“Thanks, but I’m sure everything will go well.”
“Maybe it will, but you must remember to be careful, mustn’t you.” She was still holding my arm and squeezing it hard, and when she realized that she blushed and let go. I stroked her cheek.
“Aunt Kari, everything will be all right now,” I said, picking up my case, I was impatient and feeling bad about it.
“I wonder,” she said quietly, and she had tears in her eyes, and then I couldn’t say any more, even though I knew it would be a long time until we saw each other again. And then I went on board.
She stood on the quay until the ship was under way and I stood on deck, and for a moment I was certain she was going to take out a cigar, but she only raised her hand, turned and walked through the hall and out on the other side where the taxis had gone away and she got into the Citroën and drove off. I looked at the note I held in my hand. It was a hundred kroner. I could buy myself schnapps for months with that.
I didn’t have a berth but a hammock in a section of the ship without portholes two stairways down from the superstructure in the stern. It was pitch dark when I went in with my suitcase in one hand and a blanket I had been given in the other, and I put down the case to find the light switch. When the light came on I saw there were more suitcases and bags in there, but only one hammock was occupied, and that someone turned around and said:
“Put that light out, for Christ’s sake!”
“In a moment,” I said, “I just want to stow my luggage.”
I went over to a free hammock next to the person, who was a lady, put my blanket into it and the suitcase underneath.
“I’m feeling so ill, you see,” she said, and then I saw her face. She didn’t look well. She screwed up her eyes and pulled her mouth into a tight line. She was younger than me.
“Is there anything I can do, shall I fetch help?”
“Oh, no, I’m just so damn seasick. It’s the same every time.”
“Seasick now? We’re not at Drøbaksundet yet.”
She opened her eyes. “Aren’t we? Damn it, I thought we were long past that. I can’t have slept for more than five minutes.”
“There won’t be much sea running till we’re past Færder lighthouse. Besides, it’s dead calm.”
“Is it?” She raised her head and looked around her. She had red hair like Rita Hayworth in technicolor, it lay around her head in a huge tangle.
“You’re Danish, aren’t you,” she said. “Are you on your way home?”
“You could say that. An old aunt of mine says the best remedy for seasickness is a schnapps on an empty stomach just before you eat.”
“All very well for
her
to say that.
I’m
broke.”
“But I’m not. May I treat you?”
“Thanks for the offer,” she said, getting carefully out of the hammock and putting her feet on the floor to see if it moved. It did not.
“I’m Klara,” she said.
It was dark outside the windows of the cafeteria, but we could sometimes glimpse the snow where the fjord was narrow, and the lamps in houses right down by the water and a car on a bridge with its lights on, and mostly we saw our own faces in the glass. Klara had brushed her hair till it shone and stood out like mine would have done if it had not been cut short, and she had a sweet face with fair skin which must have been freckled in summer. She raised her glass with the clear schnapps and said:
“Farewell, Birthplace of Giants; I’m sick of it. Shall I tell you who I was named after?”
“You may as well,” I said.
“Clara Zetkin. D’you know who that is?”
“Yes. She was a German communist.”
“Right. German communist and friend of Lenin. They wrote letters to each other. She was a giant. My father is a giant too. He’s a communist at Aker Mekaniske Verksted. He makes speeches with his fist clenched at club meetings. My boyfriend is smashing, in a few years he’ll be a great giant too. It’s not that I’m against them at all, but I’m fed up. They won the war single-handed. They can’t talk about anything else. And then
I
have to make coffee. So I picked up my hat and left, as they say. Anyway for a while. Now they can make the coffee themselves. I’m going to Hirtshals in Jutland to clean fish.”
I pictured Rita Hayworth in a fish delivery hall. It didn’t seem so daft.
“We had a picture of Lenin,” I said. “That’s to say, my brother had. In a shack we built on the shore. It may still be hanging there.”
“Are you a communist?”
“No, I’m a syndicalist.”
“Ah ha. Then we’d better not discuss the Spanish war. Or there’ll be trouble.”
I laughed. “No, better not.” I said. “Skål.” Then each of us emptied our glasses into each of our empty stomachs before we ate the rissoles that were the dish of the day, and the only one.
After Færder I was the one who was ill. We had gone down to bed and fallen asleep at once, and when I woke up I heard violent creaking and the sound of the sea beating along the sides of the ship and someone snoring in the darkness. It was not Klara. I felt the nausea rising and didn’t know whether it was the schnapps we had drunk or the bad air or the sea against the ship that lifted and dropped all the space around me, but I had to get out. I found my coat in the heap of clothes and the door in the dark and went out into the blinding light of the staircase and up the stairway, leaning first against one wall and then the other with the ship’s movements, and right up on deck. It was dark out there with throbbing sounds. The weather had changed. There was a shrieking wind and white foam in the air and a sudden slash of drops on my face. With my coat tightly around me I went over to the other side of the deck so I had the wind behind me and vomited over the railing. “How kind of you to feed the fish,” Jesper would have said. I wiped my mouth and walked backward until my back was against the wall of the superstructure, held on tight and stared out into the gray black spray where the crests rushed along, and I stood there till I felt better and so long that my teeth began to chatter and then a bit more.
When I went down darkness filled the space so densely that I felt the air like cloth against my face, I had to support myself along the wall and feel my way to the empty hammock. I leaned against it to swing myself up, and that was hard enough with the light on and dead calm, and even more difficult now.
“Is that you?” whispered Klara. “Are you ill?”
“I must be.”
“I’m quite all right, isn’t that weird?” she said. “I was always sick before. It must be those schnapps.”
I did not reply. If I lay right back with my eyes open and did not move, I didn’t feel too bad.
“Hey,” whispered Klara, “can I ask you one thing?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Are you going to have a baby?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Because you keep on stroking your stomach, and I thought, unless that lady has a damn awful pain in her stomach, she must be expecting a baby. My sister did the same thing when she was pregnant. She didn’t even realize she was doing it.”
I didn’t realize it either. I stroked my stomach in the dark and felt quite sure there was something there, and I had been so confident the whole time and so full of expectation, but now I could not remember why. Maybe it was the night, and this darkness and the sea out there with no light from anywhere, only gray black in one huge abyss and the ship so frail and weightless and far away from everything.
“Yes,” I said, “I’m going to have a child.”
“That explains everything,” said Klara, “now you mustn’t bother me any more. I need to sleep.” Then she was quiet and perhaps she slept, and the creaking went on and the sound of the sea thumping against the ship, but the hammock followed gravity more than the movements of the boat, and it was like hanging in the middle of a wheel with the whole world spinning around and around, and I lay quite still.
I was awake and up on deck before Skagen. It was still dark with a pale gray streak in the direction of Sweden, and I stayed there till I saw the lighthouse in front, and I stood by the rail as we passed and let myself be dazzled. The sea was calmer now, the seagulls following us hung over the ship completely still and gray and unmoving as if they were tied to invisible threads, and when the beam of light came they were suddenly white and so close that if I stood on tiptoe I was sure I could stroke the feathers under their breasts.
I stood there until the lighthouse disappeared to the north and only the flashes came each time the beam pointed at the ship’s course, and then I went into the cafeteria. I sat there for an hour before Klara came up with her hair in chaos, and the ship turned toward land around Hirsholmene, and I saw the lights of the town and Pikkerbakken faintly in the gray light behind the houses and the lights of the breakwater, red and green alternately, and the masts in the fishing harbor and the corn silo and the church with the bell like a golden spot in the tower. The tugboat came thumping toward us from inside the harbor, and Klara sat down beside me and said:
“I get really melancholy when I arrive at a new place like this. Don’t you?”
“Not exactly,” I said, “this is my town. I was born and brought up here.”
“So you’re home, then.”
Home, I thought, where is that. I gazed at the quay and the few people there, but it was still too far away to distinguish one from another in the gray light that made all the colors melt together.
“Then you will be met and everything. I’m quite alone, I am. But that’s what I wanted, of course.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
There was no one there to meet me. I didn’t know what to think. Everything was familiar, and everything was strange. Klara walked away from the ship with me. We each carried our suitcases along the inner quays where fish boxes with holes in them were immersed in the water with the live catch inside, and two fishermen pulled the net from its roll in their boat and out over the quay in one big fan, I saw there were tears in it and loose threads in several places. They wore big boots and oilskin trousers with wide braces and thick jumpers and caps of the same material. One of them had bare hands. It was cold, and they were painfully red and swollen from the freezing wind and water, and I felt uncomfortably neat and different in Aunt Kari’s coat as we walked past. Klara turned and stared and could not stop staring and almost walked backward up to the Cimbria Hotel.
“Christ. I’ll be meeting that sort of man every day. Just look at them,” she said, but I didn’t want to turn around.
“I’ve seen them before,” I said. We were almost at Lodsgate, and I felt like stopping or walking past. It was confusing.
“Yeah, of course you have,” said Klara.
We turned up the street and walked past the Færgekroen which was dark and closed and then on to the sign which should read: Herlov Bendiksen—Glazier, but it did not. It read: Konrad Mortensen—Everything in glass and frames, and it came so abruptly that it almost made me cry. It was dark in the dairy shop, and dark in the little room beside it, but there was light in the living room on the first floor. I stood still for a moment, Klara looked the way I was looking, and then I went on up to Danmarksgate and stopped on the corner and pointed:
“The railway station is five blocks that way and then up to the left onto Kirkegate. You’ll see it at once.
I’m
not going any further now.”
Klara put down her suitcase on the sidewalk, clasped her arms around me and gave me a big hug. She had perfume on. After a few weeks of cleaning fish
that
would change.
“I don’t really want to leave you,” she said, “you suddenly looked so sad.”
“I’m fine. Now I’m going home and all that.”
“Of course you are.” She laughed. “I’m not, luckily. Maybe we’ll meet again. We’re in the same country, at least.”
“We probably will,” I said.
“Thanks for the schnapps. They gave me a real buzz.”
“You’re welcome.”
She walked backward up the street for a few steps waving one glove, and I waved back, took a firm grip of the suitcase handle, and went down Lodsgate again and into the entrance to Number 2.
It was quiet on the staircase. I put the suitcase beside the door leading into the dairy shop. I pushed it ajar and looked in. It was still dark in there, but I saw the clock on the wall. It was past eight. That was odd. The light should be on now and early customers with rolls in paper bags on their way in to buy milk for breakfast coffee. The door of the room at the other end was closed, and no sounds came from it. I took a few steps into the shop and stood there behind the counter on the black and white tiles. I looked at the door for a long time, then I went back again. I left the suitcase standing there and went and sat down on the step in front of the shop and lit a cigarette. It didn’t taste good, but I stayed there until it was finished. A man cycled past, he stared at me and went on staring until his head had turned right around and he almost fell off and had to put one foot down. I stubbed out the cigarette on the edge of the step, stood up and went in again and up the steep winding stairs without the suitcase and without making too much noise, but I did not tiptoe either. It smelled of coffee and faintly of cigar as it had always done. The door of the living room was open but it was silent in there. I heard the tick of the pendulum clock. I put my head in to look. They both sat in their chairs by the window, and between the chairs was the lighted lamp and the small table in dark wood and glass where the missionary journals lay in piles. But neither of them was reading.
“Hi, it’s me,” I said. “You’re so quiet in here.”
They turned and looked toward the door where I stood. I had only been home once in almost three years, but they looked at me as if I were either a total stranger or had just been down for a couple of minutes to fetch a bottle of milk. At length my father tried to smile, and that was strange too, he hardly ever smiled, and anyway he didn’t manage to, and my mother’s eyes were blue, blue, blue.
“Where’s Jesper?” I asked.
“Jesper is in Morocco,” my mother said in a low voice.
“That is not right. I had a letter two weeks ago and then he was about to come home, and that letter had been on the way for just as long. So that
isn’t
right.”