Borderliners (24 page)

to
move some of the school's collections—which were valuable
but
stored away—out
of the main building. In time, it was hoped, they
would form the nucleus of a museum to the Grundtvigian
educa
tional tradition.

There was no light. There were boxes and gardening tools
on the floor; along the walls—glass-fronted cabinets. Darkness was falling
outside, but behind the glass I saw Magdeburg hemispheres, glass
retorts, and a Van de Graaff generator. Along with a
large number
of stuffed birds, and a civet
caught in the coils of a cobra.

The
snake was bigger than the civet, it had a good grip and was starting to
squeeze. At the same time it had stretched its jaw wide
and exposed its poisonous fangs. The animals were frozen in the
moment just before the strike.

I knew that the civet would win. It was not something I
wanted
to
happen,
it was something I knew would happen. It had most to lose, its life was on the
line—and maybe the lives of others, whom
it
was protecting from the snake—and it was the
smaller,
and it had its back to the wall. It was a little, restless, wild animal and
the snake was bigger, cold, and steady. Even so,
it did not stand a
chance.

We sat down on a
couple of boxes.

"What are we
going to do?" she said.

A moment before, you could not have imagined that
there was
anything
you could do. Now things had changed, now we would
have to leave the school. That was
easily
arranged,
I wanted to
explain it to her. There had been people who had run
away from
Himmelbjerg House, and who had
stayed out, on the loose, for up
to two weeks and more. And here the
situation was
different,
to
gether we could stay out forever.

These were the words I wanted to say. Instead I said
something
else.

"August,"
I said.

Never, ever, can you abandon a
child without tumbling into per
dition
yourself. It is a rule against which one personally can do
nothing.

She had known this, before I said it
she had known. It had never

been
just us two, never just Katarina and me. There had
always
been three of
us, even before he came and I saw him for the first
time.

I told her about the engineering tunnels and about his
file. I did
not say much, nor was it
necessary. She sat on the box, leaning
forward,
and listened to me, even to my pauses. She heard every
thing, even the things I could not say.

We
sat there and I knew that this was how it felt to be totally
accepted. You sit close to another person and are
understood, ev
erything is understood
and nothing is judged and you are in
dispensable.

And
we sat on, saying nothing. I tried to find a solution, to find
out how to get August out, so that we could be
together, all three
of us. The locks
were there, before my eyes—first those between
him and us—on the main door and the doors to the corridor and
the sickroom, and the lock of the closet where
they kept his outdoor
clothes and shoes at night. And then, once we had
got to him, the locks between us and freedom—on the car we would have to use,
and in front of the money you had to have.
And beyond them, all
the locks
in the world, a never-ending host.
No one could open that
many.
It would be an overwhelming achievement, one that would never come to an end,
no matter how much you struggled and did
your best.

It became obvious
that we were lost, and then came the despair.

Although only for August, not for
Katarina, and definitely not
for me.
I had been given everything and no one could ever take that
away from me. For someone who
has been given everything you
cannot feel
despair.

I was sure that Katarina had been thinking the same.
That, in
that moment, we were
thinking the same thought, without having to discuss it.
I was convinced of that.

Then she stood up and went over
to the window, and just by the
way she walked I could see that I had been wrong.

"If there were no clocks in the school,"
she said, "what would
you know about time?"

Her voice had
changed, she was in another world, she was an-

other
person. Inside her, at the same time, there was another
person—but a different person—who
had now taken over.

It was like August, and yet not the same. August was
either the
one
person or the other, there was no connection. The August who
stood with his back to the wall
and went for your fingers was out
of
control.

With
Katarina it was different. The two people were connected,
they were both there at the same time, but this
one, the one that
had now taken over,
I would never understand.

I could have gone on sitting with her forever. That is how it was,
and that is how it will be for
the rest of my life.
If the child, August,
had also been there, I could have sat there with the
woman always.

I never wanted anything else. Nor have I, since then.
Than to be
allowed inside, and
then to sit quietly with the woman and the
child.
That would have been enough.

But now I saw that it was
different for Katarina. And that she,
and maybe every person, was like row upon row of white rooms.
You can go together through some of them,
but they have no end,
and you cannot
accompany anyone through them all.

I would never have gotten her to come with me. Not even if we
could have brought August. The
other part of her, some of the other people inside her, wanted something more.
They wanted an answer.

In
the laboratory she had asked a question: What was time, what was the plan
behind the school?—and as yet the question had not
been answered.

It is not easy to understand. That it can be so important
for
someone to ask a question and receive
an answer; that it is more
important than
anything else.
Maybe even more important than
love.

There is no way you can understand
it. You have to give in
and say: That is how it is.
That they need to know.
No matter
what.

She asked again.

"What would
you know about time if there were no clocks?"

I suppose you'd still be aware of it, I said, and we'd
better be
getting
back soon. It was almost dark, I had seen Klastersen outside,
he must have realized that I was missing,
and made one more
circuit.

I thought of her breathing on the telephone, and
breathing in
general.

"You breathe," I said, "and there's your
heartbeat, it's like a
clock. The sun and the moon rise and set."

"Those are rhythms," she said, "there's some
kind of order,
there's
no confusion. But it isn't total regularity."

I had no answer to that. Klastersen had
run off into the darkness.

"Tell
me again, about the letters," she said.
"The bit
about the
director of education."

She had moved up close to me, I
took my time telling her. I could
no
longer see her face.

She took my arm.

"I brought
you a watch," she said.

She put it on my
wrist. Where had she got that?

"Now,
listen," she said.

And then she
explained something to me.

A
t
the beginning of January 1993, I
hiked all
over
Copenhagen looking for a particular clock.

By then I had been writing the account here presented for
over a
year, and I
had kept putting off this one task: after twenty years,
once more having to enter a
school.

It was cold and very dark. It was
daytime, but still murky enough
for
night.

I
started at random with Øster Farimags Street School, maybe because from the
hill in the grounds around Biehl's you could al
ways see the tower of the church next to it.

The school office was on a mezzanine floor. I stood for a
long
while in front
of the secretaries,
then
I pulled myself together.
"Might I be allowed to see
your school bell?" I said. "I'm writing
a book."

It was high up, encapsulated in Plexiglas and sporting
red digital
figures. They told me that it
had been installed before their time—
no one
could remember when—and kept perfect time. Very occa
sionally a man came to give it
a
once-over.

A teacher came by while I was standing
there. Five years earlier

he
had been working at Frederiksunds Road School, he
thought
they had an
old bell there.

So I cycled out to Frederiksunds Road. They had the same
Plex
iglas box and
digital display. But they gave me the telephone num
ber of the school engineer.

I got to speak to him a few days later. He was employed
by the
district
engineer's office, with responsibility for timekeeping in
many of the schools in Copenhagen District. He told me
that, over
the past twenty years, a private
company, Danish Time Manage
ment
Ltd., had been given the job of replacing most of the old bells
with modern quartz mechanisms. Which were very
accurate, and
required hardly any
adjusting.
And so, to all intents and purposes,
ran all
by
themselves
.
Without any human
intervention.

He did however know of two old-style mechanisms. Hellig
Kors
School and
Prinsesse Charlotte Street School still had the old-style
bells.
The
kind that had been in use in the sixties and seventies.
But
which time had made obsolete.

I biked to Hellig Kors School, and there I came very
close. The clock was in the office. It was the right casing, but there were too
many wires. They
told me that the works had been replaced, some
years earlier, by an electronic mechanism.

I found it at
Prinsesse Charlotte Street School.

The deputy headmaster came with me. I felt very small. To
me he seemed a generation older. Later on, it dawned on me that he and I must
have been just about the same age.

The clock was high
up. He held the ladder for me.

This was the clock I had been searching for. The clock I
had seen
and touched
just once, for an instant, one morning twenty-two
years before.
A
hand-wound Burk pendulum clock.

I opened the glass and took a look at the works. I meant
to take a few notes, but there was no need. It was just as I remembered.

The deputy head, the engineer, the secretaries in the office, the
teacher who had worked at
Frederiksunds Road School—all of
them have forgotten me within a very short time of
having met me.