We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [229]
"Do we have a chamber pot?" Anton asked.
"Are you ill?"
"Yes," Anton said.
"This isn't about trying to get out of going to school tomorrow, is it?"
"I'll go to school all right. Now get me that chamber pot."
With a puzzled look, his mother handed him the pot. In his room he emptied his bowels of their contents, which were impressive: he'd been holding out all day. When Herman returned that night and started calling out to him, Anton tipped the pot right over his head.
That worked. Herman didn't return, but Anton's victory didn't lift his mood. He started carrying a knife and he stopped eating. At night he slept with Albert's boots on. He didn't know why, but he felt safer with them than without. Perhaps he was preparing himself for death. His features grew stern and sunken, and his horn-rimmed spectacles, which had once made him look like a little boy, now turned him into an old man. Coal-black rings formed under his eyes. Once his head had been covered in bruises, cuts, bumps, and even cheerfully blazing black eyes that turned purple and later faded to yellow. In a boy these were all signs of good health. But black rings weren't: they seemed more a mark of death, like the chalk mark a forester puts on a tree he's going to fell. His mother started worrying about him in earnest, and for once she didn't threaten him with a punishment from his father when he returned home.
"Leave me alone," he said, every time she came near him.
He was always fidgeting with his knife. He wanted to kill Herman, but he couldn't work out how to do it. He could run much faster than Herman, but what good would that do? You can't kill a man by outrunning him.
He went outside less and less, and when he did he was always looking over his shoulder. Before, he'd had a gang behind him. Now he was alone.
Not long after the incident with the chamber pot, he heard his name being called from the vegetable garden in broad daylight. He'd begun locking the doors of the house even in daytime, and now, as the rays of the afternoon sun came through the gable window and he heard a voice, he was pleased at his foresight. But it was calling him only by his first name, and the voice wasn't the usual hoarse whisper: it was a boy's voice, like his. Deciding to risk it, he went to the window to look down and saw Knud Erik standing below.
"Is it you?" Anton asked stupidly.
Knud Erik said something he'd wanted to say for a long time. No matter how many times he'd rehearsed it, it always sounded wrong and hopeless, even desperately girly. But it was something he felt driven to say by his useless urge to help and comfort, an urge that had no outlet now that his relationship with his mother had changed and his little sister Edith needed him less.
"I miss you," he said.
He'd known in advance how pathetic this would sound. He was the younger boy, Anton was the older, and, of course, the one always missed the other. But why would the older boy care? The older ones were fine as they were. They certainly didn't need the little guys. He hadn't dared to imagine Anton's response, and when it came it terrified him.
Anton started crying.
Anton wasn't like anyone else, and he didn't cry like anyone else. His tears were full of resistance. It sounded as though a ferret had crawled under his sweater and was ripping his stomach open, as though he suffered terrible physical pain rather than unhappiness. More than anything he looked as if he wanted to stop the sobs, but they escaped him anyway. He covered his mouth with both hands and wailed through his fingers. He cried away Herman, he cried away his fear and his loneliness: you might even think he was crying away his belief that he lived only for himself and had no need for anyone else. But he wasn't. When he eventually regained the power