We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [103]
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