Borderliners (14 page)

But in all of these instances an answer did
already exist.
That
you
had to score, or remember a particular date or sing true or
run a distance under a certain time.
There was a clearly defined
quadrangle of knowledge—like a
chessboard, like a soccer field.
So it was pretty easy to see what was correct and what was
wrong, and when one
thing was better or worse than another.
But if it became just a little bit more complicated, like
at the start
of an attack, or in
midfield, then you could no longer be sure what
the answer would be.
Like with August's drawing.
You would
think, in that case, that it
would have to be almost impossible—
after
all, it was his. How could an answer already exist as to how
it should be?

When you assess something, you are forced to assume that a linear
scale of values can be applied to it. Otherwise no
assessment is
possible. Every person who
says of something that it is good or bad or a bit better than yesterday is
declaring that a points system exists;
that
you can, in a reasonably clear and obvious fashion, set some
sort of a number against an achievement.

But never at any time has a code of practice been laid
down for
the awarding
of points. No offense intended to anyone. Never at
any time in the history of the
world has anyone—for anything ever so slightly more complicated than the
straightforward play of a ball
or a 400-meter race—been able to come up with a code of practice
that could be learned and followed by several
different people, in
such a way that they
would all arrive at the same mark. Never at
any time have they been able to agree on a method for determining
when
one drawing, one meal, one sentence, one insult, the picking
of one lock, one blow, one patriotic song, one
Danish essay, one playground, one frog, or one interview is good or bad or
better or
worse than another.

Never at any time.
Nothing that comes anywhere
near
a code of
practice.

But a code of practice is
essential. To ensure that things can be
spoken of, fully and frankly. A code of practice is
something that

could
be passed on, maybe not to a character like Jes Jessen,
or me,
but at any
rate to someone like Katarina or a teacher.

But, in all the history of the
world, no code of practice has ever
existed for the assessment of complex phenomena.

And certainly not
for what crops up in the laboratory.

And yet everyone talks in terms of what is good or bad. And now
and again they can be pretty much
in agreement. For example, ev
eryone was pretty much in agreement that with Oscar Humlum—
the bit I have not been able to
talk about yet—it was no great loss.
Nor, in fact, with Axel Fredhøj,
and definitely not Jes Jessen.
Apart
maybe from me and a handful of others—we were not in agree
ment. The thing about Humlum,
that did not go down very well
with me—and not just because he had saved me, that had happened
long before. Since then, not a
day has gone by that I have not
thought of him. It is more than twenty years ago now.
Often he is
there,
between your dreaming and
your
waking; often he comes
to the laboratory and talks to me. For a long time after it happened it
was enough to drive you insane.
Sometimes, the way you felt, you
wished you could go insane.

But that is not how it works, you cannot just go crazy.
And then,
when you
have been selected to be average, or a bit below, you
have to do something else in order
to keep going. You have to
develop a strategy.

I suppose that is why I have turned upon the part about
the
assessments.

If no code of practice exists for determining when something is good
or bad, why do people talk as
though it does? How could they be
so sure when they awarded stars and points and wrote notes
in the record and decided who was gifted in mathematics or art and referred
Humlum to the Central Mission Home for the Retarded on
Gersons Road, and committed me,
for an indefinite period, to Him
melbjerg House because the fact that I was of average
intelligence

amounted
to exacerbating
circumstances? If there is no code of practice, why is everyone so very, very
sure?

Katarina came close to an explanation.

That first time, at the clinic,
she only mentioned the bit about the
stars
and time. But that was enough. For me, in a way, that has
continued to be enough—for all of my life up to
this point.

How could she know that they had never been able to
prove that
one thing
is better than another?

She had probably not worked it out logically. Actually, I would have to
say I believe that I gave more thought to it than she did.
The greater the
fear, the more thinking you do
. Yet she came closer
to the truth than anyone else.

Maybe that is how it works—that whatever is closest to
the truth
you do not
think about; you cannot reach it by achievement; you
can only feel it. And feeling is
something you can do, even when
you are
only sixteen.

While she was
talking about his drawings he had stood up.

"I knew there
was a conspiracy," he said.

I set him back on
the chair.

"We have to
get back soon," I said. "We've gone to the toilet."

He did not hear
me.

"What about
you, girl," he said. "Where do you fit into this?"

I
knew what he meant. That she was, after all, one of the well-to-do kids—she
could not have problems. So what was in this for
her? That was what he meant.

But
she understood. That she had to give him something in re
turn, if she wanted him to join us.

"You have this idea that it must be terrible when people hang
themselves," she said, "that they fall a
long way. But it doesn't have
to be
like that."

She spoke as though we knew what all this was about,
and as
though August knew the bit about her
mother, too. She said that,
with her
father, on the surface things had been quiet and calm. After
her
mother's death it was as though he began to dread the daylight,
if you could imagine such a thing. Often he did
not get up, and
when he did, he would
just sit there waiting for the day to pass.
Often he would sit and stare
at a clock. As if trying to make the seconds pass more quickly. In the end he
had gone off to their
farmhouse in
Sweden—where they used to go every summer—and
there he hung himself, in the living room.

"From a door handle," she said. "You don't
have to do it from
high
up. He put a rope around his neck and then he sat down and
put a bit of weight on the rope so that it tightened
and stopped his circulation. Then he lost consciousness and all his weight
pulled
down on it, and he was dead.

"Once it's happened,"
she said, "you're left with it, so you have to do something."

"So why this
thing about a laboratory?" asked August.

She started to sing.
Just one verse.
At first you thought she was going crazy.
The words were familiar, we had sung them often at
assembly, but this time they
sounded different.

". . .
To the Christ Child's crib my heart is ever brought,
There I can gather the sum of all
my thoughts."

She was in the choir, but even so it was incredible that she sang
alone.

"That
was where I got the idea," she said. "You have to have a
place where you can gather your thoughts. Like
people who pray.
That is what is
difficult here at the school. Peter says it is like glass
tunnels. There is no chance to think for
yourself
. A laboratory is a
place that is shut off, so you have peace and can think and carry out
your experiment."

She had risen and
started walking back and forth.

"It is already under way. It is the middle of
a period, we are not
where
the plan says we should be,
we
have stepped out of the
glass

tunnel
. The experiment is already under way. Something is
happen
ing to us, can you feel it? What is
it? What's happening is that you are starting to become restless, you want to
get back, you can feel
time passing. That
feeling is your
chance,
you can feel your way and
learn something you would otherwise never have seen. Like
when I came late on purpose. I stepped out of the
tunnel I was used
to walking along, I
saw Biehl, and I noticed something."

August was sitting bolt upright. He did not say a word,
but his
body was
listening.

"He's scared,
too," she said.

"Why
me?" said August.

She was standing over by the other door, beside the
mirror. There
was a
lock on
it,
no one knew where it led. She answered in
all
honesty.

"We have to find out why they took you. There is no
understand
ing
it."

There was no harm intended. She just said exactly what she
thought.

A
sound came over the loudspeaker. I made a sign to the others,
then
I removed the socks. The sound was very faint,
you could not
tell anything from it
except that the channel had been opened.

I put on the socks. Katarina put back the chairs, quite
soundlessly. Then I went out onto the stairs and looked down.

They
were on their way up from the third floor. I stepped back
inside and closed the door. It was Fredhøj and
Flakkedam,
you
could
identify them by Fredhøj's jacket sleeve and Flakkedam's
shirt. It could have been
worse,
Biehl himself could have been with
them.
He only came for serious accidents, like with Axel Fredhøj, or for on-the-spot
expulsions.

Even so, I thought this was the end, at any rate for
August and me. We had already gone way over the limit.

There was a knock at the door.
They could just have opened it,
but at
Biehl's one always knocked first. High up in the doors to the
lower grades there were small panes of glass.
Before the loudspeaker system was installed Biehl used to do his rounds of the
new teachers,
peeking in through the
glass to see whether they could control the

pupils
. If there was any trouble, he came in. But even then he
knocked first.

Katarina was about to say something, she did not get the
chance.
They opened
the door.

Normally they separated people for a certain length of time—one
or two months, for example—but
in our case there were special,
exacerbating circumstances.

We were questioned individually,
and then we were isolated from
one another, for an indefinite period. Each of us was assigned to our own
part of the playground. They moved August out of my
room and back to the sickroom. We
still sat together in class,
though,
because there was no opportunity for conversation during
periods.

It was Fredhøj who examined us.
He told me that he had been
requested to present me with my final warning.