only seen the work from the front the first time, he wrote.
Three and a half million dollars sounded like a fair amount of money, we thought, without really being able to grasp how much it actually was. Through the lawyer who had been hired to represent us, we nevertheless insisted that the heap of meaning cost three million six hundred thousand dollars, on the basis that you should never sell anything cheaper than what you can get for it. Indeed, we actually ended up asking for three million six hundred and twenty thousand dollars, so there’d also be enough to pay the church for Jesus on the Rosewood Cross, who was no longer in a fit state to be returned anywhere.
The museum accepted, and the deal was closed.
The only thing remaining was to agree on adate for when the heap of meaning would be collected.
To be sure, there were a lot of papers and permissions and other stuff to be dealt with before the heap could be moved across national boundaries. But at the same time — despite an unusually cold spring — the perishable parts of the heap were perishing rather more rapidly with every day that passed. The museum eventually decided on April 8, four and a half weeks from the day. Then the museum people and their lawyers left Tæring, and with them the world’s press, including our own national dailies. Tæring was once again exactly the same as Tæring always had been:
Dull. Duller. Dullest.
————
It was highly odd.
We had found the meaning and thereby the meaning behind everything. All kinds of experts had declared how magnificent the heap ofmeaning was. An American museum was paying millions of dollars for it. And yet no one thought it was interesting anymore. We were dumbfounded.
Either the heap was the meaning or else it was not. And since everyone had agreed that it was, it couldn’t just stop being it again. Or could it?
We walked to and from school, but there wasn’t a single camera, not a single journalist. We went out to the old sawmill. The heap of meaning hadn’t changed (it wasn’t in any way obvious that little Emil’s remains had been removed from the coffin with its cracked paintwork and transferred to a new one that had then been interred and now was getting all cracked just like the first). Nothing was any different, and the fact that the heap looked smaller was probably nothing more than an optical illusion. Right?
A fact it was, however, that January and all our notoriety and the significance that came with it disappeared all at once in the first week of March.
Pierre Anthon was having a ball.
“Meaning is meaning. So if you really had found the meaning, you’d still have it. And the world’s press would still be here trying to figure out what it was you’d found. But they’re not, so whatever it was you found, it wasn’t themeaning, because the meaning doesn’t exist!”
We tried ignoring him and stuck our noses in the air and were superior and both something and someone.
At first we were doing so well we almost believed in it ourselves. It helped some to reread all the newspaper cuttings in the scrapbook and watch all the TV interviews from all the various countries that our parents had recorded on videotape. After a while, though, it was like all the cuttings began to fade, the interviews became tired comedies, and Pierre Anthon was having the game all to himself.
Doubt took us out one by one.
One. Two. All but one.
It was treason, and we weren’t letting on to one another. But it could be seen in the way our smiles disappeared and were replaced by a mask that looked exactly like the one the grown-ups wore, which revealed all too clearly that maybe there wasn’t that much that truly mattered.
————
Sofie was the only one of us to stick it out. And eventually it was her pale face alone and her burning eyes that kept the rest of us from giving up.
And admitting that Pierre Anthon was right.
XXII
It was spring, but this year spring couldn’t reach
Three and a half million dollars sounded like a fair amount of money, we thought, without really being able to grasp how much it actually was. Through the lawyer who had been hired to represent us, we nevertheless insisted that the heap of meaning cost three million six hundred thousand dollars, on the basis that you should never sell anything cheaper than what you can get for it. Indeed, we actually ended up asking for three million six hundred and twenty thousand dollars, so there’d also be enough to pay the church for Jesus on the Rosewood Cross, who was no longer in a fit state to be returned anywhere.
The museum accepted, and the deal was closed.
The only thing remaining was to agree on adate for when the heap of meaning would be collected.
To be sure, there were a lot of papers and permissions and other stuff to be dealt with before the heap could be moved across national boundaries. But at the same time — despite an unusually cold spring — the perishable parts of the heap were perishing rather more rapidly with every day that passed. The museum eventually decided on April 8, four and a half weeks from the day. Then the museum people and their lawyers left Tæring, and with them the world’s press, including our own national dailies. Tæring was once again exactly the same as Tæring always had been:
Dull. Duller. Dullest.
————
It was highly odd.
We had found the meaning and thereby the meaning behind everything. All kinds of experts had declared how magnificent the heap ofmeaning was. An American museum was paying millions of dollars for it. And yet no one thought it was interesting anymore. We were dumbfounded.
Either the heap was the meaning or else it was not. And since everyone had agreed that it was, it couldn’t just stop being it again. Or could it?
We walked to and from school, but there wasn’t a single camera, not a single journalist. We went out to the old sawmill. The heap of meaning hadn’t changed (it wasn’t in any way obvious that little Emil’s remains had been removed from the coffin with its cracked paintwork and transferred to a new one that had then been interred and now was getting all cracked just like the first). Nothing was any different, and the fact that the heap looked smaller was probably nothing more than an optical illusion. Right?
A fact it was, however, that January and all our notoriety and the significance that came with it disappeared all at once in the first week of March.
Pierre Anthon was having a ball.
“Meaning is meaning. So if you really had found the meaning, you’d still have it. And the world’s press would still be here trying to figure out what it was you’d found. But they’re not, so whatever it was you found, it wasn’t themeaning, because the meaning doesn’t exist!”
We tried ignoring him and stuck our noses in the air and were superior and both something and someone.
At first we were doing so well we almost believed in it ourselves. It helped some to reread all the newspaper cuttings in the scrapbook and watch all the TV interviews from all the various countries that our parents had recorded on videotape. After a while, though, it was like all the cuttings began to fade, the interviews became tired comedies, and Pierre Anthon was having the game all to himself.
Doubt took us out one by one.
One. Two. All but one.
It was treason, and we weren’t letting on to one another. But it could be seen in the way our smiles disappeared and were replaced by a mask that looked exactly like the one the grown-ups wore, which revealed all too clearly that maybe there wasn’t that much that truly mattered.
————
Sofie was the only one of us to stick it out. And eventually it was her pale face alone and her burning eyes that kept the rest of us from giving up.
And admitting that Pierre Anthon was right.
XXII
It was spring, but this year spring couldn’t reach
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