We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [323]
The trust between them grew, but the distance was still there too, and it didn't decrease. She was right, he thought. It was the war. It was inside them both. Nothing could happen between them until the war was over. But when would the war end? Would they be there when it finally happened? He wanted to have a child with her. It was a blind urge in him, but how long could they wait? She was a couple of years older than he was, thirty-four or thirty-five. When was a woman too old to have a baby?
He gave up. There was Bluetooth. Bluetooth was his child—and the whole crew's.
They celebrated Christmas somewhere north of Ireland. In Halifax, Wally had gone ashore and come back with a fir tree slung over his shoulder: he'd lashed it to the bow, so it didn't start to lose its needles until they put it up in the mess. Helge had managed to obtain a bag of hazelnuts from somewhere, and the crew got four each. He'd wrapped them in pink tissue paper and handed them out as gifts. Meanwhile other presents were piling up under the Christmas tree. They were all for Bluetooth, though he was still far too young to appreciate them. Sophie unwrapped the packages on his behalf. Inside them was a world he'd not get to know until the war was over: cows and horses, pigs and sheep, an elephant and two giraffes. Most were hand-carved in wood and then carefully painted with any available paint—though the colors tended to be those of the world of war they were trapped in: black, gray, and white.
Bluetooth took the cows, the horses, and the elephant, put them in his mouth one by one, and gnawed at them tentatively.
BLUETOOTH WAS ABOUT a year old when Sophie went ashore with the crew in Liverpool one night. She left him asleep in the seamen's fo'c'sle with Wally, his special pal, who'd volunteered to babysit. Knud Erik didn't know what she was looking for. Was it something they couldn't give each other, something they could find only with strangers?
He went ashore alone. He'd put the whiskey bottle back in the cupboard and never taken it out again. But he couldn't give up his shore nights. They ran into each other in a pub in Court Street. She was wearing a dark red dress and her lips were painted. He was reminded of the first time he met her, in her father's house in Little Bay. They both looked away as if by mutual agreement and pretended they hadn't seen each other.
He went straight back to the ship and turned in immediately. Half an hour later the door to his cabin opened, and an unfamiliar scent of perfume filled the narrow room. Had he deliberately forgotten to lock his door?
"We can't go on like this," she said, and began to undress in the dark.
"I've killed a man," he said. "He was kneeling down, pleading for mercy, and I shot him."
She snuggled up to him in the berth. She cradled his head in her hands. He could barely make out her features in the dim light from the skylight. "My Knud Erik," she said, and her voice was thick with a tenderness he'd never heard before.
He freed himself from her embrace and stepped out onto the floor. "I need light," he said. He switched it on and went back to her. "The red distress lights."
He didn't know why he'd said that. Those words were taboo: they conjured forbidden memories he must keep at bay if he wanted to survive. But deep down, he understood that if he wanted to be able to love, he must speak them aloud.
"There isn't one of us who doesn't think about them," she said.
"I sailed over them."
"We," she said. "We all sailed over them."
He let his hand glide down her face and he noticed that her cheek was wet. He pulled her to him and looked into her eyes.
All was completely quiet around them. No air-raid warnings shrilled, no bombs thudded, no waves splashed across the deck, no thunder roared from exploding ammunition ships. There was only the sound of the generator working away deep in the bowels of the Nimbus.
He kept holding her tight.
"My Sophie," he said.
IN AUGUST 1943 the Danes rose up and built barricades in Copenhagen and other towns. The government ceased working