Nothing (4 page)

We sang the national anthem and stood to attention while Frederik fastened the red and white emblem to the iron rod Jon-Johan had found at the back of the mill, which was now planted firmly in the middle of the heap.

The Dannebrog was a lot bigger up close than when waving at the top of its flagpole, and I felt slightly uneasy about the whole venture, considering the history and the nation and all. It didn’t seem to bother any of the others, though, and when I thought of the meaning, I knew that Maiken had hit home: With the Dannebrog on high, the heap of meaning sure looked a whole lot like something.

Something. Lots. Meaning!

————

That Frederik had a wicked streak was an idea that would never have occurred to any of us. Yet he rose significantly in our esteem when he demanded lady William’s diary.

Lady William was … how should I put it? Lady William.

And lady William’s diary was a very special thing indeed, bound in dark leather and French pulp, with meticulously inscribed pages inside that looked like they were sandwich paper, but apparently were a whole lot finer.

Now lady William huffed and puffed, and under no circumstances was he willing, and he waved his hands about in a manner we girls later tried to copy as we almost died laughing.

It was to no avail.

The diary was given up to the heap of meaning, though without its key, which Frederik had forgotten to claim, thereby falling just as quickly in our esteem as he had risen.

Lady William declared in a nasal tone and rather condescendingly that with the addition of his diary the heap of meaning had reached an entirely new
plateau
— he took a particular delight in words that came from French and that the
rest of us didn’t know the meaning of. Whatever it meant, it was because of this plateau that he begged Anna-Li’s forgiveness for her now having to give up her certificate of adoption.

Anna-Li was Korean despite being Danish, and of her two sets of parents she had only ever known the Danish ones. Anna-Li never uttered a word and never interfered in anything, she just blinked some and looked down at the ground whenever anyone spoke to her. She wasn’t even saying anything now. It was Ursula-Marie who protested.

“That doesn’t count, William. A certificate of adoption is like a birth certificate. It’s not something you can give away.”

“Well, I’m most sorry,” lady William retorted with an indulgent air. “My diary is my life. If it may be sacrificed to the heap, then so may a certificate of adoption. Was it not our intention that the heap should be meaningful?”

“Not in that sense,” Ursula-Marie replied, shaking her head so her six blue braids flew about the air.

Lady William persisted politely, and we didn’t really know how else to object, so we simply stood there, mulling it over.

Then, to our astonishment, Anna-Li said a whole lot all at once.

“It doesn’t matter,” she began. “Or rather, it matters a lot. But that’s the whole idea, isn’t it? Otherwise the heap of meaning has no meaning at all, and then Pierre Anthon will be right about nothing meaning anything.”

Anna-Li was right.

The certificate of adoption was added to the top of the heap, and when Anna-Li declared that Little Ingrid had to give up her new crutches, nobody objected.

Little Ingrid would have to use her old ones.

The meaning was gathering momentum, and our enthusiasm was boundless when Little Ingrid, quite unperturbed, whispered that Henrik was going to have to bring the snake in formaldehyde.

In the biology room there were six things worth looking at: the skeleton we called Mr. Hansen, the half-man with the detachable organs, a wall poster detailing the female reproductive organs, a dried-out and slightly cracked human skull referred to as Hamlet’s Handful, a stuffed weasel, and the snake in formaldehyde. Of these, the snake in formaldehyde was by far the most interesting, and Little Ingrid’s scheme was for this reason no less than brilliant.

Henrik didn’t agree.

Not least because the snake was a cobra that
had cost his father a great deal of time, much correspondence, and an endless amount of negotiations to secure for the school’s collection. Another thing about the snake was that it was disgusting and brought shivers to the spine every time you happened to look at it. With its prehistoric patterns and closely interlocking scales, the body of the snake lay curled in an endless spiral at the bottom of its jar, the head raised keenly, its jagged neck splayed out as though in rage, and as though at any moment the creature was going to discharge its paralyzing venom from between its hissing, flesh-pink jaws.

No one ever touched the jar voluntarily.

Unless, that is, they could get at least ten kroner for doing so.

Henrik stubbornly and stupidly maintained that the snake in formaldehyde didn’t belong on the heap of meaning. However, it helped some that Hussain held the jar with the snake up above Henrik’s head at recess (Otto was paying the ten
kroner) and threatened to smash it against his skull if Henrik didn’t give the snake up to the heap.

The rest of us were just as impatient, insistent that it be done right away. We needed to get finished so we could shut Pierre Anthon up once and for all. The plums were well ripened now, and Pierre Anthon was spitting sticky plum stones at us all the while he was hollering his stuff.

“How come you girls want to be dating?” he’d shouted that same morning as I passed by Tæringvej 25, arm in arm with Ursula-Marie. “First you fall in love, then you start dating, then you fall out of love, and then you split up again.”

“Shut it, Pierre Anthon!” Ursula-Marie hollered back at the top of her lungs.

Maybe she felt especially stung, because we’d just been talking about Jon-Johan and this matter of the feelings that we just didn’t seem to be able to rein in or fathom.

Pierre Anthon laughed and went on in a more gentle tone, “And that’s the way it goes, time and
time again, right until you grow so tired of all that repetition you just decide to make like the one who happens to be closest by is the one and only. What a waste of effort!”

“Just shut up, will you!” I yelled, and started running. Although I wasn’t dating, and had no idea who I’d pick if I had to choose there and then, I certainly wanted to, and soon. There was no way I was going to let Pierre Anthon ruin love for me before it even got started.

Ursula-Marie and I ran the entire rest of the way to school, in a mood worse than we could ever recall being in at one and the same time. It didn’t even cheer us up when Pretty Rosa reminded us that Pierre Anthon had once dated Sofie for a fortnight and that they had even kissed before it ended again, and that Sofie had then gone on to date Sebastian, while Pierre Anthon had gotten together with Laura.

That was a story that sounded a bit too much like something I didn’t want to hear. And maybe
a bit too much like what Pierre Anthon himself had said.

————

I don’t know exactly when it was that Henrik saw his chance to snatch the snake from the biology room, or how he managed to get it to the sawmill without being seen. I only know that Dennis and Richard helped him and that the snake rolled disgustingly like it was alive when they lifted up the jar and placed it on top of the heap.

Oscarlittle didn’t like it much either.

The hamster squealed pathetically and cowered in the far corner of its cage, and Gerda cried and told them to wrap newspaper around the snake so we didn’t all have to see.

But Oscarlittle’s squealing made the snake in formaldehyde even more meaningful, and none of us would agree to have it be packed away.

Instead we turned our gaze expectantly to Henrik.

Henrik was a real butter-up.

He asked for Otto’s boxing gloves. The only fun of that was that Otto actually was rather fond of his boxing gloves, and that they were red to match the Dannebrog.

Otto, on the other hand, spent a whole eight days thinking before making up his mind.

————

Had it not been Otto, and had his scheme not been so sublime, we would all have gotten mad at him. For while he was doing his thinking, we
again became aware of Pierre Anthon’s hollering up there in the plum tree.

“You go to school to get a job, and you get a job to take time off to do nothing. Why not do nothing to begin with?” he shouted, and spat a plum stone at us.

It was like the heap of meaning began shrinking and losing some of the meaning, and the thought was unbearable.

“Just you wait and see!” I yelled as loud as I could, dodging a squashy plum that came flying.

“There’s nothing to wait for,” Pierre Anthon hollered back condescendingly. “And there’s nothing at all worth seeing. And the longer you wait, the less there’ll be!”

I covered my ears and hurried the rest of the way to school.

But there was no comfort to be found at school that day; the teachers were cross with us. They had a pretty good idea it was our class that was behind the disappearance of the snake in
formaldehyde. How could Henrik have been so dumb as to snatch it right after one of our biology lessons?

We all had to stay behind an hour every day after school until we revealed what we’d done with it. Everyone, that is, except Henrik, for Henrik’s father was sure it couldn’t have been Henrik.

Butter-up! Butter-up! Little Henrik Butter-up!

How we cursed him and looked forward to the day the heap was finished, and Pierre Anthon had seen it, and we could tell it like it was, so little Hen-rik Butter-up could get what was coming to him.

In the meantime he just went strutting around the place.

Strutting, trotting, rutting!

At least until Huge Hans got his hands on him and slapped his ears and cheeks so that he had to beg for mercy — and was granted it because his father in the meantime had retracted and repealed our detention.

————

“Elise’s baby brother,” Otto finally announced, and it was like a gust of wind passed through the sawmill.

It was afternoon. We were sitting at the foot of the heap of meaning, and we all knew what it entailed, what Otto was saying. Elise’s baby brother had died when he was only two years old. And Elise’s baby brother was buried in the churchyard up on the hill. What Otto was saying meant that we had to dig up the coffin containing Elise’s baby brother and lug it down the hill all the way out to the sawmill and the heap of meaning. And it had to be done under cover of darkness if we were to pull it off without being found out.

We looked at Elise.

Maybe we were hoping she would say something that would make the venture impossible.

Elise said nothing. Her baby brother had been sick from the time he was born to the time he died, and in all that time Elise’s parents had done nothing but care for him, while Elise hung out on the streets and got poor grades and became bad company before eventually going to live with her grandparents. Until, that is, her baby brother died six months ago, and Elise moved home to her parents again.

I don’t think Elise was too sad about her baby brother being dead. And I don’t think she was too sad that he was going onto the heap of meaning. I think Elise was more afraid of her parents than of us, and that that was why after a long silence she said, “We can’t.”

“Of course we can,” Otto replied.

“No, we mustn’t.” Elise wrinkled her brow.

“Must has nothing to do with it. We’re doing it, and that’s that.”

“But it’s sacrilege,” protested Holy Karl, and it was he more than Elise who was objecting. “We’ll be invoking the wrath of God,” he explained.
“The dead are to rest in peace.”

Peace. More peace. Rest in peace.

Holy Karl’s objections were in vain.

“It’s going to take six of us,” Otto declared, undaunted. “Four taking turns to dig and two to keep lookout.”

We looked at one another. There were no volunteers.

“We’ll draw lots,” Otto said.

There was a long discussion about how to make the draw. Eventually we agreed on drawing cards; the four who drew the highest cards were going to the churchyard. Four, because Otto and Elise obviously had to be among the six.

I offered to run home and get a deck of cards, but time was getting on, so we decided to put it off until the next day. On the bright side, the excavation itself would be done and over with by the following evening. Barring rain.

————

I’ve always liked a game of cards and have always had lots of different decks. As soon as dinner was over I went into my room, closed the door, and took out all my playing cards.

There were the classical ones in blue and red, but it wasn’t going to be them. Then there were the miniature decks, which didn’t seem right either. And it couldn’t be the ones with the horses’ heads on the back, or the ones with the clowns, or the ones where the jacks and kings looked like Arab sultans. Eventually there was only one deck left. But this one seemed fitting, for the reverse side was black and edged with a thin gilt line, and since they had almost never been used, the gilt edging was fully intact and still shiny. These were the ones.

I put away the remaining decks and spread out the gilt-edged playing cards on my desk. I examined each carefully. There was something ominous about them, not just the face cards, with the witchlike queen and the king with his piercing
eyes, and not just the way-too-black spades and the clawlike clubs, but also the blue-red diamonds and hearts that most of all made me think about exactly what I didn’t want to think about.

Or maybe I was just starting to get a little rickety at the thought of digging up little Emil’s coffin.

Up. Down. And bucketsful of something I didn’t want to think about.

There were two options.

Either I could remove a deuce and hide it away in my pocket and then somehow swap the card I drew tomorrow with the deuce. Or I could mark one of the deuces in such a way that I’d be able to pick it out when it was my turn to draw, and in a way no one else would notice.

Even though I didn’t know how I was going to mark the card without it being noticeable, I chose the second option. If anyone decided to count the cards before drawing lots, I’d be found out there and then. The safest thing was to mark them.