The Globe Was Bigger Than Every Door in the School

Around 1975 the United States Information Service in Copenhagen gave Copenhagen International School a planet.

The service ran a library in the city. The library was shrinking, and it owned a floor globe roughly the size of a small car that no longer suited its reduced circumstances. The school said yes. Nobody, at either end, appears to have measured anything.

The school was then on Gammel Kongevej. The globe was on the pavement. The history room was on the third floor. In between were a front door, a stairwell and a series of ordinary Danish doorframes, every one of them narrower than the Pacific.

When the world will not go through the door, you can send the world back or you can take the door off.

The school took the doors off. The globe went up, and stayed up, in the history room, and a former pupil remembered it decades later as a teaching aid of real genius, mostly because it was wrong. Its borders and country names belonged to an earlier afternoon of history, so it taught a lesson that no new globe could: that a map is a photograph of one particular moment, and the moment has usually moved on.

I have had my own experience of furniture and Danish doorframes. When we moved to Copenhagen for my husband’s posting, the removal firm delivered our sofa to the fourth floor and the sofa did not go in. The men tried it on its side, on its end and, briefly, at an angle I can only describe as hopeful. Then they took the sofa away again. It spent our entire posting in a storage unit in Glostrup. We paid rent on it. We visited it once.

The school, unlike us, had the nerve to take the doors off.

The globe stayed for roughly forty years, too big to move and too useful to replace. Then, in 2017, Copenhagen International School moved to a new building by the harbour, with wide glass doors, and the old globe found the space it had always deserved. It went into the entrance, still out of date about half the world, and entirely unbothered by it.

Our sofa came back from Glostrup when the posting ended. It went into the flat in Madrid without anyone needing to remove a door. My husband sat on it, looked at me and said, “Three years of storage fees for that.”

It is still out of date about half the world. It still does not fit. We now live in Brussels, on the second floor, and it is in the hall.