Borderliners (19 page)

                      
T
he first time Biehl talked about the Battle of
Poi
tiers he had made
an additional remark. That had been only the second time ever that he referred
to himself as "I."

There had been a pause, after which he had said that it
was his
personal opinion that Islam,
which was the religion of the Moors,
was
nothing less than the Devil's own work. So the Battle of Poitiers
had been a struggle between the forces of light and
of darkness.
And if the struggle had
turned out to the Moors' advantage, civilization as we know it would never have
existed.

This was the only thing about the Devil that had ever
been ex
plained
outright at the school.

Even so, there was no doubt in your mind. When we
descended
those
seven steps into the darkness, and pushed aside the panel, you
knew you were going down into the
underworld.

I did not collect
August until I could almost sense the breathing of
both Flakkedam and the new
inspector. The clock said seven
minutes
past midnight. It was ten days since we had spoken to one another and had been

found
out in church. I had
not seen August, other than at assembly
and
from a distance in the playground.

I made hardly any sound opening the door. He had grown
very
thin. Under different
circumstances he should have been reported
so that he could have been forced to eat.

I told him he had to get up, but gave him no further
explanation.
He was in his pajamas and
slippers,
they kept his clothes and out
door shoes locked up at night.

We had woodwork
once a week. The woodwork room was on the
second
floor and the metal work tools were also kept there. Klas-tersen was the
woodwork teacher. The year before, Carsten Sutton had been caught sniffing
solvents—paint thinner. It was kept in an
eight-gallon
container,
you could get your whole head into it. We
had all tried it, but he was the one who got found
out, due to the
fact that he had gone berserk afterward. Since then
Klastersen kept
a pretty close eye on
people.

I had shown him a cracked table tennis bat. "May I
have per
mission to
repair this?" I said. There had been no problem, not
when it was sports equipment.

I had found a place for myself beside a vise at the very
back.
Then I had cut
out Fredhøj's key in sheet metal as best I could from
memory. Over the next few days I
had tried it out and made some
adjustments to it.

Now I let August
and myself out through the main door. It was a
frosty night but there was no snow. We left no tracks.

The art room was seven steps down
on a stairway that started
just beyond the main door under the archway. On the way down
there were two doors, one to stop
pupils from hanging about on the stairs—out of sight of the teacher on
playground duty—and
then
the actual door to the art room. Both came under the master
key system.

For a long
time I had believed I was the only one who knew about
the way down to the engineering access tunnels. But Axel Fredhøj
must have known about it, too. That was how he had
made his
descent, although he must
have locked the door behind him, they
brought
him up on the playground side, they had no idea how he
had got down there. He cannot have told them
either, otherwise
the opening would
have been blocked up. Maybe he was tougher
than people thought; maybe he was just not in a condition to say
anything special, not even when he was questioned.

It was no secret that the tunnels existed.

When the new toilets were built,
the school's parents had been
encouraged
to help with the demolition of the old ones—to save
money, and to emphasize the especially caring nature of those par
ents connected to the school.

I took part on that occasion—to see people's parents.
Usually
you never saw them.

Besides which, you had been given the chance to tear down.
You had been handed
a sledgehammer, then you could just bash
away.

A plan of
the school had been hung on the wall, so that you could
see how it would look with the new toilets.
Which
would have tiles
and lights and be in decent
working order, not all tarred and filthy
and stinking like the old ones.

The engineering tunnels were shown on the drawings. I
had noticed them because it was only a month since the accident. The first
of Axel Fredhøj's two accidents,
that is.

The tunnels ran twenty feet
underground, six feet below the base
ment. Through them ran the heating pipes, hot water
pipes, and electricity cables. But not gas. That was what you could see.

The opening must have come about because they built the art room
later, a long time after the
school, maybe as part of the new trend
in education. So all they had done was to build a
partition out of
hardboard—by
the look of it, it had been a rush job. This tied in
with the order of precedence governing subjects. Art
came right at
the bottom, even lower than
weaving and home economics. No
grade
was ever given marks for art.

And
yet Karin
Ærø
was the art teacher.
Although she, for
ex
ample, never handled clay.
She also taught music and Danish, and
music and literature were clearly closest to her
heart.

I lit a little candle and placed it in an aluminum cylinder with little
windows of clear
plastic and air holes at the bottom, it was one I
had kept from the old days.
August was close beside me, maybe he could not see very well. When I struck the
match he went rigid, but
then relaxed
again.

Behind
the panel lay a bricked-in space with no windows. Even
the floor was brick. It was cold. In the floor was a black hole—the
descent to the tunnels.

They must have forgotten about this way down when they
were doing the building. Doors blocked the outlets to the north and south
playgrounds, there were iron bars strung with wire netting over the
air vents. Still and all, they had not succeeded in
making it abso
lutely secure.

To get down you had to step onto the lagging around the pipes and from
there slide down into the tunnel itself. There was little or no headroom. Even
I, with my natural stoop, kept bumping my head against the ceiling.

It was warmer here, because of
the pipes. There was a humming
sound, from the boiler maybe.

On our left the
lagging around the pipes was still blackened.

August took my
hand.

"I'm afraid of
the dark," he said.

I stayed where I was. I could
not go on until I had told him about
it. Even though he was smaller than me, like a child, I
had to tell
him.

I told him straight. One day a boy from the school—that
was
Axel—had hidden in the art room and
got himself locked in on
purpose. He had
taken a bottle of benzene from there and, in the
lunch period, he had descended into the tunnel. There he had
poured
the benzene over the lagging around the pipes, then he had
set a match to it, and then he had lain down
beside the fire.

"You can't lie
still when there's a fire burning," said August.

But that was what he had done. No details had ever been
re
leased, but there
were those who had heard what the firemen said when they brought him up—by the
stairs to the playground. It was
from there, too, that the smoke had been spotted.

"So,"
said August, "what happened to him?"

I replied that nothing had happened. They had spotted
the smoke
and called
the fire department. They had brought him up. Other
than that, nothing had happened.
Other than that he had stopped driving home from school with his father.

No one had ever seen Axel and Fredhøj speak to each other. If you
had not known it, you would never
have guessed that they were
father and son. They had, however, gone home from school to
gether. After school, on
Wednesdays and Fridays, when their time
tables
must have coincided, they drove home together in Fredhøj's
big Rover—out through the grounds and away. Axel sat
in the
back.

After the accident this stopped. Instead Axel was
collected by his
mother,
Fredhøj's wife.

She picked him up at the gate
onto the road. She had a Rover
like
Fredhøj's,
she was also a deputy inspector, elsewhere in the
suburbs. She drove up to the gate and Axel got into the backseat.
They drove away without a word having been said.

It was the first time you had
seen her. But Fredhøj had mentioned
her before.

It came up in a period where he had been reading aloud.
He was
not in the
habit of reading aloud—the math and physics syllabus
was too full to allow for that. But he had been known,
around
Christmastime, to step up the pace.
You took on more arithmetic
ink
exercises as homework, thus gaining a couple of hours in which
he would read aloud.

He
was brilliant at it. He always read stories about great and
intelligent criminals; stories from
Crime
Cavalcade
or
From Foreign
Courtrooms
and
Great and
Notorious Swindlers.
It was after hav
ing
read a story about a bigamist that he mentioned his wife, Axel's
mother.

This man had murdered women by raising their ankles
while they
were in
the bath. They had been able to keep their heads above
water for a while, but eventually
they had given up, so they
drowned. Then he had inherited their fortunes and married again.

After closing the book, Fredhøj had stared into space
for a mo
ment. You
could sense that he was close to something crucial. Lack
of intelligence, he said, was to blame for the fact
that most people
had such trouble with
marriage. For their part, he and his wife had
organized things in such a
way that they split their time. She had made the decisions for the first ten
years: where they should live,
what kind of
cars they should have—hence the Rovers. Then
there had been ten years during which he had made the decisions.
These
had now come to an end and it was once more her turn to
decide.

Teachers seldom or never spoke about what went on in
their families. This was the first time Fredhøj had said anything.

That they had split
their time.
Almost
scientifically.

I had tried to work it out. I came to the conclusion
that Fredhøj's
wife must have decided on
Axel.

I tried to explain
this to August. It was hard to tell whether he was
listening. I did not dare to talk
above a whisper, and all the while