We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [250]
Grabbing her with unexpected force, he leaned forward and found her lips. She didn't move. He'd closed his eyes, but now he opened them again. She was staring straight ahead and didn't appear to see him. Carefully he pressed his lips against hers, hoping to rekindle the magic of their first kiss. But nothing happened.
Then she pushed him away. "Leave me alone," she said. "Do you hear me! Go away!"
Knud Erik stood open-mouthed and uncomprehending.
"Leave me alone!"
She was shouting now, and her eyes glittered. She stamped the frozen ground with her boot. "Stop chasing after me like some dog!"
He was overcome by a sudden anger as intense as his infatuation had been. "Don't you dare call me a dog!" he shouted.
He clasped her shoulders and started shaking her. She was taller than him, but he was stronger. Even with her head jolting, she kept up's her defiant glare.
"Dog!" she said again.
All at once he let go of her. He was panting angrily.
"Bitch!" He spat on the ground between her boots, then turned on his heel and started running down Signal Hill.
"Knud Erik!" she called out after him.
He didn't stop. Sprinting wildly over the frozen ground, he nearly crashed several times, but his drunkenness made him strangely light-footed. The cold slapped his face.
At the foot of the hill he found a changed town. The pubs along the harbor front had closed, and the dense, heaving crowd that had filled Water Street had vanished. A fine layer of hoarfrost covered the street, and its cold sheen underscored the unnatural silence that replaced the din. The masts along the wharves were plated with silver and stood like a forest burned to white charcoal: ghost trees that at the slightest gust of wind might turn to dust.
He found the Kristina and stumbled down the ladder to the fo'c'sle, where his drunkenness finally overcame him. He collapsed dizzily onto his berth, and his eyes closed instantly.
The next morning Rikard's swearing woke him.
"Where the hell did you get to, boy? What makes you think you can run off like that?"
But the men's grins told him that they'd been too drunk themselves to be seriously worried. He remembered the maelstrom of people in the pub, but his hunt for Miss Sophie through the streets of St. John came back to him only in fragments. Their encounter on Signal Hill was equally blurred. If a door exists between dream and reality, that episode had occurred on the wrong side of it.
He was still stung by a sense of having been jilted. He vaguely recalled the vertiginous feeling that a void had suddenly opened, but he didn't know why. The memory kept churning away, but he remained none the wiser.
The frost had set in. It was ten below zero, and a thin crust of ice was already forming on the water in the harbor. In the afternoon the skipper came over to him. He was expecting a beating, but instead Bager asked him to join him on a visit to town the next day.
"Find a clean sack," he said. "We're going to the butcher's in Queen's Road tomorrow to get fresh meat."
As they walked through town the next day, they noticed clusters of people talking together in the street, where there was a strange, electric atmosphere, a kind of rippling unease. Strangers stopped to address one another, then peeled away toward the next agitated group. Bager, who spoke some English, asked the butcher what was going on. He was a giant of a man in a bloodstained rubber apron, busily chopping his way through heaps of red meat on a white scoured block. He took his time before answering. Finally, putting down his cleaver, he spoke, throwing his arms about and shaking his red-veined head sadly. Knud Erik didn't understand the words, but he recognized the name Mr. Smith.
Bager's face darkened, and he glanced sideways at Knud Erik. "I knew it," he muttered. "I told you so. That girl will come to a bad end. But it's a terrible thing all the same."
"What did he say?" Knud Erik asked after they'd left. Bager