We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [135]
"I know that look you're giving me." Josef's voice was suddenly harsh. "But it's the only language they understand. It was for their own good. Otherwise we'd have had to shoot the whole lot of them. They didn't want to work. They'd lie stretched out on a mat, soaking up the sun like crocodiles in the sand. They could do that, all right. Proud and vain, they were. But otherwise they were just like animals."
"I thought you worked as a pilot?"
"Yes, I was a pilot, port captain in Boma, commissaire maritime. I took the Lualaba all the way up to Matadi, along a narrow and tricky branch of the river. Before I arrived, the ocean steamers could get only as far as Boma. Later they went all the way to Matadi too. But I was the first."
There was pride in his voice. He raised his head and looked Albert straight in the eye. For a moment it seemed as if Josef was observing him from a great height, though they were both sitting down and Albert was taller. Josef had deep-set eyes, a protruding, straight nose, and a mustache whose ends reached all the way down to his strong jaw. His gaze became arrogant.
"I was the best pilot on the Congo River. I was the port captain in Boma. I did it all. But that wasn't what swung it. This is the most important thing..." He poked his cheek with his index finger. "Your skin color. That's what decides it. I was a white man. And I was master of all I surveyed. It's as hot as hell in Africa. But that's nothing compared to the fire you feel flare up inside you. That's Africa's gift to you. To finally teach you your own strength. Only one man in four comes back. Fever takes the other three—the fever or the blacks. But it's all worth it."
He leaned forward and fixed Albert with his gaze. His arrogance had gone. He seemed to appeal to Albert for understanding. His voice grew pleading. "I've tried to explain it to people I meet at home. But they don't understand. No one can unless they've tried it themselves. Everything you've seen before—it's nothing. Everything that follows—nothing. Mirages. You bring only one thing back with you from the Congo, and it's not those trinkets that I've got lying about at home. We had this song. No, I'm not going to sing it to you." He cleared his throat.
"Congo," he recited. His voice suddenly quivered with emotion. "Even the strongest man will shut his mouth and lie down for good. Even the hardest, wildest man soon ends up as rat food. They died like flies in the Congo." His voice became more and more urgent, almost thick with passion. "But I didn't die. I lived. Yes, I lived." He slammed the table with the palm of his hand. "Not like here! This is no life!"
Albert still hadn't spoken. He wanted to look away. But they kept staring at each other and Albert knew what he'd seen in Josef's eyes. The Congo Pilot had learned to look at other people as only a god can: the look that asks, Should this man be allowed to breathe, or does he deserve to die? This was the look that Josef Isager, the schoolteacher's son, had brought back from Africa.
Josef was an old man now. He was as tough-minded as ever, but he was old, and in Africa they needed youth and vitality. So Josef had returned to Marstal, where he came from, and where he was now living like a king in exile. Nobody bowed before the threat in his eyes, apart from Maren Kirstine, who was a mute and terrified witness to his nightly rages.
"Did he say why he suddenly wanted the hand buried?"
Abildgaard shook his head. "I asked him how he'd got hold of it. He said it was a kind of souvenir, like an elephant tusk, a necklace, or a spear—he'd come back with plenty of those sorts of things. It was common, he told me, as if he was discussing something quite ordinary, for Belgian soldiers to chop off the hands of natives they'd killed, so they could prove that they hadn't