by Peter Høeg
* * *
This I told Katarina during our second conversation in the library, the one during which they found us and separated us.
“I can remember when you came,” she said. “You were pretty small.”
* * *
In answer to that, I explained that when I was transferred to Primary Five at Biehl’s Academy, which meant that I was moved back a class, I weighed just over fifty pounds with clothes but without shoes. I was at that time four feet two inches tall, and the district medical officer declared that I was not defective but that it all had to do with the meals at Crusty House being less than adequate. Besides which, the pecking order had been such that those who had come to the school last—the children from the homes—were below everybody else, even the day pupils, and got served last in the middle of the day, when there was hot food. This, in due course, made it hard because this was the big meal that you were supposed to survive on, through the night, too.
At Biehl’s Academy, therefore, in that first year I grew ten inches and gained thirty-seven and a half pounds. Even though this resulted in a good deal of pain in my bones and also fever, back then I was never absent.
* * *
She read aloud from the letter in her hand: “‘Fleeting moments that become like an eternity.’” She asked me to explain it.
* * *
Why did it say that?
Well, one had no language of one’s own when one came to Crusty House. At Himmelbjerg House and the other homes before that, one had got by with very few words.
During the first six months one didn’t say a word in class. At the end of that time one had learned the basics. At Biehl’s they were well and truly driven home.
One adopted their language, that of the teachers and the schools, one had none of one’s own. At first it was like a release, like a key, like a road. The only road in.
Much later one discovers that what one was let into, back then, was a tunnel. From which one can never again escape. Not entirely. Not in this life.
* * *
“‘Fleeting moments that become like an eternity.’ What can he have meant?” she said. “The one who wrote the letter.”
* * *
What was meant was that time is something you have to hold on to and the place where we examined it that first time was where the Hornbæk line ran through the school grounds.
It was Oscar Humlum who discovered it. Back then I thought it was a game, later I understood that he was ill, that we were both ill.
He played at letting his mind go blank.
Crusty House was a school for academically gifted children who had gotten into difficulties because they had lacked a firm structure. Because they came from broken homes or maybe alcoholic homes. The school then established the structure that had been lacking. Like, for example, the way you slept in the dormitory, between two sheets and a blanket tucked under the mattress; two windows open all year round and only one extra blanket in winter.
Most people could, after a while, put up with the most unbelievable things. It kept on, for a long time, being hard for me because I was inadequately fed.
I found out that you could sneak out to the toilet; there was a radiator switched on in there. You waited until the teacher on duty and the other boys were asleep, then you crept out and settled down against the radiator and went to sleep. One night Humlum was sitting there when I came out, he had brought his blanket with him and he was asleep. It was the first time I had really noticed him.
Sometimes we sat for a bit and talked before we fell asleep. We sat, each on our own toilet, with a partition between. Still, we could hear each other even when talking softly. It was there he told me that he played at letting his mind go blank.
* * *
We put up a rope in a tree overlooking the railroad tracks, so we could swing out in front of the locomotive when it came, and hang for a moment outside the windscreen and look in at the engineer and get away so late that it was clear that one had only just survived.
Normally you would, right through the swing, be thinking how you had to get away in time. Now we tried, instead, to let our minds go blank; to switch off, and feel the train, and the rope between our hands, and then it became a very rich moment; then time began to stretch, so that afterward you could not say how long it had lasted. In the longest moments, those two times when I was brushed by the train, there had been no time at all.
Even then you sensed that it must be a rule. That time could not be something that passed all by itself but was something you had to hold on to. And that when you let go of it, that moment was very significant.
In a way this discovery was a help. But, at the same time, that was, in fact, the illness.
* * *
This I told Katarina while she listened.
At Crusty House no one had ever listened, at any rate no adults.
No harm intended. The school had established the firm structure that people had lacked. Anker Jørgensen had gone there, the school had reared a prime minister.
Even though that was not the norm. The norm was, that of the fifteen who came into a new class, approximately half would have to leave within the first four years because they could not cope with the academic side, or just could not cope.
I was only twelve when I was moved, but even then it was obvious that, for most of those who were left, things did not look good. Most of them were lost.
The Hornbæk line’s own people, together with the fire department, came and cut down the tree. I was under suspicion, but it was the day before I was to leave the school, and they wanted to avoid attracting any attention, so they did not pursue the case.
* * *
I dried up there. I felt very empty. It was necessary for her to say something in return.
At Crusty House we had three kroner a month dished out and three saved; even so, you paid what you owed, it was an absolute rule, even to Gummi, who could go without for a very long time and held on to candy till the end of the month and sold it dear. The few times it happened that someone tried to get out of it, they were made to jump from the willow tree down into the lake. It was thirty feet down, but only three feet of water. You did not break anything, but you sank into mud up to your chest and then you were sucked down slowly and only pulled out after your whole head had been under for a while.
So you always gave something in return and paid what you owed. Everybody did. It was an absolute rule.
Katarina must have known this. First she waited for me to go on, but I said nothing, I could not, then she said, “By the way, both my mother and my father died last year.”
* * *
At Crusty House I had tried to imagine what it was like to be with a family. You imagined that you were walking along Strand Drive, and one of the kitchen maids came bicycling along. She stopped and took you up behind her on her bike, and you talked freely and openly, and rode home to where she lived. It was a house, and her father and mother were there, and you sat down at the dinner table, and there was loads of food. That, more than anything, was how you imagined a family. That there was enough food.
When Katarina mentioned her mother and father for the first time, you could hear that there was something else, too. At first you did not understand what.
She never said what their home had looked like, not one word. Still, I could picture it. There had been books and lamps and parquet floors—easily damaged, but no one shouted at you, even if you spilled something, it was just mopped up, because that sort of thing can happen to anyone.
“They often talked about time,” she said.
They had talked about time, there had been nothing strange about that, it had been altogether normal. Although not so much about time by a clock but more about time out in space. Katarina had heard them talking about whether it passed forward or backward.
Then her mother had become very ill. The doctors had said that she had less than three months to live and it was then that she had become interested in ordinary time.
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“She developed a scientific theory,” said Katarina.
* * *
Why scientific?
This was the first time I heard that word used about a thought that an ordinary person had had. Why was it important that the theory was scientific, for her mother, and after that for Katarina, and after that for me and August?
Maybe there are only two kinds of question in the world.
The kind they ask in school, where the answer is known in advance; asked not so that anyone will be any the wiser but for other reasons.
And then the others, those in the laboratory. Where one does not know the answers, and often not even the question, before one has asked it.
Questions like what is time, why Oscar Humlum said save yourself, and why Axel Fredhøj lay down beside the lagging.
Questions that are quite painful. And that are not asked until one is driven to it. Like when they gave her mother three months.
That was what we meant by science. That both question and answer are tied up with uncertainty, and that they are painful. But that there is no way around them. And that you hide nothing; instead, everything is brought out into the open.
* * *
“She began to think that time only passed when you were unaware,” said Katarina.
Her mother had begun to believe that time sort of stole forward, in jerks, when one’s mind was elsewhere. That the bit about her only having three months left was on the assumption that she was not concentrating. Then she became very aware.
It pretty soon became wearing. She stopped sleeping at night, and Katarina and her father did not sleep much either, but when they did finally sleep, they would wake up to find her mother sitting looking at them, so as not to miss a single second.
When the three months were up, she had felt sure that she was now living a life of total awareness and had more or less stopped time, and she took Katarina with her on some of her visits to the hospital.
“The doctors sat,” said Katarina, “and she walked back and forth and told them that the passage of time was just carelessness. She weighed less than ninety pounds and had no hair left on her head.”
Eighteen months later she was dead. She had refused to take pills. Said that they took the edge off, that, instead, one should turn upon the pain the light of awareness.
Katarina had started to walk back and forth in front of the windows. She may have meant to tell me about her father, too, but no longer felt up to it.
“I saw them both afterward,” she said, “there was only six months between them. It was not them. It was them, but there was no more life in them. That was gone. It isn’t something you normally think about, that there is life in a person. But when you know them and how they ought to be, then you understand something. That life cannot just go away. That it must have gone somewhere. So I formed a hypothesis.”
She walked over to me.
“She tried to stretch the seconds by sort of staring at them. And he tried, afterward, to shorten them, to make them pass more quickly. They cannot have been living in the same time. They must each have had their own, different from the one that the rest of the world went by. Afterward, time became different for me, too. Often I thought: Now things are as bad as they can get, and will stay that way forever. Like you wrote: ‘Moments that become like an eternity.’ When I saw them lying there, I knew it. That there is not just one time, that there must be different sorts of time, all existing at once.”
She was now talking so quietly that I had to lean forward. It was not out of fear—I think she had forgotten how close we were to the staff room—it was because this was so important to her that it was hard to say.
“I want to study it scientifically,” she said. “We’re going to try to touch time.”
* * *
To touch time. That, I suppose, is what life for me has been about since then.
* * *
This is the laboratory. It is next to the bedroom, where the child and the woman are sleeping. I am afraid.
Once I thought what I feared was that something would separate me from the child. But it is not that. What I am afraid of is that the world and the child will never be part of each other; I mean, that the child will die. Or the world. I would do anything, no matter what, to avoid that.
That sounds so totally inadequate. But I cannot put it any better.
The fear for oneself, that one can do something about. Upon it one can turn the light of awareness. But when one is no longer worrying about oneself, then the fear comes for other people and, after that, for the world.
There are no fearless people, only fearless moments. Like those here in the laboratory. During and after the work there is a kind of peace.
* * *
Katarina would have told me about her father, too, but she did not get the chance.
We must both have missed hearing the bell, and this time word had gone out to look for us.
It was Fredhøj who came. He remained standing for a while in the doorway, absolutely still, and looked at us. Then he stepped aside and we walked out.
FOUR
Biehl’s Academy had a good name. It had always been said that the school set a high academic standard.
Even so, now and again, they took in the odd backward pupil who, for example, required special tuition. In due course, these pupils were raised up to the same standard as the rest.
This was common knowledge, it was part of the thinking behind the school.
In recent years they had, moreover, taken in pupils for whom special circumstances came into play. For this there was no explanation.
That was how I got in. And August, too.
He started on October 3. By that time Katarina and I had, as a precautionary measure, not spoken for one week and two days.
* * *
I saw him in the morning, in first period, at Biehl’s office. I had been summoned. Biehl was there, and Fredhøj and Flakkedam. August was standing in front of Flakkedam. He was a head shorter than me.
“This is August,” said Biehl.
Then Flakkedam ushered him out.
Biehl was holding his file.
“He has had an accident,” he said, “since which he has trouble remembering things. He will be in your class. You will sit next to him.”
Something was afoot, their faces were very aware.
“He lost his father,” said Biehl, “his mother is still in the hospital. It is not to be spoken of.”
Just as I was going out of the door, he put the file back.
* * *
You knew that the files existed, and that there was one for each pupil. But you did not know where they were kept, nor would I have known now, but you could not help but see it.
A wooden chest, with the school crest carved on its lid—Hugin and Munin, Odin’s ravens. Each morning they fly out from Valhalla and in the evening return to perch on Odin’s shoulders and whisper in his ears of all that they have seen.
The open lid of the chest was facing me as I stepped through the doorway. You could not help but notice that it had only a straightforward three- or four-tumbler furniture lock.
One’s eye was caught, too, by the ravens. They had taken on the look of birds of prey.
That was not the intention. The intention had been that one should think of the ravens as being like children and young people of school age, gathering knowledge and experience, which they would then practice faithfully in their relationship to their superiors. Then, too, there was the birds’ flight and the Nordic myths. It was a brilliant image.
Still, one could not, at that moment when Biehl put August’s papers back into the chest, help but think that these two ravens stood also for surveillance and control. And, in due course, punishment or reward.
* * *
That very day I came into contact with Katarina.
* * *
There were 240 pupils at the school. No more. This was in order to maintain the academic standards and to ensure close contact betwee
n teachers and pupils.
This meant that most of the teachers knew almost all of the pupils, it was very difficult to escape notice. Even at a place like Himmelbjerg House, where there had been a superintendent and a deputy and six assistants and a social worker and a nurse and a janitor for twenty-four pupils, because we were so damaged, not even there had the supervision been as good as at Biehl’s. It was very difficult to be alone.
The only time when it was hard for them to avoid disintegration was when you were going from one place to another. Like just after the bell had gone.
* * *
Two teachers monitored the ascent to the classrooms; one under the archway and one halfway up the stairs between the second and third floors, from where they could see almost everything—not, however, the staircase between the ground floor and the second floor. There I met Katarina.
On the landing, in one corner, there was a seat—triangular, screwed onto the wall. If you stood up against it you were invisible to the guards, and did not get swept along in the stream of pupils making their way upward.
* * *
“I have to talk to you,” she said. “You were about to tell me about the Orphanage.”
She was talking as though we had just been interrupted. We stood close together, there was nothing special to tell about back then, I just shook my head.
She leaned toward me. Around us people were making their way up. The noise was overwhelming. She did not let it bother her.
“There was the bit about my father,” she said.
I did not want to hear it, but she told me anyway.
“He could not bear the fact that she wasn’t there anymore. He hung himself. Well?”
I wouldn’t know what to say about that, I said, but what about those you leave behind, what about them, how are they to manage, who’s going to think of them?
“Have you never left anyone?” she said. “Your friend from back then, do you ever see him, why didn’t he come here, too?”