We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [180]
"But the war's over," he said, trying to placate her. Her accusation was by now a familiar one, but he'd never heard her state it with such venom.
"So sailors don't drown anymore? So ships don't get lost? So now everyone can survive a couple of days afloat after a winter storm in the North Atlantic—or even swim home to Marstal, if they're unlucky enough to lose their ship? So no one drowns in peacetime? Perhaps we've all grown gills? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"
He stood dumbstruck by this outburst from a woman whom he'd come to regard as half mute. He shrugged, in self-deprecation. Behind her he saw the boy's face at the window. But sensing Knud Erik's stare, his mother instantly shouted, "Get away from that window!"
"Mrs. Friis," Albert began, with the formality he'd use to address a stranger.
"Be quiet," she yelled. "I haven't finished with you. And then I have to hear it from strangers that the boy nearly drowned. That he fell into the water and that you calmly pulled him out and forbade him to tell me! Well, that's a fine thing. His own mother gets to hear it from others. And all those stories you fill his head with: shipwrecks, destruction, shrunken heads, mad adventures! Do you think that's the way to help a child who's lost his father at sea? Do you?"
She stared him right in the eye. He looked away. He didn't know what to say to her. He supposed she was right. He said so out loud. "I suppose you're right. I don't know anything about children."
"Don't know anything about children." She snorted. "No, you know nothing about children. You..." She looked him up and down as she searched for the right word. "You bachelor."
"I did my best," he said. "I was told that the boy needed some adult company and so I came."
"Yes, you came. And now you can leave. I want to be a sailor like my dad who drowned! What a fine lesson Knud Erik learned in your company."
The boy's face reappeared in the window. "You get away!" she screamed.
"Daddy," Edith cried again.
Klara Friis turned her back on him and slammed the door behind her.
He lifted his cap to the closed door. Then he turned and walked down Snaregade. He thought he could feel the boy's eyes on his back.
A heavy November rain was falling. A cold drop hit his neck and ran down under his scarf.
ALBERT LET HIMSELF into his house and walked around, switching the lights on. He was restless and didn't know what to do with himself. Still in his coat, he went upstairs and out onto the balcony. He was aware of the rain soaking his hair as he looked across to the breakwater. In the dusk the long line of boulders seemed to shimmer, as though made of fog.
He went back inside and asked his housekeeper to make him a pot of coffee. Then he sat down in the bay window. He watched as the dark deepened outside and felt as if he was holding his breath, and that if he let it out, something violent and unpredictable would happen: he'd start shouting, or crying, or doing something beyond his own imagination.
He was gripped by a feeling that took him right back to childhood: the same feeling he'd experienced on the beach at Drejet as he stared in horror at Karo, lying on the stones at the bottom of the cliff, with a broken back. He'd tried stroking the little dog's fur in the hope that a bit of tenderness might piece him back together. But in that moment, a notion that something irreparable had happened reverberated inside him with a long and terrifying echo. Now it reverberated again.
He took a sip of his hot sugarless coffee and tried to calm himself. He had to clear his thoughts. He'd never lived in a marriage, never experienced a woman's emotional outbursts. His relationship with Cheng Sumei had been ruled by what he'd jokingly called a meeting of souls. It was a meeting that had never existed between him and the young widow. How serious had Klara's anger been? Was her rage really caused by his conduct with Knud Erik? For heaven's sake, all boys fell into the water sooner or later. Someone pulled them out again and that was all there