We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [252]
But Knud Erik didn't join in. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his fleecy moleskin trousers and shuddered in the cold.
THEY SAILED four days after the frost set in. A tugboat led them out through the Black Hole. A brisk wind was blowing from the north, and the Labrador Current was with them. They sailed through pancake ice but made good speed nonetheless. Around eleven in the morning the skipper ordered Knud Erik up the foremast to look for open water. He climbed the rigging until he reached the topgallant yard. Below him the sails were rigid with frost. To the south the ice extended as far as the horizon. The vast unbroken surface gleaming white in the sun gave him a mild feeling of nausea, which stayed with him back on deck.
There was pot roast for lunch, but Knud Erik thought of the butcher's chopping block and the dark patches on the sack where blood from the meat had seeped through. He had no appetite but didn't want to leave his plate untouched either. He put a piece of meat in his mouth and left it there. It seemed to swell. Then he rushed onto the deck and puked over the rail.
On the second day they spied open water. The wind was rising and the sea began to shift. With the temperature still low, the Kristina had started to freeze over. During the night and the following day the ship became encased in a thick armor of ice. The halyards froze together in lumps. The bulwark became a frigid wall, and on the main deck the ice stood a foot deep. The bowsprit was a single compact block that reached as far as the martingale.
The fully laden ship now lay even lower in the water, her weight increased by several tons. The bow was already dangerously sunken, and the deck was level with the sea on the other side of the frozen bulwark. The sails looked like heavy sheets of wood that for inscrutable reasons had been hoisted from the mast.
It was like being on board a giant block of ice that a sculptor was trying his best to carve into a ship. But he was hampered by the block's continual growth, which returned the shapes he carved to formlessness: the elegant rigging, the beautifully curved lines of bulwark and bowsprit—everything that gives a ship her definition and her advantage over the sea had become a jumble of lumps and cubes. No longer a ship, nor even a reasonable imitation of a ship, the Kristina became a death sentence signed by the frost, stripped of her last remnant of seaworthiness, transformed into a dead weight of ice and salt cod doomed to sink.
The crew knew their lives depended on a successful battle against the relentless freeze. Opening up the tool chest, each man grabbed a maul and attacked the glittering castle that was building itself around them. Ice chunks clattered brightly down from the rigging and the halyards before hitting the deck. But the deck itself resisted all their efforts. They hammered themselves sweaty and red-faced, producing a crack here and a crack there, but the heavy sheet of ice wouldn't shift, and the slope of the bulwark remained imprisoned inside. They couldn't even get close to the frozen lump that was the bowsprit. You risked your life venturing onto it.
At first the challenge excited them, and they yelled out to one another. But after a while they fell silent. In the end their hammer strokes stopped too. Bager was the first to give up. He put a hand to his chest and his eyes turned glassy as he gasped for breath. Then Dreymann called it a day. They slumped, exhausted, where they'd stopped, each wrapped in his own loneliness, as though absorbed by the growing masses of ice all around.
Icicles hung from Dreymann's mustache. He had hoarfrost in his eyebrows and under his nostrils. On Rikard's and Algot's cheeks, where day-old stubble grew, the frost was sprinkled like white powder, giving