We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [211]
Isaksen left with a frown. He sensed that the performance he'd just witnessed was a peculiar mix of authenticity and pretense, but the point of it was beyond him. He had no reason to suspect that this woman—who reminded him of a timid servant girl—was his main opponent.
In between visits to the town's shipping companies, Isaksen worked on the three widows. He spoke of the sea and ships in a language he thought they would understand, using housekeeping as a metaphor. Shipping too had its shopping lists, expenses, accounts, and servants. He knew these women were skilled housewives and he tried to make them grasp that, viewed in that light, the shipping trade was not so very different from their own everyday experience.
It had just the effect he hoped for. The widows calmed down. They no longer felt that bullets were whizzing past their ears. Isaksen had done what they'd asked him to do: he'd released them from the war zone. The responsibility was out of their hands.
ISAKSEN CALLED A grand meeting of the owners of the Boye shipping company: its entire staff, all its skippers and first mates who were currently ashore, and their spouses. He was smart enough to grasp that the wives were a force in maritime affairs as well as in matters domestic. He booked the Marine Room at Hotel Ærø, the grand salon hung with royal blue Danish china plaques, Danish flags, and paintings of ships registered in Marstal, and he planned a three-course meal. For the first course, he gave the hotel's kitchen a recipe for bouillabaisse, which he knew most of the skippers would be familiar with from their travels in the Mediterranean. For the main course, he chose traditional roast beef with crispy fat. He addressed the guests between the bouillabaisse and the roast.
It was a speech about the future.
He began by describing his years in Casablanca, the port he'd been summoned from, and where he and so many of Marstal's skippers had become acquainted. Apparently he'd made a good impression on them, and he took this opportunity to thank them for their support. But his heart sank, he said, whenever a Marstal ship left Casablanca. Because he always feared it was the last time he'd see it there. He wasn't referring to the risk that the ship might be lost on her return voyage, although of course that was always a tragic possibility. No, he was thinking of another far more shocking notion: the ship might simply vanish into thin air, never to be seen again. However strange this might sound to his honored guests, this was more likely than a conventional shipwreck. They might well be surprised to hear it, but the fact was, the ship's disappearance was as certain as the sun setting tonight and rising again tomorrow.
By now he had his gawking audience's full attention. Not a single one of us could imagine where he was going with this peculiar statement.
"But listen," he said. "I can explain this strange premonition of mine. What's more, I can help you make sure that it never comes true. The cause of my despondency whenever I see a Marstal schooner raise anchor in Casablanca"—and here he looked down so that his long eyelashes swept his tanned cheeks (visible all the way up the long table, this caused the bosom of more than one skipper's wife to heave and sink in a most unusual way, as if from shortness of breath)—"the cause of my despondency"—he repeated the striking phrase—"is"—and he suddenly assumed a most prosaic tone—"that I happen to know the French authorities in Casablanca plan to build a new port. You'll all understand the consequences of this."
Again he paused, but this time, instead of lowering his eyes, he looked around urgently, as if to remind us of some piece of knowledge we already possessed but had momentarily forgotten or suppressed. One or two women returned his gaze with flashing eyes, as if they'd received an invitation, and several of the skippers looked shamefacedly at the table, as if they knew only too well that they themselves should have said, or at least thought, what Isaksen was about to follow