Nothing (11 page)

We tried ignoring him and stuck our noses in the air and were superior and both something and someone.

At first we were doing so well we almost believed in it ourselves. It helped some to reread all the newspaper cuttings in the scrapbook and watch all the TV interviews from all the various countries that our parents had recorded on videotape. After a while, though, it was like all the cuttings began to fade, the interviews became tired comedies, and Pierre Anthon was having the game all to himself.

Doubt took us out one by one.

One. Two. All but one.

It was treason, and we weren’t letting on to one another. But it could be seen in the way our smiles disappeared and were replaced by a mask that looked exactly like the one the grown-ups wore, which revealed all too clearly that maybe there wasn’t that much that truly mattered.

————

Sofie was the only one of us to stick it out. And eventually it was her pale face alone and her burning eyes that kept the rest of us from giving up.

And admitting that Pierre Anthon was right.

It was spring, but this year spring couldn’t reach us.

We were almost in eighth grade, and it wouldn’t be long before we’d be having to choose new schools and new subjects. How on earth we were going to manage that with Pierre Anthon reminding us that nothing meant anything, we had no idea. Soon we’d be scattered to the four winds, losing contact with the meaning we had found and lost again without exactly knowing how it all had happened.

As though to reassure us that it wasn’t yet spring at all, March kept sending afterblasts of
winter. Late snow fell and melted, fell and melted. And once more again, the snow fell and melted, this time faster. Eranthis and snowdrops hid away, closed and frozen beneath the white, and then when the final layer was gone for good, they pushed themselves up to signal renewal and spring flush among the few blades of grass that had stayed the winter out in Tæring.

In 7A we saw neither renewal nor spring flush.

What was spring, when fall soon would come around again and all that now was germinating simply was to wither and die? How were we to find joy in the beech woods bursting into leaf, the starlings returning home, or the sun being higher in the sky for every new day that passed? All of it would soon be turning, running back the other way until it was cold and dark and there were no flowers and no leaves left on the trees. Spring was nothing but a reminder to us that we, too, would soon be gone.

Each time I lifted an arm was a reminder of
how soon it would be lowered and turn into nothing. Each time I smiled and laughed it struck me how often the same mouth, the same eyes, were to cry until one day they would close, and others would go on laughing and crying until they, too, were put to rest beneath the soil. Only the course of the planets through the sky was eternal, and then only until Pierre Anthon one morning started hollering about how the universe was contracting and that one day it was going to collapse completely, like a Big Bang in reverse. Everything would become so small and so compact as to amount to almost nothing. Not even the planets bore thinking about. And that’s how it was with everything. It was all unbearable.

Bearable. Bearing up. All things, everything, nothing.

We were going around like we didn’t exist.

Each day was like the next. And even though we looked forward all week to the weekend, the weekend was always still a disappointment, and
then it was Monday again and everything started over, and that was how life was, and there was nothing else. We began to understand what Pierre Anthon meant. And we began to understand why the grown-ups looked the way they did.

And although we’d sworn we’d never become like them, that was exactly what was happening. We weren’t even fifteen yet.

Thirteen, fourteen, adult. Dead.

————

Only Sofie still yelled back at Pierre Anthon whenever we walked by Tæringvej 25 and the crooked plum tree.

“The future’s all here!” Pierre Anthon shouted, and waved his hand as if to show us that everything had been done and nothing was left for us but Tæring and the meaninglessness of it all.

The rest of us bowed our heads. But not Sofie.

“The future is what we make of it,” she yelled back.

“Stuff and nonsense!” Pierre Anthon hollered. “There’s nothing to make anything of, because there’s nothing that matters!”

“There’s a whole lot that matters!” Furious, Sofie hurled a handful of stones in the direction of Pierre Anthon. Some of them hit home, though not hard enough to bother him. “Come out to the sawmill, then you’ll see what matters!”

I realized that Sofie really meant what she said.

For her, the heap of meaning was the meaning. Or maybe it would be more true to say that the heap of meaning meant something to her that it no longer did to the rest of us.

“Your junk doesn’t mean a thing! If it did, the world’s press would still be here and all the world’s population would be flocking to Tæring to get in on the meaning.”

“You won’t see the heap of meaning because you haven’t got the guts!” Sofie yelled as loud as she could.

“If your pile of garbage meant the slightest little thing, then there’d be nothing I’d rather do,” Pierre Anthon replied condescendingly.

Then softly, almost pityingly, he added, “But it doesn’t, or else you wouldn’t have sold it, would you?”

For the first time since the innocence, I saw tears in Sofie’s eyes.

She dried them away so angrily and so quickly with her fist that afterward I wasn’t sure I’d seen it. But she said nothing more to Pierre Anthon. And from then on she took another route to and from school.

————

There was just a week until April 8.

A week until the museum would pack, seal, and dispatch the heap of meaning.

A week until Pierre Anthon was proved right forever.

————

The rest of us had given up without a fight, but still the thought of Sofie giving up too was unbearable. And that was exactly what was happening. Or so I thought. But Sofie didn’t give up. Sofie lost her mind.

It happened suddenly, although thinking about it we realized it had been coming for some time. One minute Sofie was standing quiet and peaceable with the rest of us at the sawmill. The next minute she was running around, banging her head against the posts and kicking sawdust up at the heap of meaning and wanting to climb up onto it, and she would have pulled the whole thing apart had Otto and Huge Hans not taken hold and kept a tight grip on her.

————

It was the day before the museum people were coming to pack up the heap of meaning, and the meaning — or what was left of it — was forever on its way out of Tæring.

“It’s not their meaning, it’s ours!” Sofie screamed, and only then did it occur to us that it was the first time in six days Sofie had said anything.

“We sold it to them!”

“But we can’t sell the meaning!” Sofie hammered with her fists at Otto’s chest and stomach, and I could see it was hurting him. Then Huge Hans got hold of her by the arms and twisted them behind her back, and now it was Sofie who was hurting.

I knew Sofie was right.

Meaning is not something you can sell. Either it’s there or it isn’t. Our having sold the heap of meaning had deprived it of its meaning. If there had ever been any. But I didn’t wonder about that, because if it had never been there, then it
wouldn’t be Sofie but Pierre Anthon who was right.

“That’s what we’ve done, and there’s no more to be said!” Otto shouted back with such fury that I knew he too had realized that we shouldn’t ever have done so.

“But then it means nothing!” Sofie yelled.

“Oh, come on, Sofie! Who cares about that heap?” Huge Hans shouted, and I found myself thinking that with the money from the museum he’d always be able to buy himself a new and better bike than his neon yellow racer. So what did he care?

“If the heap means nothing, then Pierre Anthon’s right, and nothing matters!” Sofie went on. “Nothing!”

“Stop it, Sofie,” Gerda yelled.

“Yeah, shut up, Sofie!” said Jon-Johan.

“Shut up, Sofie!” chimed in Elise, Hussain, Ursula-Marie, Holy Karl, and a whole bunch of others, too.

But Sofie wasn’t going to shut up. No way. Sofie started screaming even louder.

“Nothing,” she screamed. “Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! …”

Sofie screamed and screamed. She screamed so loud and so piercingly it made our ears ring and hurt right to the bone. But the worst thing was that with that scream it was like everything fell apart. As though the heap of meaning truly no longer had any meaning, and with that all else lost its meaning too.

Spring, summer, fall, winter, joy, sorrow, love, hate, birth, life, death.

It was all the same.

The same. One. Nothing.

It wasn’t just me who understood.

And with that revelation it was like the devil himself took ahold of us.

Hussain lashed out at Ursula-Marie for making him give up his prayer mat. Huge Hans kicked into Hussain and got back at him for the bike.
Elise scratched at Otto and bit him as hard as she could, and then Ursula-Marie hit out at Elise, and Sofie laid into Huge Hans and tore at his hair until it came away in great tufts in her hands. Jon-Johan threw himself at Sofie and started punching away at her. Holy Karl joined him, since it was also Sofie who’d come up with the idea about Jesus and the rosewood cross. Frederik gave Maiken a slap in the face, and soon they were rolling around in the sawdust, but then Maiken wrestled herself free when lady
William delivered Frederik a kick between the ribs. Maiken went for Gerda now, while lady William was floored by Anna-Li, just as Little Ingrid cracked Anna-Li over the head with one of her crutches, and Henrik grabbed the other one of Little Ingrid’s crutches and thrust Little Ingrid onto the floor.

That was all I saw before Gerda jumped me from behind and I was pulled down, Gerda on top of me, and we tumbled around in the sawdust among all the others. Our fists hit home, untrained
yet hard. I pulled at Gerda’s hair and she at mine. Then she got hold of my earring and tore, and I screamed in pain. Her astonishment at suddenly sitting there with my earring in her hand allowed me to throw her off and leap to my feet. I brought my hand up to my ear, and it was wet with sticky, warm blood. My eye caught sight only of more blood in the chaos of fighting bodies, blood that ran from the faces of my classmates and gradually was staining the sawdust and the concrete floor beneath.

It was like we wanted to kill one another.

And at once I knew I had to go get Pierre Anthon.

I managed to kick myself free of Gerda’s grip on my shins. I pushed my way through the ruckus, disappeared out through the door, and ran off down the road.

I ran as hard as I could.

Ran like I’d never run before. I gasped for breath and got a stitch, and my throat and legs
hurt, but I kept on running. I didn’t know what I was going to say to Pierre Anthon to make him come back with me to the sawmill. All I knew was that he had to come, that I had to, needed to, must get him back there.

————

Pierre Anthon was sitting on his branch in the plum tree, staring emptily at nothing.

I could see his blue sweater from a distance among the light green of beginning buds. I ran until I reached the tree, then stopped dead on the sidewalk and at first could say not so much as a word, but could only cough and spit and gasp for the air that was all too reluctant to fill my lungs. Pierre Anthon considered my efforts in astonishment, and not without amusement.

“To what do we owe the honor, Agnes?” he said politely, though with a clearly mocking undertone.

I ignored his mockery.

“Sofie’s gone crazy,” I stammered as soon as
I’d got enough breath back to speak. “They’ve all gone berserk. You have to come.”

I was about to say more to try and persuade him, though I wasn’t quite sure what. But Pierre Anthon slid from his branch without a word, hung for a moment from his arms, and then let himself drop to the grass below. He disappeared into the yard, only to appear again a moment later on his old gents bike. Then he sped off, allowing me no chance at all to keep up.

By the time I got back to the sawmill, Pierre Anthon’s bike was lying by the roadside where he’d let go of it, and there was no sign of Pierre Anthon. The place was deathly silent.

I pushed open the door cautiously and went inside.

————

It was a gruesome sight that met my eyes.

7A were standing in a semicircle around Pierre Anthon.

Noses were beaten askew, eyebrows had been cut, teeth were missing, lips were gashed and swollen, eyes were red and bruised, an ear was all but torn away, and one or two looked like they could hardly keep themselves upright. All were smeared with blood and sawdust. But that wasn’t what I saw. What I saw was the hatred.

Hatred. More hatred. All against all.

I pulled the door shut and edged my way along the wall into the sawmill.

Pierre Anthon’s gaze went from one face to another.

“What a bunch of half-wits!” he exclaimed. He shook his head and moved slightly forward. “If nothing matters, then there’s nothing worth getting mad about! And if there’s nothing worth getting mad about, then there’s nothing worth fighting about either!” He looked around at each one of us, as though daring us to challenge him. “So what do you think you’re doing?” He kicked at the sawdust and laughed derisively. “Is it that
pile of junk you’re fighting about?” He pointed with disdain, but then his attention was caught by something in it, though exactly what was hard to say.

Pierre Anthon stepped closer and walked slowly around the heap. He studied little Emil’s coffin for a while with the rotting carcass of Cinderella on top. He considered Cinderella’s head high up at the top of the heap, then allowed his gaze to move from the telescope to the Dannebrog, to the desecrated Jesus on the Rosewood Cross, the boxing gloves, the snake in formaldehyde, the six blue braids and the neon yellow bike, then on to the prayer mat and the crutches and to dead Oscarlittle and Jon-Johan’s stiffened index finger. Then he caught sight of something that puzzled him.