Borderliners

by Peter Høeg

  He led Biehl over to the door.

  “August!” she said.

  He stopped.

  “They have children,” she said. “He’s somebody’s father.”

  To this he made no reply. He simply led Biehl out through the door, and then they were gone.

  * * *

  With that, Astrid Biehl turned and went out into the corridor. A door was unlocked. We heard her going into the room with the school clock. They must have had the lock fixed. Every sound could be heard quite plainly—her bare feet on the floor, the soft crunch as she smashed the glass. Then the alarm went off.

  * * *

  It was the same signal as usual, sent over all the loudspeakers. But this time it kept going on and off, on and off, the noise was unbearable. We went out into the corridor and turned away from it, into the staff room.

  It was dark, the only light was coming from outside—from the grounds and the sky and, farther off, from Copenhagen. We stood by the window.

  They came pretty quickly. Astrid Biehl must have met them in the driveway, once the searchlights had been lit you saw her several times, still in her nightgown.

  They parked in a semicircle and left the car headlights on, in addition to switching on the searchlights. The storehouse sat there, like a black bull’s-eye in the white snow. For a while, nothing happened. Then more cars arrived, you saw Fredhøj, too, down there in the snow. Then peace and quiet descended. Very bright light, but otherwise nothing. Pause.

  Then Biehl appeared. He came out of the shed, alone, but still bent double. His dressing gown had slipped half off him, he was partly naked. And in that state he ran toward the searchlights.

  Then came the fire. Not an explosion, not really. Not anything as violent as that. Just a very speedy combustion. First the flash from August’s bottle, then the blast, as the gasoline cans for the lawn mowers caught fire. It blew out the windows and doors first, then it forced off the roof, letting in oxygen. It was all over in seconds.

  Of course, where we were, so high up, we could not feel the heat, nor could we hear very much.

  It did not help, though. Even though we held each other tight and had our eyes closed, it did not help. The light pierced the eyelids—only for the briefest of moments, but still, it burned into the brain. It hurt the body, too. As if, even from way down there, the fire had reached up and peeled away the top layer of skin, leaving us like two burn marks, two scorched fetuses supporting each other.

  I did not want to look. When, despite myself, I did look, it was at Katarina’s face. It was turned toward the window, screwed up like the face of an incubator baby. The pain of an abandoned, newborn baby on a far-too-old face.

  And yet even then—I remember it now—deep down, but distinct: awareness. The need to understand.

  PART THREE

  ONE

  First they transferred me to the Lars Olsen Memorial Home, Engbækgård, 2990 Nivå. There I prepared the first draft of my report.

  * * *

  Lars Olsen Memorial had the country’s first secure unit for children under fifteen years of age—surrounding wall, no handles on the inside, a small, barred window set high up, table and bench screwed to the floor, and you had to ring for the duty officer when you needed to go to the toilet.

  Before you could be put there they had to have the special permission of the department, and you could stay there for two months at the most, that was the law. However, dispensation was given in my case, since there was the death of a schoolmate to be considered. I spent six months and eleven days there, in strict isolation. This, inevitably, did me considerable damage.

  * * *

  Back then they were not so reluctant to use solitary confinement. It was considered to have a powerfully educative effect, like waiting outside Biehl’s office. The department’s representative said that now I would have plenty of time for reflection.

  At Himmelbjerg House and at the Royal Orphanage you had often been isolated and locked up in various places—mostly the cellars, but other places, too. At the Orphanage the standard punishment for being late three times in a row was royal guard duty—in an empty broom closet under a picture of King Frederik and Queen Ingrid. You stood from eight in the morning until six in the evening, but even though it was in the dark and standing to attention it was of course nothing compared to six months and eleven days.

  Even so, you could have coped with it, others before you had coped. But when they transferred me I must have been weakened by what had happened, and by the fact that I had got used to talking to Katarina and August.

  * * *

  If those who listen, those who are your friends, are nevertheless to be taken from you, then it would have been better if you had never gotten to know them.

  * * *

  Since then there has been something about closed doors, or being in a room with several other people. Many years later—after my adoption and when I had completed my education and been to the university—I tried working. I taught at the Institute of Physical Education at Odense University. I was there for a year and a half, then it became overwhelming. It kept coming and going—the fear of being alone like back then. Just when you were faced with twenty people, and all the responsibility, then came the feeling that they were going to leave you and lock the door behind them, and there would not even be a button so you could ring for the duty officer. Furthermore, I worried about being late, so I used to get there hours ahead of time. But still the fear was there. After a year and a half I had to give it up.

  If I had not been led into the laboratory it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to hold one’s own in society, to find a place in the outside world.

  Here, too, the door is closed. But the child and I have come to an agreement. We both find closed doors difficult. According to the agreement, if it gets too difficult, then it is permissible to knock on the door and say so. And then the other one has to open the door to the one who is not feeling so good.

  * * *

  I was there for an indefinite period. Nevertheless, I found a way out—through the books. I found the books, and with their help I drew up the report, in the form of a speech. I knew there would be a confrontation.

  * * *

  That was the way the department did things, by confrontation. When violence or abuse had been ascertained to have occurred in an institution, or if any other acts of negligence were suspected, where it was the adults’ word against the children’s, then a confrontation was arranged, this was a rule.

  All doubt could thus be eliminated. Thus it would be possible to discover the utter and definitive truth as to what had occurred. Then the blame could be apportioned and the guilty party be punished.

  With this in mind I prepared the speech. I expected it to be addressed to Biehl and Fredhøj and Karin Ærø, and to the department’s representatives, and to Katarina.

  In a way I also expected August to be there. Even though that was an insane thought.

  As excuse, I just want to point out how things were while the work was in progress. I could no longer really tell day from night.

  * * *

  Now, later on, you can see that we had in fact understood most of it.

  They had had a grand plan. Of bringing all children together in the Danish public school system, including the mentally defective and delinquent, including the slow pupils—everyone right down to the borderline with severe retardation. Biehl’s Academy was to be turned into the model for this unification. The school was to have been a laboratory, a workshop for the study of how the unification should be brought about. Whatever this would require in the way of security arrangements, psychological assistance, and extra tuition.

  The orderliness and precision of the school were to form the firm, secure structure around this experiment.

  * * *

  Over the past couple of years I have gradually unearthed most of the papers from that time. Some of them are kept at the Department for Primary and Lower-Secondary Education, som
e at the Institute of Education and at the Queen Caroline Amalie Charity Schools Foundation, and at the Teacher Training College on Emdrup Road.

  According to these, fifty-four major experiments on the integration of disadvantaged pupils into Danish public schools were run between 1964 and 1974. Fifty-four.

  But even today, when one looks back on it, the experiment at Biehl’s was something out of the ordinary.

  * * *

  When I read the applications they made back then, for money and support for the project, I do not understand them.

  They are like Biehl’s memoirs. So eloquent. So well intentioned. But still somehow totally unrelated to what really happened. As though they have had a wonderful, visionary theory about time and children and fellowship.

  And then—strictly isolated from this theory—there have been their actions.

  * * *

  Gaining access to the archives has been so surprisingly easy. I have been met with outright helpfulness. Back when it happened, they did everything they could to keep it hidden. At that time suppression, discretion, was one of the school’s fundamental principles. Now the safeguarding of any information whatsoever no longer seems to be important.

  Maybe most people are of the same mind as Oscar and August, when they come to me in the laboratory and say I should abandon the work, because the seventies were so long ago, it is over, it is too late.

  Often I have had that thought: over and too late.

  * * *

  When such thoughts present themselves, I know that I am thinking like an adult. Growing up means first of all to forget, and thereafter disown what was important when you were a child. To this I have then raised objections.

  Even if it was over and too late, and altogether pretty insignificant, still it was your life. And around that everything since then has revolved.

  * * *

  But it was not insignificant. Of that I have since become certain.

  Their plan was directed at the entire universe, of that I have become certain. And such a plan cannot be disregarded.

  In the applications they talk only about helping the delinquents and the mildly retarded and mildly defective—those were the words, in the applications for the grants. But in their minds or at the back of their minds, like a distant goal, they had the whole world. “We work for future glory,” wrote Biehl. They felt that time was on their side, that they were working with something that would spread and inspire first the entire public school system and then the rest of the country. If it had to be put into words they only mentioned groups of children. But their goal was the universe.

  Biehl, Fredhøj, Karin Ærø, Baunsbak-Kold, state inspector Aage Hårdrup, Hessen, Flakkedam, the department representatives. All of them were certain that they were defending eternal values. They have not said it straight out, they may not have thought it straight out either. But somewhere inside themselves and among themselves they have been absolutely and utterly certain that they were right, and that, with future generations of children who grew up, their ideas and thoughts could fly out into the world and spread across the country and beyond, maybe as far as the Moors. That it would be possible, sometime in the not too distant future, to have everyone respect their ideal of diligence and precision. And on that day, all living things in the universe would live at peace with one another.

  I know this was their goal. It is not what you could call run-of-the-mill. You would have to call it colossal.

  This goal was the subject of my report.

  * * *

  It went against common practice in the home and was also at variance with the corrective effect of isolation to give me pencil and paper. What I found out I therefore had to commit to memory.

  * * *

  I was, however, given books. I based my speech upon what I read in them. It was carefully planned, with an introduction, a discourse, and a conclusion. When the day dawned I went in and presented it, in a clear, distinct voice. That was the last word. After that, there was nothing more to be said.

  * * *

  This is not true. I see that I have written it. But it is a lie. When the confrontation came, I said nothing of what had been in my mind, not one word.

  There was no speech. By the time I had been at Lars Olsen Memorial for a few weeks there was no memory left in which to store it. By then there was nothing but chaos.

  I had a relapse, too, and hit a male nurse, and a doctor—a woman at that, I have nothing to say in my defense. During the final months I was strapped down at night and given medicine, pretty much as though I had been severely retarded.

  That is over and done with long ago. There is no point in saying any more about it.

  But before that happened I had started to read. The bit about the books really was true.

  * * *

  There was a visiting psychiatrist attached to the secure unit—a consultant, who had made a study of the connection between children’s perception of time and their intelligence, at home and abroad. He talked about children in Ghana, where the people are Moors. How, even when they were in Primary Six or Seven like me, they could not tell the length of a bus journey, whether it had taken ten minutes or six hours.

  It was because of him that I was given books, although, strictly speaking, this ran counter to the treatment. What brought this about was that I had said I would like to read about time.

  * * *

  When Katarina had said that her mother and father had talked about time, I had instinctively known that there had to be books about it, that it must be possible to write about it.

  At Lars Olsen Memorial I saw and read for the first time books, given to me by the consultant, such as E. J. Bickerman’s Chronology of the Ancient World, Whitrow’s Natural Philosophy of Time, and Guide to the History of Chronology, vols. 1–3.

  Back then I could not understand one word of what I read.

  Reading did, however, give me heart. Even if you cannot understand what you are reading you can get something from books.

  This was during the first weeks of my time there. When I worked on the speech, and felt that the work was progressing well.

  * * *

  It was Katarina who gave me the idea of doing it. Even though she was gone, she was still there.

  Often she stood before me, even when I did not close my eyes. Her skin was so white—so transparent, almost—her sweater was too big and had belonged to her father who had hung himself, her hair was caught in at the collar. She had lured Baunsbak-Kold to the school and caused him to forget himself. And she had spoken to him. Unbidden, she had also spoken to Biehl and to Fredhøj.

  * * *

  Speaking is not easy. All your life you have listened, or looked as if you were listening. The living word came down to you, it was not something you, personally, gave voice to. You spoke only after having put up your hand, and when you had been asked a question, and you said what was certain and correct, what was beyond doubt.

  With my speech the opposite was the case. It was full of uncertainty, and it was unbidden.

  After a few weeks, I had to give up. Nor did I ever present it. When the confrontation came I was silent.

  I have kept quiet ever since.

  * * *

  It was the child who made me aware that it was still not too late.

  She was born in November 1990. In August 1991 I embarked upon this series of experiments in the laboratory. Now, as they approach their provisional conclusion, it is July 1993.

  So she was not quite a year old when it began. Now, at its close, she is more than two and a half years old.

  I started reading aloud to her from the manuscript when she was a year and a half. From the rest of the world I kept it strictly isolated. But I showed it to her. In the afternoons, when we were alone, I would take out the papers and read bits and pieces to her. At one point she then said that I ought to write the report, the unfinished speech.

  I know that this statement will render me suspect. It will be asserted that she is, af
ter all, just a little child and that what I am claiming is all but insane.

  But it was she who suggested it.

  There are many ways of suggesting something. It does not actually have to be put into words. You can sit quietly and listen and in this way show the other that what he is saying is all right. That he will not be judged. That you are his friend, no matter what.

  * * *

  One day she pointed out that it was not too late. After all, they were all still alive. There was still time to catch the boat.

  Immediately, I understood. Biehl, Ærø, and all the others who were present back then, they are still there, it is still not too late to have a word with them.

  * * *

  Until she showed me the way, I must have thought that it was over. I knew, of course, about Fredhøj and the stroke. But I had given up on the others, too. It had seemed overwhelming, it was so long ago. When we had the chance of doing something, of saying something to them, only Katarina had the courage, and now it was, irrevocably, too late. In the laboratory I might be able to show a pale reflection of what took place. But, over the twenty-two years separating me from that time, I could not speak.

  To this the child raised the objection that all of them were still around. Each and every one of the sixteen people who were present at the department’s confrontation—Fredhøj excluded—are still around, that was what she said.

  That the past is not over and done with. But that it lives on.

  And so I prepared this.

  TWO

  In Denmark, two libraries have extensive collections of books on schools and education—the libraries at the Teacher Training College on Emdrup Road and at the Danish Institute of Education, which I have visited on a number of occasions.

  I have looked for books on the history of education, I wanted to see what they wrote about time.

  I found next to nothing. Next to nothing. Pedagogikens historia, Education and Society in Modern Europe, Histoire mondiale de l’éducation, Schule und Gesellschaft, Skolen i Danmark, next to nothing on time. And anything there might be amounts to facsimiles of timetables from previous centuries. They look just like what you have today, and they are not even commented on. Time plays no great part in books on the history of education, in a way it is not there at all.