We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [210]
He had only one hostile encounter and that was with Klara Friis. He'd done his homework, so he expressed no surprise at finding a youngish, modestly dressed woman at the helm of one of Marstal's most renowned shipping companies. He knew all about Albert Madsen and his alliance with the widow in Le Havre; he also knew that Denmark's last great barks, the beautiful Suzanne, Germaine, and Claudia, were registered in Prinsegade. There was only one lesson he'd neglected. He hadn't looked into Klara Friis's heart, or into her safety-deposit box. He had no idea of the size of her fortune, and more important, he knew nothing about what she planned to do with such a vast amount. She'd have welcomed him if he'd arrived like Genghis Khan, to lay waste to the entire town. Instead, he arrived like Alexander to found a city. So she received him as an enemy.
He wanted to build the new Marstal from the ruins of the sailing trade that had once made the town flourish. He was offering a renaissance, not a funeral. No swan song here: instead, a joyous salute to the future.
He touched something in us. Once before we'd seen progress arrive—sooner than most people—and we'd stood to salute it. Now he was asking us to rise and welcome it again.
Klara Friis had pondered what to wear when she received Frederik Isaksen. Finally she decided to dress in her usual modest fashion, so as not to draw attention to herself in any way. She wouldn't flaunt her wealth or her recently acquired self-confidence, or, for that matter, her femininity. She wouldn't have been able to seduce him anyway—not because she'd lost her bloom, but because she didn't have a sufficiently high opinion of her charms. She thought it safer to reprise the role she'd played effectively for much of her life, which she too had believed in: that of the poor, self-effacing woman who allowed herself no richer emotion than a barely articulated bitterness at the wicked-stepmother treatment that life had given her. She wouldn't act downright dumb, but she'd let him think she was paralyzed by anxiety and an inability to understand the great big world in which men moved; she'd feign the very helplessness that she encouraged in the three widows.
She responded to everything Isaksen said with a hesitant, mechanics cal smile and a nod contradicted by the blankness of her eyes, which clearly hinted that she hadn't understood a word of what he'd said but was merely acquiescing to it, with the timidity and submissiveness so typical of her sex.
But Isaksen didn't give up. He changed his wording, making his images simpler and more accessible. He even waxed lyrical about the sailor's uncertain existence, to persuade her that his proposal actually involved a whole new style of life, one that would take the sailor's dependents into account and thereby free them from constant anxiety about his fate.
"Imagine the difference a big, well-managed shipping company could make to a sailor's job. Regular leave, safety on board, none of the poverty that currently forces smaller skippers to take risks in dangerous waters."
He fixed her with his thick-lashed brown eyes, which she hadn't met until now. His voice grew urgent. He wasn't satisfied with the empty gaze that was her sole reaction to his words. She felt tempted to surrender and was immediately overwhelmed by a familiar terror: of darkness and flooding, of black waters rising up to reach the roof where she huddled; of Karla disappearing into the torrent; of the ridge of the roof, shaped like the sawhorse that landowners had once used to beat rebellious peasants, pressing against her groin like an instrument of torture
Cold sweat erupted on her forehead. She grew pale and had to ask him to leave, making excuses in a feeble voice about