We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [36]
This question was enough to make anyone dizzy, especially since Isager had omitted to tell us that the Earth circled the Sun. However, he'd drilled the answer into us. It was at the back of the book: four geographical miles—plus a fraction that no one would have known how to pronounce, had it not been for the thrashing rope. A boy called Svend gave the answer on this occasion. From that day on he was known as One-Second Svend, and he went on to take the famous fraction with him to his watery grave at the age of sixteen.
Isager bowed deeply in response to the crown prince's compliment, and Frederik patted him on the back. One-Second Svend had been ordered to keep his hands behind his back so that Frederik wouldn't catch sight of his damaged fingers.
That was all the wisdom Isager ever imparted to us: that the thrashing rope and the ruler could achieve what a teacher's skill could not. Isager's knowledge didn't extend far even with Cramer's Arithmetic in his hand. But the rope did its work. If we learned to count, it was only to keep track of the number of strokes we were dealt.
Marstal School was later named Frederik School in honor of the occasion. But they might as well have named it Isager Establishment. Crown Prince Frederik's pat on the back had turned the school—and our bruised limbs—into Isager's personal property. He'd bowed to two future kings, and two future kings had given him a pat on the back: that put him beyond criticism.
An education committee consisting of a wholesale grocer and two skippers had been set up, and our parents could complain to them if we came home looking worse than usual after an encounter with Isager's rope. But the committee members were simple people, who dumbly deferred to the learned schoolteacher. After all, he'd been praised by not one but two kings. So no complaint was ever upheld.
Besides, everyone remembered what it had been like in old Andrésen's time. There had been 350 pupils at the school in those days, but only two classes, with 175 pupils each. Andrésen couldn't possibly remember so many names, so he gave the boys numbers instead and directed them with the aid of a whistle. Pupils would sit wherever they could find space, including on the windowsills, in the kitchen, and even out in the yard. This meant that the windows had to stay open until the weather grew too severe. But long before that happened, the pupils all caught colds and bronchitis from the draft. Then, once the windows had been closed for the winter, the atmosphere became suffocatingly close, and children fainted daily. And there were no blackboards or writing implements: the pupils stood in front of a tray of sand and scratched in it with a stick. A single gust of wind could blow their combined knowledge clean away.
With such memories, the three members of the committee regarded the new school, with its inkwells and its blackboards and its headmaster who had been praised by two future kings, as progress. There was only one remedy for children's reluctance to learn, and that was more thrashing.
But then again, we rarely complained, because another aspect of the solidarity that Isager had taught us was that we couldn't even snitch on our tormentor. We'd return home with bald patches on our scalps where a furious Isager had ripped out clumps of hair; with black eyes; with fingers incapable of holding knife or fork. And we'd say we'd been in a fight, and when parents asked who with, we said, "Nobody."
We swore that when we grew up, we'd give Isager what he'd been asking for. We couldn't fathom our fathers' tacit consent to our ill-treatment: they knew full well who Nobody was because they too had been victims of the rope. But they turned a blind eye to our suffering.
Our mothers suspected that something was wrong, but they were always at a loss when dealing with the authorities. It wasn't that they lacked strength: they had considerable supplies of it, with so many children and their husbands away at sea. But when faced