We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [208]
Farmer Sofus had been a man of the people, and his children and grandchildren were cut from the same cloth. They didn't make up a caste of their own; like everyone else, they belonged to the town. They knew that their money came from the hard toil of sailors: the boys had had to work their way up from the bottom of the ship's brutal hierarchy before reaching the broker's office or the board of the shipping company. Every word spoken in their daily meetings expressed a reality these men had personally experienced. But to their widows, who'd been brought into this new world with neither warning nor preparation, the language of shipping was a barrage of abstract terms that flew about their ears like lethal projectiles on a battlefield.
Sometimes Klara Friis would give them a piece of sound advice or display a sudden decisiveness that astonished them. Their good nature made them regard the young widow as a helpless creature who needed their charity. So they were baffled when the opposite frequently occurred; she was the one who rescued them from their difficulties. As they didn't have much faith in women's business acumen, they imagined that her good advice was pure serendipity, snatched out of thin air.
They didn't know, of course, that Klara Friis was taking her own correspondence course in brokering, ship ownership, and much more. Like the prince's kiss that breaks the witch's spell, the wealth that had come to her after Albert's death had aroused her slumbering intelligence. Before then, her mind had been imprisoned by her own humbleness, a humbleness imposed on her not only by her harrowing childhood but also by her position in adult life, which demanded that she work with her hands, not her head.
Now once more, there was a man in her life—but this one she didn't have to seduce with her already timeworn feminine charms. Unlike poor Albert, Markussen wasn't interested in kisses or cuddles, or what they might lead to. It was Cheng Sumei who bound him to her and to the task that, so late in his life, had fired his curiosity one last time: helping Xerxes find an apt way of punishing the sea.
They exchanged letters frequently and often spoke on the telephone. Every now and then Klara Friis would travel to Copenhagen. She could manage on her own now and didn't need Herman or anyone else to accompany her.
"You're not interested in taking over a shipping company on the verge of bankruptcy," Markussen said, "and you can soon straighten out the shipyard. Give them good advice, but not too good. They shouldn't get confident. You must make sure they keep thinking that disaster's only one wrong decision away. Tell them how dangerous the world is." He wrote all this on a piece of paper, so she'd remember. Klara Friis was getting the support she needed.
But it was she who determined the course.
***
The three widows completely misread Klara Friis, both overestimating her character and underestimating her abilities. They thought her helpfulness was altruistic: they were wrong. They thought her often remarkably useful advice was pure luck: they were wrong there too. Deep down, they all thought they were doing her a favor by listening to her. They gave her their company and a little bit of attention—surely that was what a young woman in her situation, stricken by a dreadful loss and alone with two children, really needed.
They offered her home-baked bread to take with her.
"My dear," Johanne would say to her, patting her cheek.
They recognized themselves in her. She was a woman—and by definition just as helpless as they were when it came to the ways of the world.
As they continued to puzzle out the mess in which their own widowhood had landed them, it finally dawned on them. They were in the jungle, and they needed what women had always needed to survive there: a man.
His name was Frederik Isaksen. He was the Danish consul in Casablanca, employed by a renowned French broker's firm. He'd started with Møller in