We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [138]
Skipper Levinsen had protested when the breakwater was going to be built, saying, "You should provide only for yourself, not for posterity." Once, the whole town had heaped shame on those words.
But now the shortsighted Levinsen had become our role model.
HERMAN RETURNED home with a walking stick of white bone in his hand, made from the vertebrae of a shark. He wasn't the first man in Marstal to come back from the East Indies or the Pacific with a shark's spine, but he was the first to stroll around with it in the streets as though it were a scepter, and he a king. Self-importantly greeting old acquaintances, he'd use it to swipe the air with a fancy flourish.
It was with the same stick that he knocked on the door of his guardian, Hans Jepsen. As he did so, a group of boys watched him from a safe distance, chanting, "The Cannibal's loose! The Cannibal's loose!"
When Hans opened the door, Herman waved his sailor's record book in his face. He was an able seaman now, and he wanted to show that he was entitled to respect. Without greeting Hans, he announced his age: twenty-five. He spoke it like a punch. He'd come of age, and he was announcing the dethronement of Hans Jepsen as the official owner of the Two Sisters and the house in Skippergade.
But Hans Jepsen didn't seem to be listening. He observed the white stick that Herman was waving.
"I see you staged an eating contest with the sharks," he said. "And that you won. Shame it wasn't the other way around."
Herman's stick sliced the air, but Hans had already slammed the door. The shark's spine struck the green-painted wood and snapped, its vertebrae flying in all directions. The boys shrieked with laughter, scattering and yelling, "The Cannibal's loose! The Cannibal's loose!"
Some time later they returned and picked up the remains of the stick, which Herman had discarded. We didn't know why they called him the Cannibal. Boys have their own reasons. They were probably scared of him and so they did what boys do around any object of fear: they went up close, pointed a finger, gave it a nickname, and masked their terror with roaring laughter. They kept the salvaged vertebrae in tins and boxes and brought them out to use in secret rituals or to decorate their hiding places inside the hollow poplars that bordered the high roads outside the town.
Every day for a whole week Herman bought a round at Weber's Café to celebrate his new status as a man of property. His cheeks were flushed and he had a combative, I-dare-you look: he was constantly testing us, as if preparing to demand some oath of loyalty, a solemn agreement to submit to his whims or face the consequences. A quick glance at the way his huge hands impatiently clenched and unclenched, as though eager for something to grab and crush, gave you an idea of what those consequences might be. He'd grown even bigger since the last time's we'd seen him, with broader shoulders, impressive biceps, and a chest like the front of a truck—but he'd also grown a belly. Although still young, he was already running to fat.
We asked him if he ate at Larsen's Chops or Nielsen's Pancakes, I places we frequented for stew and mixed hash when we were looking for work in Copenhagen.
"I'm used to better things," Herman said.
At Inky-Hans in Nyhavn, he'd had a crouching lion, ready to attack, tattooed on his right arm. The banner above it read SMART AND POVERFULL in English.
He ordered another round.
"Just you wait and see, damn it," he said. "Just you wait and see!"
Something about his voice made us think that he might surprise us the same way he'd surprised Holger Jepsen that day when, somewhere between Marstal and Rudkøbing, he fell, or jumped, or was helped overboard.
Herman had traveled far. We all had, but he'd been to one place we'd never gone: Børsen, the Copenhagen stock exchange. When he talked about that, the man we'd known as a boy, with a fixed scowl and a sullenness