We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [206]
Anton, on the other hand, lived for his own sake, and when Vilhjelm had balanced on the acorn of the top of the mast, with his arms and legs outstretched twenty-five meters above the deck, he'd been living life the Anton way. For a moment, he'd forgotten to be invisible.
Of course, Anton had parents too, though according to him he might as well not have. He could make his mother, Gudrun, believe almost anything. When she found out that he'd been lying about his school reports, she wept and said as soon as his father came home, he'd get a good thrashing—though she was quite big and heavy enough to dole one out herself. In the end his father just gave him a feeble slap: on the rare occasions he was home, he found that punishing his children for old, long-forgotten offenses was hardly a priority. He could deliver a stinging blow, but it had to be cash on delivery, as he put it. He didn't want to mess with something stored in a bank.
"Spanking and banking! Do you get it?" his father roared, laughing idiotically.
At roughly the same time as Vilhjelm, Anton had made a discovery of equally far-reaching significance about his own father, Regnar, whose last name was Hay. Anton's last name was Hay too, of course, but his middle name was Hansen. That was the mother's maiden name.
Regnar, who had recently returned after several years' absence at sea, had just settled his son on his lap, having boxed his ears first, in compliance with his wife's demand that he punish the children for transgressions committed in his years of absence. He hadn't struck Anton very hard and didn't expect that Anton would hold it against him. Encouragingly, he asked the boy what his name was. Presumably Anton's willingness to affirm his paternity would assure him that harmony once more reigned between them. It's also possible that Regnar wanted to assure himself that he'd thrashed the right child, so that, having performed his fatherly duty, he could leave the house and head for Weber's Café.
"Anton Hansen Hay," Anton said.
"What the hell did you say, boy?" his father shouted. His face grew fiery red, and he began shaking Anton, rocking him violently back and forth on the knee he'd sat him on only a moment earlier, in a mood of father-son reconciliation. Then he hurled the bewildered Anton to the floor, where he skidded on its varnished surface until coming to a halt among the chair legs under the dining table.
"Would you believe it?" Anton said, as he told the story. "The asshole didn't even know his own kid's name."
Anton had been christened while his father was away at sea, and Regnar had never troubled to look at his birth certificate or ask about the ceremony. Nor had he imagined that his wife would call the boy by her maiden name, Hansen, for he'd made no attempt to hide his loathing for her family. Anton's fat, compliant mother wasn't made for rebellion. She deferred to her husband just as she had always deferred to her own family and ended by trying to please them all; so she'd squeezed her family name between Anton's and his father's. Anton Hansen Hay became a three-word recipe for a family feud.
Anton himself couldn't care less. He never sided with anyone and described his father as a fool. Most of us called our fathers "the old man." It was a term of respect, because that's how sailors refer to their captain. But Anton respected no one. His nickname for his father was the Foreigner.
However, their relationship could have been worse. The Foreigner, after all, was the source of most of Anton's knowledge of the world, not because he confided in his son about his visits to brothels in foreign parts, but because he allowed him to listen in when the sailors on leave sat bragging in Weber's Café.
Deep down, Anton