Borderliners (37 page)

He does not put it so bluntly, but the idea is not far
away.
That,
fundamentally,
man is alone.

When, at Lars Olsen Memorial, I had been isolated from other people for
three weeks, the world ceased to exist. In fact, in the
end, there was hardly any inner
reality. If man becomes totally iso
lated, then he ceases to exist.

So it is not fundamentally possible to be alone.
Fundamentally,
man has to be with other
people. If man becomes totally, totally alone, then he is lost.

Johan Asplund,
Swedish professor of social psychology, began, in
his book
Time, Space, Individual, Collective
and in many other
places, to examine the way in which time, as an
entity, is maintained
collectively by
people.
Just as Uexküll attempted to uncover the
underlying rules for each individual's awareness
of the world, so
Asplund applies
himself to describing the rules governing collective
awareness;
coexistence.
In a way that no one has ever done before.
And in a way gently and humbly,
like Uexküll.

The
subject of his books is fellowship. Even so, in many ways
they, too, stand alone.

Johan Asplund and Jakob von Uexküll.
You read what they have
written, and it is like a friend
reaching out a hand to you, even
though you will never get to meet them. They have known
some
thing special
about
time,
maybe they themselves have been ill. They
have known that there are limits
to how tightly you can hold on to a person without them cracking.

Uexküll and Asplund: Time is not something that flows indepen
dently of the individual and of human fellowship. It
is also shaped

and
maintained by the way people coexist, and this is linked
to the
sensory apparatus.

When the bell rang, the woman from the department got to her feet
and looked at her watch.

"I think
we've reached the end of the road," she said.

The end of the road.
It
was so deep. She meant that it was now
clear
that we—not August alone, but also Katarina and I—had been
unaccountable. That it was impossible to get any
further by spending more time on it. That they had covered the distance they
had set for themselves.
That
they had punished Biehl and the school
enough
by putting a stop to the project.

She
also meant that the time was right for terminating the pro
ceedings at this point. The bell had rung.
As though urging that the
confrontation
ought to come to a close.

Everyone stood up, including
Biehl and Fredhøj and Karin
Ærø
and all the others, even grownups who had not gone to
school for thirty years. It was a reflex. The moment the bell rang, time began
to flow. It would carry everything with it, out of
the room.

Against this stream, all hunched
up, came Katarina. They did not
try to stop her, but they froze. She came right over and
stood in
front of
me.

I
thought she was going to say something about the
experiment,
that
it continued for always, that it never stopped, and then I would
have nodded.

But it was not
that.

"I'm going to Svarrø," she said. "It'll
only be for a few months.
I'll leave an address for you."

If you belonged nowhere, and if you became separated
from each
other,
then it was as though you ceased to exist, even in a country
as small as Denmark; then you
never found each other again, this
I had witnessed often before, this she knew.

She looked up at me, her face was screwed up. With love,
I could
not stand
it.

"I'll come, you'll see," I said. I knew it was
a lie, she knew it,
too.

If it had just been her and me.
But there had always been
August,
too, now he
was obliterated, it was as if you had lost your own
child, I could no longer see her.

When people are going to
be
taken from you anyway, then it would
be better if you had never come to care for them.

"Try to remember the bit about the pain," she
said.
"And the
light of
awareness."

No one laid a hand on her. But
the stream of time grabbed hold
of her and carried her out and away.

FIVE

W
hat does it mean
,
to fail a child?

Over the years that I have been writing this, Princeton
University,
where
Einstein held a post, has embarked on the publication of his
collected works. The first volume
contains his correspondence with
Mileva Marić,
his first wife.

In November 1901 they had a daughter, Lieserl, out of
wedlock.
Eight months
later they gave her up for adoption, possibly to a
family in Hungary.
Most likely because she stood in the way of
Einstein's appointment, and his career.
At that time Mileva Marić
was once more pregnant. The whole affair was kept
secret. No one,
subsequently, could
find any trace of Lieserl, the only clue to her
existence lies in these letters.

Most of Einstein's letters from
this time, including those in which
he
inquires after the daughter, follow the same pattern: a few lines taken up by
inquiries about mother and child, after which he im
mediately switches to news of what really occupied his mind. Dur
ing
these years, mostly questions on thermodynamics; questions which were to lead,
not long afterward, to the special theory of
relativity,
published in 1905, in which he propounds the first part
of his theory on time.

He was divorced from Mileva Marić in 1919, by which
time they
had had a
son. The rift lasted until the late 1920s, after which they resumed the
relationship, as friends. From the next twenty years,
several hundred of the letters they exchanged have
been preserved.

In these the daughter given up for adoption is not
mentioned
once, not
even in the spaces between the lines.

What
causes people to abandon a child? And what impact will it
later have on them, that they have done so?

When Einstein has become world-famous, and journalists ask about his
youth, he himself refers to it several times as
"the corpse of my
childhood."

He says he is referring to the strict, inhibiting
bourgeois mentality
that
surrounded him.

It is clear from his letters to
Mileva Marić that his scientific the
ories are developed in protest against this bourgeois
mentality,
which he
also encounters at the Polytechnic in Zurich.

He himself has later said that
for him the theory of relativity and
its
view of time and space was also an act of rebellion against authorities that
inhibit thought. In his letters it is quite clear that his
cosmology has also been developed as political
action and psycho
logical protest.

Like a strategy for survival.
Some ate frogs, others developed, in
the laboratory, a theory of the universe.

At the same time, the inhibition
he protested against in his work,
the narrow-
mindedness,
is what
causes him and Mileva Marić to
give
away their eight-month-old daughter.

"The corpse of my childhood."

For twenty years I purposely refrained from thinking of Katarina.
If the thought occurred
unbidden, I turned away from it. It was the
child who persuaded me to leave off doing this. It
happened in the
autumn
of 1991, at which time I had only been writing this for a

few
months. She came to me
in the laboratory. "You still have to
look
up Katarina," she said.

Not outright, not
in words, but
still brooking
no denial.

She, the child that is, thinks very little about the past, and hardly
at all about the future. Her attention is taken up by
the space and
objects and people around her
at this moment. This makes you look
at
yourself.

If you lived like that and, like
her, never thought about the future,
then it would be hard to achieve what was expected of you,
then
you would find
it hard to cope with the practicalities. Especially
since, around you, everything is
planned out, perhaps not ten years
into the future like at Biehl's, but still far ahead.

But if you are too afraid of the future, or if your
thoughts are
drawn
back to disasters that are, in any case, over and done with, then you become
impotent. When this happens, I just sit and look
at her. From the present she calls to me, but I
cannot help her, I
have
been drawn back into the past and regret, or forward into fear
of what is to come. I am in
another time, and in it I am worth
nothing to her.

She, however, has helped me. I have looked at her,
watched her
playing,
I try to learn to do as she does, or at least something along
the same lines.

She
made me aware that I still had to look up Katarina. That, in
the long run, struggling against the past to keep
it at bay is
exhausting.

Even so, I put it off for months. It was winter when I went to
Svarrø. There was barbed wire
around the building, and a barrier manned by a security guard. I was not
allowed in, he spoke on the
phone to the office, the staff had all changed since that time, he
said, no one who was there now
could remember anything about
it.

As I was leaving he said that the old superintendent
lived down
in the
village.

It was a little house, dark, seeming to lie in the shadow of the
treatment home—even though it was half a mile away and
out of
sight. Why had they stayed there?

He
sat in an armchair, smoking a pipe.
Behind him, in silence,
stood his wife.
I had left my shoes in the hall, I stood there
in my
stocking feet,
they
did not invite me to sit down.

"Are you
related?" he said.

"I went to
school with her."

"We're sworn
to secrecy," he said.

"She's been left something in a will. The executors
are offering a
reward
of one thousand kroner."

Something passed between them, wordlessly and without
him
turning around. Then he made an effort
to remember.
So many
years
and so many children, one year and one child barely distin
guishable from the next.
But he tried.
To achieve
something and be
deemed worthy.

"She was discharged and removed in 1972, this much
is certain.
The
secure unit had been set up three months earlier.
After the
accident.
We had been ordered to take in
boys, too—up till then
we had only had girls. She was raped and almost strangled."

I counted out the money onto a low card table covered in
green
baize.

"Where did
she go?"

"You forget
after a while," he said. "She got out, I suppose."

"Out
where?"

The question
puzzled him.

"Just
out.
Set free."

On the way out,
Biehl stopped in front of me. He wanted to say
something, but he could not. He, who was known as a great
speaker
.

I think it was the first time he really looked at me.
Until then he
had
seen me as a gray shadow, in the stream of pupils. Now he
saw me as a person. His customary
self-control had left
him,
his
face reflected what he saw.
A wretch, a borderline case, a confirmed
liar.
And yet a human being.

I am probably wrong. But it was as though he wanted to ask some
thing of me.

Forgiveness had always been an
important word at the school. It
had been important to Grundtvig, it was important to
Biehl. If a
pupil
committed an offense he either meted out punishment or he
let it pass. In both cases,
however, the aim was a state of
forgiveness.

But it had always been from them
that the forgiveness had come,
from God to them and then on to us. They felt that time was on
their side; that not only had
they themselves long been forgiven, they had also been chosen.

And yet it was as though that was
what he was asking me for.
Forgiveness.
But I was
probably wrong.