should be the same as for the school doctor—in other words, everything off except his underpants. They had given him a hospital undershirt that buttoned up the front and long socks—I took them off. It occurred to me that the tubes and bottles hooked up to him might be advantageous, so I let him keep them—the ones hanging from needles as well as the ones up his nose and down his throat. I could not carry all the bottles. As well as saline solution and glucose there was Ringer lactate—that, too, had been administered to the girls at Nødebogård. He would have to carry them himself, maybe feeling he had to shoulder some of the responsibility would help to keep him awake.

  I let us in to the little office next to Hessen’s clinic. From there, through the Mensendieck mirror, we could watch Katarina and the director.

  * * *

  He had taken a seat and was facing us. He had white hair and sideburns like Grundtvig, but was smaller and slicker. His lips were moving but you could not hear anything. Very carefully I set the door ajar.

  “We’ve brought him up,” said Katarina, “so that you can see him.”

  One of the tubes had slipped out of August’s nose. There was no probe inside it, so it was probably meant for something else, oxygen maybe, they had usually prescribed that at Nødebogård. I used this tube to tie his hands behind his back, not tightly, mainly for show.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Baunsbak-Kold, “I’ve read the file.”

  I put on the white coat. This was my own idea, it was not part of the plan. Then I opened the door, pushed August in, and positioned him in the middle of the room.

  The director of education got to his feet and stepped back a bit. I need not have worried about him seeing the splatters of paint on the coat, he did not look at me at all.

  “Hello, young man,” he said to August. “My name is Baunsbak-Kold.”

  To this August made no reply. He seemed to be sleeping standing up.

  “I’ve tied his hands together,” I said, “there’s no risk. And he’s been given four Mogadon.”

  “I hear you’re feeling better,” he said.

  August made no reply t
o this either.

  “Take him away,” he said.

  He had not looked directly at August. He had not been able to bring himself to do it.

  “He has attacked a teacher,” said Katarina. “He will not eat. We have had him admitted on a red form. He broke two of Inspector Flakkedam’s fingers when we brought him up here. We have him under around-the-clock surveillance. We can no longer be held responsible, we need authorization.”

  He had turned to face the window. From there you could look across the grounds to Copenhagen.

  “It must be all over town by now,” he said. “I suppose Hårdrup was informed long ago?”

  Aage Hårdrup, theologian and educator, was the state inspector assigned to the school. You had seen him at close quarters just once, when he made a speech at the inauguration of the annex and the new toilets.

  “You’re the first to hear of it,” said Katarina. “We feel the less that’s said about it the better.”

  “Parliament sits less than two miles away as the crow flies,” he said. “This is all going to rebound on me.”

  He stuck his hand into his pocket—for a handkerchief, I thought—but it was a comb. Unaware of what he was doing, he combed both his hair and his sideburns.

  “This has gone too far,” he said. “I told Biehl so months ago. This boy has to go back to Sandbjerggård. The worst of the others must be sent back where they came from, I’ll attend to that personally. Although, of course, we cannot altogether put a stop to this. Too much is expected of it. At the highest level.”

  I had not so much listened to his words as sensed him. He had worked himself up, I knew that it was about to come to a head.

  “What does Biehl have to say?” he said.

  Katarina did not get the chance to reply. There was no transition. One moment he was speaking, the next he was yelling like a madman.

  “What in hell’s name does Biehl have to say!”

  Never before at the school had an adult sworn or used abusive language, never, this had been a cast-iron rule.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry…”

  I led August from the room and pulled the door to behind us, but did not close it. Very gently I set him on a chair, took off the tape, and removed the drips. He started to pull the tube out of his throat by himself.

  Baunsbak-Kold sat down opposite Katarina.

  “It is, of course, my responsibility,” he said.

  He looked straight at the mirror, I knew he could not see us. He seemed very tired now.

  “I’ve read his file,” he said, “I just cannot conceive of it. Such brutality. Violence. And between children and parents.”

  “Have you never hit your children?” said Katarina.

  At first he just clammed up, then he answered. Slowly, as though he was surprised by the question, and perhaps by his own reply.

  “I’ve spanked them,” he said. “Well, one does. But they’ve never hit back.”

  He closed his eyes. I knew he was picturing the photographs from the police report.

  When next he spoke, his voice was weak as a child’s.

  “One has seen it in the newspapers. It has drawn closer. The unaccountable children. Now he is on my desk. How can such a thing happen? The brutality. Why does it happen? Isn’t that your field? Isn’t that what you’re paid to do—to explain it?”

  She did not answer him.

  “It’s beyond my powers,” he said.

  I remembered the clock. Since Katarina had given me the wristwatch I had regularly remembered the time. As though I were becoming less ill. Now, when it was all too late, anyway.

  I had seven minutes.

  “There was no opposing Biehl,” he said. “From the first meeting at the ministry it was a fait accompli. Surely you noticed it, too?”

  “I was not there,” said Katarina.

  “No. True enough. Hessen was. ‘Man is a divine experiment which proves how spirit and dust can merge.’ Fascinating, isn’t it? Grundtvig—in the preface to Norse Mythology. He had built his speech around it. We were only going to continue this experiment. Turn the school into the ‘Workshop of the Sun’—that, too, is Grundtvig, from New Year’s Morning. It sounds so plausible when he says it. ‘We act in the hope of future glory.’ You must have seen that, after all it turns up several times in his writing.”

  “Where?”

  “In the applications?”

  “Where are they?” she asked.

  He did not get her drift.

  “They are arranged in the same way as the Ministry circulars, by date. They cover November and December 1969. They’re all there, in the office, on those shelves. I’ve referred to them myself several times.”

  For a moment he had been on the verge of coming unstuck. Now, gradually, he regained his composure.

  “It was an idea that seemed born to succeed. He carries everyone with him. Me, the minister, the department, the Charity Schools Foundation, the Institute of Education, Hårdrup. The money is there. The wheels start to turn. It all bodes so well. And then these breakdowns start to occur. At least in the residential schools they were out of the way. But this is a reputable school, a model, on the outskirts of the capital. And now the grants have been awarded and partially spent. There’s no stopping it now, the forces that have been set in motion are too great, too much is at stake.”

  I got up. Four minutes to go.

  “If that were all there was to it,” he said. “But then there are the children’s interests to be considered. Like that one, that little boy. What burden is he carrying?”

  He buried his face in his hands. I went over to the door.

  “I must go,” he said.

  * * *

  The corridor was deserted. The staff room door was at the far end. I opened it and stepped inside.

  Pupils had no business in the staff room. I had never been there.

  It was big. There were sofas, and fabric on the chairs. In the classroom you sat on wooden chairs or at a desk. The teacher’s chair had a leather seat but nowhere else was there upholstered furniture.

  It smelled of coffee and good food. Not packed lunches, nor like what came out of the kitchen in the annex. Good food.

  One of the kitchen staff, in her overalls, was in the room, and two of the new teachers were sitting there, marking some papers. Fredhøj was standing by one of the windows.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “I was sent with a message for Hessen.”

  Then I closed the door.

  There had been pictures on the wall, you noticed them right away. Sticking things up on the classroom walls was not permitted—to save on wear and tear. There had also been a big electric clock. But nothing that could have been the school bell.

  I ran along the corridor to the door next to Fredhøj’s office—the one Katarina had spoken of—and unlocked it. Then I stepped inside and locked it behind me.

  It was a very narrow room, but deep. On the wall to my left, behind glass, hung a small plate with a push button. The school fire alarm, it said. Next to it hung a notice giving the procedure for evacuation.

  Other than that, the room held nothing but the clock.

  * * *

  It was fixed to the wall. So high up that it was beyond the reach of any living soul. The actual works were enclosed within a locked casing. There was a glass panel in the cover. You could see the face and a long pendulum. Under the face there was a gear wheel, of a sort you had never come across before. I had two minutes left.

  I took off my shoes and socks, placed one foot on either wall, and ascended.

  * * *

  A year earlier, two girls from the class ahead of us had turned up at school barefoot.

  Naturally Biehl had spotted them right away in the playground, and yet he had let them pass. The first period had gone by without comment.

  At assembly they had been isolated. Fredhøj had positioned them next to the lectern. Then Biehl had come. He proceeded with assembly in the normal way. Everyone had known that so
mething was up, everyone knew the girls. They had written a song for the school play, and it had been banned. One of them was said to have had gonorrhea the year before.

  At the close of the patriotic song the hall had grown quiet. Biehl had waited until the awareness was absolutely concentrated. Then he had said that the school welcomed intelligent and accurate criticism of the established order, but the method which these so-called provos had chosen was both futile and stupid. As far as long hair and bare feet were concerned, everyone was entitled to their own opinion. What was, however, beyond the shadow of a doubt was that such unhygienic and downright disgusting habits would not be countenanced in this school. He would now ask the two girls standing beside him to go home and give this some careful thought. And they need not come back until they felt that they had understood.

  I remembered this now. It meant that I had to force myself to set foot on the walls. Never before had you so much as brushed against them. Yet here you were, and with bare feet besides.

  “Bürk” it said, on the clock. I wedged myself tight and opened the cover.

  It was lifeless. It moved, but it was not alive—that is what I told myself. But still I could not cope with touching it.

  Electrical cables ran into the casing, but not to the works. The works were hand-wound. Two keys lay on the floor of the casing, and there was a pawl in the face. Above the pawl sat a small dial that shifted once every second. One minute to go.

  There were labels stuck to the back of the casing, with warnings printed in German. I could read these only with some difficulty. But I could tell, from the exclamation marks and the underlining, that these were the directions for winding the clock. Besides the keys, on the floor of the casing, there was a box of 250 ma fuses and a slip with details of when the works had been adjusted. An adjustment of about a minute had been made at the end of each month.

  I tried pushing the big hand back. Impossible. It seemed to be stuck fast, there was nothing to be done about it.

  The gear wheel below the works was connected to a fair amount of machinery, it was impossible to figure it all out in such a short time. What was clear, however, was that it had to be connected to the bell mechanism, which was electric. Inside the casing there was a relay marked “Tradania, Denmark.” The works themselves were German, so the clock was, in fact, the result of German-Danish cooperation.