Borderliners

by Peter Høeg

  * * *

  You could not make outside calls from Sandbjerggård. Some of the inmates had abused and tormented little girls, and after they had been taken into custody, they had continued to call the girls at home. After that, all the telephones were disconnected, now you could only make calls from a locked booth while an officer listened in.

  I called Biehl’s Academy, the secretary answered the telephone, when I gave my name she went very quiet.

  I apologized for telephoning, but there were some things which had been left behind in my room and which I missed very much. She said she would forward them. Yes, I said, but there was also something concerning what had happened that I would like to say, would it be possible for me to speak to someone in authority?

  * * *

  It was Fredhøj who came. He parked his Rover in the courtyard, no one shouted at him.

  He was very curt in the visiting room. As far as he was concerned I had ceased to exist.

  While I was in isolation my own clothes had been returned to me—two pairs of pants, two corduroy shirts, underwear, socks, a sweater, a raincoat. What Fredhøj brought were personal effects that had been in my locker—slippers, sneakers, PE clothes, schoolbag, and pencil case. There should also have been some comic books and a Stiga table tennis bat. They were not there, I did not mention them, they must have been stolen the day after I was taken away, the contents of the pencil case, too—it was completely empty. I said nothing either about the stitching of the schoolbag having been slit open, whoever had done it had tried to repair it, albeit clumsily, so I said nothing.

  In addition, Fredhøj had brought me three books, the only three that, as a pupil, you had to purchase for yourself and therefore owned. Mine had been paid for by the Social Services Department, which had bought them secondhand. The books were: Primary and Lower-Secondary Biology, A Pocket Flora, and the Folk High School Songbook.

  More times than you could remember, Fredhøj had questioned you, up at the blackboard. Or you had sat and listened while he read stories about the great criminals. I had been in the class when Anne-Dorthe Feldslev found Axel in the chart locker. And yet now it was all he could do to look at me.

  It was not indifference, it was distaste.

  “I want to be adopted,” I said. “I can’t stay here, I’m going insane. Do you think I could have a statement from the school to the effect that I am fit to be with a family?”

  He opened the door, the officer came in and signed a receipt on my behalf for the clothes and books. When you were in care you could not sign for yourself until you were sixteen. Not until he had gone out and closed the door did Fredhøj answer.

  “No one believes you’re a bad lot,” he said. “There’s nothing anyone would like better than to see you make good. There’s been some talk about it at the school. Everyone, including your guardian, Child Welfare Services, and the police, agrees that this is the best place for you.”

  It was well put. As though he himself had no part in it but had merely been given the task of delivering the message.

  “Personally, I can well understand you,” he said, “but after what has happened, I think it’s highly unlikely that anyone else at the school could be persuaded to recommend your getting out of here.”

  * * *

  I waited until nighttime, there was really no place where you could be alone in the daytime. You slept three to a room, when the other two were asleep I slipped out to the toilet.

  The toilets were the same as at Crusty House, there was a radiator and the light was left on all night. You could not lock the door but everything was quiet.

  I slit the spine of the Folk High School Songbook, I had taken a new Stanley knife blade from the workshop, even with that it was a slow job, you could feel how the binding had been made to last as long as ten or twenty years. In the front the previous owners had written their names and the years, the first was from 1960. Tucked in next to the pages printed with the songs were the papers I had taken, long ago, from Biehl’s locked drawer. Still glued in and intact.

  * * *

  The following night I wrote to my guardian. It took half the night. I wrote in detail about how I needed to get out, just for a few hours one afternoon, to see where August had been buried, would that be possible?

  I received no reply. When a week had gone by I rang her office, the minute you heard her voice you could tell that it was out of the question.

  “He’s in an unmarked grave in Bispebjerg Cemetery,” she said, “at the family’s request, there’s nothing to see.”

  “I still need to see it,” I said.

  The guard looked at me. Permission to leave was very rarely granted, and then only with the consent of the guardian and the Department of Health and Welfare and if accompanied by an officer.

  “You just don’t seem to understand your situation,” she said. “Not for six months, at least.”

  * * *

  The next day I sent her another letter. I wrote asking her if she would take three photocopies of the enclosed sheets, in which case I would be forever in her debt, and would she be so kind as to send them to me in a Children’s Panel envelope?

  Her letter arrived two days later. Maybe she had wanted to make up for not being able to arrange permission to leave for me, I think she had. In a small way she had wanted to ask for forgiveness.

  Usually, all private mail was opened and checked for drugs before being handed over, but because she had sent an official envelope I received it unopened.

  The next evening I left the home for a short while.

  * * *

  It was Friday, there was a dance, with a band. They had invited Ravnsborg assessment center for young girls. Fifteen girls turned up, and about twenty female staff and assistants. It was the first time in the history of the home that girls had been admitted, it was part of the new educational policy of the time.

  All their attention was focused on the assembly hall where the band was playing, and on checking whether anyone was drinking or breaking any other rules. It had not entered their heads that anyone would try, right now, to run away from the school.

  The gate was manned, but there was no problem. Normally the fence was lit up, but they had used the searchlights to light the stage, everything was in darkness, I had the time I needed.

  There were doors in both the outer and the inner fences, both fitted with standard padlocks, and reinforced with chains. To make absolutely certain, I had borrowed a small drill from the workshop, I drilled through them.

  I walked from the home to the Kalundborg highway and hitched. Taking the bus would have entailed too great a risk, the home had an arrangement with West Zealand Transportation Company, who reported anyone looking like an inmate who got on near Ravnsborg.

  * * *

  I was given two good rides and a bad one. When he put his hand on me I just said, “I’ll stick my finger down my throat and throw up in your car.” That made him keep his distance, it usually does. I was dropped off on Ålekiste Road, from there I walked the rest of the way along the side of Damhus Lake.

  It was not cold—mild, more like. It had stayed light for a long time and even though it was now dark the light had not disappeared, but lay sort of enfolded in the night. That is what I thought. I suppose there have always been light summer nights in your life, but there comes a time when, for the first time, you tell yourself that this is so. For me it came that night.

  The gate to the grounds was locked, but not the little door. I came up past the storehouse, it had been rebuilt and freshly painted, and the trees closest to it were still scorched—apart from that there was nothing to be seen.

  All the lights in the annex were out, including the one in Flakkedam’s room and that of the new inspector. In the main building a solitary light burned, right at the top, in Biehl’s apartment.

  There was a new lock on the door under the archway, I tried using my sheet metal copy, it did not fit, so I drilled through the lock, at the join of the tumbler and th
e cylinder casing, it took less than five minutes. On the way up the stairs I tried a few of the doors onto the corridors, the entire lock system had been replaced.

  Clearly this was because of what had happened with us. They had replaced them in order, somehow, to make it easier to forget us and make a fresh start.

  I ascended to the fifth floor and let myself into the corridor with the drill, and from there into the assembly hall. I came past Delling, who unlocks the gates of morning, and from there through the little door that led to Biehl’s office, the one through which he entered in the mornings and ascended the podium.

  The room was as I remembered. But there was a key in the wooden chest now. I felt inside, it was empty. Now it was only for show, the papers had been moved to a safer place. A wise move, I had never understood why they had been kept in such an exposed position.

  I sat down at his desk. Not in his chair, but in the one kept for adult visitors, it had arms and was upholstered. I had carried the papers in my shoe, between the insole and the sole, I took them out and placed them on the desk. There was enough light from outside to read by. From the moon and the stars and the night-enfolded gleam of daylight.

  There were two sheets of notepaper, closely written and three-quarters covered, in black ink. It was Biehl’s handwriting, he always wrote with a fountain pen and black ink.

  The paper was made exclusively from rags.

  There was no way of telling this—it felt like ordinary paper, but thicker—it was something we had been told. Biehl had said that this was one of the signs of the current state of decay, that the quality of paper grew steadily poorer. For especially important documents—diplomas, end-of-the-year report cards, recommendations and reports on pupils and teachers—the school used rag paper with a watermark, both for the originals and for the copies. The Ministry of Education required that these be kept on file, along with examination returns, for at least ten years after the person concerned had left the school. Rag paper, Biehl had said, does not yellow.

  When you held the sheet up toward the window you could see the watermark—Odin’s ravens, Hugin and Munin.

  Across the ravens flowed the black lines of writing—figures, letters, and symbols. On the whole sheet there was not one single complete word. The figures were obviously dates. Against each date there were several letters and a symbol, a diagonal stroke or a cross or, very occasionally, a circle. The first date was August 4, 1970.

  At another time in your life you would not have grasped the significance of this list, you would have looked at it and not made head or tail of it, and then forgotten it. It obviously had something to do with the past two school years, the first date was less than a week after the first day of school last year. Apart from that it would have held no meaning. And yet I had understood it the moment I saw it, that first time, under the blank sheets of school rag paper, while August sat on a chair, half-asleep, when he was still alive.

  It was because it came into my hands at a time when I was constantly thinking about time. When I remembered all the dates that I had been late, or had handed in work late, and when I had seen Katarina in the playground, and when August came to the school and started attracting the wrong sort of attention.

  All of this I had tried to remember, because that is what you do when time threatens to slip away from you. You try to remember everything so as to hold on to it. In my desperation, many dates had entered my head and some of them had stuck. On Biehl’s sheet of paper I saw my own initials. I recognized them because they were set against the two dates when I had been summoned to his office. I saw August’s and Katarina’s initials, too, and the times when they had been to the office—Katarina’s twice, the two times she had had to make use of in order to understand Biehl and to see where the switchboard sat and work out where the clock was.

  Against her and August’s and my names, every time, there was a diagonal stroke, apart from in one place, September 9, where there was a cross against mine. That had been the first and only time that Biehl had hit me, at that point I had been registered as having been late six times in less than twenty school days.

  After each set of initials he had noted which class the pupil was in, I found “C.S.” for Carsten Sutton, there were a lot of entries for him, it looked like a record. Every time, against his name, there was a cross. You knew that he had never been summoned to the office for less than a cuff around the ear.

  He had been expelled at the beginning of November 1970, for the incident with the paint thinner and what followed. The day before, I had seen him coming from Biehl’s office, it was the first time I had seen him cry, you would not have thought him capable of it. Biehl had a slim fiberglass pointer that he brought along whenever he needed to point out something on the maps of the world. It had a cork handle like a fishing rod, he preferred this to the stiff wooden pointers provided in the classrooms, someone said he had used the fiberglass pointer on Sutton.

  That day, against Sutton’s initials, “C.S.,” and “2nd Sec.” for the class he was in, there was a circle.

  * * *

  When I came to the school there was talk about the fact that a recommendation had been received from the Ministry of Education, saying that sex education ought to be taught at the school. Biehl had come right out and said that the teachers had been unanimous in deciding not to comply with this recommendation. Instead it would be up to the individual teacher to bring up the subject whenever it was judged to fit naturally into a lesson.

  Which meant that it was never brought up directly. Although hints were given—in Biehl’s Greek mythology classes, when he told us about Zeus and those he had raped, and especially in Fredhøj’s classes, when he read, for example, about the wife killer. And it was Fredhøj who told us about the masturbation marks in Hans Christian Andersen’s diaries.

  Secret symbols. Every time Hans Christian Andersen had jacked off, he had put a mark in his diary.

  A bit like the marks Madvig had made.

  * * *

  Stuus, the school’s Latin teacher, was a university man, like Biehl, and therefore almost overqualified. It was a measure of the school’s caliber that it had a teacher like him. He only took the school-leaving certificate classes—for French, too—but now and again you had him as a substitute teacher. He never remembered a single pupil’s name, or what sort of class he was in. Even so, you sensed that if you left him alone he would do you no harm.

  He had told us about Madvig. Madvig was a nineteenth-century Danish philologist and educational reformer. His works on Greek and Latin had sent the name of Denmark flying out across the world. Stuus said that Madvig had never been to Greece and only once to Italy, it was as though it was not so much the country or its people that had interested him as the extinct language. He had had a big Greek dictionary, it was still around, in it he had set a blue dot alongside a word the first time he looked it up, and a red dot if he had to look it up a second time. In the whole dictionary there were only a very few red dots.

  * * *

  Hans Christian Andersen and Madvig, both had kept a discreet account. You understand them immediately, but still it is hard to say exactly what they were recording. It must have been something to do with shame and love and time and control and memory. And perhaps a certain pleasure in being able to document your weakness, your illness. A secret delight over the solitary craving, the solitary forgetfulness and recall.

  * * *

  Biehl’s list was a secret account of which pupils he had punished. Specifying date and punishment. There were three possibilities, the paper had recorded three forms: The verbal reprimand. The standard blow. And something exceptional. Beating. A circle.

  * * *

  When an explanation had been demanded of Biehl—because Jes Jessen’s right ear had hurt and his doctor had said that it looked as though it was a result of the outer ear having been molested, and why had they waited six weeks before taking him to the emergency room—then he had explained that it had been a spontaneous act. Bo
xing a pupil’s ears was something that happened suddenly, it was uncalculated. Granted, he had said, this was perhaps not the best solution, but afterward the air was cleared, and if you asked the children they would tell you that they preferred this to more long-term measures.

  Even so, he had kept an account. In his heart of hearts he had felt a need to create an overall picture for himself, to have visible proof of how time and punishment were bound up with his own life. Perhaps to prevent himself from hitting out too often, or perhaps to have a better idea of which pupils had repeatedly merited it, or perhaps just out of a need to keep track of time, or perhaps out of a certain pleasure—or perhaps for all of these reasons at once.

  * * *

  Hans Christian Andersen’s marks, Madvig’s dots, Biehl’s symbols. Something to do with time, improvement, control, memory. And pleasure.

  As though one part of their nature was attempting to repress another. To keep it under some sort of surveillance.

  They have run a sort of risk with their signs, especially Biehl. As though one part of him has longed for exposure.

  As though this exposure has been part of the plan.

  * * *

  In Danish primary and lower-secondary schools there is a ban on striking pupils, there was a ban on it back then, there had been a ban on it since the Ministry of Education circular on disciplinary measures in schools of June 14, 1967, which replaced the physical contact circular of 1929 (augmented 1945). This had affirmed that teachers should have as little physical contact with pupils as possible, so as not to be misunderstood, preferably only with respect to administering a good cuff around the ear.

  Danish private schools were subject to standard Danish educational legislation, government grants covered more than 80 percent of their running costs. By nevertheless regularly meting out physical punishment to pupils, the school, and Biehl in particular, had been running a risk. He must have known this. The pupils were not aware of it, nor the parents, the school was shut off from the outside world. We who attended it were the only ones who really knew what went on within its walls. And even we hovered in a certain ignorance. What happened in Biehl’s office and in Fredhøj’s office and in Karin Ærø’s classes was not something you spoke about, that was between teacher and pupil.