Borderliners (40 page)

Read Borderliners Online

Authors: Peter Høeg

Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Dystopian

BOOK: Borderliners
12.09Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

what
is happening now, regardless of the passage of time. And
fur
thest back, the
mind remembers a timeless plain.

If you grow up in a world that permits and rewards only
one
form of memory,
then force is being used against your nature. Then
you are imperceptibly nudged out
toward the edge of the abyss.

Time is made up of many different states of consciousness, of sym
bols from human life.

This means that time is also a sphere of language, like a
land
scape, the
place you make for when you try to comprehend, in
particular, those elements in the world concerned with
its change.

Like all linguistic landscapes, time is not just a matter
of words
or linguistic significance. It
is also colors, tones, rhythms, touch,
tension,
relaxation, and scent.

In its simplest form, it is the
indescribable combination of rec
ognition
and surprise that arises when the mind encounters the
movement of the world. It is the acknowledgment of the fact that,
in every change, there is something never before
seen, something
unique and
irreversible, and something that always remains the
same.

Time refuses to be simplified and reduced. You cannot say that it
is found only in the mind or only
in the universe, that it runs only
in one
direction,
or in every
one imaginable. That it exists only in
biological substructure, or is only a social convention.
That it is
only
individual or only collective, only cyclic, only linear, relative, absolute,
determined, universal or only local, only indeterminate, illusory, totally
true, immeasurable, measurable, explicable, or un
approachable. It is all of these things.

You see, for you
yourself life is in fact irrevocable. When your
problems were so great that they piled up until finally you could

only
see yourself—or not even that—then life ran away from
you,
through your
fingers, like sand.

But if you stand back from yourself, for example, because
the
child helped
you, then you see the repetition: then you begin to see
that you are only one transitory link in chains of
all-powerful circuits; that you were not, after all, important, not because you
were
worthless—you were not; even though
you were small, you were
important—but
because the great repetitions are so much bigger
and more important.

If your mind senses only itself, then it sees only the
irrevocable time. But if it sees the family and heredity and the children and
the
births and being
with others, then it sees the repetitions, then time is not so much an
hourglass—its sand slipping away and running
out—as a stretch, a plain, a continent you can
journey across.

I have woken in the night, the child has kicked off her quilt,
I
do
not know whether she has been too warm or has been afraid of
being hemmed in. I have laid the
quilt across her legs alone, that
way at
least she will not be cold and if she becomes desperate she
can free herself in a second. Then I have not been
able to get back to sleep, I have sat in the dark and looked at them both, the
child and the woman. And the feeling has become too much. It is not
sorrow or joy, it is the weight and the pressure of
having been
brought into their lives,
and of knowing that if you were ever to be
separated from them,
it
would mean your
obliteration.

Then I have prayed. Not to anyone,
God and Jesus will always
be too close to Biehl, but out into the universe, to that place where
the grand plans are formed,
including those that lay behind and
above Biehl's and our time there. I have prayed for our
survival.
Or
at any rate
for that of the child and the woman.

I believe that Biehl's Academy was the last possible point in three
hundred years of scientific development. At that place only linear time was
permitted, all life and teaching at the school was arranged

in
accordance with this—the school buildings, environment, teachers,
pupils, kitchens, plants, equipment, and everyday life were a
mobile machine, a symbol of
linear time.

We stood on the edge, we had reached the limit. For how far you
could, with the instrument of
time, push human nature.

And then it was
bound to go wrong.

EIGHT

F
rom the confrontation they drove me back to
Lars Olsen Memorial. I stayed
there for fourteen days, but not in
isolation. On the fifteenth day my guardian from the
Children's
Panel
came to see me.

She told me that the school and
the police had wanted to hold a judicial inquiry into possible grounds of
complicity in a violent act and driving one or possibly more schoolmates to
suicide. They had
also unearthed the bit
about Humlum. She and the child welfare
people
had opposed them, they had pointed out my age—paragraph
15 of the penal code for 1930. Regardless of the
inquiry's outcome
I would have wound
up under the Department of Health and Wel
fare, this she had made them aware of.

We were alone while we talked, she
had sent the duty officer
away, she had never been afraid of me. She looked
tired,
she was
guardian to
280 children, this she had told me.

She had saved the worst till
last, not until she was at the door
did she bring herself to say it.

"You're going
to
Sandbjerggård
," she said.

"What about
Katarina?"

At first she did
not understand.

"The girl?
We got her away from them, too.
Even though she is
over fifteen.
'Charge
conditionally withdrawn.'
Administration of
Justice Act, paragraphs 723 and
723a."

The state reform school of Sandbjerggård, primarily for mildly re
tarded and backward adolescents, was situated near
Ravnsborg. August had been there for a short time before coming to Biehl's.
Those who had been given up on, or who were too
young to be
put in a proper
prison,
or in the unit for the exceptionally dangerous
and
criminally insane at the State Hospital in Nykøbing,
Zealand,
were sent there. The home had sixty residents and
the same level
of security as
Herstedvester Prison—guards, towers, twenty-foot-
high double fence with
barbed wire on top. Even so, people fre
quently
ran away, one or two at a time—although never planned, like at Himmelbjerg
House.
Unfocused.
They stayed out for two
days at the most. The second time it happened while
I was there
they had committed
several rapes. A demonstration was staged out
side the gate by people from the area, they carried shotguns and
pickaxes.
We hid in the grass and watched them, they had written
placards,
one
of them said they should bring
back the death penalty.
Workshop training was given in heavy industrial
work, particu
larly metalwork. No one really
took it seriously, not even the teach
ers,
no one expected people to manage in any reasonable manner
on the
outside. Over half were receiving mandatory psychiatric
treatment, many were checked up on by Child Welfare and the vice
squad on a weekly basis.

In the long run, you can never be any better than your surroundings.
When you are in the company of people who look down
upon
themselves as though they are animals,
you, too, become like an
animal.
Or worse, because animals do not despise themselves.

We cut out steel plates. They came already primed, five feet by three and
an inch thick. We cut them with a big cutting blade fitted
to the grinder, so the safety
cover cannot be used, a shower of

sparks
flies back over your arms. One day I had taken my gloves
off and rolled up the sleeves of
my coverall and started cutting with
my arms
bare
. The iron filings
burned a black worm up to the
elbow, the burned flesh stank. At first I did not feel anything, I had
not known what I was doing,
another
person inside me had taken
over. To make me sense the
numbness that had settled over me.

That evening I did not go into the television room, I sat
out in
the toilets
and wrote a letter to my guardian, saying that I needed to see her, and would
she come as soon as it was convenient.

She came the next week. There
were no female staff
at
Sandbjerggård
, when she walked across the
courtyard people hung out of the
windows and opened their pants and shouted at her.

There was a
visiting room, she sent the officer out.

"I want to be
adopted," I said.

First she went
absolutely quiet.

"You're fourteen
years old," she said.

If orphans were not adopted as babies, because they were too ugly,
or gave the impression of being
brain-damaged, or for other rea
sons, then no more was ever said to them about adoption. And you
never brought up the subject
yourself.

I suppose, actually, you were afraid of the family. You
knew you were unfit.

But now I had met August and Katarina. I would never have
been
able to explain
it to Johanna Buhl. But if you have once sensed that
someone cares for you,
then
you will never sink again.

"It's what I
want," I said, "
what
are the
conditions?"

"It has to go through the National Council
for the Unmarried
Mother
and Her Child," she said, "they have an adoptions office
in Copenhagen. According to
recommendations from the select
committee for the Department of Health and Welfare, and
that of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child, it
has been the practice to
investigate the child's situation, and that of

the
natural parents and the prospective adoptive parents.
In a case
such as yours, where it will be
said that there may be some doubt as to the state of the child's mental health,
you will have to be
examined by a
specialist, just as it will be necessary to obtain a statement from the
Institute for Genetic Studies, as to whether you
have a predisposition toward any hereditary illnesses, it's all there
in official report number 262 from 1960. And then
comes
the prob
lem
of finding someone who will take you. The National Council
for the Unmarried Mother holds weekly conferences,
which are at
tended by a psychiatrist,
a psychologist, a pediatrician, a lawyer,
and a social worker.
Statements will also be obtained from those
institutions
in which you have been placed. The statement from
your last place, Biehl's Academy, will be
absolutely crucial. So per
haps you
should just forget the whole thing."

You could not make outside calls from
Sandbjerggård
. Some of the
inmates had abused and tormented little girls, and after
they had
been taken
into custody, they had continued to call the girls at
home. After that, all the telephones were
disconnected, now you
could only make calls
from a locked booth while an officer listened
in.

I called Biehl's Academy, the secretary answered the
telephone,
when I
gave my name she went very quiet.

I
apologized for telephoning, but there were some things which
had been left behind in my room and which I missed
very much.
She said she would forward them. Yes, I said, but there was
also something concerning what had happened that I would like to say,
would it be possible for me to speak to someone in
authority?

It was Fredhøj who came. He parked his Rover in the courtyard, no one
shouted at him.

He was very curt in the visiting
room. As far as he was concerned
I had ceased to exist.

While I was in isolation
my own clothes had been returned to

Other books

Mistress of Justice by Jeffery Deaver
The Diamond Heartstone by Leila Brown
Space Invaders by Amber Kell
The Fall of the Stone City by Kadare, Ismail
Seduced by Chocolate by Celia Kyle, Lizzie Lynn Lee
His Majesty's Ship by Alaric Bond
Three Summers by Judith Clarke