Nothing (3 page)

Others went from house to house asking if
they could have anything that meant something. One or two doors were slammed in our faces, but we were also given the most wondrous things. The old folks were the best. They gave us china dogs that could nod their heads and were only slightly chipped, photographs of parents long since dead, or the toys of children long since departed into adulthood. We were given clothes that had been treasured and worn to threads, and even a single rose from a bridal bouquet, thirty-six years old.

The rose, however, made us girls somewhat fainthearted, because it really was something we felt mattered, the white bridal dream with the wedding bouquet and the kiss from the man who was to be ours forever. But then Laura said that the lady who had given it to us had gotten divorced only five years later. And since many of our own parents were also divorced, if indeed they had ever been married at all, that dream clearly wasn’t worth our time.

————

The heap grew and grew.

In just a few days it grew almost as tall as Little Ingrid. Nevertheless, it was still short on meaning. We all knew that none of what we had collected mattered to us, really, so how were we supposed to convince Pierre Anthon that it did?

He was going to see right through us.

Squat. Zilch. Nothing.

Again Jon-Johan called us together, and it wasn’t long before we had to admit that certain things did matter to us, even if it wasn’t much and even if they weren’t all that important. Still, it was a better take than the one we had.

Dennis was the first. He brought a whole stack of Dungeons & Dragons books he had read over and over and almost learned by heart. Otto, however, soon discovered that four of the series were missing, and he said that Dennis was going to have to give them up too.

Dennis blew up and told Otto to mind his
own business, that we all knew that wasn’t part of the scheme, and we were so mean, all of us. But the more Dennis yelled, the more the rest of us maintained that the books plainly mattered a whole lot to him. And hadn’t we just agreed that it was the things that meant most to us that had to go on the heap if it was ever going to convince Pierre Anthon to climb out of his tree?

When Dennis had first handed over the last four of his Dungeons & Dragons books, it was as if the meaning started to take off. Dennis knew how fond Sebastian was of his fishing rod. And Sebastian knew that Richard had a thing about his black soccer ball. And Richard had noticed how Laura always wore the same African parrot earrings.

We should have stopped even before it got this far. Now it was somehow too late, even though I did what I could.

“This isn’t going to work,” I said.

“Ha!” Gerda scoffed, and she was pointing at
my green wedge sandals that I’d spent all summer persuading my mom to buy me, and that she’d only just gotten me recently for half price in the sales.

I knew it was going to come. And to be honest, that was probably why I tried to stop the whole affair. It would only be a matter of time before someone got around to my sandals. The fact that it was Giggling Gerda, little bye-baby-bumpkin, only made things worse. At first I tried to pass it off, as if I hadn’t even noticed what it was she was pointing at, but Laura wasn’t letting me off the hook.

“The sandals, Agnes,” she said, and there was no way out.

I squatted down and was about to untie them, but then I couldn’t get myself to do it and stood up again.

“I can’t,” I said. “My mom’s going to ask where they are, and then the grown-ups are going to figure the whole thing out.” I thought I was smart. But I wasn’t.

“You think you’re any better than the rest of us?” cried Sebastian. “What do you suppose my dad’s going to think I’ve done with my fishing rod?” As if to underline his words, he grabbed hold of the line and fishhook that dangled from the heap.

“And what have I done with my books?”

“And where’s my soccer ball?”

“And my earrings?”

I’d lost, and I knew it. All I could do was ask for a few days’ respite.

“Just until summer’s over.”

There was no mercy. Even if they did let me borrow a pair of sneakers from Sofie, so I wouldn’t have to walk home barefoot.

Sofie’s sneakers were too small; they pinched at my big toe, and the way home from the sawmill was a whole lot longer than usual. I was crying as I turned into the street and walked the last part of the way up to the house alone.

I didn’t go in, but sat down in the bike shed,
where I could be seen neither from the street nor the house. I pulled Sofie’s sneakers off my feet and kicked them into a corner. The image of my green wedge sandals on top of the heap of meaning wouldn’t go away.

I looked down at my bare feet and decided Gerda was going to pay.

It took me three days to find Gerda’s weak spot, and during those three days I was sweetness itself with her.

I had never liked Gerda. She had a way of spitting when she spoke, even more when she giggled, which she did almost all the time. Besides that, she would never let Ursula-Marie alone, and Ursula-Marie was my best friend and so very special, not only because she had blue hair and six braids, but also because she only ever wore black. If my mom hadn’t kept on sabotaging it all by buying those garish clothes for me, I would have worn only
black too. As it was, I had to make do with one pair of black pants, two black T-shirts with funny slogans in English, and one black woolen undershirt that was still too warm to wear yet here at the beginning of September.

But now it was all about Gerda.

I swapped hair elastics with Gerda, whispered with her about boys, and confided to her that I had warmed a bit to Huge Hans (which wasn’t true in the slightest, but though you’re not supposed to lie, this was what my older brother referred to as
force majeure
, and even though I wasn’t quite sure what it meant, it definitely entailed that right now lying was okay).

The first two days didn’t yield much. Gerda didn’t seem to be especially fond of anything. Or perhaps she had seen through me. There were some old paper dolls her grandmother had given her, but I knew she hadn’t played with them since we were in fifth grade. At one point she showed me a picture of Tom Cruise, who she was swooning
over and kissed every night before going to bed. Then there was a whole stack of romantic novels, with doctors kissing nurses and living happily ever after. I admit I wouldn’t have minded borrowing them occasionally, and Gerda would probably have stifled a tear or two had she been made to hand them over, but it was still just trifles, nothing that truly mattered. Then on the third day I found it.

It was while we were sitting in Gerda’s room drinking tea and listening to a tape her father had just given her that I discovered Gerda’s weak spot. We’d spent the two previous days at Gerda’s mother’s place, in the room she had there. It was filled with girls’ stuff, all sequins and tinsel. Now we were sitting in her room at her father’s place, where she stayed every other week. It wasn’t the stereo tape deck or the inflatable plastic armchair or the idol posters on the walls that made this room different from the one at her mother’s place, for she had a stereo tape deck and an inflatable plastic armchair and idol posters on the walls there, too.
No, the thing that made the room at Gerda’s father’s place special was that in the corner stood a very large cage with a very small hamster inside.

The hamster’s name was Oscarlittle, and Oscarlittle was what I declared the next day that Gerda had to give up to the heap of meaning.

Gerda wept and said she was going to snitch about me and Huge Hans. I howled laughing when I told her it was just something I’d made up on account of
force majeure
. That made Gerda cry even more and say I was the cruelest of anyone she knew. And when she had cried for two hours and was still inconsolable, I started having second thoughts and thinking maybe she was right. But then I saw my green wedge sandals on top of the heap and wouldn’t budge.

————

Ursula-Marie and I walked Gerda home to get Oscarlittle right away. We weren’t giving her any chance to get out of it.

Gerda’s father lived in one of the new row houses. They were gray-brown and built in brick, at least the outer layer was, around the concrete, and all the rooms were fitted with large, easy-to-open windows. The row houses lay at the other end of Tæring, where until recently there had been meadows full of gray-brown sheep. The fact that the house was at the opposite end of Tæring made the walk long and exhausting, but the main thing was the large windows. Gerda’s father was home, and Oscarlittle had to be smuggled out.

Ursula-Marie went with Gerda into her room, while I stood outside ready to receive. Oscarlittle was handed through the window, and I stuffed him inside an old rusty cage we had dug out for the purpose. Gerda herself just stood sniveling in a corner of the room and refused to lend a hand.

“Shut up, Gerda!” I snapped eventually, unable to take any more of her whining. “Or there’s a dead hamster going on the heap!”

It didn’t make Gerda stop sniveling, but it did
quiet her down enough to make things tolerable again. And for her to leave the house without her father catching on.

Oscarlittle was mottled white and brown and actually fairly cute with his trembling whiskers, and I was happy not to have to do away with him. The cage, on the other hand, was heavy and unwieldy, and the road to the sawmill unendingly long. We should have borrowed Holy Karl’s trailer. We hadn’t, so we took turns carrying. Gerda too. There was no reason for her not to take her fair share of the aching shoulders Ursula-Marie and I were getting. It took an age to reach the field and the sawmill, and Oscarlittle squeaked the entire way as if I really was going to kill him, but eventually we got there and could put the cage with Oscarlittle down in the half-light inside the door.

We let Gerda line the cage with some old sawdust, and after she had given Oscarlittle an extra portion of hamster food and a bowl of fresh water,
I climbed up the stepladder and placed him and the cage on top of the heap.

I climbed down again, dragged the ladder away, and stood to admire the heap with the cage like a star slightly crooked on top. Then I noticed how quiet it was in the mill.

Quiet. Quieter. All quiet.

It was so quiet I suddenly couldn’t help but notice how big and empty the place was, how many cracks and crevices there were in the concrete floor that could just be picked out beneath the dirt of the sawdust, how thick the cobwebs were that clung to every beam and joist, how many holes there were in the roof, and how few windowpanes were still intact. I surveyed the surroundings from one end of the mill to the other, up and down, down and up, then finally turned my gaze to my classmates.

They were still staring silently at the cage.

It was as though Oscarlittle had added something to the heap of meaning that neither my green wedge sandals, nor Sebastian’s fishing rod, nor Richard’s soccer ball had been able to. I was pretty pleased with myself for having come up with the idea, so it stung that the others seemed less than enthusiastic.

It was Otto who came to my rescue.

“Now
there’s
something that’s got meaning!” he exclaimed, looking away from Oscarlittle and toward me.

“Pierre Anthon’s never going to top that,” Huge Hans added, and no one seemed to be protesting.

I had to bite my tongue not to blush from pride.

————

It was getting late, and most of us had to be getting off home for supper. We took a final admiring look at our bulging heap, then Sofie turned off the lights and closed the door behind us. Jon-Johan put the padlock on, and we hurried away in all directions.

It was Gerda’s turn.

Gerda wasn’t particularly inventive and said only that Maiken was to hand over her telescope. We all knew Maiken had invested two years and all her savings into her telescope, and that she spent every evening, when the sky was clear, observing the stars, for she was going to be an astrophysicist. Even so, it was a disappointing choice.

Maiken herself, though, proved more adventurous.

Without needing time to think about it, she looked directly at Frederik and said:

“The Dannebrog.”

It was like Frederik started to shrink—he grew thinner and smaller and more and more red in the face and began to shake his head vigorously.

Frederik had brown hair and brown eyes and was always dressed in a white shirt and blue pants with creases the other boys did their best to ruin. And like his parents, who were married and not divorced and never would be, Frederik believed in Denmark and the Royal House and was forbidden to ever play with Hussain.

The Dannebrog, our proud flag, had descended from the skies in twelve-hundred-and-something, Frederik maintained, in order that the Danish king could prevail over the enemy in Latvia. What the Danish king was doing in Latvia, Frederik was unable to enlighten us with, nor would it have helped him any had he known.

We definitely couldn’t have cared less about kings or Latvia as we hooted, “Dannebrog, Dannebrog. Frederik, fetch your Dannebrog!”

As songs go it was hardly noteworthy, but we
repeated it over and over to our great amusement. What amused us most, though, was probably the horrified expression on Frederik’s face.

In the front yard of the red bungalow where Frederik lived with his married and undivorced parents stood Tæring’s tallest flagpole. From that flagpole the Dannebrog waved from sunrise to sunset every single Sunday, as well as on just about any special occasion, whether it was the queen’s birthday or Frederik’s, or just a regular holiday. In Frederik’s family, running up the flag was the man’s duty and privilege, and since Frederik had recently celebrated his fourteenth birthday, he had proudly accepted taking on both the duty and the privilege from his father.

It went without saying that Frederik had no intention of giving up the flag. But we were unyielding and pitiless, and the following day the Dannebrog took its place on the heap of meaning.

————