Borderliners by Peter Høeg Read Free Book Online

living in them—the day began at dawn and ended with the onset
of darkness, and work was regulated by the changing of the seasons.
    What fascinated people about the measurement of time
was not time itself, because that was
dictated by other factors.
    What fascinated
them was the clock.
    The regularity of the clock was a metaphor for the accuracy of the universe. For the accuracy of God's
creative achievement. So the clock
was, first and foremost, a metaphor.
    Like a work of art. And that is how it was. The clock has
been like a work of
art, a product of the laboratory, a question.
    And then, at some point, this has
changed. At some point the clock has stopped being a question. Instead it has become the answer.

At Biehl's, in every corridor, there hung a bell. That way, when the main bell went, it could be heard just as clearly all
over the school.
    The bell hung just inside the corridor doorway, so
high up that reaching it was out of the
question, but still in full view.
    Out of a black box containing an electromagnet jutted a
little clapper for striking a bell.
    The bell was chrome-plated and polished regularly by the
janitor, Andersen,
who was referred to as Lemmy when out of earshot. It bore some sort of decoration, a
pattern. It was too far away to make out the details, but you supposed that it must be in
keeping with the school's overall
decorative theme. It could have been a meander
border or an entwining motif from one of the runic stones.
    The
bells looked as though they dated from the turn of the cen tury. Like Biehl's fob watch. Together they
saturated the school with a finely
meshed web of time.
    In the spring of '71 the bells were removed. Instead, a loudspeaker was
set into the wall of each classroom. Behind the teacher's
desk, beside the blackboard. A ringing tone was now
transmitted over this;
lower than the old mechanical one but nevertheless quite clear.
    Furthermore, through this loudspeaker messages could be
passed to individual classes from a central microphone in the headmaster's office, and you could answer by
speaking in the direction of the loudspeaker.
    And it turned out that, from the
office, a line could be opened in such a way that Biehl could hear what was
going on in the class rooms, without your
knowing it. In this way they could make sure that
order reigned even if, for example, a class had to wait a few minutes for a teacher.
    The loudspeaker sat behind a white panel, so that it
was, to all intents and purposes, invisible.

The old bells had
been polished regularly. The new were invisible. We did not see them being delivered, nor the old ones being re moved. We came back to school and the job was done.
    They had done it
during the Easter vacation. The same Easter that the teachers' children were removed.

THIRTEEN

 
     
           A fter dinner, from 7:00 to 8:15 p.m. there was a study period for boarders in the main hall,
supervised by Flak- kedam. During this time
leaving the hall was prohibited. It was difficult for August. Even during the day he had trouble sitting still, but in the evening it got worse, as the time for
his medicine approached.
    I sensed that it was very bad, so I went over to
Flakkedam in the duty room and asked for
permission for August and me to go out side
for a minute. To decline the irregular German verbs together, without disturbing the others. I explained that he had been moved up a class, of course, so he had not had German
before. Permission was granted.
    It was dark. You could sense that he felt better
outside, but not much. Here, too, he looked
for the walls. He would not walk along the
paths or across the grass, but made for the fringes of the shrubbery.
    We walked for a
bit side by side. He walked along looking up at me.
    "What's it
like in a children's home?" he said.
    "Fine," I
said.

"How do you
survive?"
    "You just do," I said,
"no problem, and can we get back to the hall now, time's up."
    "Not yet," he said. "First you have
to answer, I don't want