We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [110]
But she never came to Marstal; it was always Albert who went to Le Havre. Until one day he stopped. At first we thought they'd fallen out. But then we learned she'd died—quite unexpectedly. Albert didn't tell us any of this; we pieced it together ourselves. Why had they never married? Why hadn't they lived together? Had Albert not loved her enough? Had she not been enough in love with him?
If any of us got up the nerve to ask why he'd never married her or anyone else, he'd reply, "I was in so much of a hurry that I clean forgot." That made us laugh. He'd had plenty of opportunities.
When Albert first came ashore, he bought the old merchant's house on the right-hand side of Prinsegade as you come up from the harbor. Later, he moved across the street, into a brand-new house he'd had built for himself, with high ceilings and a first floor. From its large east-facing balcony he could see the breakwater and the archipelago. A bay window gave onto the street. On the small pane of glass above his front door he had his name painted in gilt letters: ALBERT MADSEN.
Diagonally across from his was the house of Lorentz Jørgensen, who'd set up shop as a shipowner and broker many years before Albert. As a boy, Lorentz had been fat and wheezing, with a permanent pleading look in his eyes. Then the sea had hardened him until we forgot that we'd once thought of him as nothing but a flabby sissy with no balls. He hadn't stayed long at sea, and had come ashore after sitting his navigation exam. Though he'd not been able to save up much from's his modest wages, it turned out he had a talent for making money. He bought shares in ships and knew how to talk business with Marstal Savings Bank. He entered into a kind of partnership with the biggest shipowner in town, Sofus Boye, who was nicknamed Farmer Sofus because he came from Ommel, a village three kilometers inland from Marstal.
Lorentz Jørgensen hadn't yet turned thirty when he convinced us to have a telegraph cable laid from Langeland. He spoke of the world market and the telegraph. The words meant little to us, but he managed to convey that the world market was to the sailor what the soil was to the farmer, and that without a telegraph we'd never make contact with it.
The government turned us down when we applied for financial assistance for the telegraph. So Lorentz went to see Sofus Boye. Farmer Sofus was a modest man who despite owning the biggest shipping company in town could still sometimes be found waiting by the ferry dock, hustling a few coins as a porter. He had no office as such: he'd just tap his forehead with his index finger and say he kept everything in there. But Farmer Sofus listened when Lorentz described the speaking cable that could shrink distances to nothing.
"It doesn't matter whether you live in a big town or a small one. Even if you live on the tiniest island in the middle of the ocean, as long as you have a telegraph, you're at the center of the world."
This kind of talk sounded fanciful to most people, but not to Farmer Sofus, whose ears quite readily went deaf on other matters. He came along with Lorentz to Marstal Savings Bank and told him to repeat what he'd said about the telegraph to Rudolf Østermann, the manager.
"The center of the world," Lorentz insisted.
The bank manager, who considered himself something of a wit, was on the verge of asking if there was any chance of using this telegraph thing to contact the good Lord God—but one sharp look from Farmer Sofus wiped the grin right off his face. As it turned out, Rudolf Østermann soon became the most zealous of the invention's converts, frequently