Borderliners

TRANSLATED
  
BY
 
BARBARA
 
HAVELAND

                               
ONE

What feeling was there in the hall while this was going on?

There was no special feeling, really, I said,
it was early in the
morning and people were tired, and could we finish now, I
was
getting
a headache, and it was late, the bell had gone already, I
pointed out the time.

Not yet, she said, there was yet another
relationship she wanted to call to my attention, and that was the relationship
to pain. When pain made itself felt during an experiment—like now, with this
headache—one should never just break off and walk
away from it.
Instead one should turn
upon it the light of awareness.

That is how she spoke. The light of awareness.

And so we turned upon the fear.

Biehl had written his memoirs,
In Grundtvig's Footsteps.
It con
tained the names of all the
teachers who had ever occupied position
at the school, all the moves to bigger and better premises, a long
string of achievements, and the rewards for such.

But not one word about
the relationship to the pupils, and so
nothing either about the fear. Not one word, not even in the
pauses
or in the spaces between the lines.

At first it was
impossible to understand. Because that was the
truly significant factor. Not the
respect, not the admiration. But the
fear.

Later it became clear
that this reticence was part of the more fa
r-reaching plan. And then I understood.

We stood utterly still during
assembly. That was the first thing I
tried to get through to her.

At a certain time every day you were let
into the assembly hall,
240 people with 26
teachers and Biehl, and then the doors were
shut, and you knew that from this moment for the next quarter of an hour
you had to stay completely still.

The prohibition was
total, giving rise therefore to a certain tens
ion in the room. As though the rule, by
covering everything and

by
tolerating nothing, called for its own violation. As
though the
tension in the room was part of
the plan.

Over the years it had proved impossible to have the
prohibition
observed absolutely. But those
few violations that had occurred had,
in
fact, only served to confirm and reinforce the rule.

Those few times it happened, there had
been a faint commotion
among the pupils, a
hemming and a hawing, and a rustling that
spread like an infection and,
for a while, could not be stopped. A critical situation, one of the most
difficult for a man in Biehl's po
sition. The
passive resistance of a crowd of small people.

On these occasions he had been brilliant.
He did not try to pre
tend that nothing had
happened. He bowed his head and took the
disturbance upon himself. He stood like that, head bowed, while
the
tension in the room rose, and eventually the fear stifled the
disturbance.

At no time had he
looked directly at anyone; he carried on with
assembly as usual. Even so, you knew
that he knew who had started
it. That he had located the source, and knew how it
should be
stopped.

Another teacher, who should have been
there, never came. Instead,
the door to the classroom stood open, and we waited for a
pause
so
long that what we had known all along was confirmed for us. Then Biehl came in,
very quick and brisk.

"Sit down," he said. "Jes—remain standing."

He needed some time to
get into his stride. Not much, even
though it felt that way after I became ill,
probably only a couple of
minutes.
Just long enough to go over what had happened. That Jes had disrupted assembly
for his schoolfellows, disrupted a school
timetable
that was already overstretched, abused the trust put in
him, and, suddenly, the blow fell.

Very fast, and yet with a weight that
jolted the body free of the
desk and out into
the aisle.

Just after it
struck, there was a brief pause, and even though this
was what held the key
to the fear, it was so brief that it went unnoticed, I said, let's not talk
about it anymore.

"On the
contrary," she said. "That's exactly what we have to
talk about."

So I tried: When the
blow fell, first there was a brief lull, when
the shock had brought everything to a standstill. Then came
two
things at once. The relief that
everything had now been put to
rights,
and something else—something deeper, far-reaching—that
occurs when an
adult hits a child hard, something that has nothing
further to do with the pain from the blow.

Back by the
blackboard Biehl adjusted his clothing. Like a man
who has been to the
toilet. Or with a hooker. And has now put
behind him something that was difficult but
necessary.

She did not understand me, so we went on.

"How often does it happen?" she asked.

Before my illness
there had been no reason to wonder about how often. But now, when it was
necessary to be aware of time all the time, it turned out to be very seldom,
less than once a week in any
one
class. Quite precisely administered.