Borderliners (29 page)

remove
the screws that would have closed the circuit, here, ten
sec
onds later.

Then the door was unlocked and in came Fredhøj. He looked
down the room. Then he went over
to the window and looked out.
Then he walked back to the door.

He did not look
up, he did not see me.

It was not luck. It was because he would never have
dreamed of
it, because the thought never
occurred to him.

He could not. Well, he had never looked upward for
children.
They had
always been beneath him. Down in the class, or down in the playground, or down
in the hall, or down in the church, always
down. He could no longer lift his face toward the ceiling
and the
light. Not to
catch sight of a child.

I saw him from above.
As I had never
before seen a teacher.
I saw his dandruff.
On his
scalp and on his jacket.

He went out and
locked the door behind him.

I moved the screws. For the rest of the day there were ten
more.
Ten minutes had
now disappeared from the school day and from
the universe, as though they had never been. Staying up there was
not easy, but I forced myself. There was no
strength left, though,
for climbing down once it was done. I fell the
last part of the way
and could not get up
right away. Then Oscar Humlum sat down
beside
me.

I had not seen
him, but he must have been there all the time.

"We're going
home soon," I said.

He made me aware of my foot. It had swollen up
straight away.
There was no way of getting
it into the shoe, but I got the sock on.

I told him that I had better see
about getting home now, with
August and
Katarina, and wouldn't he like to come, too, how about
it?

He shook his head. Maybe it was
that apprenticeship on the
Swedish ferries,
maybe it was something else. He started to leave.

I called after him,
he stopped and turned.

"There's
something you should know," I said. "Since we met,

ever
since that first time when we each sat on a toilet, up
against
the
radiator, ever since then I have never been completely alone,
even after you left me. Before
that there had never really been anything in my life. But once someone has
stood under the cold shower
just so that
you can stay under the warm one, then you can never
really be totally alone again."

I let myself out into the corridor and was sure that disaster had
struck.

The
door of the office was flung open and the secretary came
running out. I knew that now I would have to take
her into the
clock room and get her to keep absolutely quiet for a
while,
how
ever that was to
be done. That was as far as I got in my thinking.

She did not look at me at all.
She cut across the corridor and ran
out onto the south
staircase,
you could hear her clattering down it.

Katarina walked out
of the office behind her.

We
stood there, face-to-face, in the corridor—the worst of all
possible places—caught in a little eddy in the
stream of time.

"I told her a car had been smashed," she said,
"one that looked
like
hers. I said a Taunus had reversed into it, that I had recognized
the director of education,
then
he had driven off. I said the Mascot
looked like a concertina, and
didn't she want to go down and
check."

She had a big manila folder under her arm. There
were some
dates
marked on the outside. The way she was holding the folder I could not see them,
but I knew it would have to do with November
and December 1969.

"Once you
start lying," she said, "it just gets easier and easier."

August had woken up a bit. When we came in he put his finger to
his lips.
The loudspeaker.

Very softly I went up to it. It
was giving off sounds, a crackling
that rose and fell, there was no way of telling whether
they were

looking
for us, or what was the matter—only that something
was
going on.

When I came back, Katarina was standing looking at the
filing
cabinet.

"Can it be
opened?" she said.

My first reaction
was to deny this, but I opened it anyway.

She found our
files. Then she counted the others.

"Sixty,"
she said. "They're testing sixty pupils.
What for?"

August said,
"I'm cold."

We shared out what clothes we had. Katarina gave him boots and tights,
which left her in a dress and sweater and with bare legs. She
got my shoes, which I could not use anyway because of
my foot,
which had got bigger. August put
on his undershirt and I gave him
my
sweater.

Plaintive voices were now
ascending to us from the depths. Ka
tarina went over to the window. "Klastersen has had
our class in the main hall," she said.

The main hall was used for ball games. A different time applied
there. To get the full physical benefit of the PE
classes, the breaks on either side were suspended, to allow for showers and
changing.
So there was no bell in the main
hall. Klastersen controlled the
periods
with a stopwatch. The showers and changing rooms were
in the main building, which was locked during
classes, to prevent
strangers from
the outside from getting in and committing acts of
vandalism or theft. What had happened now was that
Klastersen
had sent the pupils over to shower and they had found the
main building locked, because the bell had not rung as it should, and so
the teacher on playground duty had not unlocked the
door. Now they were hanging about in the snow, in shorts and sneakers.

Then
Biehl spoke over the loudspeaker.

"Andersen," he said, "report to the
office."

It was the first time ever that
anyone had been summoned over
the
loudspeaker.

"He's off
duty," said Katarina, "Andersen's off duty."

She
did not have her timetable with her, but still she knew
,
she must have memorized it.

"They want him
to open the door to the bell," I said.

"Why don't
they do it themselves?"

"They can't," I said. "I snapped off the
key, the end of the
key's
stuck in the lock."

At that moment the
bell rang.

Just as it sounded, there was a pause. Then silence. It was almost
absolute.

It should not have been there, there should have been
voices and
people
in the corridor, but instead the school now seemed dead. I
could tell from the others' faces
that they did not understand it.

"It's the teachers," I said, "they're
confused. The bell's ten
minutes late in
going off. They don't know whether it's rung for a
class or a break, and no one's had recess. Right now they don't
know what they're supposed to do. It will only
take a moment,
then
people will come out into the corridors."

"There's
something else, too," said August.

He had gotten to
his feet, the sweater came down to his knees.

"They don't dare let people downstairs. They know
the kind of
racket there is in the
playground. During periods it's like you're
dead, but the playground's
jumping.
Haven't you
noticed the way
the teacher on playground duty keeps to the edge? It
only works at
all because they have the
bell. It's like a knife, the only thing that
can cut through. Without it
they would never get people back up.
Now
they don't know whether it's working. They don't dare send
people down."

He was not steady on his feet,
especially not in Katarina's boots. But I had noticed before that once he got
started—on drawing or
something—he
did not stop until he ran up against something solid.

"Right now they're sitting
at their desks, not letting on. But ev
eryone
knows there's something wrong, the pressure in the class
room is rising and rising. Then you get an idea. You remember that
there's
only one teacher, but there are twenty of you, no one stands
a chance against twenty, not even with the lower
grades, if they set
their minds to it.
So you look around and then your imagination
lends a hand. Everyone has a pencil sharpener—it's compulsory,
isn't it—so you work the blade free, it may be small
but it's like a
razor blade, then you
get up and walk over to the teacher's desk,
and it's over, a moment more and he's lying there and then you pelt
out into freedom
..."

"Yeah," said Katarina, "with straps on
your arms and legs, two
drips, and a rubber tube up your nose."

He
had been far away, but he came down like a shot and was at her side in a single
movement.

"So what was
that about your father and mother, girl?" he said.

I had managed to get between
them. His eyes were fixed on me.
He, who rarely looked at
anyone
.

Under his skin
another person had taken over, danger threatened.

Even so, I could not strike—I could not strike a child,
come
what
may.

I
stuck my left hand out toward him, with the fingers that were
taped together. I did not try to protect myself.

"Why don't
you just break them in another place," I said.

He
checked himself and then seized up. He did not look at the
hand.

"It
wasn't me," he said. "What're we waiting for, what happens
next?"

At that moment Biehl's voice came over the loudspeaker
once
again.

"The time is
now 1:00 p.m.," he said. "All classes will go to the
playground immediately. There
will be recess until 1:20 p.m."
Katarina stood there, listening, leaning toward the sound.

"He's
scared," she said.

She had spoken right beside the
loudspeaker,
I put a hand over her mouth.

The voice came again, very clear, as though he was right
beside
us.

"Will all teachers, apart from those on playground
duty, please
report
to the staff room
immediately.
"

Katarina removed
my hand.

"It was something you said," she said.
" 'Time
is something you
have to hold on to.' It's the pauses they're
scared of."

We were still standing right beside the loudspeakers, we
should
not have
spoken.

"He's not scared," I said. "He's the one
who talked about the eloquent pauses."

"We're not talking about them. This is different.
These pauses
are out
of control. Time and planning are falling apart."

Then Biehl's voice came again, but he did not get the
chance to
finish.

"To all classes.
Anyone having seen, or seeing,
Peter from Pri
mary
Seven, August Joon—"

He got no further. August struck just once, but the blow
went through the fabric and crushed the grille behind. Then he grabbed
the casing and butted
it—shattering the membrane and pulling the loudspeaker loose. Then I got to him
and led him away. He was
bleeding, the loudspeaker dangled by its wires, we had been cut off.

Now we could hear the building. Distant voices, stairs vibrating.
We stood absolutely still,
listening to this. We looked at Katarina.

Up until this point it had been her plan. This was as far
as we
had gotten in
the storehouse.

"Now
what?" said
August.

Of course, in a
way, we had been depending on her.

She did not answer him. She just
stood there, straight-backed,
looking at us. And then I realized that she had no answer.