We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [144]
She entered with the coffee cups. They were English tin-glazed earthenware, a gift from her husband perhaps, or an heirloom. When she bent to light the stove, he didn't offer to help, nor beg her not to bother, nor suggest that they drink the coffee in a room that was already heated. He knew that the small household task was holding her together in this moment, just as other daily routines would help her survive the times to come. Coffee was a ritual, as significant as the funeral she'd never be able to give her son.
She sat down opposite him and poured the coffee. He accounted for the circumstances of the lost ship as well as he could. There wasn't much to say. "Missing" meant only that it had failed to arrive at Liverpool, but it was important that she not draw hope from this uncertainty, for then her mourning would never end. Perhaps it never would, anyway. But hope stops time, and time only heals when it passes. He knew that much.
He hadn't mentioned the war.
"Do you think it was a U-boat?" she asked.
He shook his head. "No one knows, Mrs. Koch."
"I got a letter from him two days ago. Posted in St. John. He wrote that a lot of sailors had jumped ship. The Ægir couldn't even sail—there wasn't a single hand left. Men deserted from the Nathalia and the Bonavista too, even though they had rye bread on board. On the Ruth they had only ship's biscuits. 'If only I had the crusts that Granddad gives to his hens,' that's what he wrote to me. Oh, I always worried that they weren't feeding him properly."
She still wasn't crying.
"A mother never has peace of mind." She went on. "Sometimes I think I won't stop worrying till the day I die. I've been scared since his first minute at sea." She fell silent. Then she said suddenly, "Why does it have to be this way? Always the same fear. But a U-boat's the worst."
Albert took her hand. He knew it had been a U-boat. He'd seen it himself, in his dreams. The crew had been shot down before they could leave the ship. Peter had been on deck, preparing the lifeboat, when a bullet ripped his chest open and he collapsed. Then the U-boat crew had boarded the ship, doused it with petrol, and set it alight. The rigging and sails flared into a blazing pyre, and the Ruth vanished into the waves with a hiss.
This was always the hardest moment. He had to stop his hand from trembling too as he clasped hers. He was lonely. But his loneliness was nothing compared to hers; she'd lost her husband and two sons.
She looked directly at him. Still she held back her tears, as if subjecting herself to some terrible endurance test.
"Captain Madsen, I feel nothing." There was disbelief in her voice, the disbelief of an accident victim who has been paralyzed from the waist down and suddenly discovers that she can no longer feel her legs. "I knew it," she said to herself.
"What did you know, Mrs. Koch?" His voice was gentle.
"When little Eigil drowned, I knew I'd never cry again. I'd never worried about him. What can happen to a child out playing? And then he drowns in the harbor. Oh, Captain Madsen, my heart stood still that day. I think I counted the seconds, and nothing happened in my heart. Not a beat, or a pounding—absolutely nothing. It was completely still inside my chest. Peter was at home. He hugged me and held me close the way I'd done with him all those years ago when he was little. 'Mama, I'm so glad that I've still got you,' he said, and though he couldn't take away my grief, my heart started beating again. He never ever wrote without asking me to