We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [262]
He looked up and saw Miss Kristina huddling against Ivar. Both were staring at him. He grinned at them. Then he stuck the revolver into his belt and returned to his cabin.
He sat on the edge of his berth. He was still smiling. This had been a perfect moment. No one had known he had a revolver. They were surprised when he came up holding it, and he'd seen the fear in their eyes. They'd turned from the dolphin to stare at him. He'd been in control. That was how he wanted it.
Early one morning the wind fell, and after that their progress was slow. Around noon they saw Setúbal ahead of them: large whitewashed villas sitting atop steep cliffs; lush, green vegetation hanging like a veil over the rocks. When the sails were down, Miss Kristina served each man on deck a glass of wine. It was an old custom.
Her eyes lingered on Ivar, but when she reached Herman, she turned her face half away, as if she couldn't wait to move on to the next man in line.
There was already one Marstal schooner in the port. Over the next few days, more arrived and soon there was a small flock: the Eagle, the Galathea, and the Atlantic, all veterans of the route, loading salt in Setúbal for Newfoundland, then sailing back across the Atlantic with salt cod for Setúbal.
Not that they were short of fish here. The port teemed with fishermen who caught sardines as big as herrings. The men were small and sinewy and their chests were bared to the sun, the muscles clearly defined beneath their tanned skin. Spotting Miss Kristina, they called out and waved, their white teeth gleaming beneath their black mustaches; she waved back to them and they raised their huge baskets of glittering fish as though offering a joyful tribute to her sex, so rarely sighted on the deck of a sailing ship.
Bager was rowed ashore to buy provisions, but he came back empty-handed. There were neither potatoes nor bread to be had. Setúbal was in the grip of a strike—or was it a lockout? At any rate, some sort of uprising or revolution. A nine o'clock curfew had been imposed, and anyone found in the street after dark would be shot.
"Why is there a revolution?" Miss Kristina asked, her eyes lighting up with excitement.
Her father shrugged. "I suppose people are starving," he said. "There's a lot of poverty here."
"But that's awful," Miss Kristina said. "Those poor, poor people."
"Don't fret about it," Herman interjected. "It's nothing unusual. There's always some fuss going on here. They create havoc and shoot at each other. They say they want change, but the next time you visit, everything's the same as it always was. It's the way they are. They can't control their tempers and they never get anything done."
The word revolution went around the deck. Everyone wanted to taste it, like an exotic fruit bursting with a strange, tantalizing flavor. Revolutions were a part of the south. Now they'd be able to return home and say that they'd witnessed one—though as far as they could see there was nothing to witness. The sardine fishermen seemed unperturbed by the revolution—if that's what it was—and heavily laden I ships arrived every day. Then the uprising spread farther, and it was rumored that the sardine factories were striking too.
For the next few days the fishermen stayed in port, and the docks around the Kristina fell silent. The Nauta and the Rosenhjem showed up, and soon a tiny floating Marstal was established, with plenty of traffic between the ships. Visits were paid, coffee was drunk. Miss Kristina stopped strolling around with Ivar in order to meet the other skippers, who were all friends of her father and used to visit their home in Marstal. One day she went with them to see the town, which seemed peaceful enough despite its revolution. Like the proper skipper's daughter she was, she rowed the boat that ferried them all to shore.
She returned with a bunch of flowers that a park gardener had given her, and treated the crew to a lively description of the large café in the town square where a military band had been