Nothing (10 page)

It was Sofie who instructed us. We could mention the meaning and nothing else, so that was what we did.

“We’ve found the meaning!”

And that was what we told the teachers and the parents and the police and everyone else who kept on asking why.

And it was what we told the big press when they showed up.

The local newspapers came first. Then the popular dailies. Then the press from the capital and all the various regionals. Finally came the gossip weeklies and the local TV channel.

They were divided.

The first lot agreed with
Tæring Tuesday
: We were a bunch of rabble-rousers, way out of hand, who ought to be in reform school. The second lot, much to our astonishment, started going on about art and the meaning of life, while the last lot were mostly inclined toward the first. It wasn’t long before the discussion for and against gathered amazing speed.

For! Against! For × Against!

We were stunned by it all, by the rage and the fury in their words, both for and against, and the fact that people from all over the country, but especially from the capital — even though they’d never before shown any sort of interest in Tæring and its environs — suddenly were arriving here in droves. One thing was certain: All the rage and the fury and the words for and against meant that the heap of meaning at once grew irresistibly more meaningful. But more important was that with all the press coverage and all these art critics showing up, and a whole load of other grand people, as well as a few ordinary ones, the police were forced to open up the sawmill and allow access on a daily basis between noon and four o’clock.

Now there was nothing to stop Pierre Anthon coming to see the heap of meaning.

What we hadn’t bargained on was that Pierre Anthon wouldn’t.

“Nothing matters, and nothing’s worth caring about. And that includes your pile of junk,” was all he had to say.

And that was all he was saying, no matter what we did. There was just no reasoning. Whether we tried coaxing or threatening, the answer was one and the same: No!

That disappointed us a lot.

In fact, it disappointed us so much that we almost lost heart, because it rendered everything — Oscarlittle and the innocence and Cinderella and Jon-Johan’s finger and little Emil and the Dannebrog and Ursula-Marie’s blue hair and everything else in the heap of meaning — completely meaningless. And it didn’t help in the slightest that more and more people were beginning to think that the heap was indeed meaningful, or that we no longer were frowned on so much, either by our parents, our teachers, or the police.

We tried and tried again.

One at a time, in groups, and the whole class
at once (apart from Holy Karl, who had been sentenced to do voluntary work for the church and was grounded four weeks longer than the rest of us). There was nothing we could do. It didn’t even help when first the Swedish, then the Norwegian, then the rest of the Scandinavian and most of the European, and then the American and then at last what looked like the entire world press descended on Tæring and turned us all into something.

And something was the same as someone.

Regardless of what Pierre Anthon said!

————

It had been exciting when
Tæring Tuesday
wrote the story about us. It had been fantastic when the national dailies showed up and started quarreling about the heap of meaning. But it was quite beyond belief, and so very, very meaningful indeed, when the press suddenly began descending on Tæring from all corners of the world. Normally things were slow in Tæring in
January. This year, January couldn’t last long enough.

January.

January.

January.

January.

And January ran into February and the Shrovetide festival too, and when we got round to March 1 it was still January.

We were photographed head-on, from behind, and from all sides, from above and below, and from all angles. The photographers chased us around to get the best smile, the most intelligent wrinkle of the brow, the most telling gesture. We were inundated with journalists ringing our doorbells, and TV stations from all kinds of countries setting their cameras up outside Tæring School and filming us whenever we arrived or left. Even Jon-Johan was pleased and held up his stumpy bandage for all the photographers to see, so the missing index finger could be immortalized both here and there.

But above all the journalists and photo-graphers were assailing the disused sawmill in order to find their own individual angles on the phenomenon.

The heap of meaning was soon renowned.

————

Everyone was impressed.

Everyone except Pierre Anthon.

“It’s all been seen before!” Pierre Anthon hollered, a cloud of frosty white breath issuing from the mouth of his dark blue balaclava. “It’s news now, and the eyes of the world are on Tæring. In a month’s time Tæring will be forgotten and the world will be someplace else.” Pierre Anthon spat contemp-tuously at the sidewalk, but didn’t get anyone.

Neither with his spit nor his words.

“Oh, shut up!” Jon-Johan yelled back at him haughtily. “You’re just jealous, that’s all.”

“You’re just jealous! You’re just jealous!” the rest of us chanted in a triumphant echo.

We were famous, and nothing could bring us down.

Nothing could bring us down, because we were famous.

————

It was the day after the first British newspaper had shown up, and we weren’t bothered one way or the other if Pierre Anthon didn’t want to be part of the meaning and the renown. We couldn’t have cared less. Not even about him not wanting to come out to the old sawmill to see the heap of meaning.

Couldn’t, didn’t, wouldn’t care less.

And we couldn’t have cared less about those who were against us and the meaning of the heap of meaning, either in Tæring or in the press, or anywhere else in the country or even the world. For there were more and more who were for us. And so many people couldn’t possibly be wrong.

Many! More! The truth!

The truth was made no less true by our being invited to Atlanta to take part in a television show that could be seen by everyone in the USA and the rest of the world too.

Everyone in Tæring was involved in the discussion about whether or not we should be allowed to go to America. Those citizens of Tæring who were against the heap of meaning and our own newfound significance didn’t even need to consider. No way should we be allowed to travel abroad and make fools of ourselves — and Tæring, and them, too, for that matter — in front of the whole world. As if things weren’t bad enough already! The rest of the people in Tæring were proud of the invitation and of us and of the meaning, for Tæring had never before been accorded so much attention on any account, no matter what the context.

Those in favor of the meaning were in the majority.

Yet we still were banned from going.

The more people were in favor, the more reason there was to take extra good care of us and the heap of meaning. And whatever the people from the TV station said, no one could be sure what might happen to us over there on the other side of the Atlantic.

We were sad about that. But not that sad. People feeling they had to watch over us only added to our significance. So we thought.

Until we came by Tæringvej 25 again.

————

It was Monday morning, dark, cold, and windy, and not especially pleasant to be on the way to school if it hadn’t been for the meaning still over-shadowing math and Danish and German and history and biology and everything else that was tedious about Tæring. I was together with Ursula-Marie, Gerda, and lady
William, and as we leaned into the wind we were discussing whether or not we were significant enough for the hostess on the TV
show in America to come to Tæring, now that we wouldn’t be going to America to go on the show.

Lady William was quite certain.

“Bien sûr!”
he said, nodding his head. “
Bien sûr
, she’ll be here.”

I thought it was a sure thing too, but before we got to discussing where the best place in Tæring would be to record the show, and what we were going to wear, we were interrupted by Pierre Anthon.

“Ha!” he spluttered, easily making himself heard above the wind from up there on the branch of his tree. “As if not being allowed to go has anything to do with your safety! Ha, ha!” He laughed emphatically. “How much money do you think Tæring would get out of it if you went over there to visit those journalists and photographers instead of them coming here and staying at the inn and everywhere else where there’s a vacant room to let, and eating as well, and buying beer and chocolate and cigarettes, and having their
shoes mended and all that kind of stuff? Ha, ha! How dumb can you get?” Pierre Anthon swung his balaclava in the wind so it became part of his laughter.

“He who laughs last, laughs longest!” Ursula-Marie shouted. “Just you wait. If the meaning can’t go to the TV show, the TV show’s bound to come to the meaning!”

“True, indeed.” Pierre Anthon laughed. “He who laughs last, laughs longest!” And then he laughed so loud it sounded like a whole bunch of incisive arguments and conviction.

Ha, ha! Ho, ho! I’m right!

————

Whether Pierre Anthon knew what he was talking about or was just guessing, it turned out he was right.

We never did appear on television in front of the USA and the rest of the world, for even though we were now important and so very significant,
the hostess on the show was even more important and even more significant. And she didn’t have the time to come to Tæring and talk with us here.

That in itself was bad enough.

What was worse was that it planted inside me an unpleasant, nagging suspicion that Pierre Anthon maybe had ahold of something: that the meaning was relative and therefore without meaning.

I didn’t tell anyone about my doubts.

I was afraid of Sofie, but it wasn’t just that. It was nice inside the fame and the belief in the meaning, and I didn’t want out of it, because beyond that there was only the outside and nothing. So I carried on parading myself around and looking superior, exactly as if I really had found the meaning and had no doubts whatsoever.

It was easy enough to pretend. To be sure, there were still a lot of people against us, but the very intensity of the fight over the meaning of the heap of meaning could only indicate that the matter was of the greatest significance. And significance was the same as meaning, and the greatest significance was therefore the same as the greatest meaning.

And I only doubted a tiny little bit.

Tiny little. Smaller. Nothing.

————

We won the struggle for the meaning, both at home and in the world’s press.

The strange thing was that our victory ended up feeling like a defeat.

It was a big museum in New York that settled matters. It was referred to by an odd abbreviation that sounded like something a child couldn’t pronounce properly. But however silly its name sounded, it put a stop to the whole furious debate once and for all when it bid three and a half million dollars for the heap of meaning.

Suddenly everyone knew that the heap of meaning was art, and that only an uninitiated ignoramus could say otherwise. Even the art critic from the biggest of the local newspapers backtracked and said that he’d now considered
the heap more closely and that it was indeed a work of near genius, comprising what perhaps was a quite novel and original interpretation of life’s meaning. He had only seen the work from the front the first time, he wrote.

Three and a half million dollars sounded like a fair amount of money, we thought, without really being able to grasp how much it actually was. Through the lawyer who had been hired to represent us, we nevertheless insisted that the heap of meaning cost three million six hundred thousand dollars, on the basis that you should never sell anything cheaper than what you can get for it. Indeed, we actually ended up asking for three million six hundred and twenty thousand dollars, so there’d also be enough to pay the church for Jesus on the Rosewood Cross, who was no longer in a fit state to be returned anywhere.

The museum accepted, and the deal was closed.

The only thing remaining was to agree on a
date for when the heap of meaning would be collected.

To be sure, there were a lot of papers and permissions and other stuff to be dealt with before the heap could be moved across national boundaries. But at the same time — despite an unusually cold spring — the perishable parts of the heap were perishing rather more rapidly with every day that passed. The museum eventually decided on April 8, four and a half weeks from the day. Then the museum people and their lawyers left Tæring, and with them the world’s press, including our own national dailies. Tæring was once again exactly the same as Tæring always had been:

Dull. Duller. Dullest.

————

It was highly odd.

We had found the meaning and thereby the meaning behind everything. All kinds of experts had declared how magnificent the heap of
meaning was. An American museum was paying millions of dollars for it. And yet no one thought it was interesting anymore. We were dumbfounded.

Either the heap was the meaning or else it was not. And since everyone had agreed that it was, it couldn’t just stop being it again. Or could it?

We walked to and from school, but there wasn’t a single camera, not a single journalist. We went out to the old sawmill. The heap of meaning hadn’t changed (it wasn’t in any way obvious that little Emil’s remains had been removed from the coffin with its cracked paintwork and transferred to a new one that had then been interred and now was getting all cracked just like the first). Nothing was any different, and the fact that the heap looked smaller was probably nothing more than an optical illusion. Right?

A fact it was, however, that January and all our notoriety and the significance that came with it disappeared all at once in the first week of March.

Pierre Anthon was having a ball.

“Meaning is meaning. So if you really had found the meaning, you’d still have it. And the world’s press would still be here trying to figure out what it was you’d found. But they’re not, so whatever it was you found, it wasn’t the
meaning, because the meaning doesn’t exist!”