Borderliners

by Peter Høeg

  They were the same transcripts as had been in his folder in Biehl’s office.

  “It’s from the court records,” I said. “They must have had the sanction of the Ministry of Justice, those are confidential.”

  “He writes that it’s for the children’s sake,” she said. “So that they can go on being children for as long as possible. And not be encumbered with adult responsibilities. That’s what he’s always believed.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He said the same thing when he refused to set up a student council.”

  August was so restless now that he could no longer sit still. He had got up, he put his hands on the cabinets and kind of felt his way along them. Oscar was no longer looking at me but at Katarina.

  “He writes that the experiment is ahead of its time,” she said. “That it belongs to the future. That it is ahead of public opinion. Therefore it would be better to carry it out discreetly. And not unveil it until you could produce some convincing results.”

  August had disappeared toward the back of the room, out of sight. But you could hear him pacing around in the darkness.

  “But it all went wrong for them,” she said. “They must have thought they could help, turn the school into the ‘Workshop of the Sun,’ like he said. Into a laboratory where the differences between those who were damaged and those who were normal would be eliminated. That’s why you two were accepted. And it explains Hessen and all those tests. That’s why they appointed Flakkedam. To take care of security.”

  I could see his eyes now. In the darkness they absorbed the last of the light, like those of a wild animal.

  “But what about Karin Ærø’s stars?” I said. “And the thrashings? And the marks and the schedules? There’s still no explanation for them.”

  “No,” she said. “Behind their plan there has to be another one. One they know nothing about.”

  “So who knows about it, then?” said August.

  “Something greater than them.”

  Suddenly he was right in front of her, I would have done something but I did not have a chance. It had even taken Humlum by surprise, he had not got to his feet either.

  “There’s nothing above them,” said August. “They’ve got it all worked out. That’s why they’ve got to go, one way or another…”

  That was his strategy. To hate. But then it had to be directed at someone, it could not just be there. And those you hated had to be the ones who were responsible. Well, I mean otherwise they, personally, would not be guilty.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “There’s something greater behind them.”

  She was very aware. Not just of him, but of something else, something that surrounded us. She was close to something crucial.

  “There’s nothing behind them but a black hole!”

  He had screamed. He turned away, pushed in a pane of glass in the cabinet with the flat of his hand, pressed his palm against the rim of glass that was left and started to run it around. Only then did Humlum get to him, and pull him back, then I took over.

  Katarina stood there, ramrod-straight, she had not moved. I kept hold of him with one hand, while with the other I took off my shirt, ripped off a sleeve, and bound it around his hand. Then he got away from me.

  He walked along the cabinets looking through the glass at the things on the shelves, the stuffed animals. He had to lean against them to stay on his feet.

  “It’s like at home,” he said. “Twelve of everything from the good old days. They’re locked up, too—no sticky fingers on them. I could do with a smoke.”

  I handed him a pack, they were his own—the matches, too. I had tucked them away before they came for his things, after he was admitted to the sickroom.

  He lit it himself, but then it slipped through his fingers, he bent down and picked it up. He inhaled and broke into a bout of coughing.

  “Christ, that’s good,” he said.

  He had the cigarette caught in at the bandage. It was already very wet, once everything had been settled I would clean the wound and put on a proper bandage.

  “She has to take the bus now,” he said. “Mom, I mean, even though she hates it. To stand and hold on to bars that people have touched, even though she’s wearing net gloves. When I get back I’ll buy her a car.”

  He seemed to be talking in his sleep. Katarina led him back to the table and got him to sit down. There was a coating of sweat on his forehead. She supported his head with one hand, and with the palm of the other she wiped away the sweat.

  “Nobody touches me,” he said.

  But he let her do it.

  * * *

  We sat around the table. August had slumped against Katarina. She did not touch him. But she moved closer, so he could sit comfortably.

  Outside, in the darkness, there was some activity. I looked over at Oscar Humlum. He shook his head. “Not yet,” he said.

  August and Katarina were sitting looking at me, it was all okay. They did not assess me. Nor did they want me to achieve anything further. I had brought them here and everything was as it should be.

  I saw how pure, in a way, they were—no matter what they had done. Each in their own way, they had tried to stay what they were. Not like me, who had never been anything, and so had been trying all my life to be someone else. To come inside.

  I saw that they understood this, too. That they understood it and that it was okay. That, even so, I mattered, no matter what.

  And then time, too, faded away. I saw how small August was, like the child I would later have, even though he was older. In that moment, those two became as one, he and the child, and thus it became impossible ever again to separate them completely.

  I stretched a hand across the table and stroked his hair. He let me do it. Beneath my hand it grew warm and quite smooth. Soon he was sleeping. Katarina was watching me.

  I looked around.

  “Humlum,” I said.

  She nodded, as if she had known all along.

  “‘Save yourself,’” I said, “that was the last thing he said. He knew we couldn’t both get away. It would have been like too much contamination for the school to export at one time. He stood there with the rope in his hands. Then he cocked his head and listened for the train. His sight wasn’t so good. In the winter, in the toilets, he had told me that when he was nine years old he had been with a foster family who lived on Reunion Square. They used to wake him at half-past three in the morning and send him across to N. L. Dehn’s Institutional Laundry, where everybody pretended he was fourteen, because then it wouldn’t be child labor, and there he wheeled the clothes from the dry-cleaning machine to the woman who did the ironing. The man on the dry-cleaning machine used to turn up drunk for work and one day there was something to do with a faucet and Humlum got sprayed in the eyes with cleaning fluid, and then he’d been taken away from that family. But from then on he didn’t see too well at all. Instead he located the train by its sound, this time, too.

  “‘I’ll stay here,’ I said, ‘if you don’t do it I’ll stay.’

  “He smiled, he did not hear me, already he was in another world.

  “He pushed off, pretty much in the normal way, with the right timing. But when it came to the end of the swing he just hung there. He stretched out this last moment of his life so long that the return swing was delayed, but at last he began to move, like a pendulum, and then came the train.”

  Katarina did not say a word, she just nodded.

  I did not look up at Oscar, it was not necessary, we both knew it had been the right thing to do, laying it out for her.

  * * *

  August said something. Because of the fever it sounded as though it came to us from a distant room.

  “Maybe a person can be born to the wrong people,” he said. “Maybe a person should have been put somewhere else.”

  He said it, but we had all thought it, all four of us, Oscar, too.

  “Do you get another crack at it?” he asked.

  He asked in such a peacefu
l way. The way a child asks its mother, but more as an equal. And that is how she answered him.

  “Back then,” she said, “with my mother and father, I didn’t believe it would ever stop hurting. That happiness would ever come again. But it’s better now and it is there, now and again, despite everything. So in a way you do.”

  “But what about something you’ve done to someone?”

  She did not answer that. Somewhere in the darkness the dog barked.

  “I’m scared of dogs,” he said.

  * * *

  I would have liked to read to them.

  They had not read to us at Crusty House, or at Himmelbjerg House—it was considered soppy. But at the Christian Foundation home they did.

  Once you had experienced it, it was impossible to forget. In the mornings it had been the Thought for the Day, from the bottom corner of the Christian Daily; in the evenings, the Bible. Even so, you had looked forward to it. The matron, Sister Ragna, did the reading. She read standing up, from the end of the dormitory. It had made it easier to fall asleep. Entering the night was always the hardest part. It is easier to keep things at bay when it is light. When it grows dark they come pouring in.

  I wanted to read to them. This was the most difficult time of day for August. And there was no medicine to give him. I wanted to ease his way into the darkness.

  There was World of Nature, but that seemed out of the question. And the only thing that came to mind was the Bible. That was no good, it was too close to the sisters and to Biehl.

  So I chose to say whatever came into my head.

  “We take a boat,” I said, “big enough to live on. We sail southward, where it’s warmer. On a boat you can never be expelled, you always have the right to stay where you are, and you’re always together. In the evenings we can sit and listen to the water. When I’m twenty-one we’ll adopt you.”

  Maybe he wasn’t awake. Maybe he was sleeping, which had been the idea. But Katarina was listening to me.

  As a rule, what you imagine is not like real life. As a rule it is worse. This moment was just exactly as I had pictured it. I had pictured how a family would sit together. Just like this.

  “I’m sorry if I’ve hurt you two,” she said.

  She was just to forget it, I said. Everything had turned out fine. But what about her mother and father? I said. And what about the experiment?

  “I suppose I thought I could get to meet them again,” she said. “But it doesn’t work that way. That was just wishful thinking. But the experiment is coming to an end, anyway. At least the first phase.”

  I did not want to get too close, by asking what she meant. But even though the question went unasked, she understood it. The way things were between us now, it was not necessary to say all that much.

  “Time is no law of nature,” she said. “It is a plan. When you look at it with awareness, or start to touch it, then it starts to disintegrate. That is the conclusion of the first phase of the experiment. This plan is not Biehl’s. It’s too big, too complete for that. The second phase will be to investigate what lies behind time. We have seen it start to fall apart. The next thing is to understand what lies behind it.”

  * * *

  You could see by looking at her. She had to have an answer. It was a need about which she, personally, could do nothing. There was something I wanted to say to her, but it was impossible.

  August was shaking badly. She took off her sweater and put it around him.

  “If you come over here it’ll be easier for us to keep warm,” she said.

  She put her arm around August and I leaned against her. And then I said it anyway, the words just came out, there was nothing to be done about it. I told her I loved her. It was the first time I had ever got my tongue around the words.

  I saw that they also applied to August. That you could not say something like that to the woman without its applying to the child as well.

  She did not reply. Nor was it necessary. I had given, without needing something in return.

  * * *

  All three of us must have slept. When he spoke, it still seemed to be in his sleep.

  “If there is a second time,” he said, “then they ought to suffer more. It was over too soon.”

  All the time we had known that he was lost.

  FIFTEEN

  It was Katarina who discovered it. She laid a hand on my arm.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  It was light outside, because the fog had lifted, and because of the stars and the snow. We followed his tracks. He had been bleeding as he went, at one spot we found the bandage.

  All the lights in the school were out, the building was in darkness, the windows were black. Just as it had looked to me, those nights when I had not slept. He had crossed the south playground, keeping close to the wall. He had got in by smashing a pane in the door. I had always thought it was careless to have a latch fixed next to a pane of glass.

  We ascended to the fifth floor. He had left the door open and the light burning in the clinic, but had drawn the curtains. They were blackout curtains. Certain of the tests—Raven’s progressive matrices, for instance—involved slides.

  To begin with, there was silence. Then you heard them in the corridor.

  * * *

  First you smelled Biehl’s cigar. Then there was a brief pause, and then Biehl himself came in. He was looking for something, his head was right down at floor level. You had never supposed that he could bow so deeply, you had only ever seen him upright. He was in his dressing gown, and had his right arm twisted up his back. The last part of him to come through the door was his hand. Behind him came August. He had hold of three of Biehl’s fingers, all of them broken.

  Behind August came Biehl’s wife, Astrid, in her nightgown. She had always looked like a Norse goddess—willowy, ash-blond, and stately, even now.

  The fever lay like a membrane over August’s eyes. You could see how terrified he was. Like a little child. And yet quite determined. He, too, had now turned upon the pain. In order to erase it.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said.

  He said it without recognizing us. We were standing ten feet away from him. He could no longer see as far as us.

  He let Biehl lift his head a fraction.

  “My mom and dad are here,” he said. “To collect me.”

  Biehl had not looked at us. His awareness was on August.

  “You know perfectly well what has happened to your mother and father,” he said.

  No visible movement, just the spongy crack as one of his fingers snapped in a fresh place. He fell to his knees.

  You could not tell by looking at August.

  His left hand was sort of hidden. I shifted position slightly, to get a look at it, the movement must have caught his eye because he brought it into the open. In it was Biehl’s cigar, which was lit. That, and a half-gallon bottle of gasoline—he must have picked it up in the storehouse. In the bottle was a cork, between the cork and the glass he had jammed a strip off his bandage.

  “It’s like a wick,” he said. “If I put the cigar to it and smash the bottle, we all go sky-high.”

  Astrid Biehl was looking at my bare feet, I’d taken off my socks.

  “I hurt myself,” I said, “I couldn’t get my foot into my shoe. It won’t happen again.”

  They said nothing. Maybe because it was obvious from the bruising that I was telling the truth, maybe because they could not speak.

  “We’re just leaving,” August said to Biehl. “We’re going home. But before we go you have to confess.”

  No one said a word.

  He went on, “I could have stayed at home. We were fine, we could have sat together in the evenings, like we’d just been doing. Not too close together, nobody bothering anybody else, no need to be all over one another. But you’re together, quiet and peaceful. If anyone feels like drawing they can just get some paper and a pencil, nothing will be said about it. No one goes on about your grades. No one gets hit. But
then you’re dragged up here. You’re tied down at night, during the day Flakkedam sits behind you. Tell Mom how a thing like that can happen.”

  Biehl was on his knees, so his face was level with August’s.

  “We wanted to do good,” he said.

  Another finger broke.

  All of a sudden Biehl’s lips were like sandpaper. Gray and as though dusted with dried granules. He looked August in the eye.

  “We wanted to help,” he said. “Not just the children of the light. We wanted to carry the rest of you along with us. From the halls of the dead to the land of the living. We wanted to bring all of you together in the Danish Free School. Even those who suffer hardships have a right to the light.”

  August’s body was now shaking badly, even his face was out of control, it looked like he was constantly making faces. Only the hand encircling Biehl’s fingers did not move. It held the last of the life within him.

  “What about the darkness inside people?” said Katarina.

  “The light will disperse it,” said Biehl.

  August brought his face right down to Biehl’s ear. They looked like two people exchanging confidences.

  “There’s not that much light in the whole world,” he whispered.

  He looked at Katarina. She was standing less than two feet from him but it was obvious that his eyes were failing him. He stretched out a hand and felt her. With his left hand, the one holding the bottle and the cigar. He felt with the outer edge of the hand, up over her throat and cheek. The cigar end, the smoke, and the bottle hung in the air before her eyes. She did not move.

  “It’ll be over soon,” he said. “Then I’ll come back to you. And we can sit the way we did back there. With Peter, too. Is he with you now?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Can I keep the paper and pencils?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He stroked her cheek.

  “Will you wait here for me?” he said.

  She could not answer him.

  “No more taking the bus,” he said. “I’ve bought you a car. It’s waiting down below.”