We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [157]
"Really? You ate raw potatoes?" The boy gasped.
Everywhere they visited, there were sea chests filled with strange objects: shark jaws, porcupine fish, sawfish teeth, a lobster claw from the Barents Sea the size of a horse's head, poisoned arrows, lumps of lava and coral, antelope hides from Nubia, scimitars from West Africa, a harpoon from Tierra del Fuego, calabashes from Rio Hash, a boomerang from Australia, riding crops from Brazil, opium pipes, armadillos from La Plata, and stuffed alligators.
Every single object told a story. Each time the boy left one of the low houses with its high roof, he was dizzy with excitement at the world's infinite variety. Everything whispered in his ear: a leather tom-tom from the Calabar River, amphoras from Cephalonia, an Indian amulet, a stuffed mongoose fighting a cobra, a Turkish hookah, a tooth from a hippopotamus, a mask from the Tonga Islands, a starfish with thirteen arms.
"Half a kilometer in that direction," Albert said, and pointed up Prinsegade toward the Market Square. "That's where the countryside begins. The people who live there know only their own soil. They know nothing about the world beyond the boundaries of their fields. They'll grow old there, and when it's time for them to die, they'll have seen less than you already have."
The boy looked up at him and smiled. Albert could feel how his longing stretched in all directions. Knud Erik was fatherless, but Albert was giving him new fathers. The town and the sea.
Spring came and Albert taught the boy to sail.
"What a good sound," Knud Erik said as he sat on the thwart, listening to the gurgling of water lapping against the side of the clinker-built boat, where the narrow planks had been layered on top of one another. He'd heard it before, but only from the edge of the wharf. Now he was surrounded by it on all sides. That was something else.
Albert took his hands and placed them on the oars.
Albert was well aware that he was encouraging the boy, but surely he was only promoting something that was natural for a Marstal boy? Things couldn't be otherwise. But he couldn't tell Klara Friis this to her face. He saw how vulnerable and uncertain she was in the unfamiliar role of widow. Perhaps he was cowardly not to champion Knud Erik's cause, but he simply thought it was too soon. Life would have to be Klara Friis's teacher. She'd said goodbye to her husband. And then one day she'd have to bid her son goodbye too. It would be a different goodbye, though: not a farewell to a dead man, but a parting with a living one who was going out to stare death down.
So Knud Erik lived two lives. One was at home, where he had to promise his mother that he'd never go to sea. The other was with Albert, where he lost himself in dreams of following in his father's footsteps. The blue of the sea and the white of the sail were the only colors in the boy's mind. He was going to be a seaman. You might as well shorten that to "man." It was the promise of manhood that drove a boy seaward.
Why did a woman fall in love with a sailor? Because a sailor was lost, bound to something distant, unobtainable, and ultimately unfathomable, even to himself? Because he went away? Because he came back home again?
In Marstal the answer was straightforward. There were few other men to fall in love with. For poorer people in Marstal, there was never any question about whether a son would go to sea. He belonged to it from the day he was born. The only question was which ship he'd first sign on to. That was all the choice there was.
Klara Friis came from Birkholm. It was a small island; we sailed past it when we left the harbor in springtime and went to sea through Mørkedybet. Albert remembered those spring days, when the sky was high and the wind brisk, when the ice broke up and a hundred ships left from Marstal. It was as if the whole town greeted the spring by setting its sails, as white as the scattered, rapidly thawing ice floes. It felt as if the sun, rather than the wind, filled