We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [189]
Then the cold moved in and started its blockade of his flowing blood.
WE DON'T KNOW if that's how it actually happened. We don't know what Albert thought or did in his final hours. We weren't there. We only have the notes he left us, together with the columns of figures that spelled out what proved to be the beginning of the end of our town. In telling this story, each of us has added something of his own. Our picture of him is made up of a thousand thoughts, wishes, and observations. He's entirely himself. And yet he's one of us.
We've walked out to the Tail. We've visited the place where Albert died. We've planted our boots in the mud and tried to pull ourselves out of the sucking ground. Some of us say yes, he was stuck. Others say no, he could have freed himself. Or he could have rolled out of the trap that the cold and the mud had set for him. A drenched winter coat and soaked trousers are a small price to pay for an escape from death. Even pneumonia is preferable to a sudden end to it all, and he was a strong man.
We don't really know anything, and we each have our own version of the story because we're all looking for a little of ourselves in Albert. Some of us would like to condemn him. Others regard him as being above all petty-mindedness. We all have an opinion about Albert. We followed him everywhere he went. We watched him through our windows and passed his words on, not always for kind reasons, and possibly they weren't the actual words he'd used, but we attributed them to him because we thought it proper or likely that he'd have said them.
We've gone over his life again and again, just as we always go over one another's lives in our conversations—some whispered, some spoken aloud. Albert is a monument we've all carved and erected.
We thought we knew everything about him. But that's not how life is. When all's said and done, we can never truly know one another.
***
Albert was found the following day.
It had snowed through the night, and in the morning a couple of boys appeared on the breakwater. They'd half rowed, half crashed a boat through the new ice toward Kalkovnen, and they were in line for a major ass whipping from their fathers, or anyone else who caught them doing something so blatantly dangerous. When it comes to boys who flout the rules that apply on the water, every single one of us has a father's rights and responsibilities.
But this time there was no ass whipping.
They saw him from the top of the snow-powdered granite boulders of the breakwater, where they were leaping about like mountain.
"A snowman!" shouted one, a boy called Anton. "Who's built a snowman there?"
They ran through the stiff rushes, which rang in the frost like a forest of steel blades, across the rock-hard mud and solid puddles and frozen shallow creeks.
There he was.
They never forgot him. You rarely see such a sight. Some say never.
Between Marstal and the sea, frozen to death in Laurids's boots, Albert stood upright.
III
THE WIDOWS
IN THE MONTHS that followed Albert's death, Klara sat in her house in Snaregade, staring blankly into space. We saw her when we walked past and glanced inside the lit parlor, where she'd neglected to draw the curtains. It looked as if her brain had stopped. At first we thought she was in mourning. It was a while before we recognized that Klara wasn't numb with grief, but rather in a state of profound contemplation.
Sometimes life unexpectedly throws up a wealth of possibilities, so many that the mere thought of having to choose between them can floor you. Was that Klara's problem? The sudden flood of freedom in which an ordinary person, unaccustomed to making her own decisions, might drown?
Then one day she ordered a horse and cart to move her furniture. She called Edith and Knud Erik, and they all walked hand in hand to Prinsegade, where she took a key from her purse and let herself into Albert's empty house. She had her own furniture stored in the loft and left Albert's where it was. She sat on his sofa and slept in his