We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [170]
With Cheng Sumei, it was like the brothel visits of his youth. In the bedroom she was a compliant and yet superior spirit. In their encounters he became his younger self. He didn't know whether or not he was a good lover. Desire had never been a demanding inhabitant of his body: it had never had the power to rearrange his life. It was not lovemaking he missed as he lay awake. It was a human being.
He finished drying himself and ran a hand through his short, trimmed hair, which had begun to dry despite the humidity of the bathroom. He found a pair of scissors and started trimming his beard. He studied his face in the mirror and wondered what it was he'd awakened in Klara Friis. His age and position offered security. He presumed that was what she was looking for. And he'd seen gratitude in her eyes when he listened to her story about the flood on Birkholm.
What did he want from her? Was it just about gratified vanity? Though she wasn't exactly pretty, the traces of grief had vanished from her face, which when they first met had seemed both swollen and sunken. She dressed with more care nowadays: she'd lost the shapelessness of her pregnancy and he could see that she had a lovely figure. But it wasn't her looks that attracted him. Nor was it her personality. He didn't actually know her at all. Her words were few and reticent, stilted by the difference in social rank they were both only too well aware of. It was something impersonal that had stirred this feeling in him, which he still hesitated to acknowledge as desire. No, it wasn't her. It wasn't even the woman in her. It was her youth, a fundamental force of nature that had reawakened in her along with the summer, a last reflection of what she'd once been before childbirth and poverty started to grind her down, and grief struck. It was his own doing, in a way. His attentiveness, which to begin with had been nothing but kindness, had rekindled her youthfulness.
The boy had come first. Then the three of them had sat down together and suddenly they'd resembled a family, the family he had never had, the family she'd lost. But they could not be that family unless he and Klara behaved like a man and a woman.
He was old. Again, he reminded himself of that. Old men had their regular orbits like planets that circle a sun. But the sun they circled was cooling down. He halted his reflections at this point. He ought to stay in his rightful orbit, around the fading sun. He was in the ice age of his life, and any open ground not yet covered by snow could only produce lichen.
But his hands spoke a different language when he tied the laces on his white canvas shoes and settled a straw hat on his head. As he passed through the dining room, he stopped and took a white daisy from the bouquet his housekeeper had placed in the middle of the table. In front of the mirror in the hall he ran his hand through his hair once more, and put the daisy in the buttonhole of his summer jacket. Then he opened the front door and walked down the steps to Prinsegade, filled with the blind triumph that people sometimes experience when they've conquered their own better judgment.
WHEN ALBERT WAS asked to step inside the house, Knud Erik was there. Klara Friis had put up her long hair; he noticed that she'd washed it. He rarely paid attention to the seasonal displays of changing fashions in the shop window of I. C. Jensen in Kirkestræde, but he could tell from the cut of her dress, which reached halfway down her calves, that it wasn't new. She must have produced it for this occasion: a garment set aside from the first years of her marriage, perhaps, or even an earlier time, when she was full of youth and expectation.
The table was set for three, which both disappointed and reassured him. Knud Erik's presence ruled out any blunders occurring, and yet Klara Friis blushed when she opened the door to him. She stepped aside, just as she'd done this morning, and bowed her head slightly. Her neck, exposed below her chignon,