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Johannes had a strange way of smiling. Everyone who knew him will say so. When he removed his small, round, steel-rimmed glasses and smiled, his face looked almost childishly innocent and unguarded. But his eyes would evade yours, as if the smile was no more than a mask to cover his face so that no one should know what he really thought. It made some people uneasy; they felt it was false and a sign that he was not to be trusted. Others thought it was just additional proof that he was in a constant state of confusion caused by his incessant imbibing, a word that people used in those days. They said that he had started to drink immediately after signing off from his last ship or else that he hit the bottle well after the end of the war, around the time he was sacked from his job at the Mains Farm. That was when the islanders went for him in earnest, threw stones at the walls and windows of his house, overturned his beehives on the hillock and broke into the garage to slash the tyres of his lovingly cared-for Renault Dauphine. To us children, his boozing was in the nature of things, like his mood swings and censorious hatred of everything and everyone. We had become used to the stale smell of alcohol, both bitter and intensely sweet, oozing from his pores when we tried to shake him awake in the mornings, clinging to his clothes and suffusing the air in the house. When he drank, he usually grew more uncommunicative and distant, and retreated to the attic, where he could stay holed up for days before his conscience forced him to come down and try to find us something to eat. At other times, drinking could make him sentimental and chatty, and then he might tell us about growing up in Blylaget village on Nesodden, and about relatives who had gone to sea, as he had done, even though he would have preferred to study geography or maybe the natural sciences, like Nansen or Amundsen. Johannes had crossed the North Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean, and knew his way around the harbours in the Strait of Malacca and French Indochina. He had stories to tell about practically everywhere he had been and would show us the places on maps and postcards. One of his recurring stories came from a tour with a ship carrying propane and butane gas from the Black Sea port of Constanta to Liverpool in England. The ship had just passed through the Bosporus when the seaman on guard duty discovered that one of the gas containers in the hold had started to leak. The captain ordered the crew to go below immediately, locate the faulty container and pump the gas out. The crew refused, to a man. The captain’s next move was to promise the sum of £50 from his personal cash allocation to the first man who volunteered. This was quite a fortune at the time and a man whom everyone called Cheery Harry stepped forward. Harry got his nickname, Johannes explained, because he was the sort of chap who never missed a chance to tell a joke or a tall story or attract attention in some other way. There are people like that, Johannes said, they are somehow raging inside, have to be in on everything straight away and can’t let a challenge pass them by. At this point in the narrative, Johannes would stop for a moment, take his glasses off and rub his face before continuing. There was no diving suit on board but they tied an oxygen canister on to Cheery Harry’s back, stuck a rubber tube on its nozzle and told Harry to keep the other end of the tube in his mouth and breathe through it. Then they wrapped his face in several layers of damp linen cloths, put goggles on him and a helmet on his head, and lowered him into the hold by a rope round his waist. Johannes said that Harry had been moving around down there at first: we watched the flickering beam of his torch but then the light disappeared and the rope went slack. When we hauled him up on deck, the helmet and the mouthpiece had come off and the linen cloths were covered in vomit. Some of his mates cut his shirt open and tried to give him artificial respiration, but it didn’t help. The poisonous gas was inside him. I remember seeing bubbles of gas the size of oranges slip along his spine and his eyes protruded, like fish eyes. As soon as the ship’s doctor had confirmed that he was dead, the crew demanded that the ship should go to the nearest port, but the captain refused and said he didn’t dare to, not with a gas leak on board. We sailed on with the hatches open round the clock and a total ban on fires and open flames. For several weeks, we lived inside a stinking cloud of gas and kept throwing up, until we were so drained and exhausted we could hardly stay upright. They say that one finds true freedom at sea. Once there, you know soon enough who’s in charge: you’re owned by the ship’s officers and the shipping firm, take my word for it, Johannes said. I never felt as free as the day I signed off. Still, if it were true that the man with gas bubbles in his body had sacrificed his life in vain because he belonged to a different kind, as you said, why keep coming back to that hot, sun-pierced morning in the Sea of Marmara when you all stood lined up on deck and the captain held out his fist with fifty quid in it, on offer to the first man to step forward? Could it be because, deep inside, you had a sneaky feeling that it was you, Johannes, who were of a different kind? Because you would not see that, to get somewhere in life, you can’t keep moving anxiously sideways, like a crab, whenever a demand is made of you. But you smiled, Johannes, nothing more: your usual accommodating smile. Of course, as you would stubbornly remind us, it’s a fact that you survived and Cheery Harry did not. And who could deny that?
After signing off, Johannes drove a beer delivery lorry for a brewery in the city. It was his first job on land and he always said his good looks got it for him. And that, for the same reason, he had also been given the use of a motorbike: a robust Harley-Davidson with a Steib sidecar. The sidecar had been rebuilt to hold a gigantic beer barrel with the brewery’s name and logo painted on its side and, below this, the words EXPRESS DELIVERY in large capitals, as if to suggest that in the event that a licensed venue should suddenly find itself short of beer, a young biker with a fine head of hair would instantly come to the rescue. Obviously just a publicity stunt. When Johannes was not posing for photographs, like some mobile advertising pillar, he drove around in a perfectly ordinary lorry, loading or unloading crates of full or empty bottles in dark, smelly dockside bays. But he really was good-looking. His thick, straight hair, which would grow thin and lanky with age, was slicked neatly back over his head from just above the fold of skin made by the sweatband of the brewery driver’s peaked cap, and his prominent nose, which later made him look crafty and sly, gave strength and character to the young man’s face. One of his first deliveries was to the Inner Islands, probably in 1919 or 1920, when Kaufmann had recently installed himself in the Mains Farm and was about to set up the first colony. The bridge to the mainland was not yet built. Because the brewery lorry was too wide to be taken across on the ferry, the crates of beer had to be loaded separately. At the ramp on the island side, a farm cart stood ready to pick them up. Kaufmann himself was waiting in the yard as the cargo of beer bottles came clattering up the Mains Farm Road, and he still stood there, his thumbs hooked under his braces, when Johannes jumped down from the cart and started to unload the rattling crates. No one knows what went through young Kaufmann’s head just then, but Johannes was definitely wearing his grey service coat, taken in at the waist and with wide lapels, and of course the cap, complete with sweatband, peak and lacquer emblem, and then Kaufmann asked, having found out the brewery man’s name: tell me, Johannes, are you a family man? And as soon as Johannes shook his head emphatically, the decision was already made in principle. Kaufmann often gave an impression of being distrait, even confused, but he always knew what he wanted and, once he had made up his mind, arguing was out of the question. Now, can Johannes see the house down there? Kaufmann had said, pointing at a shack on the other side of the road, on the site where later the Yellow Villa was to be built. The place was just a wreck at the time, a man called Brandt lived there and used the outbuildings to breed animals like mink and foxes for their fur. But no more of all that from now on, Kaufmann said, rocking on his heels. Come time, he might well try his hand at animal breeding, he said, but under more rigorous and sanitary conditions. The tannery and those tin-roofed box things meant to be breeding sheds stink to high heaven and must be demolished! Instead, two garages would be built on the si
te, Kaufmann explained, one to house the new Ford car he had just ordered (though, for practical reasons, it had not yet reached the island) and the other for a diesel-engine Daimler van that he had purchased with the intention of starting up a local omnibus service. Johannes would be responsible for the driving as and when required and, otherwise, for the maintenance of the two vehicles. To that end, he would move into the Brandt house, the Yellow Villa to be, and the land that went with it. He could dispose of it all as he saw fit, but Kaufmann offered to help with supplying wood and other building materials if Johannes wanted to refurbish or even rebuild. Besides, there were quite a few skilled tradesmen on the farm who could lend him a hand when needed. Tell me, in that situation, what was I to do? Johannes asked us. I couldn’t say thanks-but-no-thanks just because of the man’s political opinions, even if I had known about them at the time. And then Johannes would show us the photos from the year it took to rebuild the Yellow Villa; actually, it was more like a year and a half because the work had to be put on hold during the winter, which was a hard one. There was a picture of the tannery site; in it, Johannes stands in a ploughed field. He and his helpers had been dynamiting and it took weeks to get the blocks of stone out of the way. They are standing side by side, arms around each other’s shoulders, possibly at dusk, or else the light might come from the front, it is impossible to say because it is a black-and-white photograph and slightly overexposed. Their string vests are bright white against their tanned bodies, which look so dark they almost merge with the newly tilled soil. It is easy to make out Johannes on the far right because of his round glasses, which reflect a stray shaft of light. And there is his smile, open and so excessively well-actually, meaning it makes him look like an ingratiating vicar. Do not swear allegiance to anyone, the priestly smile seems to say; remember, if you don’t there will be no one for you to betray.
When did the decay set in, the slow, inexorable disintegration that stood out as the one ever-present part of Minna’s and my childhood? Johannes got his job because of his handsome looks and impeccable reputation (as people put it at the time), but later, when the war was over and her husband held in a penal institution, Mrs Kaufmann let it be known that she had no further use for him. Anyway, the farm workers seemed to despise and distrust Johannes, probably from early on, and no one was more against him than Mr Carsten, the farm manager. Johannes had of course always been there on show, as it were, and now he was simply too visible; just walking about, he reminded everyone of the shame and notoriety heaped on the Kaufmann family after the war. Perhaps one should make a distinction between the external and internal signs of decline. Long before he arrived on the island, he must have sensed the inner disorientation that he himself thought of as having a spacious soul. Even though he never completed secondary school, he was better read than almost anyone else in the neighbourhood. His first job was as a gardener’s apprentice, but he dropped out and joined the merchant navy, perhaps because men in his family had earned their living at sea for as long as anyone could remember. Unlike them, Johannes did not have a family to support. Both his parents had died early, within a year of each other. He grew up in the care of an uncle, a rural doctor with a large district who was, as far as I know, quite well-to-do. Perhaps Johannes went to sea because he felt there really was nothing else for him or perhaps he followed the path of least resistance. At least, until that fateful sailing from Constanta. Time passed but he did not marry, not even once he had moved into breeder Brandt’s old house. It would have been the proper thing to do, but not only that: he would also have had a wife to stand by him. Instead, he hired a woman to clean and cook, the first of many housekeepers who all had uncertain functions in the household. Some remained just housekeepers, others shared his bed and at least one of them advanced to the point where she got to do his accounts. Regardless, all of them quit within a few months and were remembered only in Carthage, usually the best place for womenfolk, Johannes felt. I remember one of the housekeepers well, perhaps because she stayed on longer than most. Her name was Anne-Louise Hegland. She was not from the island, so she came and went by the regular bus service that linked us to the mainland: four round trips daily. Mrs Hegland was a nice, straightforward woman who would surely have agreed to extend her duties a great deal if Johannes had been able to suggest what and how with any sort of delicacy. Once a month, on a Sunday, the two of them visited a Mrs Guddal, who had worked in the Kaufmann household and later became an in-patient in the Sanatorium at the far end of West Island. The clinic was housed in a large villa, almost a mansion house, which for a few years in the early 1900s had been a nunnery. West Island did not have a bridge either, so the nuns rowed back and forth across the bay in two longboats, which afterwards were left belly-up nearby, looking like beached whales. Once the bridge to the Main Island was ready, the Sanatorium became the home of a psychiatric clinic, run by a trust, with Mrs Kaufmann as one of the board members. Mrs Guddal had been employed by the Kaufmanns since the mid-thirties but had lately succumbed to a condition that was officially understood to be feeble-mindedness but which all the locals knew was kleptomania. Mrs Kaufmann had caught Guddal red-handed in the process of pilfering a cream jug from the family china collection and, once an investigation got underway in earnest, the woman turned out to have quite a treasure trove tucked away in the basement, where the servants’ quarters were at that time (the basement could be reached via a separate entrance at the back of the house). Guddal’s booty included jewellery, clothes and a considerable sum of money. Mrs Kaufmann gave her a stiff talking-to, Mrs Guddal claimed to be full of remorse and apparently handed everything over. She worked as a cleaning lady in various island homes afterwards, but that phase ended just as badly. I believe she stole from Johannes as well. She grew more and more confused, insisting for instance that Mr Carsten was her legal husband and other similar notions, which were always dismissed as pure nonsense up at the Mains Farm. I noted that Johannes and Mrs Hegland were exceptionally punctilious about their monthly trip to visit Mrs Guddal in the Sanatorium but could not fathom why they laid on this overdone show of respect for a woman who was, when all is said and done, no better than a thief and a liar. They drove there in Johannes’s blue Dauphine. Minna and I were not allowed to come along because Mrs Guddal didn’t like children, or so Mrs Hegland said. Before each visit, Hegland set aside several evenings to bake and prepare meals for the ailing lady, and if it was spring or early summer, she always took a bouquet of freshly cut flowers. And then, on the return journey from one of these Sunday excursions, Johannes proposed to Mrs Hegland. He probably tried it on because their joint trips made them look like a couple but, however he went about making his obviously distasteful proposal, it is a fact that the Sunday outings to the Sanatorium ceased from that day, and Mrs Hegland never again stepped off at the bus stop or made her way up to the Yellow Villa with a laden shopping basket. Mrs Hegland was the housekeeper who stayed for the longest time, but I also remember some of the others. One of them stood balanced on the top rung of the ladder, measuring tape in one hand, as she worked out the size of the new sitting-room curtains, one length of fabric after another. She had bought the material with money from the housekeeping kitty, but Johannes took more of an interest in the lady’s long, slim legs than in the curtains. He climbed up into the oxblood-coloured studded armchair and hugged the housekeeper’s thighs so hard that she lost balance and tumbled to the floor in a cloud of glittering lace. And then she, too, gave notice. On top of all the recrimination caused by Johannes’s offensive behaviour towards the women who helped him in the house, there was much head-shaking about the poor little children whom he had been made responsible for, goodness knows why. Anyone could see what a rough time they were having, what with that man being the only one to look after them. Johannes alone did not grasp why people were shocked. But, then, he had anxieties of his own. He must have thought it incomprehensible that his every attempt at courtship was regarded as an indignity. It made him distrustful, and more and mor
e of a loner. One might speculate about what would have become of him if we had not been there – my merciful gifts, as he called us. As well as the great shame of his life.
The Tempest Page 3