Borderliners (10 page)

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 Or
phanage
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 supplemen
tary
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.

i

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 con
centrating and organizing my time. And then she
had our test
results.

She told me that there were people who
were born fast, and peo-

pie
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 Second
ary?"

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 to
gether 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 untruth.

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 viola
tions could lead to a reward of a
sort.

TWELVE

       
A
t 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 keep
ing 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 trav
eled 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 Poi
tiers.
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 acces
sible 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 popu
lation, 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.