Borderliners (16 page)

The straight back and the too-big clothes.
Which had
been her fa
ther's, who had hung himself.
That strength, and yet something
lost.
It was an
inexplicable contradiction.

Maybe it is wrong to imagine that contradictions can be
ex
plained.

"Binet-Simon?"

She had written these words at the top of a sheet of
paper, be
neath them
there was space for a reply.

I wrote:
"Yes."

Then two days went by before I had
a chance to pass the note
to her. I came up behind her on the stairs and slipped it into her
duffel coat pocket. No one
noticed anything. At first I thought she
had not noticed. Then she put her hand up to her hair and
pulled
it free of
her sweater and let it fall down her back. Then she waved to me. With the same
hand that had touched her hair she waved to
me, without turning around.

Two days went by before she sent me a reply. The reply was yet another
question. She had written it on the same sheet, under my
"Yes." It said:
"Why is it not available?"

Before this I had
never tried exchanging notes with anyone. I had
seen others do it, but had never, personally, been involved.

Sometimes people had passed notes
to one another in class.
Maybe because they could not wait, maybe because it was
hard to
find a place
where you were not being watched, maybe because
they were bored.
I had
purposely avoided looking at what was in
them.

One of these had been confiscated, by Fredhøj. No
punishment
had been meted out. Instead he
had read the note out loud. It had
been about love. You felt so ashamed,
even though it was not your

note
. You felt like you could have beaten up the person who
had
written it.

So now I felt
uneasy. But I answered her anyway.

"Why is it not available?"

She had done what several others had done. She had looked
up
Binet-Simon in the school's card
index, which was in the library, right
out
in the open. You were encouraged to use it. It provided a complete
listing of the school's collection of books and
other printed matter. In
the card
index, just like at Crusty House, it said: "Not available."

Binet-Simon was an intelligence test; the one most commonly used in
Denmark, and maybe in Europe as a whole. It was French but adapted for the
Danish system. On the front cover it said: "Danish
standardized revision of
Binet-Simon's intelligence tests by Marie
Kirkelund and Sofie Rifbjerg.
Revised,
1943."

Underneath this it said: "These tests are
confidential. Publication,
even in the form of extracts, is forbidden."

Which was why, in the card index, they were designated
"Not available."

I knew this because it so happened that they had given them to me
several times.

The second time was when they came out from Århus Social
Services Department to check
whether it could be recommended
that I take the entrance exam for Crusty House.

The only way you could get into
Crusty House was by having a
mother who was a single parent, which I did not, or by being ac
ademically gifted—which, before
now, no one at Himmelbjerg
House had ever been. So, when it was mentioned to the Social Ser
vices Department, they came out
personally to check. And they
brought Binet-Simon.

I had been given it some years
earlier, in connection with the first
escape attempts. They tested me then. This had not been
entered in
my file.

So I was already familiar with the test. And when I was
waiting
in the
office and they went out to fetch a stopwatch I opened their
briefcase. This was before the
days of combination locks, it was a
standard lock. I was hoping I could manage to memorize
some of
the
answers,
it had become very necessary to get out of there.

Just after that they came back. I did not get to see the
answers, but I did manage to see the cover.

Since
then I had been tested with Binet-Simon at Crusty House and by Hessen. Maybe
they did not know I was familiar with it,
maybe
they thought that it made no difference. There was a test for
each age level, which meant that each year you were
given new,
and unfamiliar, questions.

I tried to put
some of this in my letter to Katarina.

Writing to her took a long time. One was not used to it, and it was
hard to do it without being spotted. I did it at night.
I tried to write
precisely and accurately,
but still it was upsetting to see one's own
handwriting under hers.
After a while I stopped trying and just
answered
her.

She kept asking
about the tests.

At Crusty House they had started giving pupils their test results
shortly after I was admitted, in
1968. Until then they had been kept
secret. You solved the problems and you knew you were
being eval
uated, but
you were never told anything.

I had been there six months when we started getting the
results.
It was at
this time, too, that I was given partial insight into my file.
They explained that it was part of
a new teaching method.

The result you were given
consisted of a figure and a classification.
Different from
test to test.
Binet-Simon told you how many
percent below the national average
your intelligence
lay
. Jepsen's

speech
and language test
told you how fluent you were—they used a tape recorder and afterward they wrote
down what you had said
and counted your
pauses, and measured the length of the words
you used. In this way they could measure how complex your language
was—the fewer the pauses, the longer the words, the greater your fluency. In
the Danish Institute of Education's standardized
reading proficiency tests they measured the number of mistakes and
the reading speed. This gave two figures, which
could then be com
pared with the
national average for that particular age level.

At Crusty House you never talked about the tests, only
ever about
the
results.

Katarina did not write about her results, not once. She
wrote
about the
actual problems.

She wrote:
"Are they all timed?"

To this I could reply in the
positive. Binet-Simon had six tests for
each age level. The last three were timed. You had ten
or fifteen
minutes to
read a story—about a grasshopper, for example. You
had to insert the missing
syllables. But even with the first three, lesser, problems, they kept an eye on
the clock.

At Himmelbjerg House and Crusty House they had had a
special psychologists' clock in the room where they did the tests. Big, a bit
like the ones they use in ball games. They set it going when the test
began,
it was turned away from you,
only the psychologist had been
able to see it. Hessen used a combined wristwatch and stopwatch.
It took a little time for me to
realize this. She could start and stop
it and read off the time, in such a way that you almost
missed it.

In Jepsen's speech and language test you had two minutes
in
which to talk
about a picture. In the standardized reading tests clas
sification was by your year.

This is what I wrote back to
her. I also asked her to destroy this sheet of paper. We were still using the
same one; with all that was
now written on it, if it was confiscated, it would mean the end.

Binet-Simon was used to calculate the intelligence quotient. They
started with tests just below
your age level and worked downward
until
you could solve all the problems. Then they worked upward
until you could not solve any of the problems. In
this way they
could calculate your
mental age. In Hessen's, mine had been 12.9
—one year and one month younger than I actually was. This figure
was then divided by my actual age and multiplied
by 100. So mental
age divided by
actual age multiplied
by 100 equaled intelligence
.
Mine
was just over 92, in other words, average intelligence. From
90 to 110 you were of average intelligence.

The limit for being transferred from Himmelbjerg House was set at
75. If you had an intelligence
quotient of less than 75 but more
than 70 you were sent to a residential school for the
mildly retarded. If you had less than 70 you came under mental retardation
services
and were
sent to the loony bin.

So the test results were always related to time. Thus producing a
new figure—a measurement of
intelligence. A calculated
figure,
and
hence quite objective. All the psychologist had done
was let the
children read and answer the
questions, record them on a tape, note
the
times, double-check the figures, and refer to the evaluation table.
Everything clear and obvious.
So that the result was, by and large,
exempt
from human uncertainty.
Almost
scientific.

A week went by, and
no letter.

In the afternoons, during free time, I would walk down
through
the grounds to the gate and watch
the cars go by. There were chil
dren in some of them, on their way home
with their parents. From
the gate you could
see the girls' wing in the annex.

Other than that, I
just stayed in my room, over in the corner,

with
the light out. You felt a bit like an animal in its
lair, like a
fox.

I thought about August and the
kitchen, even though he had been
taken from me and so was no longer my responsibility. One
night I went across to the sickroom. The door was locked. Not a sound
to be heard. During classes
there was no chance of talking to him,
they kept a close eye on us.

A letter came from her. It was not in her own words, it was a quote
straight out of Binet-Simon. She must have learned it by heart, just
by reading it. "There was
once a grasshopper, who had sung merrily
all summer long. Now it was winter and he was starving. So
he
went to see some
ants
who
lived nearby and asked them to lend
him some of the stores they had
laid up for the winter. 'What have
you been doing all summer?' they asked. 'I have sung day
and
night,' replied
the grasshopper. 'Ah, so you have sung,' said the
ants. 'Well, now you can dance.''

Beneath this she
had written: "What is the moral?"

It was so deep. It showed how she had figured out that
this was
a problem
from the "fourteen years" level and that I must have had
it. She had, therefore, used what
I had written to her and discovered the system behind Binet-Simon.

At the time when I had been given this story, I had come
close to answering that the moral was ants were not helpful. But this
would not have fitted in very well with the other
problems. Instead
I had sensed Hessen, and
then I had said the moral was that one
must seize the moment.

I had been able to see from her face that this was the
correct
answer.

Reading between the lines of Katarina's letter, I
understood that
she,
too, had been about to give the wrong answer. That was why
she sent it to me. She knew that
we had both been about to give
the wrong answer.

I knew that our
letters were part of her experiment with time.