Borderliners (31 page)

I stretched a hand across the
table and stroked his hair. He let
me do it. Beneath my hand it grew warm and quite smooth.
Soon
he was
sleeping. Katarina was watching me.

I looked around.

"Humlum,"
I said.

She nodded, as if
she had known all along.

" 'Save
yourself,' " I said,
"that was the last thing he said. He
knew we couldn't both get away. It would have been like
too much
contamination
for the school to export at one time. He stood there
with the rope in his hands. Then
he cocked his head and listened
for the train. His sight wasn't so good. In the winter, in
the toilets,
he had
told me that when he was nine years old he had been with
a foster family who lived on
Reunion Square. They used to wake
him at half-past three in the morning and send
him
across to N. L.
Dehn's Institutional Laundry, where everybody pretended he
was
fourteen, because
then it wouldn't be child labor, and there he
wheeled the clothes from the dry-cleaning machine
to the woman
who did
the ironing. The man on the dry-cleaning machine used to
turn up drunk for work and one day
there was something to do
with a faucet and Humlum got sprayed in the eyes with cleaning
fluid, and then he'd been taken
away from that family. But from
then on he didn't see too well at all. Instead he located
the train by
its
sound, this time, too.

"
‘I’ll
stay
here,' I said, 'if you don't do it I'll stay.'

"He smiled,
he did not hear me,
already
he was in another world.

"He pushed off, pretty much in the normal way, with
the right
timing. But
when it came to the end of the swing he just hung there.
He stretched out this last moment
of his life so long that the return swing was delayed, but at last he began to
move, like a pendulum,
and then came the train."

Katarina did not
say a word, she just nodded.

I did not look up at Oscar, it
was not
necessary,
we both knew it had been the right
thing to do, laying it out for her.

August said something. Because of the fever it sounded as though
it came to us from a distant
room.

"Maybe a person can be born to the wrong
people," he said. "Maybe a person should have been put somewhere
else."

He said it, but we
had all thought it, all four of us, Oscar, too.

"Do you get
another crack at it?" he asked.

He asked in such a peaceful way. The way a child asks its
mother,
but more as
an equal. And that is how she answered him.

"Back then," she said, "with my mother and
father, I didn't be
lieve
it would ever stop hurting. That happiness would ever come again. But it's
better now and it is there, now and again, despite
everything. So in a way you
do."

"But what about
something you've done to someone?"

She did not
answer that,
Somewhere
in the darkness the dog barked.

"I'm scared of
dogs," he said.

I would have liked
to read to them.

They had not read to us at Crusty
House, or at Himmelbjerg
House—it was
considered soppy. But at the Christian Foundation home they did.

Once you had experienced it, it was impossible to
forget. In the
mornings
it had been the Thought for the Day, from the bottom
corner of the
Christian Daily;
in the evenings,
the Bible. Even so,
you had looked forward
to it. The matron, Sister Ragna, did the
reading. She read standing up, from the end of the dormitory. It
had made it easier to fall asleep. Entering the
night was always the hardest part. It is easier to keep things at bay when it
is light. When
it grows dark they come
pouring in.

I wanted to read to them. This was the most difficult
time of day
for
August. And there was no medicine to give him. I wanted to
ease his way into the darkness.

There was
'World of Nature,
but
that seemed out of the question.
And the
only thing that came to mind was the Bible. That was no
good,
it was too close to the sisters and to Biehl.

So I chose to say
whatever came into my head.

"We take a boat," I said, "big
enough to live on. We sail south
ward, where it's warmer. On a boat you can never be
expelled, you
always
have the right to stay where you are, and you're always together. In the
evenings we can sit and listen to the water. When
I'm twenty-one we'll adopt
you."

Maybe he wasn't awake. Maybe he was sleeping, which had
been
the idea. But
Katarina was listening to me.

As a rule, what you imagine is not like real life. As a
rule it is worse. This moment was just exactly as I had pictured it. I had
pictured how a family would sit
together. Just like this.

"I'm sorry if
I've hurt you two," she said.

She
was just to forget it, I said. Everything had turned out fine. But what about
her mother and father? I said.
And what about the
experiment?

"I suppose I thought I could get to meet them
again," she said.
"But it doesn't
work that way. That was just wishful thinking. But
the experiment is coming to an end, anyway.
At least
the first
phase."

I did not want to get too close, by asking what she meant.
But
even though the
question went unasked, she understood it. The way
things were between us now, it
was not necessary to say all that
much.

"Time is no law of nature," she said. "It
is a plan. When you
look
at it with awareness, or start to touch it, then it starts to
disintegrate. That is the conclusion of the first phase
of the exper
iment. This plan is not Biehl's.
It's too big, too complete for that.
The
second phase will be to investigate what lies behind time. We have seen it
start to fall apart. The next thing is to understand what
lies behind it."

You could see by looking
at her. She had to have an answer. It was
a
need about which she, personally, could do nothing. There was
something I wanted to say to her, but it was
impossible.

August was shaking badly. She took off her
sweater and put it
around
him.

"If you come over here it'll
be easier for us to keep warm," she
said.

She put her arm around August and I leaned against her.
And
then I said it
anyway, the words just came
out,
there was nothing
to be done about it. I told her I
loved her. It was the first time I
had ever got my tongue around the words.

I
saw that they also applied to August. That you could not say
something like that to the woman without
its
applying to the child
as well.

She did not reply. Nor was it necessary. I had given,
without
needing something in return.

All three of us must have slept. When he spoke, it still seemed to
be in his sleep.

"If there is a second
time," he said, "then they ought to suffer
more. It was over too soon."

All the time we
had known that he was lost.

FIFTEEN

I
t was Katarina who discovered it. She laid a hand
on my arm.

"He's
gone," she said.

It was light outside, because the
fog had lifted, and because of
the stars and the snow. We followed his tracks. He had been bleed
ing as he
went,
at one spot we found the bandage.

All the lights in the school were out, the building was
in darkness,
the
windows were black. Just as it had looked to me, those nights
when I had not slept. He had
crossed the south playground, keeping
close to the wall. He had got in by smashing a pane in
the door. I had always thought it was careless to have a latch fixed next to a
pane of glass.

We ascended to the fifth floor. He had left the door
open and the
light burning in the clinic,
but had drawn the curtains. They were blackout curtains. Certain of the
tests—Raven's progressive ma
trices, for
instance—involved slides.

To begin with,
there was silence. Then you heard them in the corridor.

First you
smelled Biehl's cigar. Then there was a brief pause, and
then Biehl himself came in. He was looking for
something,
his head
was
right down at floor level. You had never supposed that he could bow so deeply,
you had only ever seen him upright. He was in his
dressing gown, and had his right arm twisted up
his back. The last
part of him to come
through the door was his hand. Behind him
came August. He had hold of three of Biehl's fingers, all of them
broken.

Behind August came Biehl's wife, Astrid, in her
nightgown. She had always looked like a Norse goddess—willowy, ash-blond, and
stately, even now.

The fever lay like a membrane over August's eyes. You
could see
how
terrified he was. Like a little child.
And yet quite
determined.
He,
too, had now turned upon the pain.
In order to erase it.

"I'm glad you
came," he said.

He said it without recognizing us. We were standing ten
feet away
from him.
He could no longer see as far as us.

He let Biehl lift
his head a fraction.

"My mom and
dad are here," he said.
"To collect me."

Biehl had not
looked at us. His awareness was on August.

"You know perfectly well what has happened to your
mother
and
father," he said.

No visible movement, just the spongy crack as one of his
fingers
snapped in a
fresh place. He fell to his knees.

You could not tell
by looking at August.

His left hand was sort of hidden. I shifted position
slightly, to get
a look at
it,
the movement must have caught his eye because he
brought it into the open. In it was Biehl's
cigar, which was lit.
That,
and
a half-gallon bottle of gasoline—he
must have picked it up
in the storehouse. In the bottle was a cork, between the cork and the
glass he had jammed a strip off his bandage.

"It's
like a wick," he said. "If I put the cigar to it and smash the
bottle, we all go sky-high."

Astrid Biehl was looking at my bare
feet,
I'd taken off my socks.

"I hurt myself," I said, "I
couldn't get my foot into my shoe. It
won't happen again."