We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [109]
There was a time when all we ever carried was grain. We bought it in one place and sold it in another. Now we were circumnavigating the globe with a hold full of commodities whose names we had to learn to pronounce and whose use had to be explained to us. Our ships had become our schools. They were still powered by the wind in their sails, as they had been for thousands of years. But stacked in their holds lay the future.
Albert Madsen came ashore when he was about fifty, as most of us did. If you'd saved up thirty thousand kroner by then, you could put it in the savings bank, where they offered you 4 percent interest per annum, and you'd get a monthly payment of one hundred kroner: enough to live on. But Albert had earned much more than that, and he didn't put his money in the bank. Instead, he invested it in ships and became a shipowner and broker. Many of those who bought shares in ships in those days, including farmers from the interior of the island, knew nothing about shipping and needed advice from someone who himself had once sailed and understood the sea. This called for someone known as a corresponding shipowner, and Albert became a corresponding shipowner like no other. During his many travels he'd become acquainted with a Jewish tailor in Rotterdam who went on board ships docked there to make clothes for the sailors, and they'd become friends. Luis Presser was an astute businessman. After Rotterdam he'd settled in Le Havre and set up his own shipping company, with a fleet of seven large barks. He had them registered in Marstal and made Albert, who'd just come ashore, their corresponding owner.
In Le Havre Albert had fallen in love with Presser's wife, a beautiful Chinese lady called Cheng Sumei. And she'd fallen in love with him. They'd looked at each other, realized that they'd met too late in life, and decided on friendship instead. When Luis Presser died suddenly of pneumonia, his widow took over the business and continued it with even greater success than her late husband. Perhaps she'd always been the woman behind the man. At any rate, she now became the woman behind Albert. It was she who advised him as he went from being captain on the brig Princess to managing ten ships.
Their two businesses eventually became so closely intertwined that Cheng Sumei's company in Le Havre was hard to distinguish from Albert's in Marstal. Albert too had a talent for making money. Once, when he was a young man, he'd stood on the deck of a ship in the Pacific with a bag of pearls in his hand that could have made all his dreams come true, and he'd flung it into the sea because he felt that the wealth they could buy him would bring a curse. Now a woman from China had placed a new bag of pearls in his outstretched hand. And this time he'd opened it.
We don't know whether Albert Madsen and Cheng Sumei were entwined as closely on a personal level as they were on a business one. Life had demanded so many changes from both of them: first they'd had to snuff their growing love and replace it with friendship. Now the possibility of love was open to them once again. Did they grab the chance?
Cheng Sumei never had children of her own, but she always referred to the company's huge, elegant barks, such as the Claudia, the Suzanne, and the Germaine, as her "daughters." She was now too old to bear a child, though you wouldn't know it from her strangely ageless features. The two held hands in public. They probably slept together too, the slim Chinese lady with the smooth, polished skin stretched beautifully across her high cheekbones and the big, coarsely built Dane who could easily fill a double bed. But they never married.
She'd been born in Shanghai. She'd never known her parents and had survived on the street by selling flowers. Many of us had met her in Rotterdam when Presser was still alive and coming on board our