Nothing (6 page)

Anybody going anywhere near little Emil
Jensen’s grave couldn’t help but notice that little Emil Jensen was no longer occupying it. Now Elise began to cry and wouldn’t stop, no matter how much Otto insisted.

We stood awhile without knowing what to do. Then I figured we could roll a couple of headstones from the other graves into the hole and cover them up with earth. The church warden was going to wonder about the missing stones, but he was never going to guess they were at the bottom of Emil Jensen’s grave. All we had to do was make sure we put all the flowers back as they were before.

It took us a good while and a whole lot of toil to get the stones loose and roll them over to little Emil’s grave. We left the ones closest by in case anyone noticed the earth had just been dug. But down they went eventually, with a good heap of earth on top, and gravel topmost of all, and then the flowers, which had suffered some underway, but which would just pass after we’d
brushed them down a bit with Otto’s broom.

The town hall clock struck midnight exactly as we finished up and turned toward the coffin.

I stiffened, and even in the dark I could see the boys grow pale. The town hall clock had a deep, hollow resonance, and each stroke echoed through the graveyard like some ponderous, ghostly appeal.

Come! Come! Come!

None of us moved.

I could neither look nor close my eyes and just stared stiffly at Jon-Johan like he was the only image I dared admit to my retina. I didn’t count the strokes, but it felt like there were many more than twelve. After an age the last one died away, and silence prevailed once more.

We looked at one another nervously. Then Jon-Johan cleared his throat and pointed at the coffin.

“Let’s get out of here,” he said. I noted his subtle avoidance of the word “coffin.”

The coffin must have been very fine and white when Elise’s baby brother had been put into it. Now the white finish was blistered and cracked and no longer fine at all. There was a worm crawling in some earth at one of the corners, and Holy Karl refused to carry until Otto had brushed it away. Then they bore the coffin, the four of them: Otto and Holy Karl on one side, Richard and Jon-Johan on the other. Elise, who had stopped crying when the town hall clock had struck, walked ahead and lit the way with her flashlight, while I brought up the rear with mine.

————

The coffin was heavier than they’d imagined, and the boys were panting and sweating, but Otto wouldn’t let them rest until we’d gotten all the way down to the street. It was no loss to me. I could see no reason to hang about in the churchyard more than was absolutely necessary.

Behind me there was a crunching of gravel.

Sørensen’s Cinderella plodded slowly along after us as if she were the mourner in the procession. To begin with it was comforting and kind of made us feel braver, but when we got down to the street and the coffin had been handled into place on the trailer, we were somewhat unnerved to see her still following on behind.

It wouldn’t do for the church warden to discover the next morning that not only was he missing two gravestones, but Cinderella was gone too. There was nothing we could do about it, though. No sooner had one of us taken her back to the churchyard than she turned around and followed us again. After we had tried to shake her off four times, we gave up and decided she could come along until she turned back herself. Which she didn’t. When we arrived at the sawmill, turned the code on the padlock, and opened up, Cinderella slipped in ahead of us.

————

I turned on the lights, and the boys stepped in with the coffin between them. In the bright neon light it didn’t seem so scary anymore. It’s just a dead child with some wood around it, I thought to myself as I considered more closely the coffin that had now been placed at the foot of the heap of meaning, it being too heavy to be put on top.

We were too tired to worry any more about Cinderella, so we just let her be, turned off the lights, locked up, and scuttled away back through the town. Reaching the end of my street, I said good night to the others and hurried off, rather more at ease than I had been setting out.

The book was still jammed in the window, and I climbed inside and into bed without waking anyone in the house.

How they stared when they saw the coffin with Sørensen’s Cinderella on top.

————

The six of us who had been at the churchyard may well have felt like falling asleep at school that day, but we certainly weren’t hanging our heads. On the contrary! The story was passed around the class and around again in an ever-increasing whisper until Eskildsen became furious and yelled at us to be quiet. Everything went still for a moment, and then it all started off again
and Eskildsen had to holler at us some more.

It felt like an eternity before the final lesson was over and we could set off in our different directions to the sawmill. But then there was no end to the heroics and the events of the previous night, the churchyard plunging deeper into darkness, looming larger and more forbidding as the story was told and told again.

————

In the days that followed, there was no one anywhere in the town who wasn’t talking about the vandalism at the churchyard.

Two gravestones had been stolen, someone had trampled around on little Emil Jensen’s grave, and Sørensen’s Cinderella had disappeared. The latter event was a source of very little regret; after all, it was a disgrace having that old mongrel going about the churchyard, urinating on the gravestones and depositing stuff that was worse who knows where.

No one suspected us.

My mom did ask me about the gravel and the dirt on the carpet in my room. But I just said I’d been playing with Sofie on the field behind her house and had forgotten to take off my boots when I came home. And even if I did get bawled out for the boots, it was nothing compared to what would have happened if my mom had found out where I’d really been.

It was Cinderella who gave us the most trouble.

She refused to leave little Emil’s coffin for more than just a few minutes at a time. She must have thought Sørensen’s remains were inside. Whatever, we were unable to let her out of the sawmill during the daytime. If anyone saw her together with one of us, they’d be sure to get suspicious about matters at the churchyard. Sofie, who lived closest to the sawmill, couldn’t get away to walk Cinderella after dark. She wasn’t allowed out late, and her parents were already of the opinion that she was spending far too much time at the old sawmill. It was Elise who solved the problem.

It was like Elise had grown fonder of her dead baby brother after his coffin had been placed under our care. And perhaps it was Cinderella keeping guard by the coffin that made Elise especially fond of her. No matter the reason, Elise offered to go out to the sawmill every evening and take the dog out for air. It was mid-September now, and dark by eight thirty, so there was just enough
time for her to be back home before bedtime. Her parents didn’t care much one way or the other if she stayed out late, Elise explained, and looked as if she didn’t know if that was good or bad.

“There’s one other thing,” she added.

We stared at her, mouths wide open. With all our nerves about the matter at the churchyard, we’d forgotten that it was now Elise’s turn to choose the next thing to be going on the heap of meaning.

“Ursula-Marie’s hair!”

I looked at Ursula-Marie, who had immediately brought her hand up to her thick blue braids and now opened her mouth in a protest she knew was futile.

“I’ve got some scissors!” Hussain announced, laughing. He held up his Swiss Army knife and pulled out the scissors.

“I’ll do the cutting,” said Elise.

“They’re my scissors, I’ll do it,” Hussain insisted, and they agreed on doing half each.

————

Blue. Bluer. Bluest.

Ursula-Marie sat quite still and didn’t say a word as they cut, but the tears rolled down her cheeks, and it was like the blue of her hair reflected in her lips, which she gnawed until they bled.

I looked the other way so as not to cry too.

Cutting off Ursula-Marie’s hair was worse than cutting off Samson’s. Without her hair, Ursula-Marie would no longer be Ursula-Marie with her six blue braids, which meant that she no longer would be Ursula-Marie at all. I wondered whether that was the reason the six blue braids were part of the meaning, but I didn’t care to say it out loud. Or leave it unspoken. Ursula-Marie was my friend, even if she no longer was Ursula-Marie with her six blue braids, peerless and all her own.

First Elise cut off one braid. Then Hussain cut off another. It was hard work; the scissors were blunt and Ursula-Marie’s hair was thick. It
took them twenty minutes to get through all six. By that time, Ursula-Marie looked like someone who had gotten lost on her way to the asylum.

The severed braids were placed in a pile on top of the heap of meaning.

Blue. Bluer. Bluest.

————

Ursula-Marie sat for a long time, looking at her braids.

There were no longer tears on her cheeks. Instead her eyes were glowing with rage. She turned calmly to Hussain and in a gentle voice, her teeth only moderately clenched, said:

“Your prayer mat!”

Hussain kicked up a storm.

Hussain kicked up a storm to the extent that we finally had to beat up on him.
We
being Otto and Huge Hans. The rest of us watched. It took a while, but eventually Hussain just lay there with his face in the sawdust and Otto on his back. He wasn’t saying anything anymore. When they let him get to his feet he looked terrified, almost like he was shaking. But somehow it wasn’t Otto or Huge Hans he was scared of.

Who it was, we didn’t discover until Hussain had handed over his prayer mat in tears and then
hadn’t come to school for a whole week. When finally he showed up again, he was black and blue and yellow and green all over, and his left arm was broken. He was not a good Muslim, his father had told him, and then had beaten the life out of him.

That wasn’t the worst.

The worst was that he wasn’t a good Muslim.

A bad Muslim! No Muslim! No one!

————

Something in Hussain seemed to have been destroyed.

He went round dragging his feet with his head bowed, and whereas before he’d always dished out his fair share of knocks and shoves, now he wouldn’t even defend himself if someone went for him.

I have to say it was a beautiful mat. The patterns were interwoven, red and blue and gray, and it was so fine and soft to the touch that Cinderella looked like she was going to abandon little Emil’s coffin. But then Jon-Johan laid the mat at the top
of the heap of meaning, where Cinderella couldn’t reach it. That helped. Cinderella stayed put.

At first Hussain wasn’t saying what the next in line had to give up. He just shook his head despondently when we began to pressure him.

Pierre Anthon’s hollering was getting to us, and Hussain would have to get a move on. It was already October, and we were far from being done. We wanted it over with, and there were still five of us to go.

Eventually, when Hussain was unable to put it off any longer, he pointed to Huge Hans and said quietly:

“The yellow bike.”

Hardly a big deal, even if the bicycle was brand-new and neon yellow and a racer, and Huge Hans was beside himself and waited two whole days before he came and leaned it up against the heap of meaning in the old sawmill. Still, a little was better than nothing, and at least now we were able to go on to the rest.

Had we known that giving up his bike would make Huge Hans so furious that he would do something terrible, then some of us may well have told Hussain to think of something else. But we didn’t know, and we insisted on Huge Hans handing over his neon yellow bike, just like Hussain had said.

————

Sofie was one of those who pressured the most.

She shouldn’t have done that.

I can hardly bring myself to tell what it was Sofie had to give up. It was something only a boy could think of, and it was so gross and repugnant that the rest of us almost all pleaded on her behalf. Sofie herself said hardly anything, just no and no and no, and shook her head again and again, and the rest of her was shaking some too.

Huge Hans was merciless.

And of course we had to admit that we had all been quite unyielding when he had been forced to hand over his neon yellow bike.

It wasn’t the same, we said.

“How do you know my neon yellow bike doesn’t mean as much to me as Sofie’s innocence means to her?”

We didn’t.

So even though we had our doubts, it was eventually agreed that Huge Hans was going to help her lose it the following evening at the old sawmill. Four of the boys were to stay behind to lend a hand if necessary. The rest of us would be sent home to make sure we couldn’t come to her rescue.

————

It was a dreadful day at school.

Sofie sat white as the classroom walls at her desk and said nothing, not even when some of the girls tried to comfort her. No one else dared say anything either for thinking about what was going to happen to Sofie, and it was almost worse than when we were making trouble, for Eskildsen had never known us so quiet all at once in the same lesson. He was beginning to suspect, and started going on about our class behaving very oddly ever since the beginning of the school year. He was right, but fortunately, he didn’t connect it with Pierre Anthon’s empty desk. If he’d started on about Pierre Anthon, I’m not sure we could have kept things up.

While Eskildsen went on and on about our strange behavior since August, I turned my head to look at Sofie. I don’t think I would have blamed her if she’d told on us at that point. But she didn’t. She sat completely still, all pale in the face like little Emil’s coffin must have been when it was new, and yet calm and almost collected, like I
imagined a saint would look who was about to meet her death.

I started thinking about how it all had begun, and how Pierre Anthon was still yelling at us from up there in his plum tree, mornings and afternoons and whenever we passed by Tæringvej 25. It wasn’t just us who were going crazy from all this. It sounded like he himself would be losing it if we didn’t get him out of that tree soon.