We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [240]
"Greenland to leeward, Greenland to leeward!" he yelled, and could hear his own fright. The skipper and the first mate rushed up from the cabin. Bager stared briefly at the bizarre mountain landscape. "It's not Greenland," he said. "Those are icebergs."
He pointed to the horizon. More icebergs appeared to windward now, scattered so randomly that any illusion of a continuing coastline was shattered. Then the fog returned, and they were once more marooned on deck.
The skipper looked worried. His sunken face was paler than usual.
"We're in God's hands," he said.
The fog bank remained with them for a fortnight. There was little wind, and the moist sails hung limp most of the time. The great Atlantic swells moved in a slow rhythm that left no ripples under the Kristina's vulnerable hull. The water, which was smooth as oil, seemed to be thickening in the humid cold as if it were turning to ice. They were surrounded by silence, and at first Knud Erik thought that fog must dampen sound, in the same way that it limited the view. It dawned on him that the crew had begun whispering, as if the icebergs crouched behind the wall of fog surrounding the Kristina were evil spirits whose attention it was vital not to attract. Their silence got to them, and yet they dared not break it. Knud Erik wondered if even God Himself could keep an eye on them inside this dense gray shroud, as the skipper hoped.
When the fog lifted at last and they saw the sea around them, free of ice, they started shouting. They could have cheered, but they didn't; they just yelled incoherently, wanting to hear the sound of their own voices. Each man had been isolated by the silence: now they were united again. No icebergs were stalking them. Shouting was permitted.
On the following day they spotted the coast of Newfoundland. They'd been at sea for twenty-four days since leaving Iceland.
They docked at Little Bay, and Knud Erik rowed the skipper ashore. He was going to speak to a broker and the port authorities, and he told Knud Erik to wait for him there. When he returned, his face looked strange. Knud Erik positioned the oars and started rowing toward the Kristina.
"Knud Erik," Bager said. His tone was confidential, and one that Knud Erik wasn't used to, for the skipper normally addressed him only to give orders. "The Ane Marie hasn't arrived." The Ane Marie was a Marstal schooner that had left Iceland eight days before the Kristina. The skipper sighed and looked across the water. "So she's probably gone. I imagine she hit an iceberg." The skipper kept looking across the water and said nothing else for the rest of the trip.
Vilhjelm. That was Knud Erik's first thought when the skipper told him. Vilhjelm was on board the Ane Marie. He looked down at his hands: they were gripping the oars so tightly that his knuckles had gone white. He took huge strokes, as though shaking himself from a trance, and nearly fell off the thwart.
"Mind how you row," Bager said. His voice sounded absent, almost gentle.
In the evening Knud Erik lay in his berth, grieving. Had Vilhjelm surfaced twice? Or had he gone straight to the bottom, pulled down by his clogs and heavy oilskins? What was the last thing he'd seen? The bubbles in the water? Or the frozen chaos of the icebergs? He remembered the unnaturally square iceberg he'd seen on the first day of the Kristina's voyage through the ice and the sinister feeling it had given him. Had the Ane Marie collided with it? What had Vilhjelm felt in that moment? Had he cried out for help? But why would he? There was no one to come to the rescue out there in the open North Atlantic.