We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [191]
But she hadn't gone far before she reached black water. Suddenly, a rift appeared in the ice ahead of her, plowed by the A.L.B., the ferry between Svendborg and Marstal, whose massive steel hull functioned as an icebreaker. As it went past, sparks flew from its funnel. The ice under her feet shuddered. In the ship's wake came the Hydra, homebound, her sails set to catch even the slightest wind that frosty night.
The Hydra's crew crowded along the rail. A girl in a party dress in the middle of the ice was the last thing they'd expected to see.
They hailed her. "Where are you going?"
"To a dance on Langeland," she replied.
They invited her to a dance in Marstal instead, and both she and her bicycle were pulled over the rail.
"You look frozen stiff," said Henning Friis, the handsomest of them. And she was indeed cold. Under her dress her legs were bare. He took her down to the fo'c'sle to warm her up in the top berth. And that was how she became his, with her blue lips trembling and cystitis lying in wait in the wretched block of ice that was her inadequately clothed body. She didn't get pregnant right away. Knud Erik came later. So did Henning's drinking, and pub crawls, and endless voyages.
One year Henning came home with a stuffed guenon monkey. "The guenon is the most ungodly of all the animals," he said. "The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Injustice." An Arab had told him that.
"And what am I supposed to do with it?" she asked.
"You can look at it when you miss me," he replied, his voice laden with contempt. That was how things had grown between them.
"The worst thing about the sailor isn't that he steals your virtue. The worst thing is that he steals your dreams," she said to the marine painter's widow.
Now the Hydra was gone, and Henning with it.
"One day Marstal will be a good place to grow up in," she said, "instead of a place where boys are raised to become fish food, and girls to be their widows."
"Do you really think you can take the sailor out of a Marstaller?" asked the widow.
"Yes, I do. I have the means. And I know how to do it." A new stubbornness had entered Klara Friis's voice, and her face grew ugly with defiance.
Wondering if the younger woman's mind might have become dislocated by grief or her vast inheritance, the widow quickly steered the conversation back to the orphanage, and to her relief Klara Friis became sensible and practical again.
But Klara never mentioned the most important part of her plan.
THE SAME DAY that Albert died, Mr. Henckel was declared bankrupt.
At a general meeting of Kalundborg Steel Shipyard Limited, to everyone's astonishment he voted in favor of liquidating his own company; he owned 99 percent of its shares. It was subsequently revealed that the shipyard owed Kalundborg Bank twelve million kroner. The bank collapsed, dragging other businesses along with it. Including, finally, Marstal Steel Shipyard. Peter Raahauge, the ship worker, had warned Albert that there was no way in hell things could last. His prophecy had now been fulfilled. The nearly one million kroner that had been invested in the Marstal enterprise was lost, and the yard was auctioned off for just thirty-five thousand kroner. Mr. Egeskov, owner of the Ærø, would survive. He had his hotel to fall back on. But Herman had ransomed his house in Skippergade, along with the Two Sisters, and he was left with nothing but debts.
Court cases followed. Both Edvard Henckel and the manager of Kalundborg Bank were arrested. Not even the devil could make head or tail of their accounts. Henckel had been too smart for them. You could argue that he was a kind of genius who happened to forget the laws of the land and ended up on the wrong side of them. He was quite open in admitting everything.