Borderliners by Peter Høeg Read Free Book Online Page A

to go inside."
    We continued. He walked slowly, he listened, for the first time since we had met.
    "You have to
have a strategy," I said.
    He shivered as he walked. He had
come out without a jacket. I took off my sweater and pulled it over his head,
the way you dress a child. If he caught a cold they would ask why I had not
looked after him. He
put up no resistance. His arms did not go into the sleeves. They just hung there, dangling.
    "I had a friend who ate frogs," I said.
"He was dangerous as well, but that wasn't the main thing. If you're alone it doesn't matter
how dangerous you are. The main thing was the frogs. The grownups knew about them, too.
It's hard to touch a man you've seen eat a frog. That was his strategy."
    I did not expect
him to understand.
    "If you can't remember anything," he said,
"if the light in your brain has simply been put out, that would be a
pretty good strategy, right?"
    So he had, after
all, understood.
    We walked back to the annex.
    "Why does she ask," he said, "why does she
write, asking why the
teachers' children were removed?"
    It was early to tell him about it, but we were walking
together. For the first time we were walking side by side and at absolutely the
same pace. So I told him.
    It took a month.
That was what was so strange. From the time when Axel was found in the chart locker until the children
related

to the teachers were removed—it took a month. An inexplicable pause between the catastrophe and its consequences.
    It was then, too, that the loudspeakers were installed
in the class rooms, and that you were
assigned a regular appointment with the psychologist
once every two weeks, and when you saw Hessen for the first time, and her two assistants, and then
there were other things, too. Somehow, all of this seemed too much to be
because of Axel.
    "What sort of
other things?" he said.
    It was Flakkedam. It was at that time that they had appointed Flakkedam.
    Before that, at Biehl's, and at
the Orphanage, and at Himmelbjerg House, the boarders had always been supervised by a
teacher. In other words, it was he who
checked that chores were done and sat with them in the dining room and
supervised the study period and put out the
lights at 10:00 p.m. There might well be others who assisted him, but the person in charge had always
been a qualified teacher—it was a
rule.
    Flakkedam was not a
teacher.
    At the Orphanage and at Himmelbjerg House there had also
been people who were not teachers. At the
bottom, under the superintendent and the deputy and the department heads and
the teachers and the senior assistants and
the social workers, there had been aides
or porters. These had been gardeners' assistants, or NCO's or former accountants who, for one reason or another,
had not been able to cope in their previous place.
    It was different
with Flakkedam.
    You never saw him drink alcohol, you never saw him hit
anyone, never, not
once. He just had to appear on the scene and people grew absolutely quiet, out of
fear.
    In the corridors he walked only a
little bit in front of Biehl. In the
yearbook for '71 it said that, in April, the school had bidden welcome to Inspector Jonas Flakkedam.
    "Inspector." There was no further
explanation.

"He stands on my foot," said August. "When he's checking
that I take the
medicine, he stands on my foot. I can't move. He's good."

FOURTEEN
    I fell asleep that night, but I must have heard him
in my sleep. When I checked he was gone.
    He was finished by the time I got there. He stood
polishing the stove
with his sleeve. The light was on. He was swaying.
    I got him onto my
back. From there he talked to me.
    "There were
never any dirty dishes," he said.
    I told him to be
quiet, Flakkedam would hear him.
    "The fingermarks had to be wiped off," he said,
" she would have spotted them right away."
    I put him down on
the bed.
    "There must be another way," I said,
"something other than gas."
    His eyes were half-open, but he was sleeping. I closed
his fingers around
my