We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [319]
"He's a degausser," Anton said.
The degausser was the electrical cable that circled the waterline. It reversed the ship's magnetic charge, to prevent her attracting magnetic mines. That was Bluetooth's function too: not only to unite the crew but also to protect them, mostly from themselves. He helped them take some kind of root in the middle of the heaving sea.
Your roots aren't to be found in your childhood so much as in your child. It's he who provides your link to the world, and home is wherever he is. It suddenly dawned on Knud Erik that it was Bluetooth he felt connected to, not Sophie.
They'd met twice, both times by coincidence, but two coincidences don't make a pattern. The first time had been nothing but an immature infatuation, and on Sophie's side not even that, but just a frivolous game with an impressionable boy. She admitted so herself when they happened to talk about it. He'd barely got to know her. The only thing that had tied him to her was the unresolved way they'd parted, and her sudden disappearance.
Knud Erik was no longer attracted to her. But then, he wasn't attracted to any women. That was the problem. He was attracted to a moment's ecstasy in the thunder of an air raid, and nothing else. He preferred to make love in the dark and he only wanted to see a face in a flash of phosphor from a bomb detonating close by. He suspected that, deep down, Sophie was a kindred spirit and that Bluetooth had been conceived during a blitz.
Something united them, but it was no longer budding desire. It was those icy minutes they'd spent together in the water, close to death, when he'd leapt into the sea to save her. Really, it was he himself he'd been trying to save, he supposed. She'd just been the random pretext.
They spoke a lot, and that was what made the greatest change in his life. She'd moved out of the captain's cabin into Helge's; Helge now bunked with the second mate. Though she'd stopped sleeping there, the captain's cabin was no longer a solitary den. She was a few years older than Knud Erik, and both were experienced and disillusioned. She'd lived the dream of her youth to excess, but in the meantime she'd outgrown it and hadn't found a replacement. She'd seen the world too: he could reel off one port after another, and she could match his list, as one sailor to another. That was the note they struck together.
It was a stage he never got beyond, nor did he try to. He never sought out the feminine in her, and perhaps that was why she accepted him. Once she'd hidden behind the stilted, literary language of a bookish and dreamy young girl. Since then she'd acquired the manner of a hardened sailor. It was a world he knew and felt safe in and he had no need to explore what lay behind it. He had neither the energy nor the courage. Anton's advice was still valid: it was better to forget.
He didn't want to get to know another human being too well. He was afraid that what he discovered might destroy him.
He put the whiskey bottle in the cupboard and didn't take it out again. He overcame his contempt for Herman and started turning up in the mess. Bluetooth was the attraction. Though Knud Erik wasn't his father, the boy wouldn't be in this world if it hadn't been for him. He'd stood on the threshold between life and death and pulled a newborn into life. No, he didn't know whether he'd saved himself. But he'd saved Bluetooth, and that mattered more. Suddenly he felt his own lack of children as the greatest absence in his life. Bluetooth wasn't