NOTHING
NOTHING
JANNE TELLER
TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH
BY MARTIN AITKEN
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Intet copyright © 2000 by Janne Teller
Originally published in Denmark in 2000 as Intet by Dansklærerforeningens Forlag A/S Published in the USA by arrangement with the Gyldendal Group, Denmark Translation copyright © 2010 by Martin Aitken Translation published by arrangement with Rights People, UK
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Book design by Michael McCartney
The text for this book is set in Caslon 540.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First U.S. Edition 2010
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Teller, Janne, 1964–
[Intet. English]
Nothing / Janne Teller; translated by Martin Aitken. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Danish Cultural Ministry Prize for best children’s/youth book of 2001. Le Prix Libbylit 2008.
Summary: When thirteen-year-old Pierre Anthon leaves school to sit in a plum tree and train for becoming part of nothing, his seventh grade classmates set out on a desperate quest for the meaning of life.
ISBN 978-1-4169-8579-2 (hardcover)
[1. Meaning (Philosophy) — Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations — Fiction. 3. Schools — Fiction.] I. Aitken, Martin. II. Title.
PZ7.T2367Not 2010 [Fic] — dc22 2009019784
ISBN 978-1-4169-9879-2 (eBook)
I
Nothing matters.
I have known that for a long time.
So nothing is worth doing.
I just realized that.
II
Pierre Anthon left school the day he realized that nothing was worth doing, because nothing meant anything anyway.
The rest of us stayed on.
And although the teachers had a job on their hands tidying up after Pierre Anthon in the classroom as well as in our heads, part of Pierre Anthon remained stuck inside of us. Maybe that was why it all turned out the way it did.
It was the second week of August. The sun was heavy, making us slow and irritable, the tarmac caught on the soles of our sneakers, and apples and pears were just ripe enough to lie snugly in the hand, the perfect missiles. We looked neither left nor right. It was the first day of school after summer vacation. The classroom smelled of detergent and weeks of emptiness, the windows reflected clear and bright, and the blackboard was yet to be blanketed with chalk dust. The desks stood two by two in rows as straight as hospital corridors, as they did only on this one day of the year. Class 7A.
We found our seats without caring to shake any familiarity into the orderliness.
There’s a time for everything. Better things, jumbled things. But not today!
Mr. Eskildsen bid us welcome with the same joke he made every year.
“Take joy in this day, children,” he said. “There would be no such thing as vacation were it not for such a thing as school.”
We laughed. Not because it was funny, but because him saying it was.
It was then that Pierre Anthon stood up.
“Nothing matters,” he announced. “I’ve known that for a long time. So nothing’s worth doing. I just realized that.” Calm and collected, he bent down and put everything he had just taken out back into his bag. He nodded good-bye with a disinterested look and left the classroom without closing the door behind him.
The door smiled. It was the first time I’d seen it do that. Pierre Anthon left the door ajar like a grinning abyss that would swallow me up into the outside with him if only I let myself go. Smiling at whom? At me, at us. I looked around the class. The uncomfortable silence told me the others had felt it too.
We were supposed to amount to something.
Something was the same as someone, and even if nobody ever said so out loud, it was hardly left unspoken, either. It was just in the air, or in the time, or in the fence surrounding the school, or in our pillows, or in the soft toys that after having served us so loyally had now been unjustly discarded and left to gather dust in attics or basements. I hadn’t known. Pierre Anthon’s smiling door told me. I still didn’t know with my mind, but all the same I knew.
All of a sudden I was scared. Scared of Pierre Anthon.
Scared, more scared, most scared.
————
We lived in Tæring, an outpost to a fair-size provincial town. Not swank, but almost. We’d often be reminded of the fact. Nobody ever said so out loud, yet it was hardly left unspoken, either. Neat, yellow-washed brick homes and red bungalows with gardens running all the way round, new gray-brown rows with gardens out front, and then the apartment houses, home to those we never played with. There were some old timber-framed cottages, too, and farms that were no longer farms, the land developed into town, and a few rather more imposing whitewashed residences for those who were more almost-swank than the rest of us.
Tæring School was situated on the corner of two streets. All of us except Elise lived down the one called Tæringvej. Sometimes Elise would go the long way around just to walk to school with the rest of us. At least until Pierre Anthon left.
Pierre Anthon lived with his father and the rest of the commune in an old farmhouse at Tæringvej number 25. Pierre Anthon’s father and the commune were all hippies who were still stuck in ’68. That was what our parents said, and even though we didn’t really know what it meant, we said it too. In the front yard by the street there was a plum tree. It was a tall tree, old and crooked, leaning out over the hedge to tempt us with its dusty red Victoria plums, which none of us could reach. Other years we’d jump to get at the plums. We stopped doing that. Pierre Anthon left school to sit in the plum tree and pelt us with unripe plums. Some of them hit home. Not because Pierre Anthon was aiming at us, because that wasn’t worth it, he proclaimed. It was just chance that made it so.
He yelled at us too.
“It’s all a waste of time,” he yelled one day. “Everything begins only to end. The moment you were born you began to die. That’s how it is with everything.”
“The Earth is four billion, six hundred million years old, and you’re going to reach one hundred at the most!” he yelled another day. “It’s not even worth the bother.”
And he went on, “It’s all a big masquerade, all make-believe and making out you’re the best at it.”
Nothing had ever indicated that Pierre Anthon was the smartest among us, but suddenly we all knew he was. He was onto something. Even if none of us cared to admit it. Not to our parents, not to our teachers, not to one another. Not even to ourselves. W
e didn’t want to live in the world Pierre Anthon was telling us about. We were going to amount to something, be someone.
The smiling door wasn’t going to lure us.
No, sir. No way!
That was why we came up with the idea. “We” is perhaps an exaggeration, because it was Pierre Anthon who got us going.
It was one morning when Sofie had been hit in the head by two hard plums one after another, and she was so mad at Pierre Anthon for just sitting there in his tree, disheartening all of us.
“All you ever do is sit there gawking. Is that any better?” she yelled.
“I’m not gawking,” Pierre Anthon replied calmly. “I’m contemplating the sky and getting used to doing nothing.”
“The heck you are!” Sofie yelled angrily, and hurled a stick up at Pierre Anthon in the plum tree. It landed in the hedge, way beneath him.
Pierre Anthon laughed and hollered so loud they could have heard him all the way up at the school.
“If something’s worth getting upset about, then there must be something worth getting happy about. And if something’s worth getting happy about, then there must be something that matters. But there isn’t!” He raised his voice a notch and roared, “In a few years you’ll all be dead and forgotten and diddly-squat, nothing, so you might just as well start getting used to it!”
That was when we understood we had to get Pierre Anthon out of that plum tree.
III
A plum tree has many branches.
So many endless branches.
All too many endless branches.
Tæring School was large and square and gray as concrete. It was in two stories and in essence an ugly building, but few of us ever had time to think about that, and certainly not now that we were spending all our time not thinking about what Pierre Anthon was saying.
Yet this particular Tuesday morning, eight days into the new school year, it was as though the ugliness of the school struck us like a whole fistful of Pierre Anthon’s bitter plums.
I walked with Jon-Johan and Sofie through the gate into the schoolyard, and just behind us came Ursula-Marie and Gerda, and we all fell quite silent as we turned the corner and saw the school building. I can’t explain how, but it was like it was something Pierre Anthon was making us see. As if the nothing he kept yelling about up in the plum tree had overtaken us on the way and gotten here first.
The school was so gray and ugly and angular that I almost couldn’t catch my breath, and all of a sudden it was as if the school were life itself, and it wasn’t how life was supposed to look but did anyway. I felt a violent urge to run over to Tæringvej 25 and climb up to Pierre Anthon in his plum tree and stare into the sky until I became a part of the outside and nothing and never had to think about anything again. But I was supposed to amount to something, be someone, so I stayed where I was and just looked the other way and dug my nails into the palm of my hand until it hurt good and strong.
Smiling door — Open! Close!
I wasn’t the only one to feel outside calling.
“We have to do something,” Jon-Johan whispered, making sure the other new seventh graders just ahead of us didn’t hear him. Jon-Johan could play the guitar and sing Beatles songs so you could hardly tell the difference between him and the real ones.
“He’s right!” whispered Ursula-Marie, whom I suspected of having a crush on Jon-Johan, and sure enough Gerda sniggered right away and stabbed the air with her elbow, Ursula-Marie having walked on in the meantime.
“But what?” I whispered, breaking into a trot. The kids from the other class had come disconcertingly close, among them the bully boys who twanged rubber bands and dried peas at the girls whenever the opportunity arose, and my opportunity looked like it was going to arise pretty soon.
Jon-Johan sent a note round in math, and the whole class met down on the soccer field after school. Everyone except Henrik, because Henrik was the son of our biology teacher, and we didn’t want to run any kind of risk.
————
To begin with, it felt like an age we were just standing there talking about other things and making out we weren’t all thinking about one and the same thing. At last Jon-Johan drew himself up and declared almost solemnly that we all had to pay attention.
“It can’t go on like this,” his speech began, and that was how he ended it too, after briefly stating what each and every one of us knew, that we couldn’t go on making like things mattered as long as Pierre Anthon remained in his plum tree, yelling at us that nothing mattered.
We had just started seventh grade, and we were all so modern and so well-versed in life and being in the world that we knew that everything was more about how it appeared than how it was. The most important thing, in any circumstance, was to amount to something that really looked like it was something. And though that something as yet seemed rather vague and unclear to us, it certainly had nothing to do with sitting in a plum tree, pitching plums into the street.
If Pierre Anthon thought he could make us think any different, he had another thing coming.
“He’s bound to climb down when winter comes and there are no more plums,” said Pretty Rosa.
It didn’t help.
For one thing, the sun was still blazing away in the sky, and winter looked like it was a long way off. For another, there was no reason to believe that Pierre Anthon couldn’t stay in his plum tree winter or not, even if there were no plums. All he had to do was dress warmly.
“You’re going to have to beat up on him, then.” It was the boys I was talking to, for even though we girls could scratch some, it was obvious that it was the boys who would have to bear the brunt.
They looked around at one another.
They didn’t think it was a good idea. Pierre Anthon was solid and thickset, with a splash of freckles on the nose he’d broken one time in fifth grade when he’d butted some kid from ninth down in the town. Despite his broken nose, Pierre Anthon had won the fight. The kid from ninth had been sent to the hospital with a concussion.
“Fighting’s not a good idea,” said Jon-Johan, and the other boys nodded, ending the discussion there and then, even though we girls probably lost some degree of respect for them on that occasion.
“We should pray to God,” suggested Holy Karl, whose father was something big in the Inner Mission; his mother as well, for that matter.
“Shut up, Karl!” Otto hissed. He pinched Holy Karl until Holy Karl couldn’t possibly shut up, but squealed like a hog with its head in a fire, and the rest of us had to get Otto to lay off so that all his squealing didn’t attract the janitor.
“We could make a complaint about him,” suggested Little Ingrid, who was so small we didn’t always remember she was there. Today, though, we remembered, and responded all at once, “Who to?”
“To Mr. Eskildsen.” Little Ingrid noted our astonished expressions. Eskildsen was our homeroom teacher, and he wore a black raincoat and a gold watch and didn’t care to deal with problems on any scale. “To the principal, then,” she went on.
“The principal!” Otto spluttered, and would have pinched Little Ingrid if Jon-Johan hadn’t quickly stepped in between them.
“We can’t complain to Eskildsen or to the principal or to any other grown-up, because if we complain about Pierre Anthon sitting in his plum tree, we’ll have to tell them why we’re complaining. And then we’ll have to tell them what Pierre Anthon’s saying. Which we can’t, because the grown-ups won’t want to hear that we know that nothing matters and that everybody is just making like it does.” Jon-Johan threw up his arms, and we imagined all the experts, the educators and psychologists who would come and observe us and talk to us and reason with us until eventually we would give in and again start pretending that things really did matter. Jon-Johan was right: It was a waste of time that would get us nowhere.
————
For a while no one said anything. I screwed my eyes up at the sun, then stared at the white soccer goals without their nets, the
n behind me at the shot-put circle, the high-jump mattresses, and the running track. A gentle breeze was blowing through the beech hedge that ran round the soccer field, and suddenly it was all like a gym lesson and a day like any other, and I almost forgot why we had to get Pierre Anthon out of his plum tree. For all I care he can sit up there and yell till he rots, I thought. I said nothing. The thought was true only at the moment it was thought.
“Let’s pelt him with stones,” Otto suggested, and now came a lengthy discussion about where to get hold of the stones and how big they should be and who was going to throw them, for the idea was good.
Good, better, best.
It was the only one we had.
IV
One stone, two stones, many stones.
They were all piled up in the bike trailer Holy Karl used every Tuesday afternoon for delivering the local paper and the church newsletter the first Wednesday of the month. We’d gathered them down by the stream where they were big and round, and the trailer was heavy as a dead horse.
We were all going to throw.
“Two each, at the least,” Jon-Johan commanded.
Otto kept tally to make sure we each took our turn. Even Henrik, the little butter-up, had been summoned and duly delivered his two shots, neither of which came even close. Maiken’s and Sofie’s were marginally better.
“So nothing’s got you all scared, then?” Pierre Anthon hollered as he followed Ursula-Marie’s pathetic shots and watched them land in the hedge.
“You’re only up there because your dad’s still stuck in ’68!” shouted Huge Hans, and hurled a stone into the tree. It smacked into a plum, which splattered in all directions.
We hooted.
I hooted with the rest of them, even though I knew neither claim was true. Pierre Anthon’s father and the rest of the commune grew organic vegetables and practiced exotic religions and were receptive to the spiritual world, alternative treatments, and their fellow human beings. But that wasn’t the reason it wasn’t true. It wasn’t true because Pierre Anthon’s father wore a buzz cut and worked for a computer company, and the whole thing was up-to-the-minute and had nothing to do with either ’68 or Pierre Anthon in the slightest.