We let Gerda line the cage with some old sawdust, and after she had given Oscarlittle an extra portion of hamster food and a bowl of fresh water, I climbed up the stepladder and placed him and the cage on top of the heap.
I climbed down again, dragged the ladder away, and stood to admire the heap with the cage like a star slightly crooked on top. Then I noticed how quiet it was in the mill.
Quiet. Quieter. All quiet.
It was so quiet I suddenly couldn’t help but notice how big and empty the place was, how many cracks and crevices there were in the concrete floor that could just be picked out beneath the dirt of the sawdust, how thick the cobwebs were that clung to every beam and joist, how many holes there were in the roof, and how few windowpanes were still intact. I surveyed the surroundings from one end of the mill to the other, up and down, down and up, then finally turned my gaze to my classmates.
They were still staring silently at the cage.
It was as though Oscarlittle had added something to the heap of meaning that neither my green wedge sandals, nor Sebastian’s fishing rod, nor Richard’s soccer ball had been able to. I was pretty pleased with myself for having come up with the idea, so it stung that the others seemed less than enthusiastic.
It was Otto who came to my rescue.
“Now there’s something that’s got meaning!” he exclaimed, looking away from Oscarlittle and toward me.
“Pierre Anthon’s never going to top that,” Huge Hans added, and no one seemed to be protesting.
I had to bite my tongue not to blush from pride.
————
It was getting late, and most of us had to be getting off home for supper. We took a final admiring look at our bulging heap, then Sofie turned off the lights and closed the door behind us. Jon-Johan put the padlock on, and we hurried away in all directions.
It was Gerda’s turn.
VII
Gerda wasn’t particularly inventive and said only that Maiken was to hand over her telescope. We all knew Maiken had invested two years and all her savings into her telescope, and that she spent every evening, when the sky was clear, observing the stars, for she was going to be an astrophysicist. Even so, it was a disappointing choice.
Maiken herself, though, proved more adventurous.
Without needing time to think about it, she looked directly at Frederik and said:
“The Dannebrog.”
It was like Frederik started to shrink—he grew thinner and smaller and more and more red in the face and began to shake his head vigorously.
Frederik had brown hair and brown eyes and was always dressed in a white shirt and blue pants with creases the other boys did their best to ruin. And like his parents, who were married and not divorced and never would be, Frederik believed in Denmark and the Royal House and was forbidden to ever play with Hussain.
The Dannebrog, our proud flag, had descended from the skies in twelve-hundred-and-something, Frederik maintained, in order that the Danish king could prevail over the enemy in Latvia. What the Danish king was doing in Latvia, Frederik was unable to enlighten us with, nor would it have helped him any had he known.
We definitely couldn’t have cared less about kings or Latvia as we hooted, “Dannebrog, Dannebrog. Frederik, fetch your Dannebrog!”
As songs go it was hardly noteworthy, but we repeated it over and over to our great amusement. What amused us most, though, was probably the horrified expression on Frederik’s face.
In the front yard of the red bungalow where Frederik lived with his married and undivorced parents stood Tæring’s tallest flagpole. From that flagpole the Dannebrog waved from sunrise to sunset every single Sunday, as well as on just about any special occasion, whether it was the queen’s birthday or Frederik’s, or just a regular holiday. In Frederik’s family, running up the flag was the man’s duty and privilege, and since Frederik had recently celebrated his fourteenth birthday, he had proudly accepted taking on both the duty and the privilege from his father.
It went without saying that Frederik had no intention of giving up the flag. But we were unyielding and pitiless, and the following day the Dannebrog took its place on the heap of meaning.
————
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.
VIII
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.
IX
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 ta
ke 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.