She got up and started walking. I followed. We came down to the lake, the snow and the water ran into each other, no sign of any downward movement, just a gray wave between heaven and earth. You were enclosed, like in a cell or a white hospital. And yet you were free, on all sides you were hidden from view.
She did not turn her head, I had to lean toward her to catch the words.
“Just go,” she said, “go to hell.”
“I’ve been transferred,” I said, “it’s a punishment, they’ve had it ratified by a judge, there’s nothing to be done.”
She turned her face toward me, the skin was white, transparent. She looked at me as though she was searching for something. Then she touched my arm.
“It’s them who are having you transferred?”
She kept her eyes fixed on me, it was almost overwhelming.
“I was waiting for you,” she said. “I have the timetable, I knew you would come.”
We walked along side by side, we had run out of options. But it did not matter. She stumbled, I took her arm. We were in a desolate forest, I had protected her, I had wrapped extra blankets around her. It was getting darker, we were heading into the darkness, toward destruction, but it did not matter.
You spend your whole life believing that you will always be on the outside or on the borderline. You struggle and struggle, and yet it all seems to be in vain. And then, suddenly, you are allowed inside and lifted up into the light.
She looked at me, there was snow on her eyelashes and flakes of ice—tears, she was crying, and not out of aversion, and not because I had hit her. For the first time in my life.
“I thought you wanted to leave,” she said.
I wanted to ask for permission to kiss her, but I could not speak, I tried but I could not. And yet maybe I did say it, because it happened. Her lips were chapped with the cold.
It was everything, that kiss was everything. Everything you had dreamed of but never attained, and everything that, now, would never come to pass, because I was going away and was lost. All of that was in it.
It got rid of time. I knew I would remember it forever and ever and that they could not take it away from me, not ever—come what may. And so that moment became one of utter fearlessness.
* * *
A house came at us out of the darkness. That is how it seemed, even though it was we who were moving. It was one of the storehouses. It was locked, but only by a padlock with a shackle. You loosen the nut and the shackle pin slips down.
There had been a bit about the storehouses in Biehl’s memoirs. When the school, achieving a significant goal, had added school-leaving certificate classes to the curriculum, it had been necessary to move some of the school’s collections—which were valuable but stored away—out of the main building. In time, it was hoped, they would form the nucleus of a museum to the Grundtvigian educational tradition.
There was no light. There were boxes and gardening tools on the floor; along the walls—glass-fronted cabinets. Darkness was falling outside, but behind the glass I saw Magdeburg hemispheres, glass retorts, and a Van de Graaff generator. Along with a large number of stuffed birds, and a civet caught in the coils of a cobra.
The snake was bigger than the civet, it had a good grip and was starting to squeeze. At the same time it had stretched its jaw wide and exposed its poisonous fangs. The animals were frozen in the moment just before the strike.
I knew that the civet would win. It was not something I wanted to happen, it was something I knew would happen. It had most to lose, its life was on the line—and maybe the lives of others, whom it was protecting from the snake—and it was the smaller, and it had its back to the wall. It was a little, restless, wild animal and the snake was bigger, cold, and steady. Even so, it did not stand a chance.
We sat down on a couple of boxes.
“What are we going to do?” she said.
A moment before, you could not have imagined that there was anything you could do. Now things had changed, now we would have to leave the school. That was easily arranged, I wanted to explain it to her. There had been people who had run away from Himmelbjerg House, and who had stayed out, on the loose, for up to two weeks and more. And here the situation was different, together we could stay out forever.
These were the words I wanted to say. Instead I said something else.
“August,” I said.
Never, ever, can you abandon a child without tumbling into perdition yourself. It is a rule against which one personally can do nothing.
She had known this, before I said it she had known. It had never been just us two, never just Katarina and me. There had always been three of us, even before he came and I saw him for the first time.
I told her about the engineering tunnels and about his file. I did not say much, nor was it necessary. She sat on the box, leaning forward, and listened to me, even to my pauses. She heard everything, even the things I could not say.
We sat there and I knew that this was how it felt to be totally accepted. You sit close to another person and are understood, everything is understood and nothing is judged and you are indispensable.
And we sat on, saying nothing. I tried to find a solution, to find out how to get August out, so that we could be together, all three of us. The locks were there, before my eyes—first those between him and us—on the main door and the doors to the corridor and the sickroom, and the lock of the closet where they kept his outdoor clothes and shoes at night. And then, once we had got to him, the locks between us and freedom—on the car we would have to use, and in front of the money you had to have. And beyond them, all the locks in the world, a never-ending host. No one could open that many. It would be an overwhelming achievement, one that would never come to an end, no matter how much you struggled and did your best.
It became obvious that we were lost, and then came the despair.
Although only for August, not for Katarina, and definitely not for me. I had been given everything and no one could ever take that away from me. For someone who has been given everything you cannot feel despair.
I was sure that Katarina had been thinking the same. That, in that moment, we were thinking the same thought, without having to discuss it. I was convinced of that.
Then she stood up and went over to the window, and just by the way she walked I could see that I had been wrong.
“If there were no clocks in the school,” she said, “what would you know about time?”
Her voice had changed, she was in another world, she was another person. Inside her, at the same time, there was another person—but a different person—who had now taken over.
It was like August, and yet not the same. August was either the one person or the other, there was no connection. The August who stood with his back to the wall and went for your fingers was out of control.
With Katarina it was different. The two people were connected, they were both there at the same time, but this one, the one that had now taken over, I would never understand.
* * *
I could have gone on sitting with her forever. That is how it was, and that is how it will be for the rest of my life. If the child, August, had also been there, I could have sat there with the woman always.
I never wanted anything else. Nor have I, since then. Than to be allowed inside, and then to sit quietly with the woman and the child. That would have been enough.
But now I saw that it was different for Katarina. And that she, and maybe every person, was like row upon row of white rooms. You can go together through some of them, but they have no end, and you cannot accompany anyone through them all.
* * *
I would never have gotten her to come with me. Not even if we could have brought August. The other part of her, some of the other people inside her, wanted something more. They wanted an answer.
In the laboratory she had asked a question: What was time, what was the plan behind the school?—and as yet the question had not been answered.
&nb
sp; It is not easy to understand. That it can be so important for someone to ask a question and receive an answer; that it is more important than anything else. Maybe even more important than love.
There is no way you can understand it. You have to give in and say: That is how it is. That they need to know. No matter what.
* * *
She asked again.
“What would you know about time if there were no clocks?”
I suppose you’d still be aware of it, I said, and we’d better be getting back soon. It was almost dark, I had seen Klastersen outside, he must have realized that I was missing, and made one more circuit.
I thought of her breathing on the telephone, and breathing in general.
“You breathe,” I said, “and there’s your heartbeat, it’s like a clock. The sun and the moon rise and set.”
“Those are rhythms,” she said, “there’s some kind of order, there’s no confusion. But it isn’t total regularity.”
I had no answer to that. Klastersen had run off into the darkness.
“Tell me again, about the letters,” she said. “The bit about the director of education.”
She had moved up close to me, I took my time telling her. I could no longer see her face.
She took my arm.
“I brought you a watch,” she said.
She put it on my wrist. Where had she got that?
“Now, listen,” she said.
And then she explained something to me.
NINE
At the beginning of January 1993, I biked all over Copenhagen looking for a particular clock.
By then I had been writing the account here presented for over a year, and I had kept putting off this one task: after twenty years, once more having to enter a school.
It was cold and very dark. It was daytime, but still murky enough for night.
I started at random with Øster Farimags Street School, maybe because from the hill in the grounds around Biehl’s you could always see the tower of the church next to it.
The school office was on a mezzanine floor. I stood for a long while in front of the secretaries, then I pulled myself together. “Might I be allowed to see your school bell?” I said. “I’m writing a book.”
It was high up, encapsulated in Plexiglas and sporting red digital figures. They told me that it had been installed before their time—no one could remember when—and kept perfect time. Very occasionally a man came to give it a once-over.
A teacher came by while I was standing there. Five years earlier he had been working at Frederiksunds Road School, he thought they had an old bell there.
So I cycled out to Frederiksunds Road. They had the same Plexiglas box and digital display. But they gave me the telephone number of the school engineer.
I got to speak to him a few days later. He was employed by the district engineer’s office, with responsibility for timekeeping in many of the schools in Copenhagen District. He told me that, over the past twenty years, a private company, Danish Time Management Ltd., had been given the job of replacing most of the old bells with modern quartz mechanisms. Which were very accurate, and required hardly any adjusting. And so, to all intents and purposes, ran all by themselves. Without any human intervention.
He did however know of two old-style mechanisms. Hellig Kors School and Prinsesse Charlotte Street School still had the old-style bells. The kind that had been in use in the sixties and seventies. But which time had made obsolete.
I biked to Hellig Kors School, and there I came very close. The clock was in the office. It was the right casing, but there were too many wires. They told me that the works had been replaced, some years earlier, by an electronic mechanism.
I found it at Prinsesse Charlotte Street School.
The deputy headmaster came with me. I felt very small. To me he seemed a generation older. Later on, it dawned on me that he and I must have been just about the same age.
The clock was high up. He held the ladder for me.
This was the clock I had been searching for. The clock I had seen and touched just once, for an instant, one morning twenty-two years before. A hand-wound Bürk pendulum clock.
I opened the glass and took a look at the works. I meant to take a few notes, but there was no need. It was just as I remembered.
* * *
The deputy head, the engineer, the secretaries in the office, the teacher who had worked at Frederiksunds Road School—all of them have forgotten me within a very short time of having met me. But, while we were standing together, they thought they were dealing with an adult.
Wrong. They had been speaking to a child.
Confronted by them, I had no skin, nothing to shield me. I noted their every change in tone, every flicker of the eye; I sensed their need to be getting on, their politeness and distraction and indifference. They forgot me five minutes after I was gone, I will remember them always.
Crossing the threshold of a school, I stepped inward and downward into the child I was twenty-two years ago, and in this form I met the adults.
They were protected. Time had wrapped a membrane around them. They were jovial and pressed for time and totally unaffected by our meeting.
That is how it was back then, when I was at Biehl’s. That is how it is now, that is how it will always be. Time has wrapped itself around the adults—with its haste, its dread, its ambitions, its bitterness, and its long-term goals. They no longer see us properly, and what they do see they have forgotten five minutes later.
While we, we have no skin. And we remember them forever.
That is how it was at the school. We remembered every facial expression, every insult and word of encouragement, every casual remark, every expression of power and weakness. To them we were everyday, to us they were timeless, cosmic, and overwhelmingly powerful.
This thought has crossed my mind: that when you feel pain, when you feel that this thing growing, here, in the laboratory, is all for nothing, you could counteract it with the thought that now this is perhaps the only way of telling how the world seemed to you back then.
Things adult. Precise, accurate things. Of those there is no shortage. In fact, everything else around us is comprised of them. But to sense without skin is something that can perhaps only be done under conditions such as those in the laboratory.
TEN
I did not let myself into August’s room. I could not risk getting caught. Instead I went up to the door and called to him, it was just before he was due to have his medicine. We lay down and talked through the gap at the bottom of the door. Which meant that I could not see him and I could only just hear him. I said no more than was absolutely vital—that I was going to report him for having gone without eating for a long time.
“It’ll mean Sandbjerggård,” he said, “they’ve got a clinic there, then it’s all over.”
“No,” I said. “You’ll be admitted to the infirmary, on a yellow form, or a red one. It’s all worked out.”
* * *
The infirmary was on the fifth floor, diagonally opposite the assembly hall, next to the district medical officer’s clinic. It was bigger than the sickroom, with two beds instead of just an examining table, and a locked closet for instruments.
The sickroom was for people suffering from minor ailments or those who had to be kept in isolation for a while. The infirmary was for real accidents.
After Axel Fredhøj’s second accident he was taken there, while they waited for the ambulance. And Werner Petersen, who had been the PE teacher before Klastersen, was taken there, too. He had always been tough and yet, at the same time, nervous. He had never been able to cope with people leaving a room before he did, a strict prohibition had been in force against leaving the gym during his classes. Which was not easy, since the place was not heated in winter and you could easily find yourself needing to go to the toilet, which was why one day Kåre Frymand had peed in the wastepaper basket in the changing room. It was done out of desperation and with the best of intentions, not
to have to go all the way up to the toilets. He was very scared of Werner Petersen. Being wicker, the wastepaper basket was not watertight. It leaked and Werner Petersen set about punishing him. You had sensed that this was not like the other times, he went off his head and screamed like a madman. Someone had gone to get other teachers, who had overpowered him and locked him up in the infirmary. It had been done on the quiet, the rest of the school would never have found out about it if Kåre Frymand had not turned out to be damaged and an explanation demanded of the school. It was said that it was a breakdown. Special circumstances had been in play in Werner Petersen’s family for some time, and he never returned to the school. Klastersen was appointed in his place.
From then on, it was obvious what the infirmary was used for. Because it was close to the staff room and the office and had direct access to the south staircase, it was ideal for things that were not to be spoken of.
Never before had I heard of anyone at Biehl’s suffering from an eating disorder. But at the Royal Orphanage and especially at Himmelbjerg House it had been common. The management there knew that it was not dangerous if people were caught in time. Even so, they had not wanted it discussed. People were put to bed and the doctor was called and an admittance slip was filled out—yellow if they were only a danger to themselves, red if they were also a danger to their surroundings. This was a strictly regulated procedure, I had explained this to Katarina in the storehouse.
There was no time, and no chance, to tell August this. I hoped it would work the same way here at the school—that was our plan. Although I could not be sure. But, in any case, neither August nor I had more than a few days left. I mean, we had come to the point where there really was not much to discuss.
“I can’t stay on my own at night,” he said.
I comforted him by saying that they would have someone watching him.
“It’ll be Flakkedam,” he said.
You knew what he meant. That that was worse than being alone.
“Don’t swallow the medicine,” I said.