Borderliners by Peter Høeg
Jesus had been asked about eternity. And he had pointed to the here and now. It had never been explained, the Bible was full of things like that. Biehl read from it at assembly, but it was never explained.
What should you do if you want to enter into life, here and now. This was what Jesus had answered. That was one of the things I thought about.
The other was that maybe Jesus had also tried to touch time, maybe that had been his plan. In his laboratory, not in the manger but later on, he had gathered his thoughts to understand the plan behind it all. Then he had told those who followed him that they must go forth into the world and reveal this plan, even though the natural aversion of the people would be roused against them, so that they would be persecuted and isolated. This they should do so that everything that was covered should be revealed. Then he had descended into the underworld.
Descent into the underworld. And so I made up my mind.
* * *
Fredhøj sat in front and a little to the side of me, his hands resting on the ledge for the hymnbook in front of him. One hand lay across the other, you could smell his after-shave. All in all, the sense of him was overwhelming.
Across his left hand lay his key ring. As always.
* * *
All the locks in the school were linked to a comprehensive master key system. A Ruko system—back then there was nothing else.
The keys were in order of precedence. At the top, a master key—held by Biehl alone—which opened every door in the school. Then came the sub-master keys held by Fredhøj and Flakkedam and the new inspector; beneath them came the departmental keys, and, at the bottom, the keys held by the ordinary teachers.
It was a good system, with only one flaw. At its lower levels, for example, with the main door and the doors to the corridors, it was necessary that a number of different keys could open each lock. The more keys that have to fit a lock, the weaker it is, the more receptive to strange keys.
* * *
I could not have done it today. Apart from the fact that today I would never have wanted to, still, it could not have been done. Advances in technology have made it impossible.
Back then, they were ordinary five-pin keys, the cuts of the key fitted into the lock and pushed five bottom pins into place, then the cylinder could move freely. Nowadays, with the modern systems that time and technology have produced, there are also side pins. In addition to which the keys are patented and the designs restricted. I could not have done it today.
I looked at Fredhøj’s keys.
Of course, I had known they were there. But I had purposely avoided taking a closer look at them.
On the bunch were some standard keys, as well as several smaller keys to the locks of the physics closets. Then there were the Yale keys to his home. And his car keys. The school key was lying awkwardly, but I just waited. There came a moment when he shifted position and it was brought into full view.
I concentrated on the depth of the cuts—nothing else. Afterward I closed my eyes. And sort of tested myself on the key. As though I had been up at the blackboard.
At last I had it.
* * *
None of us were expelled. There was absolutely no accounting for it.
That very evening they moved August out of the dining room and served him his food in his room, in the sickroom. The next day they moved him down a grade and put Flakkedam on permanent watch over him. To begin with, Katarina was absent—I thought forever—but a few days later I saw her in the playground, sitting on a bench, looking down at the asphalt. As for me, I was summoned to the secretary’s office. Fredhøj and Karin Ærø were there, and Stuus—in his capacity as chairman of the board of teachers. They advised me that I had been reported to the Children’s Panel and to the Child Welfare Services, since I was on a scholarship and had been given special permission to attend the school. There would now be a pause. When the reply from my guardian and from the Department of Health and Welfare was available, they would review the situation.
Karin Æro did the talking. She was our class teacher. Fredhøj stayed absolutely still. I tried to sense him, the situation was absolutely inexplicable. Even though I had been given my final warning, they had still not kicked me out. There was no understanding it.
FOUR
The first time Biehl talked about the Battle of Poitiers he had made an additional remark. That had been only the second time ever that he referred to himself as “I.”
There had been a pause, after which he had said that it was his personal opinion that Islam, which was the religion of the Moors, was nothing less than the Devil’s own work. So the Battle of Poitiers had been a struggle between the forces of light and of darkness. And if the struggle had turned out to the Moors’ advantage, civilization as we know it would never have existed.
This was the only thing about the Devil that had ever been explained outright at the school.
Even so, there was no doubt in your mind. When we descended those seven steps into the darkness, and pushed aside the panel, you knew you were going down into the underworld.
* * *
I did not collect August until I could almost sense the breathing of both Flakkedam and the new inspector. The clock said seven minutes past midnight.
It was ten days since we had spoken to one another and had been found out in church. I had not seen August, other than at assembly and from a distance in the playground.
I made hardly any sound opening the door. He had grown very thin. Under different circumstances he should have been reported so that he could have been forced to eat.
I told him he had to get up, but gave him no further explanation. He was in his pajamas and slippers, they kept his clothes and outdoor shoes locked up at night.
* * *
We had woodwork once a week. The woodwork room was on the second floor and the metalwork tools were also kept there. Klastersen was the woodwork teacher. The year before, Carsten Sutton had been caught sniffing solvents—paint thinner. It was kept in an eight-gallon container, you could get your whole head into it. We had all tried it, but he was the one who got found out, due to the fact that he had gone berserk afterward. Since then Klastersen kept a pretty close eye on people.
I had shown him a cracked table tennis bat. “May I have permission to repair this?” I said. There had been no problem, not when it was sports equipment.
I had found a place for myself beside a vise at the very back. Then I had cut out Fredhøj’s key in sheet metal as best I could from memory. Over the next few days I had tried it out and made some adjustments to it.
* * *
Now I let August and myself out through the main door. It was a frosty night but there was no snow. We left no tracks.
The art room was seven steps down on a stairway that started just beyond the main door under the archway. On the way down there were two doors, one to stop pupils from hanging about on the stairs—out of sight of the teacher on playground duty—and then the actual door to the art room. Both came under the master key system.
* * *
For a long time I had believed I was the only one who knew about the way down to the engineering access tunnels. But Axel Fredhøj must have known about it, too. That was how he had made his descent, although he must have locked the door behind him, they brought him up on the playground side, they had no idea how he had got down there. He cannot have told them either, otherwise the opening would have been blocked up. Maybe he was tougher than people thought; maybe he was just not in a condition to say anything special, not even when he was questioned.
* * *
It was no secret that the tunnels existed.
When the new toilets were built, the school’s parents had been encouraged to help with the demolition of the old ones—to save money, and to emphasize the especially caring nature of those parents connected to the school.
I took part on that occasion—to see people’s parents. Usually you never saw them.
Besides which, you had been given th
* * *
A plan of the school had been hung on the wall, so that you could see how it would look with the new toilets. Which would have tiles and lights and be in decent working order, not all tarred and filthy and stinking like the old ones.
The engineering tunnels were shown on the drawings. I had noticed them because it was only a month since the accident. The first of Axel Fredhøj’s two accidents, that is.
The tunnels ran twenty feet underground, six feet below the basement. Through them ran the heating pipes, hot water pipes, and electricity cables. But not gas. That was what you could see.
* * *
The opening must have come about because they built the art room later, a long time after the school, maybe as part of the new trend in education. So all they had done was to build a partition out of hardboard—by the look of it, it had been a rush job. This tied in with the order of precedence governing subjects. Art came right at the bottom, even lower than weaving and home economics. No grade was ever given marks for art.
And yet Karin Ærø was the art teacher. Although she, for example, never handled clay. She also taught music and Danish, and music and literature were clearly closest to her heart.
* * *
I lit a little candle and placed it in an aluminum cylinder with little windows of clear plastic and air holes at the bottom, it was one I had kept from the old days. August was close beside me, maybe he could not see very well. When I struck the match he went rigid, but then relaxed again.
Behind the panel lay a bricked-in space with no windows. Even the floor was brick. It was cold. In the floor was a black hole—the descent to the tunnels.
They must have forgotten about this way down when they were doing the building. Doors blocked the outlets to the north and south playgrounds, there were iron bars strung with wire netting over the air vents. Still and all, they had not succeeded in making it absolutely secure.
* * *
To get down you had to step onto the lagging around the pipes and from there slide down into the tunnel itself. There was little or no headroom. Even I, with my natural stoop, kept bumping my head against the ceiling.
It was warmer here, because of the pipes. There was a humming sound, from the boiler maybe.
On our left the lagging around the pipes was still blackened.
August took my hand.
“I’m afraid of the dark,” he said.
I stayed where I was. I could not go on until I had told him about it. Even though he was smaller than me, like a child, I had to tell him.
I told him straight. One day a boy from the school—that was Axel—had hidden in the art room and got himself locked in on purpose. He had taken a bottle of benzene from there and, in the lunch period, he had descended into the tunnel. There he had poured the benzene over the lagging around the pipes, then he had set a match to it, and then he had lain down beside the fire.
“You can’t lie still when there’s a fire burning,” said August.
But that was what he had done. No details had ever been released, but there were those who had heard what the firemen said when they brought him up—by the stairs to the playground. It was from there, too, that the smoke had been spotted.
“So,” said August, “what happened to him?”
I replied that nothing had happened. They had spotted the smoke and called the fire department. They had brought him up. Other than that, nothing had happened. Other than that he had stopped driving home from school with his father.
* * *
No one had ever seen Axel and Fredhøj speak to each other. If you had not known it, you would never have guessed that they were father and son. They had, however, gone home from school together. After school, on Wednesdays and Fridays, when their timetables must have coincided, they drove home together in Fredhøj’s big Rover—out through the grounds and away. Axel sat in the back.
After the accident this stopped. Instead Axel was collected by his mother, Fredhøj’s wife.
She picked him up at the gate onto the road. She had a Rover like Fredhøj’s, she was also a deputy inspector, elsewhere in the suburbs. She drove up to the gate and Axel got into the backseat. They drove away without a word having been said.
It was the first time you had seen her. But Fredhøj had mentioned her before.
It came up in a period where he had been reading aloud. He was not in the habit of reading aloud—the math and physics syllabus was too full to allow for that. But he had been known, around Christmastime, to step up the pace. You took on more arithmetic ink exercises as homework, thus gaining a couple of hours in which he would read aloud.
He was brilliant at it. He always read stories about great and intelligent criminals; stories from Crime Cavalcade or From Foreign Courtrooms and Great and Notorious Swindlers. It was after having read a story about a bigamist that he mentioned his wife, Axel’s mother.
This man had murdered women by raising their ankles while they were in the bath. They had been able to keep their heads above water for a while, but eventually they had given up, so they drowned. Then he had inherited their fortunes and married again.
After closing the book, Fredhøj had stared into space for a moment. You could sense that he was close to something crucial. Lack of intelligence, he said, was to blame for the fact that most people had such trouble with marriage. For their part, he and his wife had organized things in such a way that they split their time. She had made the decisions for the first ten years: where they should live, what kind of cars they should have—hence the Rovers. Then there had been ten years during which he had made the decisions. These had now come to an end and it was once more her turn to decide.
Teachers seldom or never spoke about what went on in their families. This was the first time Fredhøj had said anything.
That they had split their time. Almost scientifically.
I had tried to work it out. I came to the conclusion that Fredhøj’s wife must have decided on Axel.
* * *
I tried to explain this to August. It was hard to tell whether he was listening. I did not dare to talk above a whisper, and all the while he kept pacing alongside the pipes. Never far away, though, only as far as the rim of darkness.
I paused, and he stopped.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” he said. “Why did he do it? What was the matter with him?”
What was the matter with him? Nothing much, I said. He was fine, really, until the incident with the chart locker six months later, and could we get a move on, there was something we had to do.
He stayed where he was. He stood there, touching the lagging.
“Clothes don’t burn well,” he said.
No, I said, that was what had saved Axel, and could we go now, I tried moving on with the light, to get him to follow. Then he turned toward me. He did not look straight at me, but I could see there was something he had to say, it was hard to get it out. At the Orphanage you often had hemorrhoids—it was the food that did it. That was how it felt, like bleeding piles, but it has to come out. It hurt, but there was no alternative.
“I don’t put up with anything,” he said, “not from anyone. They come home, and you’re lying on the cot. You could have run off, but then he would have felt cheated. They start to say things. Usually it’s about the report card and the drawings. A pigsty, she says. Do something about your son. She eggs him on, know what I mean?”
I said nothing.
“He tosses lighted matches onto the quilt. You just have to lie still, like you’re sleeping. It doesn’t catch fire, fabric doesn’t burn well. Then they come. You could run from them, but he would feel cheated. It has to be as if…”
“An achievement and a reward,” I said.
“Exactly. You have to let him catch you, or else there’ll be hell to pay. He holds you down, but she’s the one who does it. Always with a coat hanger, down the back. And then, at the ver
We stood there, saying nothing. He was not finished yet.
“I don’t put up with anything,” he said. “I’ve warned them. They’ve done it for the last time.”
He had started shaking.
“I could adopt you,” I said, “when I’m twenty-one. You could come and live with us, with me and Katarina.”
The shaking came from the inside, but it was much bigger than the tiny, skinny body. I set the lamp down on the pipe and reached for his hand.
It happened too fast to do anything about it. I heard the sound before I felt anything. It was the little finger he broke, it made the same sound as when you snap a pencil. When the pain came, it brought me to my knees. He had not let go, he kept on squeezing. Now he was looking straight down at me, I do not think he knew who I was. The other August had taken over, there was hardly anything left of the first one.
“No one’s going to touch me,” he said.
He pressed down on my finger and looked me in the eye, to see the pain.
“D’you know what it’s like in the end?” he said. “In the end it’s great. If she keeps going long enough, it gets so it’s lovely, and you want to ask her to keep going. But by then you can hardly talk. And then you faint.”
I could sense that I was going to pass out, so I pressed my forehead against the floor. When I looked up he had let go of me and drawn back into himself. He was standing over by the lamp, with his back to me, looking into the flame.
* * *
My plan had been for us to climb out through a vent at the foot of the south staircase. We found it all right, but it turned out to be covered over with wire netting. Normally I could have pulled away the netting, but, because of my finger, this was now out of the question.
So we wandered about a bit. There were more tunnels than I had remembered from the drawing, most were dead ends but some went around in a circle. At one point I had to change the candle.