"Well, that's the captain and the two first mates gone," said Petersen the stonemason, scratching his neck with the flat cap that rarely left his head. "So it's only able seamen left now."
We called Petersen the Collector of the Dead, because whenever anyone died, Petersen would carve a little statuette of them in wood. He was always sizing us up from beneath the brim of that cap: not in exactly the same way as the undertaker, but close enough. No sooner had a man been buried than his figurine would appear on a shelf in the Collector's workshop, which was right opposite the cemetery—convenient both for him and his customers, since the shiny stones, with their crosses, doves, angels, and anchors, didn't have to travel far. The Collector's workshop was the cemetery in miniature—except that here you could view the dead themselves, rather than their graves. The Collector never offered his carvings to the next of kin: when asked why, he'd reply that he didn't want to offend anyone. His little wooden figures always resembled their subjects, but in a crude way. In his hands, a big nose grew bigger, a bent back became more hunched, and the bowlegged seemed to carry an invisible barrel between their knees. Almost all of the deceased had had nicknames, and the Collector captured them in his likenesses. Smiling innocently, he said it was through sheer lack of skill, rather than ill will, that his figurines found themselves with slightly exaggerated peculiarities.
"Be patient with me," he said. "It's the best I can do."
The Collector was busy during the influenza. By day he'd carve and polish his gravestones, while at night he'd sit with his pipe in his mouth and carve wood. More and more figures appeared on his shelf.
"Who'll sail the ship now?" he said to Captain Ludvigsen. The captain, nicknamed the Commander, had come to order a gravestone for his wife. Answering his own question, he continued, "The women. Just you wait. Watch Klara Friis. Mark my words. The women will take over."
Ludvigsen shook his head. "Women don't know a damn thing about running a business."
"I didn't say they did. All I said was that they're in charge now."
IN THE NIGHT, when he was alone, Knud Erik cried. He couldn't do it in front of his mother. After all, he was her little man. And men, both big and small, don't cry in front of women. When Albert died, Knud Erik had steeled himself for his mother's tears. He'd be the one to comfort her in her second mourning. He'd be the man at her side, whose job it was to shoulder her worries and her grief. He could do that: he'd prepared himself for it. And her red-rimmed eyes and joyless face always confirmed he was indispensable. He was the only one who understood her, the only one who listened with such attention.
He placed a hand on her arm one day as she sat staring into the distance.
"Ma, are you sad?" he asked, with the usual inviting tone of voice. She could confide in her little man.
Her grief was a burden so heavy, he came close to collapsing under it, and yet he couldn't lay it down. With that burden on his shoulders he was someone. Without it, he didn't know whether he'd be visible to her at all.
"No, I'm not sad," his mother said. "Leave me alone for a while. I'm thinking."
He started playing with Edith. "Where's Daddy? Where's the man?" she asked.
But she wasn't really interested in the answer. She'd seen so little of Albert. Daddy was just a word to her: she probably thought it was Albert's name. She was just a child.
Knud Erik himself no longer knew what he was. Just now, his mother had met his offer of consolation with a blank stare. This was new to him. Had their pact dissolved? Was he no longer her little man? If he wasn't, then what was he?
***
When he was very young, Knud Erik had learned that the world could disappear and reappear all by itself. A blind would be pulled down, and everything would vanish into darkness. Then a few hours later it would roll up again with a clatter, and the world would return. The bright blue canvas of day would give way to the blackness of night, only to come back the next morning.
Loss was like the blind not rolling up again. Loss was a night that never ended.
His father had vanished in the night, but for a long time Knud Erik kept hoping that the blind he'd disappeared behind would roll back up with a clatter. He searched the horizon for a piece of string he could give a quick pull to, so the blind would roll up and his father—a man whose face had already dissolved in a mist—would reappear. He'd tried repeatedly to conjure his father's features, never certain if it was the same face as last time, until nothing was left but the word Dad. He'd had one once. The certainty was like a gap in his mind, a white spot on the canvas of his memory.
Now he had to get over the loss of Albert.
He remembered him for all the good things he'd been. They'd been mates, friends, more. Albert was an entire universe that had embraced him, with arms strong enough to protect from everything. And he knew that the old man had loved him, though he'd never said it aloud.
In death, Albert would help him one last time.
With his ginger hair, sinewy body, and sprinkling of rust-colored freckles, Anton was a figure so brim full of fighting spirit that far bigger boys respectfully made way for him. He kept a half-tamed seagull called Tordenskjold in a cramped bamboo cage in his parents' garden, and if you wanted to be on good terms with Anton, you popped a herring into Tordenskjold's hungry beak. He'd found the seagull as a chick at Langeholm Head, where he rowed every spring to plunder the gulls' nests of eggs, which he sold to Tønnesen, the baker to the south. He put them in his sand cakes and his vanilla cookies, which earned him the nickname Seagull Baker.
Anton's own nickname was the Terror of Marstal. He'd acquired it when he'd blown the porcelain insulator at the top of a lamppost to smithereens with an air gun and blacked out half the town. The gun, borrowed from a cousin, was one he normally used for shooting sparrows for a farmer in Midtmarken, who paid him four øre per bird. When the farmer tossed the dead birds onto the dunghill, Anton would simply retrieve them and resell them to his gullible client, presenting them as freshly killed—he often sold the same ones four or five times. As a result, the farmer had acquired an exaggerated impression of the size of the sparrow population plaguing his fields.
Anton was from Møllevejen, on the northern side of town; Knud Erik, who now lived in Prinsegade, belonged to the southern side. The invisible line that separated the two halves of Marstal was one that the boys took as seriously as if it were a front of the recent world war. Two factions, known as the North Gang and the South Gang, engaged in an unending and merciless war. By rights Knud Erik and Anton should have been natural enemies. But while Anton was a respected member of North, Knud Erik, who kept to himself both on the school playground and on the streets to and from school, hadn't bothered to enlist.
One spring day when the wind clipped the crests of the waves beyond the breakwater, Anton sidled up to Knud Erik on his way home from school. Knowing Anton's reputation, Knud Erik braced his shoulders in anticipation of an attack: not being a thug himself, he was unaware that behaving defensively could provoke the very fight he was trying to avoid.
"It was me who found Captain Madsen," Anton announced.
Knud Erik tried to make himself even smaller. Suddenly he wished the other boy would just hit him and get it over with.
"I wanted to tell you that I think he was quite something," the older boy said. "Dying like that with his boots on, standing up. I'd like to die like that." Knud Erik didn't know what to say, but his tension started to dissolve. "You knew him. He was like a granddad to you, wasn't he?" His tone wasn't mocking.
"Yes," Knud Erik said hesitantly. He paused, then asked, "How did he look when you found him?" He wanted to know if Albert had suffered in his final hours. If so, perhaps it had been written on his face. He was afraid the question made him look a sissy.
"He had frost in his beard and his hair. Over his whole head in fact. It looked really good," Anton said.
Knud Erik summoned up his courage. "What else?"
"What do you mean? He looked ordinary,
I guess. He was dead, wasn't he?"
They walked in silence for a while. The clouds gathering above their heads began to darken. They walked through Markgade and crossed Market Square. Knud Erik would soon be home and Anton might never seek him out again. He wanted to win the older boy's friendship. He racked his brains for something interesting to say. Then came sudden inspiration.
"Have you ever seen a shrunken head?" he asked.
Knud Erik no longer had an adult male in his life. But now he had Anton, who'd gained experience of the grown-up world through his countless clashes with it. Anton knew it in the same way an army spy knows the enemy's camp: with a view to capturing it.
One day after school Anton walked home to Prinsegade with Knud Erik. Under the guise of a visitor, his secret role was that of an observer, come to get the measure of his opponent. The maid, with her starched apron and pinned-up hair, received them. Anton looked her up and down as if he was contemplating asking her out that evening, while she in turn glared at his clogs and sharply ordered him to remove them before entering the drawing room.
Anton's behavior with Klara Friis was exemplary. He politely answered her questions about his parents and his school grades, though he failed to mention that he always signed his monthly grade report himself: indeed, his mother didn't even know such a thing existed. Klara was impressed by this model schoolboy whose friendship her son had won, and who'd clearly be an excellent mentor to him. She liked everything about Anton, in fact, except the restlessness of his eyes, which scanned the room as if registering every object it contained. And his legs kept swinging back and forth under the table. In the presence of mothers, Anton always found the etiquette of sitting still a monumental effort.
She asked about his plans for the future. Anton was only eleven, but in a couple of years he'd be confirmed and leave school, so it wasn't unlikely that he'd considered the matter. "I'm going to sea." His reply betrayed neither enthusiasm nor reluctance—just mild surprise that anyone would think to pose the question at all.
"Knud Erik isn't going to sea." Klara said this with deliberateness, determined to distinguish her son from his friends. They should know who they had in their midst. Knud Erik was destined for other things.
Anton quickly glanced from mother to son, and then around the room. Again, it was as if he was taking an inventory. This left her with a feeling of unease.
***
"She's tough," Anton said to Knud Erik, the next time they met. He sounded like a boxing coach sizing up his fighter's opponent. Seeing the defenselessness in Knud Erik's face, he placed a hand on his shoulder. "Don't worry, they're all damned tough," he said, by way of comfort. "She wants you to end up in some ship broker's office. You're to wear a starched collar and look ridiculous. No way in hell."
"No, no way in hell." Knud Erik hesitated as he repeated the words, trying to sound like Anton.
"There's a surefire way of avoiding this," Anton advised him. "You just need to do badly in school."
Doing badly in school is harder than you think. Knud Erik was infinitely tempted to stick his hand up when he knew the answer. After all, he'd done his homework, and his instinct was to be a good boy.
Having always belonged to the middle stream of his class, he now deliberately sank to the bottom. This did no harm to his reputation among his friends, but he paid the price in punishment. Most of the teachers were spinsters. Some were fat and others were scrawny, but they all hit, scratched, pinched, and otherwise disciplined the boys with an energy you'd never have guessed they had in them. Miss Junckersen would pull your ears; Miss Lærke would tweak the hairs at the back of your neck; Miss Reimer would slap you with the palm of her hand. Miss Katballe would put unruly children across her knees and smack their backside, something that only Anton was sufficiently hardened not to dread. Rage would turn her face a terrifying blue-black. It was a color we feared—along with her spluttering and her flying spittle—far more than the spanking itself. But the worst was Mr. Kruse. There was no escape from him because he was a man, with a man's strength. He would dangle lazy pupils over the first-floor windowsill and threaten to let go: no one could withstand the all-consuming terror that breathed from the void below. In his lessons, his every question was greeted by a forest of hands.
Knud Erik did his homework but kept his mouth shut in class. He didn't feel comfortable about it, but he trusted Anton's advice and hoped he'd get his reward in the hereafter that followed the years of marking time at school.
In class he sat next to Vilhjelm, who had a stutter. Whenever Vilhjelm tried to answer a question, the teachers lost patience with him—which in turn would make him lose patience with himself, and give up before finishing his answer. Knud Erik took to whispering the right answers in his ear or writing them on a scrap of paper. Soon he'd become a kind of ventriloquist, with Vilhjelm as the dummy through which he channeled the knowledge he refused to show his teachers. Over time a friendship grew between the two of them.
Vilhjelm took home his best school report ever—and Knud Erik his worst.
His mother gave him an accusing look.
"What's happening to you at school?" she asked. In her voice he heard concern, budding panic, and anger. But mostly anger. She was a different person now, and he was glad of the change. If she'd remained permanently close to tears as before, he'd never have been's able to pull this off; he'd have been too busy being her trusty little helper. Nowadays she lectured him, and he hardened himself to her just as he hardened himself to his teachers. She was a part of the regiment of women he had to endure before he was granted his freedom.
"You're a strange boy," she said to him.
The words stung him; they felt like a rejection. For a moment he had the urge to throw himself into her arms and beg forgiveness. Part of him still desperately wanted to be reconciled with her, so he could be the big boy again, and she could be the poor little mother who needed him so badly. But she was no longer helpless, and her anger taught him to give as good as he got, and to stand firm.
Anton, meanwhile, remained guarded in his attitude to Vilhjelm. He wasn't keen to amass all the runts of the playground as his followers, and his interest in Knud Erik was mainly due to his connection with the late Captain Madsen, who in Anton's eyes grew into more and more of a hero as Knud Erik retold his tales. Anton had heard about shipwrecks and adventures in foreign ports—such yarns were daily fare in every boy's childhood—but he'd never heard of shrunken heads. Next to stories like that, what did the stuttering Vilhjelm, who could barely complete a sentence, have to offer him?
No, Vilhjelm couldn't compete with Knud Erik when it came to storytelling. But he had physical prowess. The proof of it came one winter day as they were climbing around a laid-up ship in the harbor, and Vilhjelm suddenly scrambled all the way up the rigging, going higher and higher until he reached the brightly polished acorn at the very top of the mast, twenty-five meters above the deck. Then he lay across it on his stomach and balanced there, stretching out his arms and legs as if in flight. They hadn't seen anything like it since the Dannebrog Circus visited the summer before. And even then no one had climbed as high as twenty-five meters.
None of the other boys dared to match his feat. The bravest went as high as the acorn, then hesitated and backed down—even Anton. Some expected the Terror of Marstal to shrug and say it was nothing: if he didn't care to do it, it was because it wasn't worth doing. But Anton wasn't like that. On the contrary.
"Damn it, that was brave," he said. "Me, I just didn't have the guts when it came to it."
He slapped Vilhjelm on the back in approval and Vilhjelm's fortune was made. He was no longer an outsider.
In fact, Vilhjelm was able to tell a story, but it took him a long time—and time was something we didn't have. Once, though, we heard him out, and he told us how he'd nearly died, and it was only luck that saved him.
It had happened on a Sunday morning, quite early. He'd gone with his father to the harbor to repair their boat. His father w
as a sand digger. He was also completely deaf, and it was his deafness that gave the story its excitement and set it apart from the usual kind of mishap that befell all of us: to explore the depths before you could swim was a rite of passage.
Vilhjelm was only three or four years old, and his father gave him instructions in his slow voice, which always made him sound like someone speaking into emptiness, concentrating on every word as if not quite sure of its meaning. "Sit down there," he told Vilhjelm. "I want you to sit still, and if you need me you'll have to shake me."
Then he turned his back and started mending a plank on the sail deck. Vilhjelm stared at the clear, calm water; he could still describe to us the impression it had made on him. The rocks on the wharf were green and slimy, and as the rays of sun began to penetrate the water, a wonderland of changing colors emerged, filled with starfish, scuttling crabs, and shrimp that hung motionless, with only their whiskers vibrating. Vilhjelm leaned forward, full of desire to explore further—and suddenly fell headfirst into the water. Most of us had done that. But none of us had a father who was deaf as a post as our only protection against drowning.
Vilhjelm bobbed to the surface like a cork, grabbed hold of the boat's rail, and found a foothold on one of the slimy rocks of the wharf, then lost it and was left clinging there above the murky green depths until an icy undercurrent caught him, and began dragging him under the boat.
His clogs had come off and he saw them floating nearby like the lifeboats of a sinking ship. His sodden clothes, so dry and comfortable a moment before, felt awkward and alien. His father was nothing but a huge, blue-clad back turned away from him. It was like the whole world giving up on him. He screamed in desperation, but his deaf father didn't hear a thing. He screamed a second time, so loudly his voice echoed around the deserted harbor.
We, the Drowned Page 45
