We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [159]
Suddenly she smiled. "What a chatterbox I am. You make me tell you the silliest things. It must sound like pure nonsense to you. All those years you've been at sea—I'm sure you've had far worse experiences."
He looked at her solemnly. "No, Mrs. Friis, I haven't. Nothing has ever happened to me that comes even close to your night alone in that flood."
She blushed. He'd seen the terror in her. And in that moment a bond was forged between them that he'd never be able to break. She'd given him something precious, told him a secret from the very heart of herself. He still knew very little about her, but the fear she'd shown him sufficed. It bound him to her.
"Karla," he said, pondering, almost speaking to himself. "That's very similar to your name. As if she were your twin."
"Yes" was all she answered. "Almost like Klara."
She gave him a look of gratitude. Now he would leave her in peace and intrude no further into her privacy. He knew about Karla and Klara; he didn't need to know any more. She no longer had anything to prove, to explain, or to answer. With him she could be something she'd never been before: a blank page. She got a fresh start.
He never asked about her parents again.
SUMMER CAME AND the war continued. Albert had fewer dreams these days, and those he had didn't affect him the way they used to. He had Knud Erik now.
"Have you had another dream?" the boy would ask him when they met.
"Not last night," he would reply.
"Not last night," the boy would repeat, sounding disappointed. "I hope you start dreaming again soon."
Knud Erik's own dreams were distorted and strange, as most dreams are. But he always told them with the same happy wonder in his voice.
One dream was different, though. He dreamt he was about to drown.
"I called for my dad. But he didn't come."
His eyes grew blank as he told it. For a moment, he sat just the way he had when Albert met him for the first time, with his shoulders hunched and his head hanging. "And so I drowned." He finished in a dull voice.
They sat facing each other in the boat. Albert took the boy's face in his hands and looked him straight in the eye. "You're not going to drown. It was just a bad dream. If you're ever about to drown, then you'll call out for me. And I'll always come."
The tension left the hunched shoulders. The boy's relief was palpable. A moment later he'd forgotten all about it. He pulled at the oars, not expertly yet, but with enthusiasm. His eyes sparkled.
"Where am I rowing us today?"
They were in the middle of the harbor, and they watched the Memory pass Dampskibsbroen, a black ribbon of smoke pouring from her tall, narrow funnel. Albert stared at the steamer long and hard. He knew she wouldn't return. The boy waved to the town's deaf sand digger as he rowed past them.
"Keep your rhythm steady," Albert ordered.
That night he had his final dream. He knew it was the final one because it began the same way as the first he'd had, thirty years earlier. It was the same voice speaking. "You're heading for danger."
But this time he didn't wake. He wasn't on a ship, as he had been on the first occasion. It was years since he'd last been on one. He could have leapt out of his bed and run onto the balcony and stared into the darkness, but there'd be no shipwreck outside, no people needing to be rescued. He was on dry land, though he no longer knew if dry land was safe. It was an unsettling dream, filled with terrifying episodes. And like the dreams that had announced the coming of the war, he had no idea what it meant.
The next day he told the boy. "Last night I had the strangest dream," he began.
The boy looked up at him expectantly.
"Go on, tell me," he urged when he saw that the old man was hesitating.
"I saw a phantom ship," Albert said. "Well, I saw lots of phantom ships. But that wasn't the oddest part of it."
"What's a phantom ship?" the boy asked.
"It's a ghost ship."
"How did you know?"
"Well, everything on the ship was gray. There were no other colors.