Nothing by Janne Teller

Tæring. I was together with Ursula-Marie, Gerda, and ladyWilliam, and as we leaned into the wind we were discussing whether or not we were significant enough for the hostess on the TVshow in America to come to Tæring, now that we wouldn’t be going to America to go on the show.
    Lady William was quite certain.
    “Bien sûr!” he said, nodding his head. “ Bien sûr , she’ll be here.”
    I thought it was a sure thing too, but before we got to discussing where the best place in Tæring would be to record the show, and what we were going to wear, we were interrupted by Pierre Anthon.
    “Ha!” he spluttered, easily making himself heard above the wind from up there on the branch of his tree. “As if not being allowed to go has anything to do with your safety! Ha, ha!” He laughed emphatically. “How much money do you think Tæring would get out of it if you went over there to visit those journalists and photographers instead of them coming here and staying at the inn and everywhere else where there’s a vacant room to let, and eating as well, and buying beer and chocolate and cigarettes, and having theirshoes mended and all that kind of stuff? Ha, ha! How dumb can you get?” Pierre Anthon swung his balaclava in the wind so it became part of his laughter.
    “He who laughs last, laughs longest!” Ursula-Marie shouted. “Just you wait. If the meaning can’t go to the TV show, the TV show’s bound to come to the meaning!”
    “True, indeed.” Pierre Anthon laughed. “He who laughs last, laughs longest!” And then he laughed so loud it sounded like a whole bunch of incisive arguments and conviction.
    Ha, ha! Ho, ho! I’m right!
    ————
    Whether Pierre Anthon knew what he was talking about or was just guessing, it turned out he was right.
    We never did appear on television in front of the USA and the rest of the world, for even though we were now important and so very significant,the hostess on the show was even more important and even more significant. And she didn’t have the time to come to Tæring and talk with us here.
    That in itself was bad enough.
    What was worse was that it planted inside me an unpleasant, nagging suspicion that Pierre Anthon maybe had ahold of something: that the meaning was relative and therefore without meaning.

    I didn’t tell anyone about my doubts.

    I was afraid of Sofie, but it wasn’t just that. It was nice inside the fame and the belief in the meaning, and I didn’t want out of it, because beyond that there was only the outside and nothing. So I carried on parading myself around and looking superior, exactly as if I really had found the meaning and had no doubts whatsoever.
    It was easy enough to pretend. To be sure, there were still a lot of people against us, but the very intensity of the fight over the meaning of the heap of meaning could only indicate that the matter was of the greatest significance. And significance was the same as meaning, and the greatest significance was therefore the same as the greatest meaning.
    And I only doubted a tiny little bit.
    Tiny little. Smaller. Nothing.
    ————
    We won the struggle for the meaning, both at home and in the world’s press.

    The strange thing was that our victory ended up feeling like a defeat.

XXI
    It was a big museum in New York that settled matters. It was referred to by an odd abbreviation that sounded like something a child couldn’t pronounce properly. But however silly its name sounded, it put a stop to the whole furious debate once and for all when it bid three and a half million dollars for the heap of meaning.
    Suddenly everyone knew that the heap of meaning was art, and that only an uninitiated ignoramus could say otherwise. Even the art critic from the biggest of the local newspapers backtracked and said that he’d now consideredthe heap more closely and that it was indeed a work of near genius, comprising what perhaps was a quite novel and original interpretation of life’s meaning. He had