————
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.
XI
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!”
XII
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 lit
tle 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.
XIII
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.
“Chimpanzees have almost exactly the same brain and DNA as us,” he’d hollered the day before, and started swinging around in the branches of the plum tree. “There’s nothing the least special about being human.” And this morning he’d said, “There are six billion people on Earth. Way too many! But in the year 2025 there’ll be eight and a half billion. The best thing we can do for the future of the world is to die!”
He must have gotten all that knowledge from the newspapers. I don’t see the point, collecting all that knowledge others have already discovered. It’s enough to make anybody lose heart who has not yet grown up and found out anything for themselves. But grown-ups love collecting knowledge, the more the better, and it doesn’t even matter if it’s other people’s knowledge and something you only learn from reading. Sofie was doing right to grin and bear it. There was definitely something that mattered in spite of everything, even if that something was something you had to lose.
————
I don’t know exactly what happened the night Huge Hans helped Sofie give up the innocence. The next day there was just a smidgen of blood and some slime on a checked handkerchief lying at the top of the heap of meaning, and Sofie was walking a bit funny, like it hurt when she moved her legs. Nonetheless, it was Sofie who looked proud and inapproachable, while Huge Hans was running around trying to please her.
“He probably wants to do it again,” Gerda whispered in my ear and giggled, completely forgetting that she wasn’t talking to me because of the matter of Oscarlittle.
I didn’t reply, but tried later on to get Sofie to tell what had happened and how it had been.
She wouldn’t tell me anything. Just walked around looking like she’d found out a secret that may have been terrible but that nonetheless had handed her the key to something of great meaning.
Great meaning? Greater meaning? Greatest meaning?
————
There were only three to go before we could show the heap of meaning to Pierre Anthon if he promised never again to sit in his plum tree and holler at us: Holy Karl, Pretty Rosa, and Jon-Johan.
Sofie chose Holy Karl. He was to deliver Jesus on the Cross.
XIV
Jesus on the Cross wasn’t just Holy Karl’s God almighty, he was also the most sacred thing in Tæring Church, and Tæring Church was itself the most sacred thing there was in Tæring. And so Jesus on the Cross was the most sacred thing any of us could imagine — if any of us believed in all that. Perhaps he was anyway, regardless of what we believed.
Jesus on the Cross was a statue that hung on the wall just behind the altar and made the small kids scared and the old folks teary-eyed with its bowed head and its crown of thorns and the drops of blood that ran together in majestic streams down the sacred face that was twisted in pain and divinity, and the nails that fixed the hands and feet to the cross, which was made of rosewood and so very, very fine, according to what the priest said. Even I, who insisted that Jesus and Our Lord did not exist and therefore meant nothing, knew that Jesus on the Rosewood Cross meant a great deal. Especially to Holy Karl.
He was going to need help.
Help is thine. Help is ours. Help is us.
Once again I took my playing cards with me to the sawmill, this time the deck with the clowns on the reverse. And once again we drew lots.
This time it was Ursula-Marie, Jon-Johan, Richard, and Maiken who drew the highest cards and who therefore were going to help Holy Karl, regardless of Holy Karl maintaining that this was something we couldn’t and mustn’t do. He softened up some when Jon-Johan said that Karl had the code to the padlock and could come by and pray to his Jesus on the Cross anytime at the sawmill. And that we would of course be returning Jesus to the church as soon as we were done with him.
I wasn’t a part of it, but what Ursula-Marie without her six blue braids told me in a hushed voice on Monday morning during our music lesson, while the others were listening to Beethoven and nearly drowning her out, was that it hadn’t all worked out according to plan.
————
Holy Karl had hidden himself away in the church as agreed following the late Sunday service. And when the church had grown still and was locked up and everyone had gone, Ursula-Marie, Jon-Johan, Richard, and Maiken had come and given three short and three long knocks at the door, and Holy Karl had let them in. But then it all started going wrong.
First Holy Karl had started to cry.
It was when the others had crawled over the prie-dieu and gone behind the altar, and he sobbed and begged so much that they had to let him stay behind on the other side. And Maiken had to stay with him to make sure he didn’t run off. And it didn’t help, no matter how many times she told him she’d never yet seen Jesus or Our Lord in her telescope, even though she’d looked all over, and neither had any of the great astrophysicists in this entire world. Holy Karl just covered his ears and howled so loudly he couldn’t hear what she was saying, and Maiken eventually just had to give up. She was scared, too, that Holy Karl’s howling would be heard by someone outside the church.
Jon-Johan and Richard had meanwhile been trying to loosen Jesus on the Rosewood Cross.
But Jesus was well fastened, and however much they sweated over him he wasn’t moving. Then Ursula-Marie had gone over to Jesus. And as she placed her hand on the foot of Jesus with the nail and the blood, it was like she burnt herself. Ursula-Marie had to admit that even if she didn’t believe in all that hokum, she certainly got a real scare. The church was so strangely empty and infinite inside, and at once it was like the Jesus figure was coming alive. Ever so slowly, without anyone even touching him, Jesus slid on his own with a scraping sound all the way down the wall and hit the floor with a bump and broke that same leg that Ursula-Marie had just touched.
That was about the eeriest thing Ursula-Marie had ever seen in her life.
They all felt like taking to their heels, but now they’d come this far they couldn’t just let Jesus lie there on the floor. So despite his astonishing weight they managed to lift him free and haul him over to the prie-dieu and tip him over onto the other side. It was almost unnatural how heavy Jesus was, and however much Holy Karl was against it, he had to help carry. So now they were five to carry, and still they were barely able to haul Jesus out into the street and the waiting trailer.
By then it was seven thirty and dark as they went through the streets with Jesus on the Rosewood Cross in Holy Karl’s trailer. Even so, they had to stop a couple of times to hide behind trees and hedges so as not to be seen by passersby.
Holy Karl howled all the way through Tæring and out to the old sawmill and kept on repeating that they couldn’t do this. And Ursula-Marie, whose hand was still stinging from the burn, was beginning to agree. And Maiken kept on and on repeating that she’d never seen either Jesus or Our Lord in her telescope, almost like what she was mostly doing was trying to remind herself. And even Jon-Johan, who normally wouldn’t shy at anything, was nervous and abrupt and couldn’t get to the sawmill quick enough. Only Richard seemed unperturbed, though only until they reached the sawmill and the code on the lock didn’t work. Then he went berserk, yelling and screeching and kicking at the door to the sawmill and then at the trailer, so Jesus on the Rosewood Cross fell and broke his other leg too.