Borderliners (6 page)

ment
, where they dealt with the most difficult cases. There
he was
put down as 3.

When you were "in care" you could be four things, nothing else
was possible. You
could be "of normal intelligence," that was 1, or
"mildly retarded," that was 2. Both 1 and 2
could be with or without "general adjustment problems." Or you could
be 3, like Hum
lum, who had "social
adjustment problems with neurotic or other
pathological characteristics." 4
was
"feeble-minded or severely
retarded."

Three was very dangerous. If you had been in a reform
school and
a
treatment home for the mildly retarded and if they concluded that
you fell into the lowest level
for 3, or lower, there was only one
alter
native,
and that was mental retardation
services. On the bottom rung of mental retardation services came permanent
residential care, in a
locked ward, strapped down, and three injections daily.

Still, Humlum went along with it of his own free will,
and got
himself put
down as 3. He told me he had had a nice time. They
had examined him on Mondays and
Wednesdays, but apart from that they left him alone. He only went to school two
days a week
and was put on a special
diet, with dessert after meals and seconds
if
he asked for them.

I never figured out exactly how long this went on for, a year and
a half at least. He attended the Save the Children
child psychiatry
outpatients
clinic, and finally the child psychiatry clinic
at Copen
hagen University. There they
assessed him as being below the limit
for
feeble-minded—4, that is—and then he got scared and started
talking again. Then it was recommended that he be
transferred to
the Central Mission
Home for the Retarded on Gersons Road in
Hellerup. To get out of this he
made a great effort. Then they re
alized
that he was academically gifted and he was sent, instead, to
take an entrance exam for the Orphanage. "I
had to do my best,"
he said. He
passed and was accepted, a year before me.

By not talking for so long he had discovered the thing about letting
your mind go blank. He told me
that this had been the only time
ever when he could sleep properly at night, the world
had become different. "Time," he said, "began to flow, like when
you let your
mind go
blank."

He was the
first one to suggest that there must be a plan. In a way,
all the homes were alike. Some had locks; some
had one sort of
workshop, while
others had another sort. With all of them it was
as though they were saturated by tight, tight time.

I had noticed this, but had not been able to put it into words.
Humlum did.

"There
must be a plan," he said, "why else should it be so im
portant to be so precise, right?"

I just listened, I
had nothing to say.

"When you let your mind go blank," he said,
"or when you stop
talking for a long time, something happens. Time becomes different.
It goes away. It doesn't come
back until you start to say
something."

After he said that, it was three years before anyone talked about
time. That was in the laboratory, when Katarina said
that we were
going to study it.

By
then it was a year since Biehl had given the signal, and re
vealed the plan for helping the borderliners.

It came at a time
when it had become hard to see any way out.

At Crusty House there had been compulsory home visits
every
third weekend, on these occasions they
sent me to Høve, to the
vacation
home for underprivileged children. That did not work out
very well. The place was used for the assessment
of children from

Copenhagen who had been in gangs that had been
split up.
At
the
home they
formed new gangs—they were used to working like that.
When I left there the last time
they had knocked out four of my
bottom teeth and I had been abused sexually. I was given
silver teeth. I refused to go back there.

At Biehl’s I saw a chance to get out of it. I went for
it in a lunch period. I wrote a letter to myself from my guardian on one of the
typewriters they
used for teaching starting in the school-leaving cer
tificate class. It said that I
was invited to visit her at her home. I
presented
it and was given permission. I left for Copenhagen on Friday evening, after we
had eaten. You could do whatever you
wanted—follow
people or just walk the streets unhindered—it was
brilliant. At night you just went back to the
school.

Still, I could not sleep. I do
not know why, I just could not.
Sometimes a whole weekend would go by without my getting a
wink of sleep. On Monday morning one was
very tired and it af
fected the rest of the
week.

It is not true, what I said about those weekends. Often one did not go
into town. Often one just stood there, down at the gate, watch
ing the cars driving past. The
school and the annex were deserted,
people were home,
I
was the only
one left. That was not so good.

The next week one was unprepared and numb inside.

Then
came
the signal.

It came in biology class. Biehl explained about Darwinism—the sur
vival of the fittest. It still
applies, he said, even in our society, but
it
is mitigated because we alleviate its consequences.

After he had said
that, there was a pause. It was a rich moment.

He had not looked at anyone in particular. He never
addressed
himself, as it were, to
individuals. Still, maybe I was the one, at that
moment, who understood him best.

Those who were on
the inside, the majority, that is, found it hard

to
get his point, mostly they were just pleased that they were on the
inside, that they were the
fittest.

For those on the outside, the fear and the abandonment
amount to almost everything, everybody knows that.

Understanding is something one does best when one is on
the
borderline.

It was a
law, that
was what one understood. It
selected some, and
some
it tumbled into perdition. But for those on the borderline,
work was being done to alleviate
the consequences. For them there
was a chance. Biehl's Academy was that chance.

Understanding that is something one does best when one
is des
ignated a
borderline case.

Biehl very rarely came to a halt. But
when he had said this, he had

come
to a halt. It had not been
planned. It was an involuntary

stoppage
. We were close to something crucial.

"Listen to my
pauses. They speak louder than my words."
The covert Darwinism.
The plan behind time was
selection. Time

was
a tool that made the selection.
One experienced a great sense

of
relief because everything had been cleared up.

Only much later, when I met Katarina,
did the thought strike
me

that
something had been left
unexplained.

S
  
I
 
 
X

    
w
hat
is
time? I shall have to try to say, but not
yet.
It is too overwhelming for that. You have to begin more simply.
What does it mean—to measure time? What is a
timepiece?

Fredhøj had
a watch, and looked at it often. Biehl had a fob watch,
I never saw him look at it, not once.

Katarina did not have a watch, neither did August, nor
did I ever
get one. At first, because
there was no one to give it to me; later on I never felt like having one.

I have read that they have never made a timepiece that is absolutely
precise. No disrespect to science, but no completely accurate time
piece has ever been made.

In the course of this century,
they discovered that the movements
of the heavenly bodies were not, as they had previously
believed,
constant.
That
the course of the earth's orbit around the sun varied
from year to year.

So they had to select one
particular year to provide them with a starting point at least. They selected
the year 1900. In 1956 the unit of time was redefined so that one second
equaled 1/31556925.9747
of the tropical year 1900.

Unfortunately, that year will
never come around again. The earth
will never again move precisely as it did in that year,
because of
earthquakes
and other irregularities that have affected its course.
This makes it hard to
synchronize the world's timepieces. It is hard
to set a watch by an event that took place in the
previous century.

Which is why, in 1967, they supplemented this definition
with
atomic time, in which a second
corresponds to 9,192,631,770 ra
diation periods
of a particular cesium-133 transition in what they
call a cesium clock.
Fredhøj
 
told
us about it in physics. Now there
were two methods of dating accurately, he said, the one supple
mented the other.

Later I read that, unfortunately, these two systems are
always out of step with each other, except for just after they have been syn
chronized, which therefore has to
be done continually.

Not to be petty. The most precise atomic timepieces they
have
constructed so far have shown a
day-to-day variation of less than
10
^-8
,
which would
, over 300,000 years, show up as an error
of no
more than one second. No one
can deny that it is extremely accurate. Everyone has done their best.

But it is not
absolutely precise.

It would not have mattered so much if they had not made
such a point of this thing about time.

Not
that it was ever talked about.
Never.
Humlum and
Katarina
were the first people I heard talk
about time. But it was at the root of everything. It screwed life down. Like
some kind of tool.

It was not just the classes and
assembly that began on the dot.
There was also a study period and the meals and the
chores and
voluntary sports and
lights-out and when you had to get up if you
were
to manage a proper wash, and what time every third week the
green
vitamin pills for the next three weeks were dished out, and
what time on Sunday evenings you had to report
back to Flakkedam

after
weekends at home. It had all been allotted a stroke of
the
clock that was
most scrupulously observed. The inaccuracy
amounted to less than plus or minus two minutes.

No explanation of time was ever given. But one knew that
it was
enormous, bigger than anything
mortal or earthly. That one had to
be on
time was not just out of consideration for one's schoolmates
and oneself and the school. It was also for the
sake of time itself.
For God.

For God's sake.

There had always been a lot of
praying and singing. But we had
never
tried to get through to God himself. For that he had always
been too close to Biehl or the rector at the
Orphanage or the su
perintendent at
Himmelbjerg House. Far too close to let us pray.

To pray is to confess something,
to admit that one needs help.
We were afraid that any confession, even to God, could worsen our
situation and be used against us.

Grundtvig
had written that the day was created for action and the
twilight for rest, and that one should, therefore, be precise.

When time itself was so exact, then so
ought
people to be, that
was
the idea. Accuracy was a characteristic, and perhaps the most
important one, of the universe.
At assembly one had to be abso
lutely precise and absolutely still. Utter time and utter stillness.
That
was the goal.
Achievement was there to bring us nearer to that goal.
And to encourage achievement,
there was punishment.

One tried to be totally exact, because time and the world were.
One tried and tried all the way through one's
adolescence, and one
could not, and
one came very close to giving up. Yet they had never
been able to construct an absolutely accurate
timepiece. They had
never been able
to show that time
itself
remained constant.

Deep down, they themselves had
never managed to be absolutely
precise. Nor had they been able to prove that the world is.