Borderliners (11 page)

At Biehl's, in every corridor, there hung a bell. That way, when the
main bell went, it could be heard just as clearly all
over the school.

The bell hung just inside the corridor doorway, so
high up that
reaching it was out of the
question, but still in full view.

Out of a black box containing an electromagnet jutted a
little clapper for striking a bell.

The bell was chrome-plated and polished regularly by the
janitor,
Andersen,
who was referred to as Lemmy when out of earshot. It
bore some sort of decoration, a
pattern. It was too far away to
make out the details, but you supposed that it must be in
keeping
with the school's overall
decorative theme. It could have been a
meander
border or an entwining motif from one of the runic stones.

The
bells looked as though they dated from the turn of the cen
tury. Like Biehl's fob watch. Together they
saturated the school
with a finely
meshed web of time.

In the spring of '71 the bells were removed. Instead, a loudspeaker was
set into the wall of each classroom.
Behind the teacher's
desk,
beside the blackboard.
A ringing tone was now
transmitted over
this;
lower than the old mechanical one but nevertheless quite
clear.

Furthermore, through this loudspeaker messages could be
passed to individual classes from a central microphone in the headmaster's
office, and you could answer by
speaking in the direction of the
loudspeaker.

And it turned out that, from the
office, a line could be opened in such a way that Biehl could hear what was
going on in the class
rooms, without your
knowing it. In this way they could make sure
that
order reigned even if, for example, a class had to wait a few
minutes for a teacher.

The loudspeaker sat behind a white panel, so that it
was, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

The old bells had
been polished regularly. The new were invisible.
We did not see them being delivered,
nor
the old ones being re
moved. We came back to school and the job was done.

They had done it
during the Easter vacation.
The same Easter
that the teachers' children were removed.

THIRTEEN

      
A
fter dinner, from 7:00 to 8:15 p.m. there was
a study period for boarders in the main hall,
supervised by Flak-
kedam. During this time
leaving the hall was prohibited. It was
difficult for August. Even during the day he had trouble sitting still,
but in the evening it got worse, as the time for
his medicine
approached.

I sensed that it was very bad, so I went over to
Flakkedam in the
duty room and asked for
permission for August and me to go out
side
for a minute.
To decline the irregular German verbs together,
without disturbing the others.
I explained that he had been moved
up a class, of course, so he had not had German
before. Permission
was granted.

It was dark. You could sense that he felt better
outside, but not
much. Here, too, he looked
for the walls. He would not walk along
the
paths or across the grass, but made for the fringes of the
shrubbery.

We walked for a
bit side by side. He walked along looking up at me.

"What's it
like in a children's home?" he said.

"Fine," I
said.

"How do you
survive?"

"You just do," I said,
"no problem, and can we get back to the
hall now, time's up."

"Not yet," he said. "First you have
to
answer,
I don't want to
go inside."

We continued. He walked
slowly,
he listened, for the first time since we had met.

"You have to
have a strategy," I said.

He shivered as he walked. He had
come out without a jacket. I took off my sweater and pulled it over his head,
the way you dress a child. If he caught a cold they would ask why I had not
looked
after him. He
put up no resistance. His arms did not go into the
sleeves. They just hung there, dangling.

"I had a friend who ate frogs," I said.
"He was dangerous as
well, but that wasn't the main thing. If you're alone it doesn't matter
how dangerous you are. The main thing was the frogs. The
grownups knew about them, too.
It's hard to touch a man you've
seen eat a frog. That was his strategy."

I did not expect
him to understand.

"If you can't remember anything," he said,
"if the light in your
brain has simply been put
out, that
would be a
pretty good strategy,
right?"

So he had, after
all, understood.

We walked back to the annex.

"Why does she ask," he said, "why does she
write, asking why
the
teachers' children were removed?"

It was early to tell him about it, but we were walking
together. For the first time we were walking side by side and at absolutely the
same pace. So I told him.

It took a month.
That was what was so strange. From the time
when Axel was found in the chart locker until the children
related

to
the teachers were removed—it took a month.
An inexplicable pause between the catastrophe and its consequences.

It was then, too, that the loudspeakers were installed
in the class
rooms, and that you were
assigned a regular appointment with the
psychologist
once every two weeks, and when you saw Hessen for
the first time, and her two assistants, and then
there were other things, too. Somehow, all of this seemed too much to be
because
of Axel.

"What sort of
other things?" he said.

It was Flakkedam. It was at that time that they had appointed
Flakkedam.

Before that, at Biehl's, and at
the Orphanage, and at Himmelbjerg
House, the boarders had always been supervised by a
teacher. In
other words, it was he who
checked that chores were done and sat with them in the dining room and
supervised the study period and
put out the
lights at 10:00 p.m. There might well be
others
who
assisted him, but the person in charge had always
been a qualified
teacher—it was a
rule.

Flakkedam was not a
teacher.

At the Orphanage and at Himmelbjerg House there had also
been
people who were not teachers. At the
bottom, under the superintendent and the deputy and the department heads and
the teachers
and the senior assistants and
the social workers, there had been
aides
or porters. These had been gardeners' assistants, or NCO's or
former accountants who, for one reason or another,
had not been able to cope in their previous place.

It was different
with Flakkedam.

You never saw him drink alcohol, you never saw him hit
anyone,
never, not
once. He just had to appear on the scene and people
grew absolutely quiet, out of
fear.

In the corridors he walked only a
little bit in front of Biehl. In
the
yearbook for '71 it said that, in April, the school had bidden
welcome to Inspector Jonas Flakkedam.

"Inspector."
There was no further
explanation.

"He stands on my foot," said August. "When he's checking
that
I take the
medicine, he stands on my foot. I can't move. He's
good."

FOURTEEN

I
fell asleep that night, but I must have heard him
in my sleep. When I checked he was gone.

He was finished by the time I got there. He stood
polishing the
stove
with his sleeve. The light was on. He was swaying.

I got him onto my
back. From there he talked to me.

"There were
never any dirty dishes," he said.

I told him to be
quiet, Flakkedam would hear him.

"The fingermarks had to be wiped off," he said,
"
she
would have
spotted them right away."

I put him down on
the bed.

"There must be another way," I said,
"something other than
gas."

His eyes were half-open, but he was sleeping. I closed
his fingers
around
my hand.

"She always
looked like a million dollars," he said.

After a while his
hand fell open, but he was restless. So I shook him
gently. That calmed him down a
bit.