We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [150]
Silence had descended upon them once more, and again she was the one to break it.
"I still have many children around me. My grandchildren—and then there are the children from the neighborhood."
"Yes, I know you step in when a family's in need."
"At times I look after a child for a while. I want to feel useful. If I didn't feel useful, I don't think I could go on living."
Again she looked directly at him. "Do you feel useful, Captain Madsen?"
"Useful?" he echoed. "Do I feel useful? I don't know. I can't tell anyone about my dreams. Even you feel repelled..."
He hesitated for a moment. Once again he felt he'd gone too far. It was unfair to blame the widow. After all, she'd listened to him without fleeing, as Anders Nørre had done. He gave her an apologetic look. She looked calmly back at him.
"None of us is superfluous, Captain Madsen."
"But, you just said..."
"I admit that I may sound pessimistic from time to time. When I think of this endless separation from my Carl, I feel I've lived too long. But when you've lived for too long and yet you can't die, then you have to invent reasons to go on. You're of no use, very well! That may be so, but only in your own eyes. There's always someone who needs you. It's just a question of finding out who."
Albert said nothing. He'd used almost exactly the same phrases when speaking to Mrs. Koch, when he told her of the loss of the Ruth, but he didn't feel that the words applied to him. He and Anna Egidia had different ways of looking at life. She'd found a purpose to it. He'd lost his, and in his opinion, that was that.
She leaned toward him.
"Listen," she said. "I happen to know a little boy in Snaregade. He lost his father not so long ago. He never knew his grandfather; the man died at sea long before he was born. He hardly ever sees the other men in his family because they're all sailors. His mother's from the island of Birkholm. She's an orphan, by the way, so there's no family to help out on her side. Don't you think a little boy like that might need someone to take him for a walk along the harbor, even take him rowing in a boat and get him used to the sea?"
"Yes, I'm sure he might," he replied, wondering what her point was.
Suddenly Anna Egidia smiled. It was a beautiful smile that made you forget her thin, bloodless lips. "And then there's you, Captain Madsen, an older, experienced sailor who complains that he's of no use to anyone." Her voice was teasing. She paused and gave him an encouraging look, as though expecting a reply.
"And then what?" he asked, slow on the uptake.
"You really have no idea what I'm talking about?"
Her sunken face grew almost round from smiling. Albert shook his head. He felt dim-witted. She was playing games with him.
"I imagine that you might be the man who would take a little boy by the hand and go rowing with him in your boat."
"But I don't even know the family. I can't just turn up and impose."
"I assure you that the boy's mother won't think you're imposing at all. She'll be both grateful and honored."
"I've absolutely no experience of children."
He made his voice brusque to mask his confusion. He felt betrayed. She'd laid a trap for him and he'd walked right into it. In a moment of weakness, of unbearable loneliness, he'd opened up to another human being. He'd been under the impression that they were two old people talking about their lives. When old men met, they talked about the sea—but he had an inner life he couldn't share with anybody. He'd shared it with her. But behind what he had taken to be her sympathy, there'd been a hidden agenda, which she'd now revealed. He was just a pawn in her charity work.
As he stood up to take his leave, it wasn't the boy he was rejecting. It was her.
"Don't you want to know his name?" she asked, as she showed him out into the hall.
"No," he said, "it's of no interest to me."
THE BOY
THE NEXT DAY she turned up outside