Borderliners (23 page)

Since the summer vacation it had been my job to empty the garbage
from the kitchen into the big garbage cans behind the
annex. This was a much-sought-after job. It did not take long and the garbage
cans were kept in a shed, so you could hang around there for a bit,
out of sight. I had been given it as a reward for
two years with no
punishment or bad
conduct marks.

After the disaster in the church I had been transferred
to odd jobs
indoors. No comment was made,
but it was a way of keeping me
under closer
surveillance. It had been a relief. The thing with my
fingers had made
it difficult to do hard manual work. On the day Katarina rang I had been oiling
the door hinges, and had continued
to do so
after dinner, to be near the telephone.

At the Royal Orphanage outside calls to pupils had been prohibited,
unless someone had died or something like that. This was to prevent
any weakening of the moral fiber
that the school was taking pains
to develop.

So people were only called to the telephone when there
was some
thing
seriously amiss in their families. Or when the Social Services
Department or the police wanted to
speak to them—which was
worse.

You had, therefore, gotten used to the telephone playing
its part
in the
surveillance of pupils.
And to it being used only by teachers
and the school management.

Suddenly—as
I stood there with the receiver in my hand and
Katarina on the other end—it was different, almost the opposite.

Usually there was a line of people, this day there was
none. It
rang, and I
picked it up before anyone could hear it.

She was out of breath. She must have waited until no one
was in
sight, and
then made a dash for it. She had been working in the gar
den all through the fall, so
they must have moved her indoors, too.

Again it struck me that her breathing was like a
clock, that
it
marked off this short time when we could be together.

We said nothing. We just stood
there, leaning into the sound of
the other's breathing.

That was when she told me how
you remembered in a line that ended a long way back in a plain. Every now and
then the phone
beeped
and she put in more money. Where had she gotten that?

"Can we
meet?" she said.

I had thought this all the way through to the end, in case
she should ask. There was only one way, I said, and that was at night.
I could help her out of the window
and down, could she manage
that?

"They've moved me," she said. "I'm sleeping
in the same room as the new inspector."

She had said it quite quietly, and yet it was as though
something
big, like a
train, had come racing along and then passed by, and with the train had gone
the last chance of seeing her.

"I'm going away in two
weeks' time," I said.
"To a reform
school."

The receiver was put down. There
was no sound, as there had
been last time. One minute we were connected, the next we were
cut off.

I stayed by the
telephone for a while, but nothing happened.

SEVEN

T
wo days in a row I spent the lunch period in the
library.

Under different circumstances I
would have been banned, but the
school's rhythm was altered, because of the snow.

The snow had fallen gently, but it had fallen day and
night, and
they had
not been able to keep pace with it. Andersen shoveled
snow and put gravel and salt
down, helped by those boarders with outdoor chores. The playground was a sheet
of ice and there were
great mounds of
snow. This meant that the lower grades were al
lowed
to stay upstairs, people took longer to come into class be
cause of their wet clothes, and, all in all, you
sensed a deviation
from the timetable.

Both Fredhøj and Karin
Ærø
saw me in the library,
but nothing was said. Maybe they thought I had already been punished; that no
more could be done to me.

I looked through old numbers of
the blue book, the school year
book. Each volume contained a picture of every class. I looked at
the old photographs of her class—from
when she started in Primary
One and all the way up.

These days I saw her at assembly, too. It hurt to look
straight at
her, it was easier with
pictures.

In
those days the girls had worn pigtails, and so did she. Otherwise she looked
just the same.

Apart from the fact that she was
smiling.
There
were eight
pictures,
from 1963 to 1971. In 1970 she was missing. The
school photographs were taken in April, which was
when she
had been
absent. In the first seven pictures she was smiling.
Not much, but nevertheless it was
noticeable. So it was clear to
see the kind of home she came from, and what life had been like for her.
Then you could see why she had talked about a lighted
plain.

Then came the year when she was missing. And then
came
the
last picture, from this year. In which she was not smiling. And her
clothes were different. You could
only see her top half, but she was
wearing one of the big sweaters.

I laid the books end to end, to
see all of them at once. Like a line
of time.

You could not get the thought
out of your head: what if you had
known her back then, what would it have been like? Maybe
you
could have seen
something of each other, she might have invited me
home, I might have met her parents, and when disaster
started to strike I could have helped her.

That is what I thought, that I could have helped her.
I, who had
never even been able to help
myself
.

I looked at the pictures. Eventually it seemed as though
you had
grown up
with her. As though you had not shot up feverishly only
after coming to Biehl's, but had
always been there and had grown
up with her, quietly and peacefully, so that now you
belonged
together.

Before this I had never looked much at photographs. You would
have thought that they would have
changed when you turned
upon them the light of awareness. That they would become

weaker
, like the fear. This was not the
case. Instead they be
came
deeper and deeper. I sat there and looked at them for
two days in a row. I would have
gone up there on the third day,
too, if it had not started to snow again, and we had been
sent out
for a run.

EIGHT

T
he next best thing—after apparatus work—for
strengthening the front was
athletics, especially the field events, al
though,
since these were outdoor sports, it was more difficult to
practice them in the winter.

The only exception was running. Klastersen had taught
the national juniors to take winter training runs across the frozen marshes and
lakes, and had achieved fine results. It was one of his ground
rules: running was something that
could be done in all weather.

So all year round you went for training runs, although
he had a marked preference for snow. Then it was a pretty safe bet that you
would have to run around the
grounds, at least for the first half hour.

Klastersen himself ran at the head. This meant that if
you did not keep up with the
leaders,
or if you
actually let yourself fall behind,
then suddenly you found yourself on your own.

She was standing
beside a tree, with her back turned. I saw the
black coat. The falling snow formed a wall behind
her. She broke
away
from the tree, stepped through the wall, and was gone. I turned off the path
and came down to the lake. There was one

spot
on it that always took a lot longer to freeze over. A
heron was standing there, and there were swans, too. They seemed not to feel
the
cold,
they were flapping
about as though someone had passed
that way.

I thought I had lost her, or maybe it had not been
her. The snow
kept on forming chambers, you
ran through never-ending rows of
white rooms. I turned up toward the
hill with the statues—icy suits
of snow over
bronze-green skin. One of them broke loose and
moved off. I started walking. We came down to a place where there
had been roses in the summer. They had been
pruned and covered
with fir branches,
she had helped with that, I had seen her there
not long after I had written the letter. Now everything was covered
with snow; just four mounds forming one long, white
trench.

She broke into a run, but did not get far. The snow was
deep
and she was
only wearing thin shoes. She kind of crumpled and
hunkered down. I came up behind
her. She half turned her face
toward me.

"Go
away," she said, "get lost!"

She
must have shouted, but the snow absorbed the sound. I had
seen half of her face. There was hate in it.

I stayed put, I had nothing to lose. I had nothing to put
around
her, I had
been running in just a sweatshirt. I understood none of
this.

She got up and started walking. I followed. We came down
to
the lake, the snow
and the water ran into each other, no sign of
any downward movement, just a gray wave between heaven and
earth. You were enclosed, like in a cell or a
white hospital. And yet
you were
free, on all sides you were hidden from view.

She
did not turn her
head,
I had to lean toward her to
catch the
words.

"Just
go," she said, "go to hell."

"I've
been transferred," I said, "it's a punishment, they've had it
ratified by a judge, there's nothing to be
done."

She turned her face toward
me,
the skin was white, transparent.
She looked
at me as though she was searching for something. Then
she touched my arm.

"It's them
who are having you transferred?"

She kept her eyes
fixed on me, it was almost overwhelming.

"I was waiting for
you," she said. "I have the timetable, I knew
you would come."

We
walked along side by
side,
we had run out of options.
But it
did not matter. She stumbled, I took
her arm. We were in a desolate
forest,
I had protected her,
I
had wrapped extra blankets
around
her. It was getting darker, we were heading into the darkness, to
ward destruction, but it did not matter.

You
spend your whole life believing that you will always be on the outside or on
the borderline. You struggle and struggle, and yet
it all seems to be in vain. And then, suddenly, you are allowed inside
and lifted up into the light.

She looked at me, there was snow on her eyelashes and
flakes of ice—tears, she was crying, and not out of aversion, and not because
I had hit her.
For
the first time in my life.

"I thought
you wanted to leave," she said.

I wanted to ask for permission to kiss her, but I could
not speak,
I tried
but I could not. And yet maybe I did say it, because it hap
pened. Her lips were chapped with
the cold.

It was everything, that kiss was
everything. Everything you had
dreamed of but never
attained,
and everything
that, now, would
never
come to pass, because I was going away and was lost. All of
that was in it.

It got rid of time. I knew I would remember it forever
and ever
and that
they could not take it away from me, not ever—
come
what
may. And so
that moment became one of utter fearlessness.

A house came at us out of the darkness. That is how it seemed,
even though it was we who were
moving. It was one of the storehouses. It was locked, but only by a padlock
with a shackle. You
loosen
the nut and the shackle pin slips down.

There had been a bit about the
storehouses in Biehl's memoirs
When the school, achieving a significant goal, had added school-
leaving certificate classes to
the curriculum, it had been necessary