We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [231]
But he didn't comprehend the boys' staring. They were waiting for him outside the boardinghouse in Tværgade, where he stayed when he was in Marstal. He could enter a shop and leave it, or take a stroll along the harbor, or hang out in Weber's Café and always they'd be there, waiting for him. More and more he began to feel the need for shelter and for places to hide. A door to something unknown was opening up inside him. He'd done something once, something on board the Two Sisters. At times the memory made him feel stronger. At other times he avoided it. Now he felt dread at the thought of being found out and of the punishment that might ensue, and he understood instinctively that the boys' inscrutable stares held a power he couldn't fight. He'd believed he could scare off that damned Anton. But now every boy in Marstal was Anton's co-conspirator. And there were hundreds of them, with new faces all the time, an unpredictable people's court where he knew the charge but had no idea of the laws, or the nature of the verdict. Their eyes persecuted him everywhere, eventually following him all the way into the darkness around his bed and into his dreams, like a madness that threatened to overpower him. He couldn't kill the whole lot of them after all, though his fists began flexing as they used to in the old days, when something was gearing up inside him. He drank more than before and got into fights more frequently at Weber's Café. That kept the fists busy.
Dutch gin was no longer to his taste; Riga Balsam, famous for a century among the skippers of Marstal, lost its power to cure; whiskey, the greatest healer of them all, had no more effect on him than water. His hands started shaking when he raised his glass to his lips. Shunning the company of others, he drank alone.
Finally he gave in. One day he stomped down to the ferry with his sea bag slung over his shoulder. His intention was to go to Copenhagen and sign on at Jepsen's Shipping Office. The boys knew it. It was as if they could read his thoughts. He didn't bother counting them. But a farewell committee of at least twenty to thirty boys was waiting by the ferry to see him off.
In the usual inscrutable silence, their gaze followed him as he disappeared on board the ferry. He didn't go straight to the saloon to smoke a cigarette, which was his habit when saying goodbye to the town he hated but was linked to inextricably. Instead he stayed in the darkness of the enclosed deck, among the horse-drawn carts and trucks, breathing in engine oil and dung until he was certain he was no longer visible from land.
When he finally entered the saloon and lit the first cigarette of the crossing, he had trouble controlling the shake of his hands.
The idea had come to Knud Erik through a very straightforward process. He'd tried to come up with the most unpleasant thing he could think of, and then made the assumption that Herman would share the feeling. A good thrashing wouldn't work: it was beyond their abilities and besides, he wasn't sure Herman would have minded a fight even if he bore the brunt of it. But burned into his soul was the memory of a worse persecution: the look his mother had fixed on him after his father's death. He couldn't call the look reproachful. It was just a silent searching, and it had followed him everywhere with a question he couldn't answer. What did she want?
He'd collapsed under the weight of that look, which seemed to challenge everything he did without suggesting an alternative. That was the worst thing: when someone looked at you constantly, and you had to guess what they meant by it, while knowing that nothing you could say could ever lighten the burden. He imagined how one could put the same kind of burden on Herman. How the pressure of a silent