We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [81]
It was under these circumstances that I started behaving in a way that I realized was strange. I started talking to Jim. I'd go down to the cabin, light the whale-oil lamp, and unwrap him from his cloth. Then I'd place him on the table in front of me, where the flickering light from the lamp lent his face an attentive expression. I could feel him concentrating, behind his stitched-up eyelids. But he never once talked back to me and I was glad of that. It would have been ultimate proof that I had lost my mind.
I'd place the bag of pearls in front of him and take them out, one by one, to show him. Then I'd ask him if he thought I ought to keep them.
My first impulse had been to throw them into the sea after Jack Lewis's body. Indeed, at times I regretted that I hadn't done so right in front of him, while he still breathed. That missed moment might have represented some sort of victory over him and the amorality he clearly believed he'd infected me with. But I'd hesitated too long. One moment had turned into several, and now I kept the pearls hidden next to Jim. Before long I would probably tuck the bag under my shirt and start guarding it with my life, giving the Kanaks a good reason for taking both from me. Why wouldn't they know the value of pearls, or want some of what the money could buy—freedom especially?
I felt that I was holding my entire future in my hands when I felt the weight of the swollen bag. I didn't even need the Flying Scud. I could buy my own ship. I could buy three ships, become a shipowner, and have my own house. Perhaps even the big, beautiful house built after the fire in Øvre Strandstræde, across from the parsonage. In my imagination I started peopling this house with a wife and children: yes, servants, even. I saw my future wife in a violet dress, picking roses in the garden.
I never described these fantasies to Jim. Instead, I asked him to be my judge. He must make the decision for me. It wasn't the suffering he had endured before he became a shrunken head that qualified him. Rather, it was his silence. I could put any reply I wanted into his mouth.
"So, Jim," I'd say in the twilight of the cabin, "should I keep the pearls? What do you think?"
Jim never said yes or no. He just looked at me through his stitched eyelids, and I felt that the answers to all my questions were hidden behind them.
I began thinking a lot about my papa tru. I'd never asked him for advice and he'd never given me any. We'd parted far too early for that. But now I was looking for him. That was my mission in the Pacific: to find my missing papa tru. But what did I want from him, and what would I do when I found him? Ask him for some good advice? Rebuild our lost relationship? The last time I saw him, I was a child. Now I was an adult and I couldn't turn the clock back. So what did I want to do? Show him that I could stand on my own two feet? Had I looked for him across half the world just to prove to him how easily I could manage without him?
I realized that I'd never thought past the moment when I stood face to face with him again. I was a skilled sailor. I'd crossed the great oceans, but when it came to this, I felt like a newcomer to the world—not because I didn't know its busy, overcrowded ports, its palm-fringed coasts and wind-lashed rocks, but because I understood so little of my own soul. I could navigate from a chart; I could determine my position using a sextant. I was in an unknown place in the Pacific on a ship with no captain and I could still find my way. But I had no way of mapping my own mind or the course of my life.
I emptied Jack Lewis's cupboard of bottles and went on deck to throw them overboard. I didn't open a single one before chucking them into the water—not even the mysterious one with the white fluid in which the outline of a dark shape could sometimes be seen. The doors Jack Lewis had opened to me had led to rooms filled with horrors. I watched the bottles fall astern and disappear beneath the waves.
I knew that I ought to have thrown out