We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [148]
***
Anna Egidia Rasmussen poured coffee into the blue-patterned china cup.
"Do have a cookie," she said, pushing a bowl in his direction. "I baked them myself. Well, I mostly do it for the grandchildren," she added, smiling.
Albert took a cookie and dipped it in his coffee.
"Your husband and I had many discussions about his paintings," he said. "But not about the religious ones."
"Yes, I remember that well. You thought he was limiting himself by just painting life on Ærø and the other islands. I think in the end he agreed with you."
"I'm no painter," Albert said. "I was probably the wrong person to be giving advice. I believe in progress, or at least I used to. But how do you paint progress? I can't answer that one."
"By painting steamers with smoke coming out of their funnels?"
He heard the irony in her voice and laughed.
"You're right, Mrs. Rasmussen. We laymen should keep our noses right out of art. Once I believed the breakwater symbolized everything the people of this town were capable of achieving. But a big pile of stones like that would never have been much of a subject for a painter. And now I realize that there's one thing the breakwater can't protect us from, and that's our own greed. I must admit the way the town's livelihood is being sold off frightens me just as much as the war."
"You mean the sale of the ships?"
"I do indeed. We make our living from the sea. If we cut our connection to it, then what will become of this town? It's as though the times have gone soft. Suddenly being a sailor isn't good enough anymore. Better education plays its part too, I suppose. Children learn more and they begin to see options other than simply going to sea, like their fathers and grandfathers. But I think the mothers play their part in it too. They never miss the chance to tell their sons about their father's tough crossings, and all the sorrow and anxiety they put up with when he's away. That kind of whining kills a boy's desire to go to sea. And why hold on to the ships when the market's favorable? There's no one to carry on the tradition."
"Have you ever considered what it's like to be the child of a sailor?"
"Yes, of course I have. I come from a family of seamen."
"So let's imagine a fourteen-year-old boy who's off to sea. How much do you think he has seen of his father, when he leaves the home he grew up in?" He could hear the obstinacy in her voice and he knew she wasn't presenting it as a question. She was going somewhere with this, and his job was to follow her.
"I'll tell you, Captain Madsen. His father will probably have been at home roughly every other year, and never stayed more than a few months at a time. So when it's the boy's turn to go to sea at the age of fourteen, he'll have seen his father seven times. One and a half years in total, at the most. You call Marstal a sailors' town, but do you know what I call it? I call it a town of wives. It's the women who live here. The men are just visiting. Have you ever looked at the face of a twos year-old lad, toddling down the street holding his father's hand? He looks up at his dad, and it's all too clear what's going on inside his little head. He's asking himself, Who is this man? And just when he's got used to this man he's just met, the man is off again. Two years later it's the same story all over again. The boy's four, and even his happiest memories of his father have faded. And the father has to reacquaint himself with a boy he hardly knows too. Two years is an eternity in a child's life, Captain Madsen. And what sort of a life is it?"
Albert said nothing. He drank his coffee and ate another vanilla cookie. His own father had failed him in a way he'd never been able to forgive. Yet he realized that he'd always regarded the absence of fathers as part of the natural order, even though men in other trades never left their homes for years at a time.
"Yes, what sort of life is it?" the widow repeated. "For the father who barely knows his own children, and for the children