She meant Humlum. We were alone on the stairs now, soon we would be missed.
I did not mean to tell her, but I did anyway, for no special reason. Other than that she listened, and that it just came out. There was nothing to be done about it.
* * *
At the Orphanage, after school, we had our set tasks, that is, kitchen duty, emptying the garbage cans, odd jobs in the house and in the garden, as well as special duties. One of the special duties was cutting Valsang’s grass.
As a rule one was not offered this until Primary Six. He asked me halfway through Primary Five, six months before I was transferred.
Up there one was allowed to take stuff from his refrigerator, it was absolutely legit. One went up after school and cut the grass and ate out of the refrigerator.
The next thing that happened was that he said one could stay the night there, and one accepted.
It was never talked about, not even among the pupils. One stayed the night up there. No one had ever come to any harm.
At first I did not want to, but it was something everyone had to go through.
He was a Danish teacher. In the evening he played music for me on his record player, then I went into the spare room where he had made up the bed.
The cramps started while I was lying waiting for him to come, they had been there before, just not so bad.
Then time began to float. I did not know whether a minute or an hour had passed. It was there it became clear to me that I was ill.
In the end I left before he came. He had locked me in, but it was only an inside lock, the kind that a piece of bent wire will open.
From then on I knew that I was too weak to make it at the school. After that he was very much on the alert. Not angry, just very often near at hand. Twice, in the showers, he very nearly got me.
There was no one to talk to about it, it was not the sort of thing you could bring up. All the others had been there, Humlum, too, and none of them had come to any harm.
I’m getting to it now.
I was passing the telephone booth. It was on the second floor. It was in the afternoon. He opened the door and pulled me in and pushed me up against the shelf with the telephone books. He asked me to look up a number, he had forgotten his reading glasses.
* * *
It’s no good. Going on. It was no good, not even with Katarina. I cannot say it—not just yet—I have to say something else first.
We struggled to get top marks for discipline, that was the ultimate goal, better than getting onto a school team, better than being seen with one of the kitchen maids.
For most people, the school was their last chance, they knew they were all but lost. They had no family, or they had been latchkey kids from the age of five, or they were like Gummi, who had not even been given a key but had to sleep on the doormat and had had pneumonia so many times that sports and standing up for himself were now out of the question, so he only survived because he could hide his candy and sell it dear at the end of the month. Crusty House was the last resort, after that came a treatment home, and that was that.
They had been given the chance because they were academically gifted. Now it was a matter of hanging on. So you sat there, with graph paper and two drafts, even when it was just sums done in ink. What you were mapping out was the structure that had not been firm enough, and that you now had to keep within. With precision and accuracy. This was the last and only chance.
Like looking things up accurately. We had had exercises in using telephone directories; that was in Valsang’s classes.
* * *
I tried to look it up, I really tried. Even though I knew it was just something he had said, I really tried. Even though he had opened his fly and had his cock out, and the tension inside the booth grew and the cramps started.
One cannot keep running away. There seemed to be nothing else for it but to try to hold him off, while turning the pages with the other hand, as one had been asked.
The door of the booth was of frosted glass in a steel frame. Val-sang held it closed with his free hand. Humlum smashed it with a fire extinguisher. They were topped up with water once a year, they held ten gallons, plus the weight of the metal.
It was safety glass, it sort of disintegrated and covered us in gritty dust.
There were a fair number of pupils outside, maybe thirty or forty. A couple of the bigger ones were damaged. They had refused to come because it was something to do with Valsang. Humlum had forced them, so that there would be witnesses. They did not want to look, they tried to look away. Still, they had to look at us.
They stood absolutely still, there was a narrow space between them and the booth which we came out through, first Valsang and me, then Humlum with the fire extinguisher. Slowly they followed us. We went into the office.
* * *
In the ordinary time, that of a watch, one understands certain, specific things. When one lets go of time one understands certain other things.
This was the alternative illness offered. When something important was happening, one could let go, and achieve a rich moment, full of understanding. It is like moving in on a black hole. If one gets too close, one gets sucked in. But if one comes up alongside it, there is understanding.
While we were still on our way to the office, the thought occurred that we ought to be able to use this, to get something in return. That we could bring pressure to bear upon them, and get away.
* * *
This I told Katarina. While we were all alone on the stairs.
“So why didn’t he come with you?” she asked.
“He didn’t want to,” I said. “When it came right down to it, he just said, ‘Save yourself.’”
She asked if I still saw him.
“He comes to visit me,” I said. “But in secret.”
FIVE
In class we sat, split up into three rows, facing the teacher’s desk. Farthest away, in the window row, in the light, there were just girls, in the middle row both girls and boys, in the door row just boys.
Here they had cleared three desks. The middle one was for August and me.
In front of us and behind us there were empty desks. Flakkedam sat down at the empty desk behind us.
A number of rules had been imposed on August. It took me a while to work out what they were. He was forbidden to get to his feet without permission, or to make any sudden movements. On those occasions when he did so anyway, Flakkedam was on him like a shot.
So we sat, on our own, with empty desks in front and behind us, right over against the wall. He was also forbidden to move. You could not help but think that he had, at one and the same time, both less and more space than anyone else in the school.
No explanation was given.
* * *
Biehl’s Academy was a private, fee-paying school.
It was common knowledge that they were very particular about the appointment of new teachers. There were always a lot of applicants, each and every one of whom was called in for an exhaustive interview. But Fredhøj, who was deputy head, had told us during one class that certain applicants had been rejected before the interview, while still in the secretary’s office, because they had looked unkempt, or had not been there at the appointed time. After a series of interviews, one individual was chosen for the vacant position. This was important for the school. That the teachers were highly qualified and carefully selected.
Something similar held true for the pupils. Something that was mentioned pretty often was the waiting lists.
For every single class the school had a waiting list. It was so long that at any given time they could have doubled the number of pupils. This did not happen. It was part of Grundtvig’s philosophy that schools should be kept pretty small. Besides which, it was a prerequisite for the high academic standard.
What happened with the waiting lists was that they were just there. Then, when it was necessary to request a pupil’s parents to remove the person concerned from the school, or if something
else happened, that place was filled from the list.
Up to eighteen. Where, in an ordinary public school, there could be as many as thirty-six pupils in each class, at Biehl’s there were only eighteen. It was a prerequisite for the standard.
The waiting lists meant that the school did not have to keep any pupil. This was something everyone knew, that there was no reason for the school to keep anyone. Regarding the fact that it was a fee-paying school, Fredhøj had said this ensured that it was those parents with a special and more serious interest in their children who placed them at the school. But to ensure that it was also open to poor families with academically gifted children, there was the possibility of applying for a full or partial scholarship.
So the pupils were selected by way of their parents’ loving care. And outside each class, on the lists, at least eighteen others were waiting to take their places—we all knew that.
Which is why there was no understanding why they let in August.
It was like a sign.
* * *
Why did they take him?
It was hard enough to understand it with a character like Carsten Sutton. Or me, who was just of average intelligence or a bit below, and on a scholarship, and who was starting to arrive very late, even though they did not yet know how bad things had become.
But that they took August was inexplicable. When they had the waiting lists and had no need to keep anyone. Why did they take someone like him?
It was this question that made me sure there had to be a plan. But long before then, more than once, you’d noticed things.
* * *
The first sign came after a year at the school, when we received word about the covert Darwinism. When it came, the word, it made one’s previous life clear as daylight.
* * *
Oscar Humlum and I had been traveling companions for a long time before we met, though without knowing it.
There was nothing strange about this. It was absolutely normal. Because, for an orphan in Denmark, everything was very strictly regulated. Across the country ran certain tunnels that were invisible; they ran alongside one another, absolutely parallel. So, when Humlum and I met, we did not talk much about the past. This silence—it was so as not to pry, but also because we knew that, in a way, we had been traveling together, even though we did not see each other.
* * *
First one was put into a home for infants. One was so small there that one could not remember anything, but the file stated that I had been in two different ones.
After that one was put in a children’s home. Both Humlum and I had been with the Christian Foundation. I was at the home on Peter Bang Road, between Copenhagen Ball Club’s soccer fields and Flintholm Church, Humlum was in Esbjerg. One feels as though one ought to have remembered quite a bit about that time, but the only thing one remembered was the storytelling, and the punishment for soiling one’s mouth with swear words—the matron, Sister Ragna, pushed one’s head down into the toilet after she had used it.
One ought to have remembered more. But that was the only thing that had stuck.
* * *
They kept you for as long as they could at the children’s home. Only if they came to the conclusion that there was no alternative were you moved. There was only one kind of place to go to from there. That was to a residential assessment center, for a limited period. I went to Brogårdsvænge in Gentofte, that was in ’66. I remember nothing about why, in the file, the matron, Sister Ragna, had written: “Willful, refuses to wear knickerbockers.”
That is what it says, but one remembers nothing.
One time I showed it to Humlum. It was winter, at night. We were sitting on the toilets, up against the radiator. “I remember them,” he said, “baggy pants and long, checked socks. The rest of them at the school wore desert boots and Icelandic sweaters. You didn’t have anything else, it was like your skin, it got to the stage where you wanted to rip it off, rip your skin off, or something.”
He did not say whether he, too, had refused.
* * *
It was all downhill from the assessment center. Because one was older, there were more places they could send one. I was put into a boarding school for children whose development does not measure up to the norm, and from there to Nødebogård Treatment Home.
That was in ’67, I must have been ten years old. By then there had been various offenses, mostly running away and break-ins, but other things, too, that I will not mention, also assault.
At that point one was allowed to see bits of one’s file, it was all part of the new trend in education at that time. The man from the Department of Health and Welfare showed it to me. It was the first time I saw it. There it said exactly how things stood: “behavioral disturbances,” “problems with adjustment to school,” “conduct disorders,” “antisocial,” “truancy.” “What are we to do?” he said. “You will be sent to Nødebogård until a place becomes vacant at a reform school in Jutland.”
“Reform school” was not an official term. Unofficially, though, the meaning was absolutely clear. It meant those schools and homes where the staff kept a tight grip on things, and had the experience and the resources for taking on even very young offenders. I had been at Nødebogård for two months when a place became vacant at Himmelbjerg House and I was transferred. Humlum and I talked sometimes about how it would have been if he had been transferred at the same time, so we would have met each other at Himmelbjerg House instead of a year later at Crusty House.
But that did not happen, since he had, two years earlier, stopped talking.
* * *
In my case they always knew that I was not backward. No one suspected that I might be academically gifted, but no one had ever actually thought that I was retarded. Apparently, in Humlum’s case, they had not been so sure. Added to which, he had stopped talking. For a year and a half he said nothing, not one word.
He never did say that much, not even later, not even about why he had stopped talking. All he told me was that his mouth had hurt.
It was true, one could tell just by looking at him. Talking for any length of time hurt. So there came a point when he stopped altogether.
First of all they sent him to an assessment center, and then to Copenhagen, where the child psychiatry clinics were. First he was sent to the Juvenile Clinic in Læssøes Street—to ambulatory assessment, where they dealt with the most difficult cases. There he was put down as 3.
* * *
When you were “in care” you could be four things, nothing else was possible. You could be “of normal intelligence,” that was 1, or “mildly retarded,” that was 2. Both 1 and 2 could be with or without “general adjustment problems.” Or you could be 3, like Humlum, who had “social adjustment problems with neurotic or other pathological characteristics.” 4 was “feeble-minded or severely retarded.”
Three was very dangerous. If you had been in a reform school and a treatment home for the mildly retarded and if they concluded that you fell into the lowest level for 3, or lower, there was only one alternative, and that was mental retardation services. On the bottom rung of mental retardation services came permanent residential care, in a locked ward, strapped down, and three injections daily.
Still, Humlum went along with it of his own free will, and got himself put down as 3. He told me he had had a nice time. They had examined him on Mondays and Wednesdays, but apart from that they left him alone. He only went to school two days a week and was put on a special diet, with dessert after meals and seconds if he asked for them.
I never figured out exactly how long this went on for, a year and a half at least. He attended the Save the Children child psychiatry outpatients clinic, and finally the child psychiatry clinic at Copenhagen University. There they assessed him as being below the limit for feeble-minded—4, that is—and then he got scared and started talking again. Then it was recommended that he be transferred to the Central Mission Home for the Retarded on Gersons Road in Hellerup. To get out of this he
made a great effort. Then they realized that he was academically gifted and he was sent, instead, to take an entrance exam for the Orphanage. “I had to do my best,” he said. He passed and was accepted, a year before me.
* * *
By not talking for so long he had discovered the thing about letting your mind go blank. He told me that this had been the only time ever when he could sleep properly at night, the world had become different. “Time,” he said, “began to flow, like when you let your mind go blank.”
* * *
He was the first one to suggest that there must be a plan. In a way, all the homes were alike. Some had locks; some had one sort of workshop, while others had another sort. With all of them it was as though they were saturated by tight, tight time.
* * *
I had noticed this, but had not been able to put it into words. Humlum did.
“There must be a plan,” he said, “why else should it be so important to be so precise, right?”
I just listened, I had nothing to say.
“When you let your mind go blank,” he said, “or when you stop talking for a long time, something happens. Time becomes different. It goes away. It doesn’t come back until you start to say something.”
* * *
After he said that, it was three years before anyone talked about time. That was in the laboratory, when Katarina said that we were going to study it.
By then it was a year since Biehl had given the signal, and revealed the plan for helping the borderliners.
* * *
It came at a time when it had become hard to see any way out.
At Crusty House there had been compulsory home visits every third weekend, on these occasions they sent me to Høve, to the vacation home for underprivileged children. That did not work out very well. The place was used for the assessment of children from Copenhagen who had been in gangs that had been split up. At the home they formed new gangs—they were used to working like that. When I left there the last time they had knocked out four of my bottom teeth and I had been abused sexually. I was given silver teeth. I refused to go back there.