We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [47]
"The coffee ran out," Albert said. He had sailed on the cutter Catrine for a year. "I was given a quarter pound. It was supposed to last three men for seven days, and the skipper said it had to be strong, and they were always shouting at me because it was too weak. But I got my own back in the end."
"What did you do?" Niels Peter asked. He'd sailed a year longer than Albert and was still wrestling with the coffee problem.
"We've got plenty of dried peas, so I burned some and mixed them in with it, and the skipper said, 'That's a fine cup of strong coffee; this will keep a man on his feet,' but then he and the second mate got the bellyache, and that's how they found out. I used four measures of peas to one of coffee, but I never told them that. Anyway, then I had to come up with something else, so I burned a pot of rye instead. And now I'm getting praise for my strong coffee."
"We always get the blame," Josef said, "when the porridge is burned or the peas won't soften or the rye bread goes moldy."
"My skipper thinks I should eat the food if it's spoiled. 'Eat that moldy bread,' he goes to me one day. 'Swallow those raw peas.' And I said to him, 'No, I'm not some pig that you can just throw any old swill at.'"
Albert straightened his back. We could tell that he was proud of his reply, but we knew what it would have cost him.
"So what happened?"
"I got no breakfast or dinner for two days."
Lorentz turned up. Johan stepped back and stared at the cobbles, but Josef sent him a challenging look, which Lorentz returned: his days of sucking up to us were gone. He was still huge, but there was a strength to his bulk that hadn't been there before. We had never fantasized about his fat white body the way we'd fantasize about women, though a warm tickling had gone through us when we thrashed his soft flesh. If you were to hit him now, you'd damage your knuckles.
He said nothing, and we retreated a step. Did his balls finally drop, once he'd climbed the rigging of the Anne Marie Elisabeth?
Albert sailed another two years on the Catrine. He landed at Flekkefjord, Tønsberg, Fredrikstad, Gothenburg, Riga, Stralsund, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Hartlepool, and Kirkcaldy—and saw nothing. So he signed off. He wanted to get away from the copper pot and the coffee war. The sea was ever-changing, and yet it left him with an impression of sameness. In the autumn he saw it congeal beneath low-hanging layers of stratocumulus cloud. The water moved sluggishly, like liquid mercury. The temperature fell, and when winter announced itself, he saw his own life reflected in the slowly freezing surface of the water.
The clouds above the frozen sea changed, but he was already familiar with them all. There was plenty for the eye to feast on, but nothing for the soul. He had a hunger for something that no sky could satisfy. Somewhere on the planet there had to be a different kind of light. A sea that mirrored new constellations. A bigger moon. A hotter sun.
The skipper offered to sign him on as an ordinary seaman.
"You're a sailor now," he said one night in Stubbekøbing, as Albert helped him pull off his boots. "You can fix a flying jib and a topsail. You know the compass and you can sail by the wind and run before it."
But instead, Albert did as his father before him: he went to Hamburg to find a ship that would take him farther out into the world.
Before he left, he went up into the loft at home. Here, among the sacks of potatoes and grain, sat the sea boots his father, Laurids, had abandoned when he left home for the last time. That had been an omen: they'd realized it later. In stormy weather, when the roof shook and the gable quaked, Albert's mother thought she could hear the empty boots stomping about up there on their own. But no one ever dared go up and look.
Rasmus and Esben had never touched the boots. Out of fear, perhaps—or simply because they'd never matched their father's considerable height and their feet weren't big enough. Only Albert took after Laurids.
He came down