We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [277]
The father, she told them, was Ivar, an able seaman to whom she'd given her heart and much more: the heart's natural companion, her virtue, which in a moment of such great and true love was not worth keeping, because he was the most wonderful man, the most handsome, the wisest she'd ever met, not like that animal, that heartless swine Herman, the monster who had murdered the best man in the world.
"My husband," she said. "He was my darling, darling husband. We would have been married. I'm sure of that. There was no one else in the world for me."
They understood then that when she spoke of Ivar as the baby's father, she wasn't talking about a fact so much as a hope.
"America isn't such a bad idea," said Klara. Anna Egidia nodded. One of her daughters had been there during the war.
Anna Egidia spoke to Kristina's mother, and Klara organized the ticket for the boat to America, making sure there would be someone to meet Kristina in New York. Now all they had to do was wait for the baby. Who would it look like when its head popped into the world? Would it be born with the signature of crime or love?
A jubilant new mother telephoned from New York.
"If it had been a boy, he was going to be called Ivar," Kristina said. "But it's a girl and her name will be Klara. Need I say more?"
A small face, too small even to smile but big enough to bear witness to its origins, had confirmed her faith in the conquering power of love. Nature had delivered her gift and the baby's true father had signed it. Ivar had sent his last greeting from the Hereafter in the form of a strong chin, a straight nose, a clear forehead, dark brows, and black hair.
Klara shared her joy. At least Kristina had cheated fate. And yet something inside Klara wept too, as if she'd been abandoned yet again. When we're wretched, we long for the company of others who also mourn, for the bittersweet confirmation that we aren't suffering because we've been unlucky or made the wrong choices, but because it's the law of life. When Kristina cheated her fate, Klara found hers all the harder to bear.
Her own child had been on that ill-fated ship, alone with a man no one in Marstal now doubted was a murderer. Knud Erik could have been killed, and she knew that she'd have experienced his death—as she'd experienced Henning's and Albert's—as a stinging rebuff. No one wanted her. They turned their backs on her and disappeared into the darkness. Or they went to sea. And that was the same as dying.
Helmer and Vilhjelm had returned with Kristina. Vilhjelm was still weak from his ordeal in the Atlantic. Helmer sobbed like a baby when he saw his parents. Now he was apprenticed to Minor Jørgensen, the grocer.
And Knud Erik? He'd stayed in France to look after the ship until a new crew could be found. Klara assumed this was something he'd been ordered to do. She went to visit the owner of the Kristina, the late Captain Bager's brother, Herluf Bager. She'd imagined it as a meeting between two shipowners. Man to man: that was how she described it to herself before entering the shipping company's office in Kongegade.
"Of course I realize that the boy has been through a great deal," Bager said, after getting up to welcome her and then sitting down again in his leather office chair, which seemed to absorb him until chair and man melded into a single mass of unperturbed and—she could not help thinking—manly authority. "But someone had to stay on to watch the ship."
"He's only fifteen," she exclaimed.
"He's a robust boy. I hear only good things about him. Of course he's welcome to sign off, though it would make things difficult for us. However, he hasn't expressed the wish to do so."
He looked her up and down, and in that moment she knew he was not going to order Knud Erik home as she'd asked. And she knew the reason, a reason that until now she'd failed to understand. This was not a meeting between two shipowners. This was a meeting between a woman and a man. And a worried mother knew nothing about the business of seafaring.
She