We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [82]
The days passed. I fantasized about my future. I regarded the pearls at one moment as an unexpected stroke of good fortune, and at the next as a curse that would make me an accomplice in Jack Lewis's crimes, should I ever sell them.
All the while we held our course for Samoa.
As long as Jim didn't answer me, I felt I was still free and that nothing had been decided yet. I'd stopped time and I caught myself wishing that I could remain forever in this fuzzy inner world that I'd created with Jim in the twilit cabin, a world where dreams could come true and there was no price to pay for them. I forgot where I really was.
***
I spent most hours of the day alone, but my solitude was no burden. I took my meals in the cabin while the Kanaks ate on deck. They prepared the food: rice and steamed taro. From time to time they'd throw a line over the rail and catch a yellowfin tuna.
I appeared on deck only to correct the course and adjust the spread of the canvas.
After a week the trade wind died down. It disappeared one evening with the sun, which sank into the horizon like a red ball while the clouds fanned out on all sides.
I took that as a bad omen and prepared for a hurricane, but when the next day dawned, the opposite confronted us. The sea was dead calm, as if a heavy lid had been pressed on top of it. The overwhelming heat suggested that a thunderstorm was approaching, but the sky was as blue as a gas flame, and no menacing clouds loomed on the horizon.
I was still convinced that something was about to happen, but my imagination stretched no farther than my fears of an imminent hurricane.
The days passed and we stayed put. The sails hung slack and we rigged an awning amidships to provide shade. For a while I had to part from Jim; it was too hot to sleep in the stagnant air of the cabin, and I didn't want to bring him up on deck with me. Should I leave the pearls down there too?
The dark thoughts I'd nursed down in the cabin wouldn't leave me. I began carrying the leather purse—which contained my entire future—under my shirt, against my bare chest. But it clung to my body in the heat, which had grown so oppressive that I struggled to breathe; I felt as though a gauze bandage gagged my mouth. So I locked the pearls in the cabin with Jim and went bare-chested. From time to time I'd lower a bucket into the sea and pour lukewarm salt water over my body, but neither that nor the arrival of night brought any relief from the heat.
One night, unable to sleep, I headed for the deck. The Kanaks had attached hammocks to the rigging and were murmuring quietly. For the first time my loneliness felt like a burden, but I knew it would be a sign of weakness to approach them or try to strike up a conversation.
We'd secured the wheel. There was no course to stick to. With no current on which to hitch a ride, we weren't going anywhere. I gazed up at the sky. There were still no clouds, and the twinkling of the stars had grown faint, as if they'd given up signaling to us. I understood then how utterly cut off we were from the rest of the world. The Flying Scud was like a planet torn from its orbit and about to vanish into the deepest, darkest corner of the universe.
A groan came from one of the hammocks. I stepped closer. It was the Kanak with the bandaged shoulder. His wound had been healing over the past few days. Did his groaning mean that the fever had returned and that his wound had become infected? I knew what an infection looked like, but I had no idea how to treat it, apart from the primitive method of regularly pouring whiskey over it. It was too dark to do anything, so I decided to wait until morning.
I didn't sleep that night; it was too hot, and I felt restless and irritable. Not because this dead calm had brought our voyage to an unexpected halt and cut us off from the world, but because it had severed me from something far more important: the interior world of the cabin, where I ran the pearls through my fingers and chatted to Jim on the