Blackwater (49 page)

A red file. A green file. Two workbooks. One for continuity. One for
in case.
I had found my teaching method.

It started that simply. Every element of knowledge from the basic curriculum we put into the red book for a start, then weighed it against that
in case.
Computer knowledge against mental arithmetic. Social studies? What if no society existed any longer? Political parties? The capitals of Europe?

They figured out that things that weren’t directly necessary for a settler life could be forgotten and that was a pity. One girl wanted to transfer a crochet pattern of stars to the green book. That gave rise to several questions. Songs? Tunes? Notes even? The names of the stars and planets?

I watched out for inflationary tendencies in their new way of thinking. All by themselves – or thanks to a tired police officer – they had found out that they lived in a civilisation. Now they were finding out that there were the remains of a culture in it and that both were fundamentally based on knowledge. If all conceivable knowledge began to swirl like fireworks round their heads, they would soon give up. Faced with complications, we bow down and go on jogging along. Better to be bored than insane.

So with no discussion, I decided that everything they wanted to have with them
in case
should be written down in detail. No abstract generalisations, but recipes. Formulas. Construction drawings. Words and notes of songs. Thus the recorder, the loom, the sourdough loaf and the composition of mortar all went into the green workbook.

Winter came and we tussled with the curriculum, but relaxed with definitions of edible plants and a careful copy of ‘My Pony Has Gone’. We discussed the manufacture of steel for knives and the tanning of elk hide. We got twice as much done and we felt no fatigue. We were playing, I suppose.

The fact that a teacher let the children have two workbooks, ‘one more concrete’, as I expressed it, was nothing remarkable. Teachers of music, art and sewing helped us with various projects. I didn’t involve the woodwork teacher. Something told me that would be dangerous.

I was electrified from within by my ideas. They never seemed to come to an end. The children were excited or thoughtful, each according to his or her temperament. Many of them were ingenious, some sharp. Some were very imaginative, two or three rebellious. Perhaps, perhaps, I thought occasionally. But I was always on the watch for prophetic tendencies from within. I had quite simply found a way of teaching and that was it.

I lived for three years with those first children of the double files, and when they had moved up to middle school, I knew that my teaching had had an effect. I had echoes back through their new teachers. My experiment did not appear extreme. I blurred things whenever I was asked. It was not all that well thought out, I said. Just two workbooks. One for older and rather more concrete knowledge.

I was careful with my secret. It must not seem political. Anything political – that was the red rag that made the bulls snort and stamp at their kitchen tables.

For two more years, I followed this double line in my teaching. With the new third form, I had to do the police officer’s exploit all over again, but this time as a trick. It didn’t work. They had already heard the story of the couple who had died of cold because they couldn’t light a wood stove. I had to make up other stories and the start was sluggish. To my sorrow, I noticed that the majority accepted the green workbook in the same dull and compliant way as they would have accepted any idea at all if coming from above. Of three rebels in this class, two were really grumblers.

There was one buffoon, of course. He was unusually unfortunate, an overweight boy, foul-mouthed and slow-witted. His genre was malice. With sleepy intuition, he found weak points and squeezed. It was like being bitten in the thigh by a horse.

He was the one to suggest that first and foremost you had to have beer to survive. Roars of laughter and belches. Indignant girls. Hopeful light in the expressions of the grumblers.

But I went into it and thanks to the brewing of beer, we actually got going. When they discovered its considerable complications – the bundle of straw in the vat, the mash that must not be over sixty-five degrees Celcius if the enzymes are to survive, and has to be quickly cooled so as not to be attacked by micro-organisms – they sat in silence for a long time. They had to invent the thermometer. They had no fingertip feel for the temperature of a liquid. We established that in the physics lab. Several of the girls could distinguish between body heat and hotter. Some of them used the skin on their upper lips as thermometers. But for the difference between sixty-five degrees and seventy, they could find no way to react.

The beer never went into the workbook. It stopped at drainage, when one genius found you couldn’t grow grain without it. They were used to marshlands. So their own catastrophe, too, was blown through by the wind from the Norwegian mountains and driving rain and snow from the North Atlantic.

We had been working for almost two years when a girl called Unni patted her green workbook and said:

‘So us must jist have’n wi’us then.’

That was how we started on ways of memorising knowledge. I showed them the Iliad and the Gilgamesh epic and told them that mnemonic professionals had had all that in their heads. Thanks to them it had survived. They had to start ransacking themselves. What would they remember without the green workbook?

We started working out techniques. I have to admit that looms and making nails were shoved into the background in this class. They had found their sport. Even the most skilful soon noticed that there wasn’t much they could take in and repeat, not in comparison with the orators of the past. I told them they had had their tricks, that the techniques of memorising had even been a special science at the time.

They had pictured the memory store equipped as a large, handsome and complicated building – usually a temple. It had halls, apses, corridors and porticos. In the halls were altars and tables and pillars. In every room was an object they could connect with an element in the mass of knowledge they wished to remember. They organised it quite concretely, with imagery that was often startling, even macabre. I told them about the bloodstained, decapitated heads and the flayed deer, about the ram testicles and poisonous snakes that had lain in these echoing halls and to which people of the past had linked their knowledge.

The children had none of the adult demand for a meaningful connection between what they wanted to remember and the symbol that would remind them of it. Without difficulty, they all thought up elements as they walked through the halls. The girls put five cute kittens in a memory room. Two boys found it more effective to use five drowned kittens.

The kittens lay on a flowery sofa, because we had to use the
ikea
store in Sundsvall as a memory temple and their sofas were floral. We had recently been on a school trip and knew of no other large premises we could use. Then they had to construct their own memory house. But they lived in places where there were no large or remarkable buildings, so I gave them permission to go down Memory Lane out of doors if they liked. But they were not to put too great a distance between the places, because then the memory became blurred. Many of the boys put their lane between the elk passes in the hunting areas.

One girl asked if memory lanes could be secret. I said yes, as long as they worked, they could be secret. After that concession, I know I lost control over two or three of them as they went down their memory lanes. I had no idea which halls they were going through or what they saw. But I had no regrets.

Everything had been quite calm, but in the spring of the fourth year, one thing happened after another. First, I was invited to dinner at the headmaster’s house. I didn’t feel very comfortable there. They were equipped with kitchen gadgets, a stereo and inherited wine glasses. We had curried fillet of pork au gratin, bananas and cream, and the head wanted to talk about my relations with the children. I thought his interest seemed unwholesome.

The second event occurred in the empty staff room. I met the head and he talked about nothing in particular at first. All I remember was that he asked if I was depressed and found it hard to sleep. That was disagreeable. I said I was on fine form, but fell asleep late when my mind was full of ideas.

‘Have you always had periods of depression alternating with periods of a great desire for activity?’

What do you say to that kind of thing? Of course, I said:

‘Yes, haven’t you?’

The third event: I was summoned to his office. He was more formal this time and I could see he was nervous. Without too much preamble, he asked me why I had given up my job at the college. He knows, I thought.

‘You were teaching up at the Starhill commune, weren’t you?’

Then the next incredible question: how had I taken that double murder? Taken. Double murder. They were words I simply couldn’t fit into my way of thinking. They were so hopelessly inadequate.

I should have given the matter more thought. But I did as I usually do when people get too complicated. I thought, He’s crazy. And left it at that. I went on working and reading.

The fifth event took place in the staff room. One of the teachers had a share in a racehorse. He used to arrange the bets. The stakes were collected up when you were paying your dues into the coffee pool. This time he had thought up something more piquant. The woman he was living with, a gym teacher at the school was going to have a baby and she was quite far gone. Now we could sign a list and leave ten kronor, then bet on when the baby would arrive. Nearly every day for fourteen days ahead had already been filled in when I came into the room.

I was furious. I knew that five of the younger male teachers got together to watch porn films on Tuesday evenings when their wives were attending a batik course. That was silly. But this was indecent.

‘Who wins if the baby’s dead?’ I said.

At first there was a silence, then a terrific hullabaloo because I refused to give way. I demanded an answer from him. The head came past in the middle of it all. He took me to his office and I told him what they were doing. The racehorses, the pregnant partner, the lot. You can imagine how many friends I had on the staff after that. The head said that of course no betting of any kind should take place in school. He asked me if I had taken it very hard when my own pregnancy had had such an unfortunate ending.

‘That has nothing to do with this!’ I shouted. ‘This isn’t about my psychology. It’s about decency!’

Then I went out and slammed the door so the glass rattled. The only thing I regretted was that I had said decency. I really thought it was about dignity. But that word was too bizarre for this school, where senior pupils rubbed pea soup into each other’s hair and men of fertile age got together to watch others screwing.

Things calmed down, though that was dull. Several teachers refused to speak to me in the staff room, but that didn’t matter. I went on working. We were to have a parents’ meeting.

I met the mothers of my class an hour or so beforehand, and we laid the tables and decorated them. I thought they had put out far too many cups, but in fact a great many people did come. We had never had so many come to a class meeting before. Most came in couples. I wasn’t used to seeing fathers there. The head came down from his office and slipped in. Like an eel. The atmosphere was tense and I thought perhaps they were uneasy because he was there. Even a plumber I knew looked worried.

I began my little lecture, bade them welcome and told them how far we had got and what plans we had. I was interrupted.

‘Can we ask questions instead?’

I noticed they turned to the head. He nodded, giving them permission to interrupt me just like that. But when they were to start asking questions, there was dead silence. That pleased me. I did nothing to help them out of their dilemma. The head seemed about to intervene when the first question – which wasn’t a question at all – came. A woman’s shrill voice said:

‘I doesn’t think it’s right to frighten children with the end of the world!’

Then the questions started:

‘Why do they have to learn the
ikea
sofas!’

‘Backwards, for Christ’s sake. Backwards!’

‘What’s all this bloody nonsense about the electricity being cut off?’

‘Mats says he’s got a room with five baby rats in a place and he’s put the Bessemer process in there. Are you mad? How the hell can you teach kids that kind of thing? Rats! And the Bessemer process.’

‘Why do you say they’ve got a house inside their heads and that they have to learn all the rooms in the right order?’

I held up my hands and tried to quieten them.

‘May I answer?’

‘An amputated foot!’ a woman cried out.

‘Mats was to give a talk on the refining of iron,’ I said. ‘The house is an important part of the technique of memorising. That there are five baby rats in a place means that is the fifth place. So there he will presumably remember the Bessemer process.’

‘Don’t you know yourself what you’re teaching?’

‘They build their houses on their own. No one has any right to ask them what the buildings look like inside if they don’t want to talk about it or draw it.’

‘Skeletons! Rats! Blood on the floor. A white lady with no head. ’Tis pure madness. And palaces. Anna-Karin has had to learn a whole palace.’

‘Sounds complicated,’ said the plumber quietly. ‘Isn’t it easier to learn the ordinary way?’

That was a question I would have liked to answer, but I wasn’t allowed to. And I had wanted to explain about the
ikea
sofas. But now they started on about the Starhill commune, the smell of goat in skirts, about marijuana and maté tea, about a dead foetus Petrus was supposed to have buried.

‘Afterbirth,’ I said. ‘And I don’t live like them nowadays. I have a flat here in Byvången.’

‘Though what sort of furniture d’you have?’ cried a woman who had never been to my place. ‘Cloths and wooden boxes! And a trestle table.’