Page 53 of We, the Drowned


  "Come on, what are you waiting for?" said Pinnerup, lifting up a pack from the deck. The dockers looked at one another and winked. One patted Knud Erik on the shoulder and offered him a cigarette. Then they took their places and the chain resumed.

  Knud Erik stayed on the wharf, smoking the first cigarette of his life. He inhaled without coughing. He studied the hand that held it. Every single finger bore a long, painful welt where salt water and harsh ropes had split the tender skin open. Sea gashes, they called them.

  "Piss on them," Boutrup had advised. "It rinses them. And then bind them with a bit of wool. That'll close them up."

  The sun warmed Knud Erik's face and he felt good.

  WHEN HE SIGNED off from the Active, his mother asked him about the fountain pen. She'd given it to him as a confirmation present so he's could write letters home.

  "A lot of good that did," Klara commented.

  He'd also received a pillow-and-eiderdown set and eighty-five kroner. He'd spent forty-five on a pair of new wooden clogs, which the shoemaker said would last him a lifetime. He bought his oilskins from Lohse's in Havnegade, where he also acquired a folding knife with a white bone handle. A seaweed mattress cost him two kroner, and he'd bought himself a green-painted sea chest with a flat lid as well. He needed work clothes: a sweater and a pair of moleskin trousers. When he was fully equipped, every last øre of the eighty-five kroner was gone.

  He'd written to his mother twice during his fifteen months at sea. Both letters basically amounted to the same thing: "Dear Ma, I'm fine."

  He couldn't exactly write to her about the time he doubted his decision to go to sea. It would have been the same as agreeing with her view that a sailor's life was brutal misery. Nor could he write about how he'd overcome that doubt, because that meant the die was cast, and he was committed to being a sailor. So he hid himself in his letters: between the "Dear" and the "Love" there was silence.

  She could see that he'd developed. But she saw more than that. The gulf between them had widened with every inch he'd grown, almost as if his growth were rooted in spite and disobedience. He looked even more like his father. He had the same blond, curly hair and strong chin. But he had her brown eyes, and when she caught sight of him in an unguarded moment, she still felt she had a share in him. If he possessed an ounce of sense, he'd tire of life at sea in the end.

  It was no use talking, or trying to pressure him. Instead, she served his favorite dishes in the months he spent at home, waiting for his next job. An unexpected warmth emerged between them, but then she realized that he'd misinterpreted it, thinking she'd finally accepted his choice. He showed her the scars on his hands and the saltwater blisters and told her about the loathsome Pinnerup, proud to show off his newly acquired status as an experienced sailor.

  But she was outraged when she saw what the sea had done to him.

  "I hope you've learned your lesson now!" The words escaped her before she could stop them. She heard their sharp desperation.

  He looked at her and guardedly said nothing. But she could read the message in his eyes: You don't understand.

  No, she didn't. She felt her own impotence. The warmth that had briefly flared between them evaporated. Again they withdrew from each other and ate their meals in silence. Her handsome son. Yes, he had her eyes. But nothing else.

  That autumn Klara bought the five steamers, the Unity, the Energy, the Future, the Goal, and the Dynamic, from the widows.

  We were pretty taken aback by this purchase, which would have required determination and willpower, not to mention the kind of capital we'd never have believed she had. We didn't know precisely how much she paid, but it had to be in the millions. For a long time we spoke of precious little else. She'd acquired a new, enigmatic quality. We'd finally caught on that she was up to something. But what it was, we didn't know.

  The widows had never found a replacement for Isaksen. There'd been several applicants for the post of managing director, but none of them was found suitable, and the company's skippers had shaken their heads. The rumors about why Isaksen resigned had traveled far and wide, so the qualified candidates stayed away, and the company was almost at a standstill. But there was still a chance that a man with the clout to sway the widows and revive their halting business might one day appear and make the town flourish again. This was a risk Klara Friis wasn't prepared to run.

  "But, my dear, there's really no need for you to do that," Ellen said when Klara put forward her proposal, after lengthy discussions with Markussen. Ellen seemed to believe that Klara was buying the ships only out of gratitude for the coffee and vanilla cookies they'd served her so frequently.

  "It's the least I can do," Klara said, making it sound as if the enormous purchase was a display of good neighborliness, though she was fully aware of the craziness of this conversation. Perhaps the widows had an inkling too, for Ellen turned unusually pale, and Emma and Johanne's cheeks were scarlet. They glanced at one another, and Klara knew that despite their chronic indecisiveness, they'd cave in.

  She hadn't exploited them. She'd offered them neither too much nor too little for the steamers, given the unfavorable state of the world market. Profit wasn't what drove her. What drove her was the damage to Knud Erik's hands.

  It was the sea gashes that had made her buy the steamers. The salt-water blisters on her poor son's fingers, wrists, and neck had repelled her: they'd brought to mind the wounds of African slaves, chained and dragged across a continent before being stowed on ships and sold. They must have had scars like that, where raw iron had gnawed at bare skin.

  This was Klara Friis's mission: to free the slaves. She wanted to re-lease Knud Erik from the chains that his mad and misconceived manhood had shackled him to. Sailors who had barely returned home, bruised and battered by their constant battle with the sea, would set off again as soon as they could, as if begging for more, unable to get enough of the lashings that came at them from all sides: the storms, the waves, the cold, the poor food, the dreadful hygiene, the brutality, the violence. And the weakest always bore the brunt. It had to stop.

  A few days later Knud Erik informed her that he'd signed on to a new ship. He would get his sea bag and sea chest ready himself.

  THE KRISTINA WAS a topgallant 150-ton sail schooner. Her captain, Teodor Bager, was a lean man with an anxious, sunken face, which neither the sun nor the wind seemed to touch. He remained equally pale in summer and winter, in northern hemisphere and southern. People said he had a weak heart and he should have retired, but he was too miserly to do so. His only love was his eighteen-year-old daughter, Kristina. He'd named his ship after her.

  There were five men in his crew, including Knud Erik, who was now fifteen. He'd graduated from the galley to the deck as an ordinary seaman and regarded himself as an experienced sailor. He knew his compass. He'd mastered eye splice and short splices, and he could whip a rope. He could heave in the stays, veer, and tack.

  The boy in the galley, feeding the fire in the stove, was a pale little fellow, green-faced from seasickness. He was fourteen, as Knud Erik had been, an eternity ago. He recognized Helmer, who was scared of water and who'd once hung from the forestay of his grandfather's smack and made it capsize. And there was another Marstaller, an older man: Hermod Dreymann, the first mate on the Kristina.

  The two able seamen, Rikard and Algot, were long-haul sailors from Copenhagen. They came from families with no seafaring tradition, as was clear from their kit. They had no sea chest or bedding. Apart from the seaman's classic canvas bag, with its cow horn of grease, sail needle, splicing fid, awl, and sail gloves, neither owned anything but a blanket and a cigar box with shaving gear. Their shore clothes looked just like the clothes they worked in: blue dungarees and sweaters.

  Rikard had a tattoo on his right arm of a naked mermaid bearing the Danish flag. Both Rikard and Algot used Polish cigarette holders, fitted with a flat bottom so you could set them upright when there was no ashtray.

  The atmosphere of the Kristina was
much more convivial than that of the Active, but Knud Erik's old tormentor haunted him. Fighting exhaustion at night, alone at the wheel, with massive, ice-laden waves looming over the ship, he'd think of Pinnerup. He'd hear his curses in the wind's howl and see his face in the foam of a cresting wave. Yet even as he choked with weariness and felt the merciless torture of his saltwater boils, he knew, with a feeling of triumph, that he'd conquered Pinnerup. He could still hate the sea with a child's defiance, but now it held no fear for him.

  He'd seen the first mate humbled. He'd sat on the wharf at Frederiksholms Kanal, dangling his legs with studied indifference, not really understanding what he was learning as he watched Pinnerup backing down in his clash with the dockers. Now he knew. Some things you had to pick up the hard way, but there was no need to humiliate someone just because they were new and green. The experienced man might even lend the inexperienced one a helping hand. And so when Helmer, exhausted and seasick, was ready to give up, Knud Erik helped him in the galley.

  "Look," he said. "Your bread's too squishy and the crew keep complaining about it. The problem's in the rising. Shop-bought yeast doesn't work, see."

  He found a couple of large potatoes and told Helmer to peel them and chop them up into small pieces. "Now get me a bottle," he said.

  He stuffed it three-quarters full with potato pieces and topped it up with water. Then he corked it and secured the cork with twine.

  "Leave it somewhere warm, and you'll have yeast in a couple of days. You strain it through a sieve into your dough. But be careful. Don't leave the bottle too long, or the cork will force the twine and explode. With an almighty bang."

  Helmer looked at him as if he'd just revealed the secret behind a magic trick. This must be what it was like to be an adult, Knud Erik thought. When people looked at you like that.

  The Kristina plied the Newfoundland route. It wasn't the voyage Knud Erik had dreamt of, but it was the only work available, and the trip across the cold North Atlantic was a new initiation. They sailed timber from Oskarshamn in Sweden to Ørebakke in Iceland. During the twenty-two-day journey, his seasickness returned and eroded his sense of being an experienced sailor. It took fourteen days to unload the ship.

  Afterward they sailed on to Little Bay in Newfoundland with a ballast of volcanic sand from the Icelandic beaches. It was now November, and after a week at sea they hit dense fog. It lifted at noon and lay like a wall on the horizon while the sun shone brightly across the rest of the heavens. Then the fog returned, and the sails turned dark gray with moisture, which dripped heavily onto the deck. One minute they could see far ahead, and the next they couldn't even make out the yardarm of the flying jib boom.

  On the third day of the fog, Knud Erik had just taken over at the wheel when the gray mass lifted once more. To one side he saw high, ice-covered mountains. To his surprise, they weren't white, but blue, purple, and a transparent sea green. One resembled a towering, massive cube; its right-angled corners and flat top made it look sculpted by human hands. It seemed so unnatural to him that he began to feel uneasy. He knew only Scandinavia's low, flat, scoured rocky coasts and had certainly never seen anything remotely resembling this savage, alien world of ice and snow.

  "Greenland to leeward, Greenland to leeward!" he yelled, and could hear his own fright. The skipper and the first mate rushed up from the cabin. Bager stared briefly at the bizarre mountain landscape. "It's not Greenland," he said. "Those are icebergs."

  He pointed to the horizon. More icebergs appeared to windward now, scattered so randomly that any illusion of a continuing coastline was shattered. Then the fog returned, and they were once more marooned on deck.

  The skipper looked worried. His sunken face was paler than usual.

  "We're in God's hands," he said.

  The fog bank remained with them for a fortnight. There was little wind, and the moist sails hung limp most of the time. The great Atlantic swells moved in a slow rhythm that left no ripples under the Kristina's vulnerable hull. The water, which was smooth as oil, seemed to be thickening in the humid cold as if it were turning to ice. They were surrounded by silence, and at first Knud Erik thought that fog must dampen sound, in the same way that it limited the view. It dawned on him that the crew had begun whispering, as if the icebergs crouched behind the wall of fog surrounding the Kristina were evil spirits whose attention it was vital not to attract. Their silence got to them, and yet they dared not break it. Knud Erik wondered if even God Himself could keep an eye on them inside this dense gray shroud, as the skipper hoped.

  When the fog lifted at last and they saw the sea around them, free of ice, they started shouting. They could have cheered, but they didn't; they just yelled incoherently, wanting to hear the sound of their own voices. Each man had been isolated by the silence: now they were united again. No icebergs were stalking them. Shouting was permitted.

  On the following day they spotted the coast of Newfoundland. They'd been at sea for twenty-four days since leaving Iceland.

  They docked at Little Bay, and Knud Erik rowed the skipper ashore. He was going to speak to a broker and the port authorities, and he told Knud Erik to wait for him there. When he returned, his face looked strange. Knud Erik positioned the oars and started rowing toward the Kristina.

  "Knud Erik," Bager said. His tone was confidential, and one that Knud Erik wasn't used to, for the skipper normally addressed him only to give orders. "The Ane Marie hasn't arrived." The Ane Marie was a Marstal schooner that had left Iceland eight days before the Kristina. The skipper sighed and looked across the water. "So she's probably gone. I imagine she hit an iceberg." The skipper kept looking across the water and said nothing else for the rest of the trip.

  Vilhjelm. That was Knud Erik's first thought when the skipper told him. Vilhjelm was on board the Ane Marie. He looked down at his hands: they were gripping the oars so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. He took huge strokes, as though shaking himself from a trance, and nearly fell off the thwart.

  "Mind how you row," Bager said. His voice sounded absent, almost gentle.

  In the evening Knud Erik lay in his berth, grieving. Had Vilhjelm surfaced twice? Or had he gone straight to the bottom, pulled down by his clogs and heavy oilskins? What was the last thing he'd seen? The bubbles in the water? Or the frozen chaos of the icebergs? He remembered the unnaturally square iceberg he'd seen on the first day of the Kristina's voyage through the ice and the sinister feeling it had given him. Had the Ane Marie collided with it? What had Vilhjelm felt in that moment? Had he cried out for help? But why would he? There was no one to come to the rescue out there in the open North Atlantic.

  He recalled their confirmation classes, marking the end of their childhood, where they'd sat in church every Sunday beneath the model ships suspended from the ceiling: symbols of Christian salvation. He'd looked up at the altarpiece, at Jesus calming the storm on Galilee with just a gesture. He'd joined in the old sailor's hymns that they'd all had to learn by heart.

  Abide with us and turn away all evil,

  Send good winds and kind weather,

  To see us safely home!

  That's what they'd sung. Had that hymn been on Vilhjelm's lips in the final minutes before the ship went down? Or had he, like Knud Erik in front of the marine artist's Jesus on the Sea of Galilee, begun to doubt?

  Where had God been when the Hydra vanished without trace, with his father on board? Perhaps God was like Vilhjelm's father? Perhaps He was sitting with His back to us, and just when it really mattered, heard nothing?

  It was pure luck who came home and who didn't. Knud Erik could find no meaning in any of it, and he thought this must be how Vilhjelm had felt when he sank for the third time: God was deaf and hadn't heard him.

  They had to clean the hold to prepare for the cargo of salt cod. They hosed it down and scrubbed it for five days, covered the bottom with a layer of spruce branches, layered birch bark on top, and nailed more bark to the lining. The smell was pungent and fresh: it was the unfa
miliar scent of mountains and woods. They were building a log cabin in the bottom of the ship. Salt cod was a demanding guest. Its lodgings must be ready and waiting.

  Every day around midmorning a curious event broke the monotonous routine of loading. A boat approached diagonally across the harbor, passing close to the Kristina. At the oars sat a young girl with black hair, cut short so that her neck was bared. She was tanned, with full lips, Oriental eyes, and strong brows. She rowed like a man, with long dogged strokes, and her skiff moved quickly. As she passed the Kristina she always glanced up. The crew would stand along the rail and stare back at her, but she never turned away: she seemed to be searching for a particular face.

  After a couple of days Knud Erik grew convinced that she was looking at him in particular. One day their eyes met, and he blushed and had to look away himself.

  Rikard and Algot talked about her afterward. She always wore a baggy sweater and moleskin trousers, which made it difficult to comment on her body. She was slim, though, that much they could see, and this spurred their speculations. Judging by her dark eyes and generally Oriental appearance, they were sure she was a descendant of "the cunt ladder."

  "That's the ladder the hookers in Bangkok use to get on board the ships," Rikard explained. Knud Erik said nothing. He pondered the look he'd exchanged with the girl and blushed every time he recalled the way her eyes had rested on him. Mostly, though, he thought about Vilhjelm. He couldn't sleep at night, and during the day his head buzzed.

  The next time the girl came by, Dreymann waved at her. She waved back, and this took the tension out of the situation. She always rowed the same stretch, out to a certain rock, behind which she disappeared. She'd reappear a couple of hours later, but on her return she didn't come close to the ship, or look in its direction. Instead, she fixed her gaze straight ahead and rowed hard.

 
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