We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [172]
"Yes, he's a good boy."
She sat down and served them.
"When you've finished you may go outside to play."
Knud Erik wolfed down his compote, sending the cream splashing over the tablecloth. She frowned at him but didn't speak. Then he disappeared out the door. She looked after him and laughed.
"Someone's got places to go."
"It's summer," Albert said.
The low-ceilinged room was semi-dark, but outside, the street was bright as day. He pushed back his chair. "Thank you, that was lovely. I suppose I'd better be off home now."
She bowed her head as though he'd rejected her. "Please stay a little longer," she begged, and looked at him. "See, I haven't even finished my wine. You did promise you'd teach me to enjoy it. So you can't abandon me now." Her voice was coquettish, as if she was permitting herself greater freedom now that her son was absent.
"I'll stay a little longer, then. May I suggest that we go outside into the garden and enjoy the summer evening?"
He could see that she was taken aback by this proposal. Her garden was small, a kitchen garden—more decorative than a bare yard but not a place she'd invite guests or spend a spare hour.
"Allow me," he said, picking up two of the high-backed, dark-varnished dining room chairs. He carried them through the kitchen and set them next to each other in the garden while Klara disappeared into the bedroom to check on Edith, who had slept soundly through the entire meal. When she returned they clinked glasses once more, and this time when he tried to catch her eye across the rim, she responded. The soft evening light transformed her pale skin, giving it an enigmatic, intense glow. She smiled at him. He smiled back. For a moment they were both embarrassed.
He looked across the small garden. At the back he saw black currant and gooseberry bushes. There were also potatoes and rhubarb. A small gravel path led to a flower bed bordered with conch shells bleached by salt water and sun; you'd find the same shells bordering most gardens in Marstal. Growing next to the house was a small rose bed. There was no terrace; he'd had to balance the chairs on the flagstones that had been laid here and there on the soil. There were no weeds between the stones, and he could see that the garden was neatly tended.
From the street came the sound of children's cries, while in the neighboring gardens women were chatting quietly. An outsider wouldn't have noticed the absence of male voices, but Albert did. Summer was the women's season. At the first sign of spring, the ships began preparing to leave the shelter of the breakwater. Some would return at Christmas, but many, bound on longer voyages, would be gone for years. In the absence of the menfolk, it was the women who ran the town. Now he sat in the midst of this female life, surrounded by summer light and the scent of elderberries, and experienced a part of Marstal in a way he hadn't done in years.
He leaned forward and picked up a conch. He put it against his ear and listened to the rush coming from the spiral within.
"Listen," he said, and handed it to her. "They've invented the radio now. But when I was a child, we had these for radios."
Instead of putting it to her ear, Klara replaced the shell in the border, with an expression that suggested he'd disturbed a secret harmony in her garden by picking it up.
The conch had a melody for everyone who listened to it. For the young, the conch sang of longing for distant shores; for the old it sang of absence and sorrow. It had a song for the young and another one for the old, one for the men and one for the women, and the women's song was always the same, as monotonous as the beating of the waves against the beach: loss, loss. The conch offered them no enchantment. When they put their ear to it, all they heard was the echo of their mourning.
They sat in the garden for half an hour. The sun went down behind a rooftop, and a grainy twilight filtered between the gooseberry and black currant bushes as the sky turned an even deeper violet.
"Oh, it's way