I don't know what had happened between him and Jack Lewis. Nor do I give a damn. Each was as bad as the other. If anything, Lewis was probably worse, and no doubt Fox had had much to avenge.
He played with my life. The idea of my death only added a touch of spice to his game. So there was an outstanding debt between us. In fact, there were two. I owed him for the gin from our previous meeting, when he sent me on the voyage he expected would be my last. Before I left the Hope and Anchor, I tossed a coin at his pulped face.
There was once a time when I thought that I'd learn something if I found my papa tru. But I hadn't. I hadn't grown wiser.
I'd just grown harder.
THE DISASTER
IT WAS MANY YEARS before we heard further news of Laurids Madsen. Albert never told his mother anything, and we all agreed that was the kindest thing to do. She'd died by the time Peter Clausen returned home, so Karoline Madsen never found out what had happened to the man she'd hopelessly yearned for all those years.
Peter Clausen was the last Marstaller to see Laurids. He was the son of Little Clausen, who had taken part in the battle at Eckernförde Fjord and been held captive with Laurids in Germany. After that, Little Clausen became a ship's pilot and moved to a house in Søndergade, in the southern part of the town. He built a wooden tower on its roof, so he could watch the comings and goings of ships that might need his expert knowledge of local waters.
Peter Clausen arrived on Samoa in 1876 when he and a fellow sailor jumped ship, and Peter took up with a native girl. In the beginning he lived by sponging, malanga-style. Then he bumped into Laurids and realized what could happen if you forgot who you were. Laurids had started to change after his German imprisonment. He hadn't grown any more genial with age. On the contrary: whatever the reason, he'd become even blunter and more closed off. He'd developed a fondness for the local palm wine—which was why you'd often find him in the treetops, where he'd use a machete to hack at the palm trunk to get the sap. But he had to do it in secret because palm wine was banned on Samoa during those years. Laurids had ended up a queer fish, respected neither by his fellow whites nor by the natives he'd chosen to live among.
Peter Clausen decided to become a merchant. He set up his own little trading station and ran the Danish flag up the pole outside. Around that time he took a native wife and and soon had children with her. He followed Laurids's example and gave them Danish names, but he never managed to teach them any Danish. Several years passed. He was just about making ends meet.
His Samoan family, as was the local way, considered his trading station to be a common source of income and settled on his lawn like a swarm of locusts, until he put them in their place. If there was one native habit that Marstallers never shook off, it was thrift. Peter Clausen didn't object to entertaining his relatives on festive occasions—that was entirely appropriate—but not daily. No way. And so he chased them off. If they failed to get the message, he was happy to threaten them with his gun.
Their problem, he said, was that they didn't understand the meaning of daily. They saw every day as one long party and never missed an opportunity to dress up or burst into song. An ordinary day was a concept you had to teach them.
His wife sulked, but when it came to imposing his will, Peter took after his father and eventually—according to him, at any rate—he ended up universally respected. He was no mata-ainga—that's a man who is weak and gives in to his family—nor was he a noa, which means "beggar" or "layabout."
Then came 1889, the year that would turn Peter Clausen into a man of consequence and restore Laurids Madsen's reason.
One event changed both their lives.
At that time the English and the Americans had joined the Germans on Samoa. They'd all laid claim to the island and ended up filling the Bay of Apia with their warships, taking sides among the Kanaks in their internal disputes, and giving them all the guns they could carry on their broad, brown shoulders.
Heinrich Krebs was now an important man. All his plans had come to fruition, and envious competitors claimed he was the only plantation owner in the Pacific with his own private navy. And it was true that Germany indulged his every whim. He was a statesman and a plantation owner rolled into one. His coconut palms were lined up as if on parade, and the way his whip cracked, you'd think his land was a drill ground. People called his plantation simply the Company, as if there was nothing on Samoa but Heinrich Krebs and his dream of straight lines, though at this point Apia had both an American consul and an English-language newspaper.
There was going to be a war. The natives now had plenty of guns and enjoyed firing them—but they never worried much about taking aim first, so they seldom suffered great losses when they attacked one another.
Then the Flag War started. The great colonial powers had planted their flags around the island, where they had no business being in the first place. First, a shot was fired at a British flag. Then an American flag was burned, and the Germans were blamed for it. German troops came ashore to find themselves surrounded by Kanaks, who made short work of fifty of them. It was said that the house where the Germans held out had more holes than a fisherman's net by the time the Kanaks had finished. The Germans inside had been killed by American bullets, supplied by the British, and all of a sudden the bay outside Apia was packed with seven warships from three nations. Everyone was waiting for the first shot.
It was never fired though, and that was the whole point of the story, Peter said. Because the sea attacked before the cannons had a chance.
The barometer fell to 29.11. Any sailor who knows the Bay of Apia knows what that means: get out to sea as quickly as you can. But the officers on board these naval ships hadn't a clue. They just wanted to challenge one another, and the poor fools didn't realize that their worst enemy was the ocean. The wind built to hurricane force and the waves in the bay grew big enough to frighten even those of us who'd witnessed an autumn storm in the Skagerrak or the North Atlantic.
The next morning revealed a sight to match any horrors of war. Three warships had run aground on the reef, two lay on the beach with their keels bared, and two had sunk to the bottom of the bay. The sea had swallowed cannons and ammunition and wrought its own destruction in their absence. Drowned sailors bobbed face-down in the frothy surf before finally being washed ashore.
The sun rose, and its glorious rays spread across a sky swept clear of clouds. But the beach was a different sight altogether. The recovered bodies were lined up, while mute survivors wandered up and down between the rows, trembling either from exhaustion or from a lingering terror of the sea's power. These were troops, not seamen: they'd been destined for other forms of victory and defeat, death and survival than the kind we knew. They were soldiers who'd tasted a sailor's fate.
They never made history. No one would remember them. The Battle of Samoa was not won by the Americans, the British, or the Germans. It was won by the Pacific.
Laurids walked among the waterlogged bodies placed face-down in the sand. No one knew why they'd been arranged that way. Perhaps those who laid them out thought it too gruesome to look so many dead people in the face at once. The day before, these people had been ready to shoot one another. Now it was impossible to tell who was German, American, or British. Laurids kept pointing at them as though taking a tally, and each body he counted seemed to cheer him.
"When I saw that, I thought he really had lost his mind," Peter Clausen said later.
He too had come down to the beach that morning. But unlike Laurids, he wasn't counting the dead; he was counting the survivors. Every one of them was a potential customer, now that the fleets of three nations had been smashed to pieces and all provisions had been lost, along with a whole swath of crew.
"Fortunately, there were more living than dead," Peter Clausen said. Whether he meant fortunate for them or for his business wasn't clear, but at any rate, the disaster in the Bay of Apia proved to be a turning point in the fortunes of his trading station.
"All I know
," Clausen said, returning to the subject of Laurids, "is that if he really had once lost his reason, he got it back that day. I can't say whether he became his old self again, since I've no idea what he was like before. But he turned up at my door, asking if there was anything he could do. That was new. In the old days he showed up only when he wanted something—which he always did. Don't get me wrong. I was happy to help him, within reason. I never refused him a meal and a cup of coffee. After all, we were both from Marstal. But he wasn't someone whose company I enjoyed. He never thanked me when he left with a full stomach. But if there was ever a different Laurids, it was the one I saw when he'd finished counting the dead on the beach. I couldn't help but remember that he'd been on the losing side in a naval battle too and spent time in captivity. That must have given his pride a hard knock. Now it was as if he'd been redeemed."
His father, Little Clausen, said, "Laurids saw Saint Peter's bare behind. He went to Heaven and stood at the Gates of Paradise. But then he came back down again, and his mind probably suffered some damage from that. Standing on the threshold of death and then turning back can't do a man any good."
"Well, I wouldn't know about that," said the son. "I don't have a clue what mad people think. But the upshot was he became almost human again. He'd been a palm-wine drunk who'd gone native. His life had been one big malanga. He wasn't exactly respected by the whites on Samoa. Not that they thought much of me either because I had children by a native woman too. Even though they've got good Danish names, they're still called half-blood or half-caste and that's no compliment. The British are the worst when it comes to labels like that. But now I'm a rich man, and the American navy is my customer, so I don't give a damn what they call us. My children will inherit the shop, so they'll be all right.
"The Germans are keeping a low profile these days. Heinrich Krebs has become a quiet man. Not much Bismarck in him now. He's a businessman again. While Laurids grew almost respectable. He trimmed his beard and stopped drinking. I even let him look after the shop from time to time. He built himself a smack and sewed his own sails. He'd sail through the surf and return with fish, just like a local: no more twiddling his thumbs in a palm treetop for him. I only once asked him if he missed his family back home. Perhaps it was stupid of me. What's family, when you haven't seen them for forty years? He turned his back on me and disappeared with a face like a thundercloud. I thought he'd go off on another malanga. But he came back a few days later and he was still the new Laurids. The next day he sailed across the reef in his smack and never came back. The boat was never found. Most people would probably say that was the end of Laurids. But I had the strange notion that he'd set off to start a new life for himself."
Albert hadn't wanted to listen to Peter Clausen's story. We told him anyway, once Clausen had left. He listened in silence and said nothing. He leaned forward and rubbed his boot with the sleeve of his jacket.
"I kept the boots," he said. "The rest is of no interest to me."
He got up. He was still wearing the same boots, thirty years after his visit to Samoa.
II
THE BREAKWATER
WE DIDN'T KNOW for sure that Herman Frandsen was a murderer.
But if he was, we knew what drove him to it.
Impatience.
No one in our town has such a thing as privacy. There's always an eye watching, an ear cocked. Each and every one of us generates a whole archive of talk. Your slightest offhand remark takes on the weight of a lengthy newspaper commentary. A furtive glance is instantly returned and pinned on its owner. We're always coming up with new names for one another. A nickname's a way of stating that no one belongs to himself. You're ours now, it says: we've rechristened you. We know more about you than you know about yourself. We've looked at you and seen more of you than you'll catch in the mirror.
Rasmus Asswhipper, Cat Tormentor, Violin Butcher, Count of the Dunghill, Klaus Bedchamber, Pissy Hans, Kamma Booze, how can any of you imagine we don't know your secrets? Hey, Question Mark: we call you that because you're a hunchback! And Masthead: well, what better name for someone with a tiny head, a long body, and no shoulders?
Everyone in our town has a story—but it's not the one he tells himself. Its author has a thousand eyes, a thousand ears, and five hundred pens that never stop scribbling.
No one saw what Herman Frandsen did. A moment came and went, and with it went a human life, snuffed out forever. There's no telling what happened, or how. It's all guesswork. And because we don't know for sure, we can't seem to let it go.
We know his motive, though. We found it within ourselves.
***
It was a summer's night in 1904, and Herman was twelve years old. As he sneaked out the front door of his house in Skippergade, you could hear the noises that emerged from within. His mother, Erna, and his stepfather, Holger Jepsen, were groaning and sniggering away on their creaking mahogany bed. Herman walked south until he left the last houses behind and then continued out toward the beach. Above him the Milky Way lit up. It was headed the same way as he was, spreading out of the night above the rooftops of Kongegade and disappearing somewhere on the other side of the Tail. In the endless universe there are no maps, yet the Milky Way still gives us Marstallers the impression of being a real road: a road that leads out to sea.
Herman did not stop until he'd reached the water. He took off his shoes and stood with his feet in the foaming surf and watched the Milky Way stretch away from him into the distance, and a feeling that could easily be mistaken for loneliness washed over him. It wasn't the kind of abandonment an orphaned child feels so much as the sense of loss you experience when the older boys go off on their adventures and leave you behind. You're full of anguish and you don't realize that it's a feeling born of impatience. You long to grow up, right there and then. You realize that childhood is an unnatural state and that within you there's a much bigger person, one you can't be right now but who'll come to life somewhere beyond the horizon.
Herman never spoke about that night to a single one of us.
But we knew: we've been there ourselves.
Herman lost his father early. That's something quite a few of us experience, but this loss was especially cruel. Frederik Frandsen from Sølvgade went down with his ship, the Ofelia, on the Newfoundland route in 1900. Herman's two brothers, Morten and Jakob, were on board too. Herman was only eight years old when he was left alone with his mother. Erna was a big woman, who'd matched her husband in height and in girth: he'd always had to bow his head and enter doors sideways, both in his modest captain's cabin on the Ofelia and at home in Sølvgade. The ceiling was so low there that if anyone in the family wanted to stand up straight, they had to go outside and do it in God's fresh air. Herman excepted, of course.
Erna soon remarried, and this earned her a rather unfair reputation for cold-heartedness—though you could well argue she was the opposite. Was her swift remarriage due to the fact that she had no need to mourn—or that her heart was so frail in the face of loneliness that she had to seek comfort where she could? Her new husband was captain of the Two Sisters, Holger Jepsen from Skippergade, a quiet man who long since seemed to have settled into a bachelor's life. He was so sinewy that his bones looked as if they were bound in string, but he was small and slight of build, and standing next to big Erna he practically disappeared: it was almost comical. After their marriage he was nicknamed the Boy.
But you could see that Jepsen stirred something in Erna. She became a blusher, which she'd never been before. What's more, her mustache disappeared. Until Jepsen turned up she'd always had a shadow on her upper lip, though whether it was prickly no one could say, as she wasn't the type to go around kissing people, least of all her own sons. Frandsen had been a coarse man and everyone had agreed that the manly, broad-shouldered Erna had been a good match for him. But now she grew almost tender, if you can imagine tenderness in a woman with hands the size of shovels. It was as if Jepsen had discovered, within the giant woman, a wisp of a girl his own
size, and lured her out.
But Herman was none too pleased. He'd already lost his father and two brothers, and perhaps he sensed that he was losing his mother as well. He must have felt homeless in Jepsen's house, as if he'd come to a strange country with a different language—though Jepsen treated him decently: it wasn't long before he presented his new stepson with his very own boat and taught him to scull, set sails, tie knots, and everything else he needed to know to handle himself at sea. But in Herman's eyes, Jepsen had committed the unforgivable sin of turning Erna into a simpering fool. All that touching and holding hands is bad for your health, he'd tell anyone who'd listen. He behaved like Erna's rightful owner, watching his property being mismanaged. The way he puffed himself up and got all indignant like a right little man, you'd think he considered Erna's mustache her best feature.
Herman would also come to blame his stepfather for his mother's sudden death. Erna succumbed to blood poisoning after gutting a codfish. A hook, buried in its flesh, had pierced her middle finger, but she hadn't been concerned and simply pulled the hook out without so much as a wince. That was the old Erna, the one Herman liked. But two days later she was dead, even though Jepsen had fetched Doctor Kroman, who'd done all he could.
Herman's view was that his mother wouldn't have died if his father had been alive. At home in Sølvgade she'd have survived, as the big, tough-as-nails woman she'd once been, not the quivering, blushing, mustacheless, lovesick jellyfish Jepsen reduced her to when he moved them to Skippergade. The fact that Herman still said "at home in Sølvgade," long after his father's death, despite the fact that he lived in Skippergade for most of his childhood, should have served as a warning to his stepfather.
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