We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [31]
That was the moment we should all have jumped him. But it was beyond contemplation. Isager was a monster you could never slay, even now, when he was on his knees, howling like a wounded animal. We all knew from our own skirmishes that the battle was over now. When you had someone kneeling with one arm twisted behind his back, you'd order him to plead for his life, or apologize, or otherwise humiliate himself. And since you'd never actually break anyone's arm deliberately, the unspoken rule was that the fight would end there. But with Isager the thing was murkier. There was nothing you wanted more than to break the hated arm he hit you with, but you couldn't do it. If an adult in our group had ordered us to finish him off, then we'd have done it. But Isager was the only adult around. And so we let him go, without even forcing him to plead for mercy, however briefly.
Hans Jørgen took a step back. Isager didn't dare touch him now. Without looking at him, he brushed the dirt off his trousers, then lunged out at the nearest boy. It was Albert, who for the second time that day ended up trapped between the teacher's legs.
Isager was to experience a few more brawls because not everyone put up with his brutality. But the majority of us ended up, like Albert, in the vise of his legs, gritting our teeth and taking a flogging.
Isager returned to his desk, panting and short of breath; he was no longer a young man, and flogging seventy boys was hard work. But he'd managed it. He put his left hand on the desk for support. The other still clutched the rope.
"You vile louts, you've just earned yourself another flogging," he snorted.
But he was too exhausted to deliver it.
His spectacles were still in place. Not once during his skirmishes with the bigger boys did they abandon their position on the bridge of his nose.
It was Albert who deciphered the code of the spectacles. If they perched low toward the tip of Isager's nose, he announced, the day would be a calm one, with only minor, quick-healing injuries to faces and hands. If they were positioned halfway down, things could go either way. But if they were pressed against the bridge, that day's education would be provided by Mr. Thrashing Rope, focusing on the tenderest parts of our bodies, which were also the ones least likely to learn anything.
This discovery earned Albert a certain amount of fame and was perceived as a tactical advantage in our ongoing war with Isager.
It was a war that left its mark on us. Our scalps were scarred from the sharp edge of Isager's ruler, and our fingers—which would get a lashing if our handwriting offended him—would often be so swollen, we could barely hold our pens. He called this practice "the distribution of ducats"—and it was the currency he dealt out generously even on the days when his spectacles sat low. Limping and bleeding, our skin black-and-blue with livid bruises, we were always aching in some exposed place. But that wasn't the worst of what Isager did to us.
He left his mark in another far more frightening way.
We became like him.
We committed appalling acts and only realized the horror of what we'd done when we stood gathered around the evidence of our atrocity. Violence was like a drug we couldn't relinquish.
He planted a thirst for blood in us. One that could never be quenched.
ONE AUTUMN DAY when the wind had torn the last leaves off the trees, we stood, flogged and sore, in Kirkestræde, looking for something to distract us, when suddenly it waddled by: Isager's dog, a stumpylegged, bloated creature of indeterminate breed. Its short coat was white and gray, and its belly pink as a pig's. We'd seen Karo before, clasped in Mrs. Isager's arms.