Nothing (12 page)

“What’s that rag?” he asked, pointing at the checked handkerchief.

“That’s the meaning!” Sofie screamed hysterically. “That’s the meaning!”

Pierre Anthon’s eyes moved from Sofie to the rest of us. It was as though something was occurring to him.

“Oh, so that’s the meaning!” he burst out angrily, and grabbed hold of Sofie. He took her by the shoulders and sort of shook her until she stopped screaming. “And that’s why you sold it?”

“The meaning,” Sofie whispered.

“The meaning, ha!” Pierre Anthon scoffed. “If that pile of garbage ever meant anything at all, it stopped the day you sold it for money.” He laughed again. He let go of Sofie and looked across at Gerda. “How much did Oscarlittle cost, Gerda, eh?”

Gerda didn’t reply. Just blushed and looked down.

Pierre Anthon considered the flag for a moment, then turned his gaze to Frederik.

“King and country!” he sneered. “You sold it all for filthy lucre, Frederik?” He shook his head. “I’m glad I’m not going to war with you as my general!”

Tears welled up in Frederik’s eyes.

“And the prayer mat, Hussain? Don’t you believe in Allah anymore?” Pierre Anthon stared at Hussain, who was standing with his head bowed. “What price was your faith?”

Pierre Anthon went on, naming the items in the heap of meaning one by one, and one by one we writhed.

“And Jon-Johan, why not let your whole hand go, if you’re willing to sell your finger to the highest bidder? And you, Sofie, what have you got left, now you’ve sold yourself?”

We didn’t answer him.

Just stood scraping our feet in the sawdust, not daring to look, not at Pierre Anthon, not at one another.

“If it truly meant something, you wouldn’t have sold it, would you?” Pierre Anthon concluded his tirade and threw his arm out wide in the direction of the heap of meaning.

Pierre Anthon had won.

But then he made a mistake.

He turned his back on us.

Sofie was the first to lunge at him, and had the rest of us remained standing, Pierre Anthon would easily have been able to shake her off. But we didn’t. First followed Jon-Johan, then Hussain, then Frederik, then Elise, and then Gerda, Anna-Li, Holy Karl, Otto, and Huge Hans, and then there was almost no room left for anyone else to kick and punch Pierre Anthon at the same time.

————

I don’t know if it was gruesome or not.

Looking back on it now, it must have been
very gruesome indeed. But that’s not how I remember it. More that it was messy. And good. It made sense to beat up Pierre Anthon. It made sense to kick him. It was meaningful, even if he was down and unable to defend himself and eventually wasn’t even trying.

It was he who had taken the heap of meaning from us, just as he had taken the meaning from us before that. It was his fault, all of it. That Jon-Johan had lost his right index finger, that Cinderella was dead, that Holy Karl had desecrated his Jesus, that Sofie had lost the innocence, that Hussain had lost his faith, that …

It was his fault that we had lost our zest for life and the future and were now at our wit’s end about everything.

The only thing we were certain about was that it was Pierre Anthon’s fault. And that we were going to pay him back.

I don’t know what condition Pierre Anthon was in when we left the sawmill.

I do know what he looked like, although that wasn’t what I told the police.

He was lying all awkward with his neck snapped back, his face all blue and swollen. Blood was running from his nose and mouth and had also colored the back of the hand with which he had tried to shield himself. His eyes were closed, but the left one was bulged out and seemed strangely askew beneath the gashed eyebrow. His right leg lay broken at a quite unnatural angle, and his left elbow pointed in the wrong direction.

————

It was quiet when we left, and we didn’t say good-bye. Neither to one another nor to Pierre Anthon.

————

That same night the disused sawmill burned to the ground.

The disused sawmill burned all through the night and still some the next morning.

Then it was over.

————

I arrived late in the morning. Most of the others were there already. We said hello but didn’t talk.

I considered what was left: the smoldering site of a fire.

It was impossible to tell what had been sawmill and what had been heap of meaning. Apart from the charred remains of walls, everything else was ash.

Gradually the rest of them turned up, and soon the whole class was assembled. No one said anything. Not even to our parents, or the police or
Tæring Tuesday
or to the people from the museum in New York. The world’s press hadn’t shown; but if they had, I know we wouldn’t have said anything to them, either.

We didn’t ask about Pierre Anthon, and it was a while before anyone connected his disappearance the previous day with the fire at the sawmill. It occurred to them only late that evening when his charred remains were found at the site of the fire. Close to what had once been the heap of meaning.

When the police got the idea that Pierre Anthon had set fire to the heap of meaning and the disused sawmill because he wouldn’t accept that we’d found the meaning and were now famous, none of us was arguing. It was just sad that he’d gotten caught up in the flames himself.

————

We attended the funeral.

Some of us even cried.

Sincerely, I believe. And I should know, because I was one of them. We lost the money from the museum, since no one had thought of having the heap of meaning insured. But that wasn’t why we cried. We cried because it was so sad and so beautiful with all those flowers, including the white roses from our class, because the shiny and unblistered white coffin, which was small despite being twice the size of little Emil Jensen’s, shimmered and shone along with the light reflecting from Pierre Anthon’s father’s glasses, and because the music crept inside us and became greater and wanted out again without being able to. And it was so, whether we believed in the God we were singing for, or some other, or none at all.

We cried because we had lost something and gained something else. And because it hurt both losing and gaining. And because we knew what
we had lost but weren’t as yet able to put into words what it was we had gained.

————

After Pierre Anthon’s white and unblistered coffin had been lowered into the ground, after a gathering at the commune at Tæringvej 25, and after Mr. Eskildsen, Pierre Anthon’s father, and several people none of us recognized but guessed were Pierre Anthon’s family had said a whole bunch of appreciative things about a Pierre Anthon who sounded little like the one we’d known, we went out to the burned-out sawmill.

We somehow felt that it wouldn’t be deemed appropriate for us to meet at the sawmill on this particular day, so for the first time in months we left three at a time by our four different routes.

The site was no longer smoldering.

All the embers were extinguished, only ash and charred rubble remained, cold and whitegrayblack. In the place where the heap of meaning had been,
the ashes appeared slightly thicker, though it was hard to be sure. The place was littered with pieces of roofing and what was left of the pillars and beams. We helped one another straighten the place up. It was heavy, dirty work and we were black all over, even under our clothes.

We spoke as little as possible. Just indicated with a gesture and pointed when we needed someone to take hold of the other end of a beam or a stone.

In garbage cans close by we found empty bottles, plastic containers, and matchboxes, anything that could be used, and Sofie ran home and took what she could find, so that eventually there was a receptacle for each of us.

We used our hands to gather the ashes together.

The receptacles were carefully closed on the grayish mass that was all we had left of the meaning.

————

And we needed to keep a tight hold of it, for even though Pierre Anthon no longer sat hollering at us in his plum tree at Tæringvej 25, it still felt like we could hear him every time we passed by.

“The reason dying is so easy is because death has no meaning,” he hollered. “And the reason death has no meaning is because life has no meaning. All the same, have fun!”

That summer we were scattered to the bigger schools to the north, south, east, and west, and Sofie was sent somewhere where they protect people like her from themselves.

We stopped playing together and never met again apart from by chance on the street, where it couldn’t be avoided. No one has ever tried to bring us together for a class reunion or anything, and I doubt anyone would come if any of the teachers ever got the idea.

————

It’s eight years ago now.

I still have the matchbox with the ashes from the sawmill and the heap of meaning.

Once in a while I take it out and look at it. And when I carefully slide open the worn cardboard box and look into the gray ashes, I get this peculiar feeling in my stomach. And even if I can’t explain what it is, I know that something has a meaning.

And I know that the meaning is not something to fool around with.

Is it, Pierre Anthon? Is it?

Tæring is a fictional place. Its name is derived from a verb meaning to gradually consume, corrode, or eat through, for example in the way rust may eat through metal. Keeping its name in the English translation means losing this immediate association, yet allows the reader an important sense of being somewhere foreign.

The children in the story are thirteen to fourteen years old, which puts them in seventh grade in Denmark, though in the United States they would most likely be a grade ahead. Toward the end of the story, the children are dispersed to outlying schools. This is a common occurrence: small local schools in Denmark often provide schooling until the end of seventh grade only, at which point children move on to larger schools in larger communities.

Some of the original children’s names have been altered by the author, making them more amenable to an American tongue, yet retaining their Danish character. Elsewhere, the reader may find it helpful to know that an authentic pronunciation of the final
vej
(literally:
way
) in the road names
Tæringvej
and
Tæring Markvej
can be approximated by rhyming with and shortening the vowel sound in words like
eye
,
pie
, or
sky
.

JANNE TELLER was born to Austrian-German parents in Denmark, but since 1988 has lived in many countries around the world, such as Mozambique, Tanzania, and Italy. She has written several award-winning and bestselling novels, and her literature—including essays and short stories—has been translated into more than thirteen languages. Her novels for adults include the bestselling modern Nordic saga
Odin’s Island
,
The Trampling Cat
, and
Come
.

Janne Teller has received numerous literary grants and awards over the years, and her controversial books repeatedly spark heated debate in Denmark and elsewhere.
Nothing
, her first novel for young adults, is the winner of the prestigious Best Children’s Book Prize from the Danish Cultural Ministry, as well as the esteemed Le Prix Libbylit for the best novel for children published in all of the French-speaking world.

These days Janne Teller splits her time between Virginia and Copenhagen. Visit her website at
janneteller.dk/?English
.