We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [190]
Klara sat in the bay window facing the street and stared into space again.
Klara Friis, a sailor's widow of modest birth, had inherited an imposing house, a broker's office, and a fleet of ships. In one fell swoop she'd become one of the biggest shipowners in town. With the last glow of youth on her cheeks, she'd reached for the big prize and won it. Albert hadn't married her in life. But he'd delivered in death.
We wasted no time discussing how much she was worth, though we failed to understand that the most fascinating thing about Albert's legacy wasn't its size, but the power it bestowed. It was during these months, as Klara sat frozen in the bay window, that our town's fate was sealed.
One day Klara called a halt to her reflections and went to visit the widow of the marine painter in Teglgade. Since her introduction to Albert was all thanks to Anna Egidia, Klara Friis felt she owed the widow a favor. She now informed Mrs. Rasmussen that she would like to be of assistance in her tireless charity work. But she offered more than that. As they sat in the drawing room with the tall windows and the paintings on the walls, she explained that her plan was to found an orphanage in Marstal.
"It will be an orphanage like no other," she said. "Where children will feel loved. They won't feel they're in the way—or at best, that they deserve to live only because they'll be of use to others. No: they'll feel they're entitled to be on this earth for their own sakes. It'll be a place where the least wanted children will feel welcome." Her voice ought to have been filled with light and energy as she described her plans to improve the existence and the future of life's overlooked, but it trembled strangely.
Mrs. Rasmussen observed her for a long time.
"You knew an orphanage from the inside once, didn't you?" she said gently.
Klara Friis nodded and began to weep. This was the unutterable part of her story, the part she'd been unable to tell Albert Madsen, even at their moment of deepest trust, when he'd guessed the secret of Karla, the rag doll lost to the dark waters of the flood.
Under the widow's maternal gaze, she finally confided her story. She'd grown up in Ryslinge Orphanage on the island of Funen. Then she'd been "collected," as she put it. It wasn't an adoption: at least she'd never use that word for it, because the Birkholm farmer who'd taken her in at the age of five had no caring parental impulse. She wasn't a human being to him: just an extra pair of hands, cheap in terms of wages, food—and emotions. She laughed bitterly. No, when it came to feelings, she'd cost nothing at all. Love was a luxury that had been available to everybody except the orphaned girl.
On Birkholm there was no getting away from the sea. It ringed the small island like a wall enclosing her restricted life, but it also represented escape. She didn't dream about a knight riding in on a white charger so much as a knight blown in by a white sail. And every spring she imagined that he'd arrive. Hundreds of sailing ships passed the island—and then disappeared again. They came from Marstal, and the town became a place she yearned for. One day the sea came to her in the form of a flood. Doomsday was paying a visit. Instead of bringing a knight, the waves took away her doll. Now, at long last, with the help of Albert's fortune, she could stick her hand into the water and haul Karla out again.
"Do you want to know how I met Henning?" she asked the widow suddenly. The confidences were pouring out of her now, and before Anna Egidia had time to reply, she continued. "I met him one winter night on the frozen sea."
"On the ice?" The widow looked up in surprise.
"I was so young. Only sixteen. I wanted to go to a dance on Langeland."
The sea had frozen over, and it was as if tiny, flat Birkholm had started to expand, trying to meet and merge with the surrounding islands. On that moonlit Saturday night, snow crystals lit a path into the world, and her longing became irresistible.