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stove," I said.
"It's eighteen inches taller than household ones."
    His legs would not carry him. I gave him a piggyback. He
was so light, even
going up the stairs. There was a smell of gas from his mouth.
    I put him down on
his bed.
    "I've got it taped," he
said. "I sleep in the living room. When they've fallen asleep I go into the kitchen. You
just have to have enough to get to sleep. But not so much that you can't get
back to bed."

For some time the child has been talking about the space around her. She uses words like
"in there" and "outside," "inside," "un derneath." She goes into
detail about her surroundings. She is twenty months old.
    But not about time. As yet "tomorrow,"
"yesterday," "in a month's time" hold no
meaning for her. She says "someday," by which she means all forms of
future.
    We grasp the idea
of space before we grasp that of time.
    But soon she will begin to talk about time. And then she
will say of it that
it passes.
    We say that time passes. That it flies. That it is like
a river. We picture it as having a direction and a length; that it can be
described in the
same way as space.
    But time is not space, is it? What I am doing now, in
the labo ratory, I also did yesterday. The
two events belong in the same place, they are not
separated in space. But they occupy different times.
    And there is another difference. Thinking in terms of
space is something you can do just like that. But thinking about time always carries pain in its wake.
    Maybe
it is the other way around; maybe the pain is there first. Because that is something one will always try to
explain away. Un accountable pain overwhelms. So one
tries to explain it away by means of time. That was what one had to say to oneself when one sat
on the bed and August smelled like he was full of gas. One had to say to oneself that it was because it was hard
for him to fall asleep. That in itself was not disturbing; it was just a
difficult time of the day for him. Time was
the problem, one said to oneself.
    As
though that explained it.
    Sometimes the
child comes to see me, even though I am shut away in the laboratory. That is as it should be. It is part of an arrange ment we have come to. Sometimes she talks to me;
sometimes she says nothing, just comes close, hesitantly, aware, without
aversion. Sometimes she touches me.
She puts out a hand, or leans against

me . It is not a caress, like you see grownups exchanging. It
is more as though,
also through her sense of touch, she wants to confirm that I exist. Or
as though she has a message for me.
    I stayed by August's bed until he fell asleep. I hunkered down so that it would not feel as though
I was crowding him.
    It took him a while to drop off; even now it took a while.
As though part of
him needed to sleep, while another part was too scared to give in.
    His hands lay on the quilt. They were clenched
tight. Then I had an
idea. I lifted one hand and opened it out, and then closed it over mine. He had
tiny hands, so I closed it around three of my fingers. That way I would be able to tell
when he fell asleep. His hand would fall open.
    Like a message.

ELEVEN

 
     
               A t Crusty
House, if you had any personal prob lems you
could consult your class teacher. That was Willy Øhrskov, who was popular and respected. He had a red MG and
drove like a madman. When I had been
there for six months he was killed in a
car crash. And besides, talking about yourself to a
teacher had always been considered a bit lax.
    A consultant psychologist had been assigned to Biehl's,
an elderly man with
whom I had two interviews. He had difficulty remembering my name. After the second
interview he said that, on the whole, everything seemed to be in order. After
that I never saw him again.
    Nine months went by. Then I received word that from now on I would have a regular appointment once every two weeks,
during school hours, preferably in a storytelling period. You were fetched by
one of the teachers, who let you