We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [214]
There was such power in Isaksen's enthusiasm that it spread through us like an inner weightlessness. If he'd spoken for much longer, we'd have ended up floating out of the windows of Hotel Ærø.
ISAKSEN HAD CONSULTED the compass and plotted the course. He'd spoken eloquently about our ability to navigate through life even when it was at its hardest, but he'd overlooked one essential thing about the art of steering a ship. You don't just keep your eye on the compass; you also check the rigging, you read the clouds, you observe the direction of the wind and the color of the current and the sea, and you look out for the sudden surf that warns of a rock ahead. It may not be like that on board a steamer. But that's how it is on a sailing ship, and in this respect its journey parallels that of life: simply knowing where you want to go isn't enough, because life is a windblown voyage, consisting mainly of the detours imposed by alternating calm and storm.
We can debate till the cows come home whether Klara Friis caused Isaksen to fail or whether it was the vanilla cookies. His knowledge of the female sex was certainly incomplete. He'd imagined that a woman paralyzed by anxiety needs to be rescued by a man bursting with the urge to take action. That was how he saw the three widows, the shipping company, and in fact the whole town: we were the bride and he was the groom. He would release us from our state of paralysis. But sometimes a whirlwind of energy can do just the opposite: it can whip up female anxiety.
When their husbands met unexpected and pointless deaths within three weeks of one another, the sailor's wife in each of them, along with what little courage and endurance she possessed, left through the front door. And in the through back door came a woman who, no matter how long ago her family had abandoned the soil, was a farmer's wife to the core. This woman was suspicious, brooding, gloomy, and passive, and she clung tenaciously to her ordained place in life.
***
Isaksen understood nothing of this. He believed he'd got the widows on his side. After all, hadn't they stood there cheering his speech, along with the entire staff of the shipping company? Of course, he'd heard of their inability to make a decision even before he came. The skippers he'd been negotiating with in Casablanca had made no secret of the fact that the women were "difficult" and "tricky to deal with," but they'd concluded unanimously that "all they needed was a firm hand"—and that he was the man to wield it.
Though Isaksen had previously regarded the women as the least of his problems, they were now proving themselves the greatest. They sat there with their coffee and their stale vanilla cookies, dipping and munching endlessly, testing the texture with their front teeth just like beavers. And that was what they were: a family of beavers, building dams around the flow of his ideas and blocking him from getting anywhere.
Out of sheer frustration he turned up for one meeting with a bag of fresh cookies from Tønnesen, the baker in Kirkestræde. But this gesture had precisely the wrong effect. Emma and Johanne exchanged looks. So he was spurning their home-baked treats. That made him wasteful. And then to bring cookies from the Seagull Baker! Did he really think they didn't know that Tønnesen bought seagull eggs from the boys in the town, who collected them on the little islands outside the harbor? What did he take them for!
Those cookies were a diplomatic disaster. Soon Isaksen noticed other signs of discontent.
"It's too risky," Ellen Boye said, when he suggested building a new steamship at the steel shipyard.
He explained that the freight market was recovering and the investment would quickly pay for itself.
"Isn't that terribly uncertain?" Emma repeated, after a long pause, during which they all resumed munching. He could hear that it wasn't a question, but a no. He made his voice