Borderliners by Peter Høeg
* * *
The life of every person contains something of significance. No matter how unfit you may be. The significant factor is human nature. Against it you can perpetrate a fair amount of violence, but if it becomes too much, then you are destroyed.
It is as though science has felt that human nature was something within which you were confined. Like being in detention on a red form. And so they have tried to push against it, as though to break out. And then it has all gone wrong.
At Biehl’s you had to sit down for five to six hours every day—not including the study period—five days a week plus Sunday for the boarders, more than forty weeks a year, for ten years. While constantly having to strive to be precise and accurate, in order to improve.
I believe that this went against the nature of children.
* * *
There could be a veil of mist in the mornings at the children’s home, a white smoke ascending from the earth. At the point where it met the sunlight from heaven, dewdrops hung in the spider’s web—big, with curved, reversed reflections of the white strands and the misty grass and your own face. As though small globular universes were being born where the water from the earth met the fire from heaven. And somewhere in the silent beauty of these curved, looking-glass worlds you recognized yourself because of the crew cut.
The web, the light, the dew—all of this must have been part of the spider’s world and its nature. But not as a limitation, not like isolation. We did not see it that way back then, and I have never, later on, been able to see it that way. Nature is not a straitjacket that must be burst open. Nature is a blessing, an opportunity for growth that has been bestowed upon all living things.
Like a guideline in your life.
* * *
To Plato, God was a mathematician. To Kepler, too, and to Biehl and Fredhøj. I do not believe it was a coincidence that their main subjects were biology and mathematics. A purpose behind them, the purpose that steered both them and the school, had caused them to align their own fates as closely as possible with God.
Mathematics is a kind of language. The only one in the universe that spurns the thought of limits.
Under duress, psychology and biology have admitted that there is a limit to the conditions to which living creatures may be subjected. That there is a limit to the amount of discipline, hard work, and firm structure that children can bear.
Even physics has its limits. The cosmic and the atomic chronon. The upper and the lower limit.
But mathematics is limitless. Because there are no lower and upper limits, there is only infinity. Maybe this, as they say, is in itself neither bad nor good. But there, where we met it—as a manifestation of time, as figures measuring achievement and improvement, as an argument for the feasibility of the absolute—it was not human. It was unnatural.
* * *
Fredhøj and Biehl never said it straight out, but I know now, with certainty, what they were thinking. Or maybe not thinking, but sensing. What the cosmology was, upon which all of their actions rested. They were thinking that in the beginning God created heaven and earth as raw material, like a group of pupils entering Primary One, designated and earmarked for processing and ennoblement. As the straight path along which the process of evolution should progress, he created linear time. And as an instrument for measuring how far the process of evolution had advanced, he created mathematics and physics.
I have had the following thought: What if God were not a mathematician? What if he had been working, like Katarina and August and me, without actually having defined either questions or answers? And what if his result had not been exact but approximate? An approximate balance perhaps. Not something that had to be improved upon, a springboard to further achievement, but something that was already more or less complete and in equilibrium. Like two trees and the sun and the moisture from the earth, between which all you had to do was to spin your web to the best of your ability, and that would have been enough, no more would be expected. And if any development should take place, then it would take place partly by itself, there would be no need for you to perform anything extreme, you could just remain true to your nature, and it would take place. Now, what if that was the intention?
* * *
August and Oscar Humlum and Katarina have paid me visits.
There are many ways of putting in an appearance and being heard without turning up in person.
Now I will say it. What I, personally, believe about time.
* * *
To sense time, to speak about time, you have to sense that something has changed. And you have to sense that within or behind this change there is also something that was present before. The perception of time is the inexplicable union in the consciousness of change and constancy.
In people’s lives, in yours and mine, there are linear time sequences, with and without beginnings and endings. Conditions and epochs that appear with or without warning, only to pass and never come around again.
And there are repetitions, cycles: ups and downs, hope and despair, love and rejection, rearing up and dying away and returning again and again.
And there are blackouts, time lags. And spurts of time. And sudden delays.
There is an overwhelmingly powerful tendency, when people are gathered together, to create a common time.
And in between all of these, every conceivable combination, hybrid, and intermediate state is to be found.
And, just glimpsed, incidences of eternity.
* * *
When I was isolated for a long time, or had stopped talking, or had gotten brushed by the train, or lay and waited for Valsang, or sat close to Katarina, or held August’s hand, then time faded away, like a sound growing fainter. When I was heading away from the world and into my self, or in death or surrender or ecstasy, or in the silence here in the laboratory, then time departed from me. Then eternity drew near.
* * *
Time is inextricably bound up with language, with the sensory apparatus, and with human fellowship. Time comes into being when the mind encounters the world in a normal life.
Without contradicting anyone, I would like to take issue with Newton, who thought that time runs through the universe regardless of man, and with Kant, who thought that time is inborn in the mind. I believe that time is a possibility inherent in all people at all times, but that teaching is required if it is to unfold, and whatever shape it takes will depend upon the character of the teaching and the environment.
Time is a sphere made up of language, colors, smells, senses, and sounds, a sphere in which you and the world coexist, an instrument with which to put the world in order and comprehend it, one of the reasons for your survival.
But if time grows too tight, then it becomes a reason for doing away with yourself.
* * *
Time is not an illusion. Nor is it the only reality. It is one possible, widespread form for encounters between the mind and the surrounding world. But not the only possible one. If you are driven by curiosity, or if you are ill and cannot survive any other way, then you can enter the laboratory and touch time. And then it will change.
* * *
You could let your mind go blank in front of a dewdrop, and time stood still. You could be waiting to have your head shoved down the toilet, and time went too fast, and yet not fast enough. You could remember things from last year as if it was today and fear something from tomorrow as if that, too, was today. And you could have gone with Oscar Humlum for a weekend at the vacation home for underprivileged children at Høve, because they did not know what should be done with us and there was just him and me, no one supervised us, we swam, suddenly two days had passed, and where had they gone?
The problem does not arise until language and society and development and science and school and we ourselves demand a choice, demand one truth. The development of the past three hundred years has required linear time.
* * *
Linear time is unavoidable, it is one way of hanging on to t
But it is not the only way. The mind also remembers stretches, fluid passages, connections between what has once happened and what is happening now, regardless of the passage of time. And furthest back, the mind remembers a timeless plain.
If you grow up in a world that permits and rewards only one form of memory, then force is being used against your nature. Then you are imperceptibly nudged out toward the edge of the abyss.
* * *
Time is made up of many different states of consciousness, of symbols from human life.
This means that time is also a sphere of language, like a landscape, the place you make for when you try to comprehend, in particular, those elements in the world concerned with its change.
Like all linguistic landscapes, time is not just a matter of words or linguistic significance. It is also colors, tones, rhythms, touch, tension, relaxation, and scent.
In its simplest form, it is the indescribable combination of recognition and surprise that arises when the mind encounters the movement of the world. It is the acknowledgment of the fact that, in every change, there is something never before seen, something unique and irreversible, and something that always remains the same.
* * *
Time refuses to be simplified and reduced. You cannot say that it is found only in the mind or only in the universe, that it runs only in one direction, or in every one imaginable. That it exists only in biological substructure, or is only a social convention. That it is only individual or only collective, only cyclic, only linear, relative, absolute, determined, universal or only local, only indeterminate, illusory, totally true, immeasurable, measurable, explicable, or unapproachable. It is all of these things.
* * *
You see, for you yourself life is in fact irrevocable. When your problems were so great that they piled up until finally you could only see yourself—or not even that—then life ran away from you, through your fingers, like sand.
But if you stand back from yourself, for example, because the child helped you, then you see the repetition: then you begin to see that you are only one transitory link in chains of all-powerful circuits; that you were not, after all, important, not because you were worthless—you were not; even though you were small, you were important—but because the great repetitions are so much bigger and more important.
If your mind senses only itself, then it sees only the irrevocable time. But if it sees the family and heredity and the children and the births and being with others, then it sees the repetitions, then time is not so much an hourglass—its sand slipping away and running out—as a stretch, a plain, a continent you can journey across.
* * *
I have woken in the night, the child has kicked off her quilt, I do not know whether she has been too warm or has been afraid of being hemmed in. I have laid the quilt across her legs alone, that way at least she will not be cold and if she becomes desperate she can free herself in a second. Then I have not been able to get back to sleep, I have sat in the dark and looked at them both, the child and the woman. And the feeling has become too much. It is not sorrow or joy, it is the weight and the pressure of having been brought into their lives, and of knowing that if you were ever to be separated from them, it would mean your obliteration.
Then I have prayed. Not to anyone, God and Jesus will always be too close to Biehl, but out into the universe, to that place where the grand plans are formed, including those that lay behind and above Biehl’s and our time there. I have prayed for our survival. Or at any rate for that of the child and the woman.
* * *
I believe that Biehl’s Academy was the last possible point in three hundred years of scientific development. At that place only linear time was permitted, all life and teaching at the school was arranged in accordance with this—the school buildings, environment, teachers, pupils, kitchens, plants, equipment, and everyday life were a mobile machine, a symbol of linear time.
We stood on the edge, we had reached the limit. For how far you could, with the instrument of time, push human nature.
And then it was bound to go wrong.
EIGHT
From the confrontation they drove me back to Lars Olsen Memorial. I stayed there for fourteen days, but not in isolation. On the fifteenth day my guardian from the Children’s Panel came to see me.
She told me that the school and the police had wanted to hold a judicial inquiry into possible grounds of complicity in a violent act and driving one or possibly more schoolmates to suicide. They had also unearthed the bit about Humlum. She and the child welfare people had opposed them, they had pointed out my age—paragraph 15 of the penal code for 1930. Regardless of the inquiry’s outcome I would have wound up under the Department of Health and Welfare, this she had made them aware of.
We were alone while we talked, she had sent the duty officer away, she had never been afraid of me. She looked tired, she was guardian to 280 children, this she had told me.
She had saved the worst till last, not until she was at the door did she bring herself to say it.
“You’re going to Sandbjerggård,” she said.
“What about Katarina?”
At first she did not understand.
“The girl? We got her away from them, too. Even though she is over fifteen. ‘Charge conditionally withdrawn.’ Administration of Justice Act, paragraphs 723 and 723a.”
* * *
The state reform school of Sandbjerggård, primarily for mildly retarded and backward adolescents, was situated near Ravnsborg. August had been there for a short time before coming to Biehl’s. Those who had been given up on, or who were too young to be put in a proper prison, or in the unit for the exceptionally dangerous and criminally insane at the State Hospital in Nykøbing, Zealand, were sent there. The home had sixty residents and the same level of security as Herstedvester Prison—guards, towers, twenty-foot-high double fence with barbed wire on top. Even so, people frequently ran away, one or two at a time—although never planned, like at Himmelbjerg House. Unfocused. They stayed out for two days at the most. The second time it happened while I was there they had committed several rapes. A demonstration was staged outside the gate by people from the area, they carried shotguns and pickaxes. We hid in the grass and watched them, they had written placards, one of them said they should bring back the death penalty.
Workshop training was given in heavy industrial work, particularly metalwork. No one really took it seriously, not even the teachers, no one expected people to manage in any reasonable manner on the outside. Over half were receiving mandatory psychiatric treatment, many were checked up on by Child Welfare and the vice squad on a weekly basis.
* * *
In the long run, you can never be any better than your surroundings. When you are in the company of people who look down upon themselves as though they are animals, you, too, become like an animal. Or worse, because animals do not despise themselves.
We cut out steel plates. They came already primed, five feet by three and an inch thick. We cut them with a big cutting blade fitted to the grinder, so the safety cover cannot be used, a shower of sparks flies back over your arms. One day I had taken my gloves off and rolled up the sleeves of my coverall and started cutting with my arms bare. The iron filings burned a black worm up to the elbow, the burned flesh stank. At first I did not feel anything, I had not known what I was doing, another person inside me had taken over. To make me sense the numbness that had settled over me.
That evening I did not go into the television room, I sat out in the toilets and wrote a letter to my guardian, saying that I needed to see her, and would she come as soon as it was convenient.
* * *
She came the next week. There were no female staff at Sandbjerggård, when she walked across the courty
There was a visiting room, she sent the officer out.
“I want to be adopted,” I said.
First she went absolutely quiet.
“You’re fourteen years old,” she said.
* * *
If orphans were not adopted as babies, because they were too ugly, or gave the impression of being brain-damaged, or for other reasons, then no more was ever said to them about adoption. And you never brought up the subject yourself.
I suppose, actually, you were afraid of the family. You knew you were unfit.
But now I had met August and Katarina. I would never have been able to explain it to Johanna Buhl. But if you have once sensed that someone cares for you, then you will never sink again.
“It’s what I want,” I said, “what are the conditions?”
“It has to go through the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child,” she said, “they have an adoptions office in Copenhagen. According to recommendations from the select committee for the Department of Health and Welfare, and that of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child, it has been the practice to investigate the child’s situation, and that of the natural parents and the prospective adoptive parents. In a case such as yours, where it will be said that there may be some doubt as to the state of the child’s mental health, you will have to be examined by a specialist, just as it will be necessary to obtain a statement from the Institute for Genetic Studies, as to whether you have a predisposition toward any hereditary illnesses, it’s all there in official report number 262 from 1960. And then comes the problem of finding someone who will take you. The National Council for the Unmarried Mother holds weekly conferences, which are attended by a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a pediatrician, a lawyer, and a social worker. Statements will also be obtained from those institutions in which you have been placed. The statement from your last place, Biehl’s Academy, will be absolutely crucial. So perhaps you should just forget the whole thing.”