We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [34]
"We can't leave Karo here," Albert said.
"Well, cuddling him won't do him any good either," Hans Jørgen snapped.
"Can't we take him back to Isager?"
"To Isager? Are you out of your mind? He'd kill us!"
"What are we going to do then?"
Hans Jørgen let go of Albert and shrugged. Then he started walking up and down the beach.
"Help me find a big rock," he said.
None of us stirred. Anders was still crying. Karo had gone very quiet, as if Hans Jørgen's words had made him pensive.
"Listen," Albert said. "He's stopped whimpering. Perhaps he's feeling better."
"Karo isn't going to get better," Hans Jørgen said darkly. That's when we understood there was no other way.
"You can go if you want to," he said.
He'd found a rock. He was clutching it in both hands.
We wanted to go, but we couldn't. We couldn't leave Hans Jørgen. If we did, it would be like being left alone with Isager.
Hans Jørgen knelt in front of Karo. The dog looked up at him expectantly, as though he thought Hans Jørgen wanted to play.
"Turn him on his side," Hans Jørgen said.
Niels Peter put a hand under the dog's hairless pink belly and turned him over. That's when Karo screamed. He didn't whine. He didn't moan. He screamed. We were all so terrified, we started screaming with him, because it was all so sad: sad that he was so stupid, and sad that he couldn't understand a single thing about this world.
Afterward, when we climbed back up the hillside, each of us carried a stone in his hand. We didn't really know why. We walked home without speaking, clasping our stones.
Lorentz met us, wheezing. He had given up on the first slope.
"What's happened?" he asked in his usual sucking-up way. Then he saw our faces.
"Where's Karo?"
"Shut your gob, you fat pig."
Niels Peter walked right up to him and punched him in the stomach, and Lorentz sat down in the middle of the road with that begging expression on his face that we all loathed. No matter what you did to him, he always put up with it.
Later we met two boys from one of the farms in Midtmarken. They stank of cow shit, so we chased them, pelting them with our stones. They howled as they scampered home to their dung heap. We didn't care what they told their parents. Our mood hadn't improved. We had a feeling that once again, Isager had won.
The next day we were sure that Isager would have vengeance on his mind. Sure enough, his spectacles sat high on the bridge of his nose, and he paced the schoolroom with the springy, elastic steps we had learned to fear. The thrashing rope too seemed to have acquired a life of its own. We sensed it twisting and turning in his hand, ready to lash out at its first victim. We were already cowering.
This was it.
Karo's failure to return home must have caused an upset in the schoolteacher's house, and whether or not Isager thought we were involved, we knew he'd make us pay the price, the way he'd made us pay for every other disappointment in his life.
Isager marched up and down, muttering "Bad boys, bad boys" as usual. But no one was ordered to kneel on the floor: when he struck, there was no warning. He started on Lorentz, who was sitting by his desk, taking up two spaces. He attacked him from behind, swiping him across his broad back. Then, quick as lightning, he whipped around to the front of the desk and hit him first across the chest and then the face. Lorentz squealed in a mixture of pain and fear and covered his head with his massive arms. Isager tugged at them to gain clear access for the rope, but Lorentz held fast, so Isager pulled him to the floor—he landed with a loud thud—and started kicking him. We'd all tried hitting Lorentz, even the smallest of us. His obesity had something fascinating and irritating to it, a feminine softness that attracted and provoked us at the same time. Word had it that he didn't have any balls and that his tiny white worm hung between the fatty masses of his thighs with an empty scrotum dangling behind. This feature made him a born clown in our