Nothing Read Free Page B

left school, we all would have laid into him.
    Just as we were about to break up and leave, not being able to come up with anything anyway, Sofie stepped forward.
    “We have to prove to Pierre Anthon that something matters,” was all she said. Yet it was plenty, for we all knew right away what it was we had to do.
    We set out the very next day.

V
    Sofie lived at exactly the point where Tæring stopped being town and became countryside. Behind the yellow-washed house where Sofie lived with her parents was a large field with an abandoned sawmill at one end. The sawmill wasn’t used for anything anymore and was to be torn down to make room for a recreation facility the town dignitaries had been talking about for years. Even so, nobody was really counting on that recreation facility, and although the sawmill had gradually fallen into disrepair, with broken windows and holes in the roof, itwas still there and was exactly what we needed.
    At lunch recess we all handed over our one- and two- and five-kroner coins to Jon-Johan, who ran the entire way to the hardware store, made our purchase, and ran all the way back again clutching a brand-new combination padlock.
    There was some discussion about what code to choose, since everyone thought their own birthday provided the most suitable combination of figures. Eventually we agreed on the fifth of February, it being the day of Pierre Anthon’s birth. Five-zero-two were the numbers we all concentrated on committing to memory, so much so that we forgot about our homework and about paying attention in class, and Mr. Eskildsen started growing suspicious and asked if our heads were full of sparrows or whether we’d just lost whatever little it was that had been attached to our necks.
    We didn’t reply. Not one of us. Five-zero-two!
    We had the sawmill, we had the lock, and we knew what we had to do. Nevertheless, it was a lotharder than we had reckoned. With Pierre Anthon being in some way right about nothing mattering, it was no easy thing to start collecting something that did.
    Again, it was Sofie who saved the day.
    “We just play along with the idea,” she said, and gradually we all found our own ploys to help us.
    Elise remembered when she was six and had cried when an Alsatian dog had bitten the head off her doll, so she dug out the old doll and its chewed-off head from the boxes in her basement and brought them along with her to the sawmill. Holy Karl brought an old hymnbook that was missing its front and back and quite a number of its hymns, but nevertheless ran with no other defects from page 27 to page 389. Ursula-Marie delivered a pink ivory comb missing two teeth, and Jon-Johan chipped in with a Beatles tape that had lost all sound, but that he had never had the heart to throw out.
    Others went from house to house asking ifthey could have anything that meant something. One or two doors were slammed in our faces, but we were also given the most wondrous things. The old folks were the best. They gave us china dogs that could nod their heads and were only slightly chipped, photographs of parents long since dead, or the toys of children long since departed into adulthood. We were given clothes that had been treasured and worn to threads, and even a single rose from a bridal bouquet, thirty-six years old.
    The rose, however, made us girls somewhat fainthearted, because it really was something we felt mattered, the white bridal dream with the wedding bouquet and the kiss from the man who was to be ours forever. But then Laura said that the lady who had given it to us had gotten divorced only five years later. And since many of our own parents were also divorced, if indeed they had ever been married at all, that dream clearly wasn’t worth our time.
    ————
    The heap grew and grew.
    In just a few days it grew almost as tall as Little Ingrid. Nevertheless, it was still short on meaning. We all knew that none of what we had collected mattered to us, really, so how were we