yearbook 2004/05 - The European Film College

SUMMER 2003
Harriet Knitter and the Chamber of Secrets
By Irene P. Paaske
They noticed it every now and then when they
went upstairs to the college office or the library.
A sign. It was grey, slightly chipped on the bottom
left hand corner and maybe it didn’t hang
quite straight. International Department, it
said.
Further down along the short corridor to the
left, just opposite the copy room, was a door.
You could see that it had not been there always,
there was a doorstep where the other doors on
the same floor didn’t have one, as if it was covering
a missing piece of carpet, and the doorframe
was still lacking some finish.
Every now and then they mentioned it, the students.
“Have you noticed the door next to the
copy room?” “Is it an office or something?” “I
think that the fax machine is in there.” “Oh, I
didn’t even know that there was another office
there.” “Well, frankly, I don’t even know where
the copy room is.”
Usually, during the office hours, a middle aged
woman was sitting in there. She had reached the
age where you are no longer young but would
not be classified as old either, a kind of no-man’s
land, where people almost disappear, emerging
later shining with the experience and wisdom
accumulated though a long life that only older
people posses. Maybe that is why they had never
really noticed her. A couple of times a week a
student popped in to send a fax and left again.
Otherwise she sat there alone, staring at her
computer screen or reading some papers.
Harriet Knitter was one of the students who
didn’t have a clue about what she would be
when she grew up. That was the reason she
and her parents had thought this college was
such a great idea. She had been enjoying herself,
she had attended all the classes, all the parties,
hadn’t dated all the boys, although a fair
0
selection of them. Now it was almost the end of
term, she had had fun, laerned a lot but she still
didn’t know what to do when she grew up.
One day Harriet was expecting a fax from her
mother. She had already had some trouble with
the college’s office because her course payment
had not arrived in spite of her mother having
told her the bank transfer had been made long
ago.
Harriet’s mother was a blond, nice, but somewhat
absent-minded woman so you could not
always count on her taking care of all the practical
things in life. Now she would fax the proof,
a copy of the bank transfer, so they could sort
things out before Harriet would have to call
her dad who was now living with a new wife,
30 years younger than himself and actually five
years younger that Harriet.
His father would not like that at all, he would
get all red in his face and use the missing payment
as another example in a long row of explanations
for him leaving his first family and
settling down with this young little thing who,
however, luckily loved him for his intelligence,
sense of humour and all his not so few extra
pounds and thinning red hair and wasn’t at
all interested in the contents of his numerous
swelling bank accounts. What a lovely creature.
So much different from his first wife, that headless
chicken, he would say. It was a pity that his
daughter and ex-wife were not able to see it and
continued to make his life so difficult by hinting
that Yasmine Hélène’s intentions were more
suitable to be written about by Patricia Highsmith
than Barbara Cartland, the latter being
actually his beloved wife’s favourite writer. And
in additon to that they forced him to interrupt
his comfortable life every now and then because
he had to straighten things out due to these
“hens” incapacity to take care of the simpliest
things.