We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [169]
"Monsieur Madsen, would you like me to tell you about the moment I fell in love with the West?" she asked.
She pronounced his name with a strong French accent, but otherwise her English was perfect. She sparkled, full of curiosity and playful teasing, as though she'd sensed his bashfulness and now wished to demystify herself. He hadn't noticed them before. He'd only seen her long, dense eyelashes when she looked down, not the eyes behind them.
"It was the first time I saw a fire being put out," she went on. "You see, in China we believe fires are started by evil spirits. So when a house catches fire, we try to scare the spirits away." She paused, as if to emphasize the words that followed. "With noise. Drums and cymbals. I've seen many houses burn to the ground to the beating of drums. We have a five-thousand-year-old culture, and in all those five thousand years it's never once occurred to us to put a fire out with water.
"The English set up a fire brigade in Shanghai. A house opposite me caught fire. It started in the evening, and the English gentlemen, who were all volunteers, arrived straight from a dinner party, wearing top hats, tailcoats, and starched white shirt collars, which quickly became filthy from the soot. They pointed large hoses at the flames. When the fire hissed and died away and most of the house was still standing—that was the moment I fell in love with the West. Do you understand what I'm saying, Monsieur Madsen? My philosophy is basically very simple. You put out fire with water. That's why I live here and not in China."
She laughed. He laughed back and nodded.
"Well, my philosophy tends to be that water's for sailing on. But I don't suppose that deep down we're so different."
It was at that moment that his awe turned into love. Here was a woman whose attitude to life resembled his. Her cheerful directness liberated him. Her beauty suddenly became accessible. When Cheng Sumei took over her husband's business after his death and carried it on successfully, it came as no surprise to Albert. He'd already spotted that she had it in her.
He wasn't just one man with her. He was several. Any sailor, by necessity, must be one man at home, another on the deck, and a third in a foreign port. But his inner selves are separated in time and space, always by vast distances: just like a ship, he has waterproof bulkheads inside, to prevent sinking. But with Cheng Sumei, Albert found he could be several men at once. He was first and foremost the man he considered his real self, the sailor and captain, and he often thought that the two of them, Cheng Sumei and Albert Madsen, were like two captains on the same vessel—an unlikely couple who nonetheless respected each other's authority and never risked the safety of their ship.
But he was also the man he remembered from the brothel visits of his youth. That self wasn't always rough. In the brothels of Bahia or Buenos Aires, a young seaman was a dumbstruck guest in marble palaces with fountains and palms, silk sheets, and mirrored ceilings and walls. And the girl, yes, she was a compliant spirit put on this earth to grant him his wishes in a brief, faithless moment, but though she was compliant she was also superior. How speechless, how blushing, how shy and ignorant, and at the same time how infinitely grateful he'd felt in her skillful hands, which knew things about his body that he'd never even suspected: that battered body, with its permanently aching muscles, sore from the rigging, covered with saltwater blisters and unhealed cuts, always on guard, always ready to fight back in the bitter necessity of self-assertion.
He'd never felt like anyone's master in those brothels. He didn't visit them to enjoy a master's dubious privileges: he'd felt like a guest and behaved with polite restraint. In them, his permanently clenched fists briefly opened up. But he learned nothing. He wasn't a better lover when he left. He remained