by Peter Høeg
No one reacts. They all know that there’s something wrong with this trip. Besides, they’re used to the conditions on board the big tankers. Most of them have been at sea for up to seven months without putting in to port.
Lukas looks at Tørk. This meeting was arranged for Tørk’s benefit. At his request. Maybe so that he could see all of us in one place. To gauge our reactions. While Lukas talked, Tørk’s eyes wandered from face to face, resting on each for a moment. Now he turns around and leaves. Seidenfaden and Claussen follow him.
Lukas adjourns the meeting. Verlaine exits. The mechanic pauses for a moment to talk to Urs, who is explaining in broken English about the croissants we just ate. I catch something about the importance of moisture. Both in the rising stage and in the oven.
Fernanda makes her departure, avoiding my eyes.
The mechanic leaves. He hasn’t looked at me once. I’m going to see him this afternoon. But until then we have to pretend we don’t exist for each other.
I think about what I have to work on in the meantime. Not some kind of glorious planning for the future, merely a dull, barebones strategy for survival.
I drift down the corridor. I have to talk to Lukas.
I have one foot up on the stairs as Hansen comes down toward me. I withdraw to the open deck area below the upper level.
This is where I first realize how bad the weather is. The rain is close to freezing, heavy and torrential. The gusts of wind whip up the rain as it falls. There are white stripes across the sea where the wind is chopping at the tops of the swells, pulling them along as spindrift.
The door opens behind me. I don’t turn around; I walk over toward the exit to the quarterdeck. It opens and Verlaine comes out.
This narrow, covered section of open deck now seems different than before. My attention is usually diverted by the permanently lit emergency lights and the two doors, and by the windows of the crew cabins facing the deck. Now I realize that this is one of the most isolated spots on board. It can’t be seen from above, and there are only two entrances. The windows behind me belong to Jakkelsen’s cabin and my own. In front of me is the sea rail. Beyond that, it’s forty feet down to the sea.
Hansen approaches while Verlaine stays where he is. I weigh 110 pounds. With a quick lift I’ll be in the water. What was it Lagermann said? You hold your breath until you think your lungs are going to burst. That’s when you feel pain. Then you exhale and take a deep breath. After that there’s only peace.
This is the only place they could do it without being seen from the bridge. They must have been waiting for this opportunity.
I go up to the railing and lean over. Hansen comes closer. We both move calmly and deliberately. On my right the drop to the sea is interrupted by the freeboard extending down to the railing. On the outside of the ship a row of rectangular iron rungs has been welded into recesses, vanishing up into the darkness.
I perch on top of the railing. Hansen and Verlaine freeze. The way people always freeze when faced with someone who’s going to jump. But I don’t jump. I grab hold of the iron rungs and pull myself out over the side.
Hansen can’t figure out what I’m up to. But Verlaine rushes to the railing and grabs for my ankles.
The Kronos is struck by a heavy swell. The hull shudders and lists to starboard.
Verlaine has hold of my foot. But the movement of the ship presses him against the railing, threatening to fling him into the sea. He has to let me go. My feet slip on the rungs, which are as slippery as soap from the rain and salt water. While the ship rolls back, I hang by my hands. Somewhere far below me the waterline shines white. I close my eyes and clamber up.
After what seems like an eternity, I open my eyes again. Below, Hansen is staring up at me. I’ve climbed only a few yards.
I’m outside the windows of the promenade deck. On my left there are lights behind the blue curtains. I pound on the glass with the palm of my hand. When I give up and start climbing again, someone cautiously pushes the curtains aside. Kützow peers out at me. I have been pounding on the window of the engineer’s office. He shields his face with his hands to block out the reflection, pressing his face against the window. His nose becomes a flattened, dull green spot. Our faces are only inches away from each other.
“Help,” I scream. “Help, goddamn it!”
He looks at me. Then he pulls the curtains shut.
I keep on climbing. The rungs stop and I collapse on the boat deck next to the davits holding the aft lifeboat. The door is immediately to my right. It’s locked. An outside ladder like the one I’ve just climbed leads up along the funnel to the platform outside the bridge.
Under different circumstances I would have had reason to admire Verlaine’s foresight. At the top of the ladder, a few yards above, Maurice is standing, with his arm still in a sling. He’s there to ensure that there are no witnesses on the upper decks.
I head for the stairs leading down. From the deck below Verlaine is coming up toward me.
I turn around. I think that I might be able to get the lifeboat lowered into the water. That it must have some kind of quick release to make it drop. That I could jump into the water after it.
But standing in front of the winches for lowering the boat, I have to give up. The system of carabiners and cables is too complicated. I rip the tarp off the boat, looking for something to defend myself with. A boat hook or a flare.
The tarp is made of heavy green nylon with elastic along the edge that fits around the gunwale of the boat. When I lift it up, the wind pulls it free and it flaps out over the side of the ship. It catches on an eyelet on the bow of the lifeboat.
Verlaine is up on deck. Hansen is right behind him. I grab the tarp and step over the side. The Kronos rolls and I’m lifted free; wrapping my thighs around the tarp, I lower myself down. At the end of the tarp my feet dangle in midair. Then I fall. They’ve cut the tarp loose. I fling out my arms and the sea rail catches me in the armpits. My knees strike the side of the ship. But I keep hanging there, momentarily paralyzed because the breath was knocked out of me. Then I slide headfirst onto the upper deck.
An absurd fragment of memory brings up images of the first time I ever played tag, right after I arrived in Denmark—my unfamiliarity with the game, which quickly eliminated the weak, and then, through a natural hierarchy, everyone else.
The door to the stairway opens and Hansen appears. I head across the quarterdeck, making it over to the stairs leading up to the boat deck. At eye level a pair of blue shoes is coming down the steps. I stick my hands under the railing and shove the shoes outward. It’s a continuation of their own movement, so it doesn’t take much force. The feet sail out into the air in a small arc, and Verlaine’s head strikes the step next to my shoulders. Then he plummets down the last few yards and hits the deck without being able to break his fall.
I run up the stairs. On the boat deck I cross over to starboard and then climb up the ladder. Maurice must have heard me. As I climb he comes over to the ladder. Behind him the door to the bridge opens and Kützow appears. He’s wearing a bathrobe and is barefoot. He and Maurice stare at each other. I walk past them into the bridge.
I fumble for the flashlight in my pocket. The beam catches Sonne’s face. Maria is standing at the tiller.
“Let me into the sick bay,” I say. “I’ve had an accident.”
Sonne leads the way. Outside the chart room he turns around and stops dead. I look down at myself. The knees of my jogging pants are gone; instead, there are two bloody holes. The palms of both hands are lacerated.
“I fell,” I tell him.
He unlocks the sick bay. He avoids looking at me directly.
When I sit down and the skin tightens across my knees, I almost faint. A flood of tiny, painful memories washes over me: the first stairs in boarding school and falling on rough ice—flashes of light, numbness, heat, sharp pain, cold, and finally a dull throbbing.
“Could you clean it for me?”
He looks away.
“I can’t stand the sight of blood.”
I clean it myself. My hands shake, the liquid runs down over my wounds. I put on sterile compresses and wrap gauze around them.
“Give me some Cliradon,” I say.
“That’s against regulations.”
I stare up at him. He takes out a bottle.
“And amphetamines.”
Every ship’s pharmacy and every expedition has a supply of medicine to stimulate the central nervous system and relieve the feeling of exhaustion.
He hands me some. I crush five tablets into a paper cup with water. They taste bitter.
I’m having a hard time using my hands. He takes out a pair of white, tight-fitting cotton gloves, the kind worn by people with allergies.
As I go out the door he tries to smile bravely. “Feeling better now?”
He is the quintessential Dane, with his fear, his iron resolve to repress what’s happening around him. And his indomitable optimism.
The rain hasn’t let up. It looks like ropes of water slanting across the windows of the bridge. The dim gray of faint daylight is appearing.
“Where’s Lukas?”
“In his cabin.”
A man who hasn’t slept for forty-eight hours is useless.
“He goes on watch in an hour,” says Sonne. “In the crow’s nest. He wants to see the ice for himself.”
One of the radar screens is fixed on a radius of fifty sea miles. A short distance from the edge it shows a cross-hatched green continent. The beginning of the field ice.
“Tell him that I’ll be up to see him,” I say.
The deck of the Kronos is deserted. It no longer resembles anything on board a ship. The faint daylight forms deep shadows, but they’re not just shadows anymore. In every patch of darkness an inferno is raging. When I was a child, this atmosphere accompanied every death. Somewhere women would start shrieking, and then we knew that someone had died; this awareness would transform the area. Even if it was May in Siorapaluk, with a bluish-green light flooding down, penetrating everything and making people crazy with the spring, even this kind of light would be transformed to the cold reflection of a realm of the dead that had moved up aboveground.
A ladder goes up along the front of the mast. The crow’s nest is a flat aluminum box furnished with windows both fore and aft. Mandatory on any ship that sails in ice.
It’s sixty-five feet to the top. It doesn’t look like much on my sketch of the Kronos. But the climb up is terrifying. The ship pitches through the sea and rolls sideways; all the movements at the hull’s fulcrum become magnified the higher I go, and the oscillation of the mast is more extreme.
The rungs come to an end at a platform, above which the block of the derrick is attached. From there you step up onto a smaller platform and then through a little door into the metal shed.
It’s just high enough to stand up. In the darkness I can make out an old-fashioned engine room telegraph, a tilt gauge, a log, a large compass, a tiller, and the intercom to the bridge. When we enter the field ice, Lukas will steer the Kronos from up here. Only from here will there be sufficient visibility.
There’s a seat along the back wall. When I come in, he moves aside and makes room for me. I see him as a denser shape in the darkness. I want to tell him about Jakkelsen. On every ship the captain has some type of weapon. And he still has his position of authority. It must be possible to hold Verlaine at bay, to turn the ship around. We should be able to reach Sisimiut within seven hours.
I slide onto the seat. He puts his feet up on the telegraph. It’s not Lukas, it’s Tørk.
“The ice,” he says. “We’re getting close to the ice.”
It’s barely visible, like a grayish-white light on the horizon. The sky is low and dark like coal smoke, with a few lighter patches.
The little cabin that we’re in jolts from side to side. I roll toward him and then back over to the wall. He doesn’t move. With his boots up on the telegraph and his hand on his chair, he seems to be wedged tight.
“You went ashore on the Greenland Star. You were in the forward part of the ship when the first fire alarm went off. Kützow has seen you walking around at night several times. Why?”
“I’m used to being able to move freely aboard ship.”
I can’t see his face; I can barely make out his profile.
“What ship? You only gave the captain your passport. I faxed the Marine Transport Commission. They’ve never issued a discharge book in your name.”
For a moment the temptation to give up is overwhelming.
“I sailed on smaller ships. They never ask for papers outside the merchant fleet.”
“So you heard someone mention this job and contacted Lukas.”
It’s not a question, so I don’t reply. He’s studying me. He probably can’t see any better than I can.
“This voyage wasn’t mentioned anywhere. It was kept secret. You didn’t contact Lukas. You got Lander, the owner of a casino, to set up a meeting.”
His voice is low, interested. “You sought out Andreas Licht and Ving. You’re looking for something.”
The ice seems to be slowly wandering toward us, across the sea.
“Who are you working for?”
It’s the realization that he knew who I was from the very beginning that is so excruciating. Not since my childhood have I felt so strongly in someone else’s power.
He didn’t tell the mechanic that I would be on board. He wanted to observe our encounter. In order to see what there was between us. That was his primary objective in gathering us all together in the mess. It’s impossible to guess what he has decided.
“Verlaine thinks it’s the Danish National Police. I was leaning toward that opinion myself for a while. I had a look at your apartment in Copenhagen. And at your cabin here on board. You seem so alone. So unorganized. But maybe it’s some corporation? A private client?”
For a moment I was about to sink back to await sleep, unconsciousness, and then oblivion. But the repetition of his question brings me out of my trance. He wants an answer. This, too, is an interrogation. He can’t be a hundred percent sure who I am. Whom I have contacted. Or how much I know. I’m still alive.
“A child in my building fell off a roof. I found Ving’s address in his mother’s apartment. She gets a pension from the Cryolite Corporation as the result of her husband’s death. This led me to the company archives and to what information was available on the expeditions to Gela Alta. Everything else stemmed from that.”
“With whose help?”
All along there’s been a sense of both urgency and indifference in his voice. As if we were discussing mutual friends or circumstances that had no real impact on us.
I never believed that people could be truly cold. Strained perhaps, but not cold. The essence of life is warmth. Even hatred is warm when unleashed on its natural target. Now I realize that I’ve been mistaken. A cold, overwhelming current of energy, physically real, emanates from this man next to me.
I try to picture him as a boy, try to hold on to something human, something understandable: a malnourished, fatherless boy in a shed in Brønshøj. Tormented, thin as a bird, and alone.
I have to give up; the image falters, shatters, and dissolves. The man beside me is rock solid, and yet fluid and cunning. A man who has risen above his past so there is no longer any trace of it.
“With whose help?”
This last question is the key one. What I know is not important. The important thing is who I’ve shared the information with. So he can figure out what’s in store for him. Maybe this is where his humanity lies, in the traces of growing up with a sense of unfathomable insecurity: the need to plan, to make his world predictable.
I remove all emotion from my voice. “I’ve always been able to handle things myself.”
He pauses for a moment. “Why are you doing this?”
“I want to understand why he died.”
An extraordinary feeling of confidence can come ove
r you when you’re standing at the end of the plank with a blindfold over your eyes. I’m positive that I’ve said the right thing.
He takes in my answer. “Do you know why I’m going to Gela Alta?”
The “I” in his question reveals great candor. Gone is the ship, the crew, me, and his colleagues. The whole extraneous machinery is moving for his sake alone. The question holds no arrogance. It is simply an expression of fact. We are all here, for one reason or another, because he wanted us here and was able to make it happen.
I’m walking a tightrope. He knows that I’ve lied, that I didn’t get here without someone’s help. The fact that I was allowed on board at all tells him as much. But he still doesn’t know whether he’s sitting next to an individual or an organization. His doubt is my opportunity. I remember the faces of the hunters when they returned home; the more they had on their sled, the more remote their expression would be. I remember my mother’s false modesty after fishing trips. It was her charade, but it was Moritz who pinned it down during one of his fits of rage: “It’s best to underplay by 20 percent; 40 percent is even better.”
“We’re going to pick up something,” I say. “Something so heavy that it requires a ship the size of the Kronos.”
It’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking. In the darkness, I sense only the presence of a force that registers and analyzes, manifested in extreme alertness. And again the image of a polar bear comes to mind: the way the beast realistically evaluates its own hunger, the defensive capability of its prey, and the situation in general.
“Why did you call my apartment?” I hear myself ask him.
“I found out a lot from that phone call. No normal woman, no normal human being would have picked up that phone.”
Together we step out onto the platform, which now has a light coating of ice. Every time a wave rams the hull, we can feel the strain of the engines as the pressure on the propeller increases.