We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [108]
The orchestra outside our windows played the same tune every day: it was nameless, but it was everywhere. Even in bed, asleep, we'd dream of the water.
But the women never heard its music. They couldn't—or they didn't want to. Outside the home, they never looked toward the harbor, but always inland, across the island. They stayed behind and filled the gaps we left. We heard the sirens' song while our wives and mothers blocked their ears and bent over the washtub. The women of Marstal didn't grow bitter. But they grew hard and practical.
Albert Madsen didn't miss the sea. How could he, living in a world capital like Marstal? He could sit on a harbor bench and chat with Christian Aaberg, the first Dane ever to walk right across Africa. Or with Knud Nielsen, who'd just returned after seventeen years on the coast of Japan. Half the male residents of the town had rounded Cape Horn, a perilous rite of passage for sailors the world over, and done it as casually as they'd take the steamer to Svendborg. Every street and lane in Marstal was a main road leading to the ocean. China was in our back garden, and through the windows of our low-ceilinged houses we could see the Moroccan shore.
There were a few cross streets in our town, but none of significance. Tværgade, Kirkestræde, and Vestergade didn't lead to the sea but ran parallel to it. At first we didn't even have a market square. Then a butcher opened in Kirkestræde, followed by an ironmonger, two drapers, a chemist, a savings bank, a watchmaker, and a barber. The sailors' hostel was torn down. We were to have a market square just like any other town. Suddenly we had a main street, but going the wrong way: instead of taking you to the harbor, it skirted the coast and then veered toward the heart of the island. Heading away from the dangers of the sea, it was a women's street.
Our streets all met and crossed. Some were men's and some were women's, and together they formed a network. The ship-brokering and shipping companies were situated on Kongegade and Prinsegade, while the women did their shopping on Kirkestræde. But that balance was about to shift. At first no one paid much attention to it or saw what it might lead to.
The 1890s were Marstal's heyday. Our fleet expanded until only the one in Copenhagen could beat it: 346 ships! These were boom times, and we all caught investment fever. Everyone wanted a share in a ship, even cabin boys and housemaids. When a ship returned from a voyage and was laid up for the winter, the streets teemed with children delivering sealed envelopes containing the dividends that were paid out to practically every household.
A ship broker needs to know how the Russo-Japanese War will hit the freight market. He doesn't need to be interested in politics, but he has to pay attention to his skippers' finances, so a knowledge of international conflict is essential. Opening up a newspaper, he'll see a photograph of a head of state and if he's bright enough, he'll read his own future profits in the man's face. He might not be interested in socialism, in fact he'll swear he isn't: he's never heard such a load of starry-eyed nonsense. Until one day his crew lines up and demands higher wages, and he has to immerse himself in union issues and other newfangled notions about the future organization of society. A broker must keep up to date with the names of foreign heads of state, the political currents of the time, the various enmities between nations, and earthquakes in distant parts of the world. He makes money out of wars and disasters, but first and foremost he makes it because the world has become one big building site. Technology rearranges everything, and he needs to know its secrets, its latest inventions and discoveries. Saltpeter, divi-divi, soy cakes, pit props, soda, dyer's broom—these aren't just names to him. He's neither touched saltpeter nor seen a swatch of dyer's broom. He's never tasted soy cake (for which he can count himself lucky), but he knows what it's used for and where there's a