We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [278]
Then she calmed down. Her agitation gave way to common sense. No wonder she couldn't get through to Knud Erik. The whole town was in the grip of this delusion that the future lay at sea, when in reality the sea promised nothing but brutalization and an ice-cold death by drowning.
THE DAY CAME when she thought Knud Erik was dead.
But when it turned out he was still alive, she decided she'd have to kill him herself. It was time. He was twenty when he told her, in his usual monosyllabic way, that he had signed on to the Copenhagen. A couple of months later, the big bark had disappeared en route from Buenos Aires to Melbourne. They looked for her everywhere: Tristan da Cunha, the Prince Edward Islands, the New Amsterdam Islands. But nothing turned up. No name board, no capsized lifeboats, not so much as a single life belt.
When the list of the sixty-four crewmen was published, Knud Erik's name wasn't there. It turned out he'd been sailing on one of Klara's own barks, the Claudia. He'd repeatedly asked her for permission to do this, and Klara had always refused. But she hadn't checked the crew register, and the captain had signed on Knud Erik behind her back.
During the dreadful days and nights when she believed that he'd gone down with the Copenhagen, she'd gone over their last conversation again and again. He'd asked her again if he could sign on to the Claudia. It was one of the few times he'd opened up to her, and she'd rejected him. Now he was gone. Her obstinacy had sent him to his death.
"Do you realize," he'd said to her, "that the barks you inherited from Albert are the last big sailing ships in the world?" They weren't just the last, they were also the most beautiful, and the final vestiges of an entire era. With their thin summer sails set, they'd ply the northeast trade wind right across the Atlantic to the West Indies to fetch dyer's broom. Every sailor, just once in his lifetime, had to experience what it was like to stand under those towering white sailcloths, with the trade wind behind him and the hot sun above, or to sit on the yardarm of the main sixty feet above the deck, king of the whole world. His eyes lit up as he spoke. He'd let her see inside him.
He was a man now. Long-limbed, but no longer gangly. Muscular and straight-backed. She could see Henning in him. She'd always been able to, but now she could see something more, something better and stronger.
"No" was all she'd said.
She couldn't even be sure that he had died, because his name was missing from the list of those lost when the Copenhagen went down. So where was he? She walked past the Collector's workshop. She was afraid to look in. What if he was carving her drowned boy right at this very moment?
There were nights when she paced the rooms restlessly, screaming out her loneliness and the loss she felt so cruelly responsible for, while Edith lay in her room with a pillow over her head. She too was weeping for the brother they both thought was lost, but her mother's uninhibited grief terrified her.
Those of us who passed by in the street didn't label Klara insane. We're all familiar with the line that separates grief from madness, and we know that sometimes the only way to stay on the right side of it is to scream.
Then a letter arrived from Knud Erik, postmarked from Haiti. Klara's hands trembled. She waited a long time before opening it. She thought it was a missive from the Hereafter: that the devil himself had written her a letter, mocking her hubris for thinking she could prevent the sea from taking her son.
But from the letter it was clear that Knud Erik knew nothing of the loss of the Copenhagen—and consequently nothing of what she'd gone through. He was simply writing to apologize for telling her he