Borderliners

by Peter Høeg

  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 distinguishable 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 something 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.

  SIX

  For twenty years I refrained from looking up Katarina. When at last I did so, at the child’s request, she had disappeared, leaving no address.

  But I have not given up. I know she is out there somewhere. She will read this, and understand it more deeply than any other living person. She will read it, and it will be clear to her that never since what happened back then have I stopped trying to touch time and see it change.

  Then she will look me up. She will meet the woman and the child and like them. If she does not have a family of her own we will tell her that she can stay as long as she likes, no one here expels anyone. Ragnarok is past.

  Then I will show her the laboratory.

  * * *

  Ragnarok. We learned about it, they said it was the end. The end of the world, total obliteration.

  As an adult I read it for myself, and saw that they had been wrong. There was, after all, an afterlife.

  It is there in the prophecy of the Völuspa, in the Elder Edda. There it says that the gods lay on the grass in the sun and played a game, the pieces were of gold, it was brilliant. Then came the war between the light and the dark, disaster, total obliteration.

  But afterward the gods were lying there in the light again, like before, playing with the gold pieces.

  As though death and war and defeat had not been the final act after all but merely a new beginning. As though, for the gods, time was one long process of repetition.

  As though, after Ragnarok, there was yet another chance.

  * * *

  To have yet another chance.

  The child is my chance, the third. When she looks at me—directly and at length and without judging, then it is as though she is the adult and I am a child, and that she is making sure that nothing bad shall befall me. Or as though I am grown up and she is me as a child—but a child who, this time, is protected by its parents, as you yourself never were, or no, it is impossible to explain, but she is my third chance.

  The first was when Karen and Erik Høeg found me, at Sandbjerggård, and adopted me in 1973, when I was fifteen years old. For this I will be eternally grateful to them. Without this I would have been obliterated.

  The second chance is the woman.

  The laboratory, here, is the fourth chance.

  When you are given yet another chance, time goes backward, the past returns. Then, yet again, you go through whatever it was that led to disaster. But this time there is hope.

  * * *

  “Furthest back you remember a plain,” she said. “It is from the days before time enters your life, in other words you have lived without time, the way small children do.”

  This she said on the telephone, when we had been separated totally.

  Furthest back I remember the Christian Foundation. The garden, the bathroom, the reading of the Thought for the Day from the Christian Daily. These memories are not in any sequence, they lie on the timeless plain of my childhood. From there I sank downward, maybe I was born to sink, maybe this was the covert Darwinism.

  There was some sl
ight upward movement, like my succeeding in getting to Crusty House and then to Biehl’s. But, in the main, I sank.

  This lasted until Katarina and August and I were brought together in time and space. Since then I have never completely lost heart.

  * * *

  To begin with, after the confrontation, I was sent back to Lars Olsen Memorial. They were concerned. If I had been strong enough I would have reassured them. I was just hibernating, I had retreated, downward and inward, to a quiet place. At Crusty House, Oscar Humlum put his frogs—the ones he would make his money from, by eating them—at the very bottom of the vegetable drawer where the kitchen maids would not find them. Under the leeks, where the temperature was just above freezing point. There they did not die, they fell into a deep, motionless winter sleep, they waited for the light. If you took them out and let them lie on your hand, they stretched out toward the warmth and came to life.

  * * *

  We met—Katarina, August, and I—and from then on, it became impossible ever again to give up completely. I have given some thought to why this should be.

  I believe it was love. When once you have encountered it, you will never sink again. Then you will always yearn for the light and the surface.

  * * *

  Twice I have seen Biehl in the street, Copenhagen is not that big.

  He has grown gray, like stone. He still walks briskly and purposefully, although his sight does not seem to be so good.

  The thought crosses your mind that he has aged like a caricature of Uexküll’s theory: a lonely man, behind an unreliable sensory apparatus, in an unreal world.

  When this is finished I will give it to him. I will find him, stand in front of him, and give it to him.

  “Back then I said not a word. Now I have said it.”

  * * *

  There exists a time lapse so lengthy that science finds it impossible to conceive of anything greater. This—2 × 1017 seconds—is the time taken by a ray of light to traverse the conjectured radius of the universe. It is known as the cosmic chronon.

  There exists a space of time so brief that it is impossible to calculate with anything less. This—10−23 seconds—constitutes the greatest lower bound for the attribution of significance to regular processes. It is known as the atomic chronon.

  It is thought that there also exist an upper and a lower mental chronon, limits for how brief and how lengthy a space of time consciousness can span.

  If you are fit, then this is of no great interest, then you have no problem sharing time with other people.

  But if you become unwell, and if time starts to float, then you run into the mental chronon.

  When Biehl had struck—hard, deliberately, and at the same time senselessly—there was a very brief pause. It was too brief to be noticed, it lasted less than one mental chronon, it was there, and then it was past, and only traces were left. A vague fear you did not understand.

  But if you were ill, then you sensed this moment. That was precisely what we had, a pathologically heightened sensitivity to very brief spaces of time. Then you saw all of the endless and complex intimations of power contained in that instant; saw, too, how all of those present were left with a subtle, everlasting stamp of fear, and how this had to do with learning about time.

  SEVEN

  Uexküll said that man is not much better than a spider.

  A spider’s sight and hearing are poor and its sense of smell is not that great either, which means that its surroundings are limited by its sensory apparatus. But it has its web, by means of which it has extended its sensibility far beyond itself. Its sense of touch is very acute, by every movement of the web it can judge how far off and how big.

  In the mornings at the Christian Foundation, when you crept out into the garden before anyone else was awake—not even the sisters—spiderwebs hung between the bushes. Drops of dew clung to the strands, they caught the sun. And if you touched the web, even quite gently, the spider would not appear. You had wanted to trick it into showing itself, but its sensitivity was so much greater than your own, it knew you were too big and powerful. Even though you were quite small.

  Man is not much better than a spider, says Uexküll.

  * * *

  The biggest webs were maybe thirty inches in diameter. Plus the strands to the tree trunks to which they clung. We had an agreement that no one was allowed to break the web, it was a rule among the children, the web was so big and the spider so small, you knew how it must have slogged to make it.

  Sister Ragna, who looked after the garden, swept it down with a broom. When she did this, things always went very still, so dead still that she always stopped short and looked around. She could not understand it, all these children suddenly standing absolutely motionless.

  During these moments she was in imminent peril of her life. Only a few details, the difference between her body weight and ours, the fact that the office on the second floor directly overlooked the garden, prevented us from obliterating her.

  The webs were so perfect. So regular and yet irregular. Totally identical and always different. Infinitely.

  And almost never bigger than thirty inches.

  * * *

  Through its web the spider did not sense the whole world. It sensed only that part of it that the web could pick up. Direction, distance, maybe the approximate weight of its quarry, maybe its size. But certainly not much more.

  Thus, too, with science and its twin, industrial technology. Physics extends its web out into the universe or down into matter, and thinks it is discovering ever greater slices of reality.

  It might be feared that this is a fallacy, that is what Uexküll was on the verge of believing. If the spider extended its web farther, beyond the thirty inches, it would still only be able to sense what lay in its own and the web’s nature to sense. It would not find a new reality. It would discover more of what it already knew. Of what lay beyond—colors, birds, smells, moles, people, sisters, God, the trigonometric functions, measurement of time, time itself—it would still be hovering in absolute ignorance.

  That is the one thing I wanted to say.

  * * *

  The other is this: Maybe it is possible to put it in stronger terms than Uexküll. Maybe the spiders at the Christian Foundation were smarter than man. Because they never extended their webs beyond a certain limit.

  What would have happened if they had done so? If the spider’s web was extended to infinity, as far out across and down under the threshold of the human sensory apparatus as technology has extended its sensors?

  * * *

  What would have happened is this: Pretty soon the spider would be unable to cope physically with checking out everything that became caught in the web. And if the web kept on extending, farther and farther away, then the spider would start to receive signals from areas inhabited by other insects and with a climate other than its own. And it would receive many more signals than it could deal with. Then the abnormally large web and what it brought back would come into conflict with the essence of the spider, with its nature.

  While the web would begin to change the world around it. Maybe it would become too heavy, maybe finally it would crash to the ground, dragging great trees with it in its fall. Maybe it would take the spider with it into perdition.

  This is the other thing I have wanted to say: Man’s exploration of the world, its web, also changes this world. When I lie awake at night, when I cannot sleep and I sit up and look at the child and the woman, then I am afraid, then I know that the web has extended far too far beyond the sensory apparatus. Now it is reaching out to black holes and stellar nebulas, and down to elementary particles that grow ever smaller, it is discovering things that then rebound onto everyday life, becoming refrigerators, schoolbooks, cesium clocks, submarines, computers, car engines, atom bombs, and a steady increase in the pace of life.

  In 1873, at the meridian conference, when Sandford Fleming of the Canadian Pacific Railway suggested a “universal world time” for the
entire globe, America had seventy-one different time systems. In 1893, the American version of Fleming’s initiative was raised to the status of law in Germany. Just after the turn of the century, large sections of Europe switched to Greenwich Mean Time.

  Man extended time as an instrument right across the world. And into the education of children the school extended precision and accuracy. So far that they reached the limits of what human beings can bear. The limit at which the web starts to yield to its own weight. And to pull the spider with it in its fall.

  We never tore down or split a web at the Christian Foundation. You looked at it and you understood that it was an expression of balance. The spider had done what it could. The web was fine as it was.

  * * *

  Was the spider familiar with time?

  For a long time, whenever Sister Ragna had swept away the web, no new one was spun at the same spot. It was as though the spiders sensed the future. Animals do, I suppose. I suppose they retain an approximate memory of what has happened and learn from it. And they can anticipate what will happen in the not too distant future. They know how events follow one another. They must have some awareness of succession.

  But that is not time, is it? Time means sensing that behind those changes which are an expression of time there is fellowship.

  * * *

  We say “time,” I believe we mean at least two things. We mean changes. And we mean something unchangeable. We mean something that moves. But against an unmoving background. And vice versa.

  Animals can sense changes. But consciousness of time involves the double sense of constancy and change. Which can only be attributed to those who give expression to it. And that can only be done through language, and only man has language.

  The perception of time and language are inextricably bound up with each other.

  * * *

  If we say that “time has passed,” then something must have changed—if nothing else, then the position of the hands on a clock, otherwise we would not know that anything had passed. At the same time something must have remained the same—if nothing else, then time itself, otherwise we could not recognize the new situation as something that has sprung from the starting point. The word “time” contains a unity of movement and changelessness.