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"You can carry on in the mess. I've spoken to Helge about it."

They were silent for a while. He felt relieved, but he had no idea how to express his joy at her decision. "The crew will be pleased to hear that," he said instead. "They all love Bluetooth."

"I don't know if it's irresponsible to sail with a baby during a war. But if I stayed ashore, I'd be working all day in a munitions factory and I'd never see him. He's only two months old. I wouldn't be able to stand that."

"There are bombs everywhere," he said. He realized that they were discussing Bluetooth the way a married couple would discuss their child.

"I don't know what I'd do with myself if I couldn't sail," she said. "It's my whole life. I can't live in any other way."

He knew what she meant. He'd chosen to be a sailor himself, but at some point the sea had chosen him too. It was something that could no longer be undone. He and Sophie had seemed so very different the first time they met, but since then, they'd lived parallel lives. That said, something seemed to be holding him back and he sensed the same in her too. He wasn't physically impotent. So the impotence must lie in his soul. Finding oblivion in a moment's ecstasy was all he could manage. He couldn't look into someone's eyes while making love.

"I'm like my grandmother," she said. "She was one of those crazy people who can't be with anyone. She couldn't fit in. She needed her independence too much. She had the ice and I have the sea. But it comes down to the same thing."

"You've got a child now. You have to fit in. You're all Bluetooth's got."

"He has us," she said.

He was uncertain if by "us" she was referring to him or the crew of the ship, which she was now a part of. He wanted to ask but feared the question might spoil something. It was she who broke the increasingly tense silence.

"I do know who Bluetooth's father is," she said. "He's not, as most of you probably think, some sailor I happened to meet on shore leave. I know his name, I know his address, I've met his parents and his friends. We were engaged to be married."

"So what went wrong?"

"What was wrong was that he looked like Jimmy Stewart. You know, the American actor. Six foot something, with the face of a boy."

"But Jimmy Stewart's handsome!"

"Yes. And he was so damn nice, I didn't know whether to cry or throw up. He was sweet and decent and reliable and he loved me. He had a flourishing law practice in New York. Plenty of money, plenty of everything. We'd have lived in Vermont and our children would've grown up in the country and the war would've been so far away, we wouldn't have heard it even if they dropped the biggest bomb in the world."

"And you couldn't stand that?"

"I wanted it more than anything. But I was promised to another. What was his name again, the ugly little manikin, Rumpelstiltskin? No prince can save me. I briefly believed Jimmy Stewart could. But the reality is that I prefer life with Rumpelstiltskin. Do you know what I ended up hating about him, my Jimmy Stewart boyfriend? It was his damned innocence. I ended up seeing it as dishonesty. He took me out to dinner. We raised our glasses and looked into each other's eyes. We planned our future. The war might just as well never have happened. We just sat there enjoying ourselves in our nice, quiet way, and afterward we went home and slept in our soft bed, and I knew we'd carry on doing that until the day we died. I couldn't bear it. So one evening, instead of clinking glasses, I threw my drink in his face. It wasn't his fault. He can't help it that he hasn't seen a ship blow up and a hundred men drown in front of his eyes. At bottom, I guess I'm the one with the problem. But his innocence came across as an insult." She flung out her hand. "It's not that I love all of this. I can't even explain why I'm here. I don't fit in anywhere. Unless it's here. Or, rather"—she smiled from sudden relief, as if all that talking had finally led her to the right word—"it's the k'ivitok in me."