Borderliners (12 page)

kedam
. It was very early. He walked the length of the rose
bed,
looking at the
soil. If there had been footprints he would have seen
them immediately.

The bed was nine feet wide, and
came right up against the house. It was difficult, if not impossible, to jump
from a window without
leaving
a print in the soil, which was, of course, always freshly raked. It was a
brilliant setup.

So
it was necessary to jump from the storeroom window. From there you could jump
at an angle onto the stairs leading up to the
entrance.
It was not the easiest place to land, but it was the only
alternative. The main door was locked.

It was cold and very clear. There were only a few leaves on the
trees,
you could see stars and the
lights of Copenhagen.

At Himmelbjerg House there had
been a plan for when you
were to run away. It was strictly regulated: two at a time,
with a two-week break between.
You took a car and saw who
could get farthest away and stay out the longest. This was to
put pressure on the grownups, but
also so you could bum around
in freedom.

The first few hours after you
had left the building, when it was
night, had always felt good. Even after I realized that
it would, in
the long run, lead to
perdition and had stopped, and then had trou
ble
with the others and started working on being transferred to
Crusty
House—even then I had missed it. The feeling of it being
night; of the teacher on duty being asleep; of
the world being spread
out at your
feet; of anything being possible, freedom—absolutely
brilliant.

Now it was different. The
feeling was there, but it was different.
Somewhere above and behind me, August lay sleeping. It
made a
difference. You knew he was lying
there, restless. It was as though
a clock had
started ticking as I left him, and now the countdown
had begun.

You started wondering how people could ever abandon their
chil
dren. How can you
abandon a child?

I climbed up the drainpipe. There was no risk, the outside of the
building had been repaired at the same time as the rose bed and the
renovations.

Also at that juncture, they had installed double
glazing, but only
the
standard windows, with a lever that did not lock, just closed
them. I opened it with the coat
hanger.

I sat for a moment on the window, feeling my way. Three
people
breathing.

Beneath the window slept the girl with whom she shared
the
room. She was
familiar, she was one of the diplomatic children
whose father was an ambassador and away
somewhere. In the dark,
Katarina was asleep. Behind her breathing there was another's.

It was Flakkedam's—deep, quite peaceful, and penetrating.
He
had to be in the
next room, just on the other side of the wall.

I pulled the window to, but without closing it with the
lever. Then
I
climbed across the diplomatic girl and made my way over to
Katarina.

I stood by her
bedside for a moment.

Sometimes, at H
ø
ve, at the vacation home for underprivileged
children, you crept into the
girls' dormitory at night, and stood
alone in the dark, and felt their presence.

But
there had been eighty girls there. That had been almost too much. This was
different.

I stretched out an arm and shook her gently. She woke up.
As
she drew
breath
to scream I put a hand over her mouth and cut off
the sound. "It's me," I said. She sat up, but I did not let go
of her until she settled down.

"I've come
about August," I said.

It was necessary to whisper, very softly, lips right up
against her
ear. She
did not pull away.

"There's a plan behind the school," I said,
"August won't be able
to cope with it. The idea is that time
raises
up."

Until that moment I had held
this back from everyone else, even
from her. Now I had to trust.

"If
you became blind," I said, "if you were used to finding your
way around a house and then, suddenly, one day had
an accident
—was attacked or
something—and became blind, only then would
you actually notice the
furniture. It would always have been there,
but
you would never have been aware of it, you would just have
gone around it. Only when something becomes hard to
cope with do you see it. That's how you become aware of time—when it becomes
hard to cope with."

Her hair was in the way. I brushed it back and sat holding
it for
a moment, so it would not fall
back. I was resting against the place in the bed where she had been lying. It
was still warm. I knew what
I wanted to say,
I had gone over it in my head beforehand.

"If you can manage to stay on at the school—if you
have com
mitted no
serious violations or acts of gross negligence—then you're
here for ten years. During those
ten years your time will be strictly
regulated, there will be very few occasions when you are
in doubt
as to
where you should be or what you should be doing, very few
hours altogether where you have
to decide anything for yourself.
The rest
of the time will be strictly regulated. The bell rings—you
go up to the classroom; it rings—you come down; it
rings—you
eat; rings—work;
rings—eat; rings—study period; rings—three free
hours; rings—bedtime. It's as if there are these very narrow tunnels
that have been laid out and you walk along them and nowhere else.
They're invisible, like glass that has just been
polished. You don't
see it if you
don't fly into it. But if you become blind or nearsighted,
then you have to try to understand the system.
I've been trying for
a long time. Now
I know."

The other girl felt so close,
Flakkedam was just on the other side,
their
breathing was right beside us
the whole time. We were talking
in a little space between the breathing of two people or,
in fact,
three, because somewhere beneath
us August lay, breathing rest
lessly. You
could not hear it, but even so, to me he was there
anyway.

She drew the quilt over our heads,
to muffle our voices. There
we sat, as though in a tent or a sleeping bag. I did not let on. I kept
going so that she
would understand me.

"There is a selection that
takes place. People are selected accord
ing
to the laws of nature. The school is an instrument dedicated to
elevation. It works like this. If you achieve in
the way you're sup
posed to, time
raises you up. That's why the classrooms are ar
ranged as they are. From Primary One to Three you're on the
ground floor, then you move up to the second
floor, then the third,
then to
Secondary on the fourth, until at last—at the very top, in
the assembly hall—you receive your certificate
from Biehl. And then
you can fly out
into the world."

There, I had said
it. We were nearing the conclusion.

"I've been wondering why it is so hard for them, why
there are
so many
rules. And it occurred to me that it is because they have
to keep the outside world out.
Because it's not everywhere out there that it raises up. There are lots of
places out there where time drags
you down toward destruction. That is what they must keep
out.
You must be
left in no doubt that the world raises you
up,
otherwise
it would be impossible to cope
with the expectations. Coping is
something
you do best when you believe in time. If you believe that
the whole
world is an instrument through which you become elevated, just so long as you
do your best—that is the metaphor the
school
presents. It's brilliant."

She moved her face until her lips were
close beside my ear.

"What about
you?" she said.

Her voice was husky
with sleep. Well, I had woken her up.

It was not absolutely clear what it was she was asking,
but I
answered
anyway.

I said that, as far as I was concerned, special
circumstances came
into
play, since I was ill but at the same time had a personal insight into my
illness—according to my record. I brought it out. That was
what I had had stuck to my
stomach. If she felt like it, she could
read it. It was the bit I had been given a copy of at
Nødebogärd
Treatment
Home. So it was not complete. You did not get to see
the confidential bit, but even so it was enlightening.
This made it
quite clear, I said, that if
you were to have any chance after having
grown up in a children's home,
there had to have been one particular grownup to
whom
you had formed an attachment. In my case,

there
had not been. For various reasons, within the first ten
years
of my life, I
had been in four different institutions. So I was dam
aged. It said so, in so many words—that it was
difficult, if not
impossible, for me to
establish stable emotional relationships—in other words, to have any deep
feelings. There was nothing personal
in
my coming here tonight. She could tell that from the record. I
had come
because of August.

"He sniffs
gas," I said.

That is not what I meant to say. I meant to say that he
was like a
wild
animal that has been cooped up; a bird of prey that keeps flying into the
invisible, polished glass; but I could not get it
out,
I had done
too much
talking. Even so, it was as if she had understood.

"He drinks from the gas tap in the kitchen so he can
sleep," I
said,
"he doesn't fit in at the school, he'll never be able to cope with it,
what can be done?"

She did not answer me. Nor had I expected an answer. It
was
not clear what
it was I was asking. There was August, back in our
room, I had to leave. And I was
very close to her.

She caught up with
me halfway across the floor.

"There's
something I don't understand," she said.

She was right behind
me,
she
had forgotten herself and had spo
ken out loud.

"He is chaos," she said. "If their plan is
order, why have they taken him?"

Order.

When the child was about one year
old she started talking. At
first it was just single words, but pretty soon they formed into
strings.
Into
lists.

She would come and sit close
beside me. You had the feeling that
there was something she wanted to explain. I said nothing.

Then she would start reciting
all the words she knew. First the
objects around us, but, after that, things she had seen
and heard
the names
of, some of them just the once.

Very rarely did she ask a
question. It was rather as though there
was something she wanted to say; that something being
these long
lists.

They took two forms. In the afternoon it was objects, in
the eve
ning people.
Before she went to sleep, before the woman came in
to her, I would sometimes sit on
her bed. She lay on her
back,
she
would be close to dropping off.
Then she would start to name the
names of all the people she knew, or who she had met, or
who she
had only
heard of—a very great number of names.

She could go on for a long time, perhaps as much as half
an hour.
It was
impossible to understand how one child could contain so
many people.

From the start I
knew that in what she was saying
lay
a message.

The first thing you realized was
that she did it all of her own accord. There was no external prompting, no
encouragement or
reward.
It was the first thing you noticed.

There had to be pleasure simply in using the words. It was
the
first time I
understood this. That, if no one hinders a person, or
assesses them, then maybe there is
pleasure in just being allowed to
use the words.

There is no explanation for this pleasure. It is like the
questions in the laboratory—that is to say, uncertain and impossible to put
more clearly.

Besides this pleasure there was yet another, profound,
message. I
understood
this the first time I was left alone with her.

The woman had gone out. Just as she was leaving, she looked at
me for a moment and I knew that
perhaps she was doing this—I mean, leaving us alone—for my sake.

The child sat beside me on the sofa. I looked at
her and the thought occurred to me that now this was my responsibility.
For
the first time.