Borderliners (22 page)
When I was sitting on the floor facing the child and she asked me
about tomorrow, I realized that
she was still on the plain, but that
she was on the point of stepping into the tunnels where
time is to
be
found.
I so much wanted to understand
her,
I tried to see whether time
showed in her
face. But there was nothing I could say to her; no answer I could give her.
When I myself did not know where tomorrow was.
"I don't
know," I said.
Then I saw that she did not need
an answer, that it was not
important. What was important was that I had sat on the floor and
listened to her.
She
stayed where she was. I had the feeling that, whatever I said
to her, it would never be that important, that
she would never eval
uate it or pay
too much attention to it. That you could afford to
be slow, or inaccurate or downright ignorant
without being pun
ished; that still she
would stay for a moment, and not walk away.
I asked August how
he remembered.
This was one night, a week after I had last been in his
room.
They looked in
on him a few times before lights-
out,
it had taken
me a week to work out their
schedule. It had proved to be strictly regulated. Flakkedam and the new
inspector took turns; they came
once
every hour, just around the hour. That was how I was able to
steer clear of them—because they were so regular.
I came just after he had been given his medicine at nine
o'clock,
which meant
we had until nine-thirty, when Flakkedam did his
rounds and put out the lights.
He lay on his back
looking at the ceiling.
"They've increased the dosage to three
Mogadon," he said. "If
you've got
something to say you'd better hurry."
There was nothing I had to say. I
just stood there, looking at him.
His skin had a papery look. At the Christian Foundation
there had
been
a reception center for abandoned babies. They had had
incu
bator babies
there—tinier than all the others but like old men.
Very
small and yet very old.
That was how he looked.
I had taped the two outer ringers together—it hurt
least that way. I suppose my little finger should have been in a cast, but then
they
would have grown suspicious. August
pretended not to notice.
He
looked feverish. I felt his forehead, keeping one eye on his
hands. If anything, he was cold.
"What happens
if you stop eating altogether?" he said.
"Two days when you feel hungry," I said,
"then two days when
it hurts, like you're ill, after that you feel fine. Until you grow weak
and they find out
about it and you're forced to eat something."
There
had also been girls at Nødebogård, and some of them had
suffered from an eating disorder. Sometimes, by wearing two sweat
ers and padding out their stomachs with cushions,
they could put
off being caught for so long that they only just had
survived. I did
not mention
this,
there was no point in encouraging him.
He was getting tired. He asked me whether I had seen
anything
of Katarina and I said that she
had wanted me to ask him about
something. I
explained to him about the way in which she believed
you remembered your
past, how would he say he remembered his?
The same way we did, he said, he, too, remembered a
line, there
was
nothing strange about that.
I felt a twinge of
suspicion.
"Where does it start," I said, "what's the
first thing you
remember?"
"The first thing I remember is the office," he
said, "I'm in the office and I see you. That's where it starts."
"That's only two and a half months ago," I said.
"What about
before
that?"
"There's
nothing before that," he said, "just a black hole."
I did not feel like asking him anything else. I stayed by
his side,
saying
nothing.
He was asleep. His eyes were not
quite shut. They were like slits,
you could see his pupils, but at the same time you could
tell by his
breathing
that he was asleep. With his eyes half-open. It did not
seem
right. I placed a finger on
each eyelid and gently closed them.
I would have liked to stay longer, but it was not
possible. Flak
kedam
could appear at any minute.
He was asleep, I am sure of that, and yet some part of
him must
have been awake, one of the people
inside him. I was by the door
when he
called me. He whispered.
"If you remember,"
he
said, "and have a past, then you can be
given the blame and be punished. See—if you don't remember
any
thing, you don't
have time like other people. It's kind of like being
crazy, so you get taken into
protective custody. Then there's a
chance."
The next morning I was summoned to Biehl's office. Fredhøj was there,
too. They said that, subsequent to the receipt of a reply from
the Children's Panel, the school—together with the
Child Welfare
Services—had come to a
decision about my future. Within the next
couple of weeks a suitable
reform school would be found for me.
This
decision was final. They had had it ratified by a judge.
S
I
X
S
econd
Year Secondary—Katarina's class—
stood two rows behind our class at assembly. Fredhøj
checked the
rows
before Biehl came in and began. Although people had their
set places, it had always been hard to maintain strict
order on the
perimeter, where one row
bordered on the next. Those who came
in last could not elbow their way
through to their proper places;
instead they
stayed on the perimeter.
Nine
days after the total separation, Katarina came in at the last
minute, though without actually being late. She
managed to stand
a little in front
of me, almost next to Fredhøj. This blurred their
awareness. It would never have occurred to them
that she would
try anything.
Each pupil brought their own songbook to assembly. Bound edi
tions were compulsory, to save
on wear and tear. She opened it in
such a way that I could not help but see it, but shielded
it from
everyone but
me. The writing was tiny, to reduce the risk of being caught, it took me the
whole of assembly to read it. It said: "What's
the name of your guardian?"
|
For all orphans and all children who had been taken into care,
whose parents had lost custody of
them, a guardian was appointed.
It was a rule.
Usually it was a lawyer from the Children's Panel. I had
seen
mine once. When
the Social Welfare Committee had given me an
indefinite period at Himmelbjerg House she gave me
the news. She
had
told me straight out that she was appointed as guardian to
between two and three hundred
children at a time. So, although
technically she was my mother and father, there would be
no pos
sibility of us
meeting again, unless I wanted to get married before
I was eighteen, or had a fortune
that had to be administered. I had not seen her since.
This was too long-winded an explanation for Katarina. All I wrote
in my songbook was "Johanna
Buhl, Children's Panel." Three days
later I moved back a row and held the book up; no one
noticed a
thing.
The next day I was summoned to the telephone to take a
call.
The school had two telephones which were accessible to pupils, both of
them located in the annex—one in the boys' wing and one
in the girls'.
Both lines went through the
school switchboard in Biehl's secre
tary's office, but they were pay phones, you were free to
make
calls from them
and talk on them during the lunch period, from
11:40 to 12:30, and after close of the study
period, from 8:15
to
8:50 p.m. The call for me was received at 12:05 p.m. I was in
the
playground,
a kid from one of the lower grades came to
get me. Flakkedam had sent
him,
he said my guardian was on the phone.
The receiver was lying on the
little table for the phone books. It was the first time that anyone had
telephoned me at Biehl's, apart
from the two calls from the Health and Welfare
representative. Nor had I ever made any calls. The telephone was just fixed to
the wall,
there
was no booth. I was glad of
that. After the business with
Valsang I had not been too keen on small spaces. It was Katarina.
I had been
at the school for a year when the telephones were in
stalled. Before that, getting permission to use the phone had not
been
easy. The call had to be absolutely necessary and always had to be made from
the school office. You stood
there,
it was a strain,
talking with people walking back and forth. The secretary
could hear every word and you knew that you were monopolizing the
school line. At assembly Biehl had said that, in
principle, telephones
were for brief and essential messages only.
Katarina must have rung the school switchboard from
the girls' telephone and said she was Johanna Buhl. This was the only pos
sible explanation. She had rung the office from
the girls' phone and
they had thought it was an outside call and put her
through to the
boys' side.
A while went by without us saying a single word. We just stood
there, holding the receivers. I
could hear her breathing—regularly,
clearly, almost like a clock. I had not believed I would
talk to her
again, not ever.
"Are you
okay?" she said.
"Yes," I
said. "But August isn't."
There was no warning, just a click, and we were cut off.
Maybe
someone had
taken her by surprise.
She called me
again.
The next day, after study period.
I picked it up myself. I was
standing just beside it when it rang, in a way I had been expecting
it.
