"I'm teaching your apprentice some manners," Herman said's calmly.
Turning on his heel, he left the shop without buying the folding ruler. Kristian rubbed his sore cheek and tried to conceal a smile. His ears had returned to a state of peace. He'd seen Herman's hands shake. And he knew that he'd set something in motion.
ANTON HAD ONCE tried to make us believe that the murdered man stood in the potato bed every night, calling for his head, but we'd never believed him. Then one night a black, stooping figure really did appear in the dark garden below his window, and a voice halfway between a whisper and a hoarse cry called out to Anton for a head—not his own, but his victim's.
"Anton Hansen Hay!"
Anton, who was fast asleep, dreamt that he was being told off by a teacher or by his father, because they were the only ones who ever used his full name. It took a while for him to wake up and even longer to work out where the voice was coming from. He looked out the window and saw the figure, but couldn't make out who it was. He wasn't scared; it had been ages since he'd thought about the dead man's skull, and at first he had no idea what the man below was referring to. He'd never believed in his own story about the ghost haunting him at night, and besides, the black figure standing there now wasn't headless.
Then he woke up fully, and though the man beneath the window still hadn't identified himself, it didn't take Anton long to work out who he was. And then he was scared, more scared than he'd ever been of any ghost, more scared than he'd ever been in his entire life—though that wasn't really saying much. If Herman could kill his stepfather, he could kill Anton too. It would be no problem for him at all.
Having got this far in his reflections, Anton slammed the window shut and hurried downstairs to make sure that all the doors in the house were locked. They weren't, but fortunately the keys were in the locks, and he frantically secured them all, one after another, before running back to his room and hiding under the bed.
Eventually the voice outside the window stopped, but Anton was too exhausted to climb back into bed. His last thought before he fell asleep on the floor was that he was lucky there was no one around to see him.
Anton's father wasn't at home: he'd gone to sea nine months before and he wouldn't be back for at least another year. He knew nothing about Anton's spectacles and Anton was convinced that the day he came home and saw his son's face, his greeting would include the word "four-eyes." No: Anton would never confide in the Foreigner, nor would he ever dream of confiding in his mother or any other adult. Anton was of the opinion that a boy should solve his own problems without expecting help from anyone else, least of all from adults, who's were the natural enemies of children. If they had to choose between believing a child and one of their own, they'd never choose the child. Least of all the Terror of Marstal, who'd shot Kristian Stærk in the eye and kept a murdered man's head in his room for months without saying a word, even though he knew who the victim was and could have helped bring the murderer to justice. Anton had always been completely indifferent to the legal significance of his find. As far as he was concerned, Herman was free to go about his business. Now he realized what a foolish attitude that was. But he saw no way out of the fix he was in.
The morning after he'd heard the voice in the garden, Anton found Tordenskjold dead in his cage; his neck had been wrung. His wings had been broken and nearly ripped from his body, as if by a person of unusual strength in an uncontrollable rage. Anton's hands started to shake at the sight and it was a long time before he was able to bury the dead seagull.
From then on, every night he locked all the doors of the house.
"What are you doing that for?" his mother said. "You've grown very strange recently." She was well aware that Anton had changed, but she didn't know whether or not it was cause to celebrate. She didn't ask him if something was wrong. Everything in Anton's life seemed so remote and alien to her that she sometimes caught herself wondering whether she really had given birth to the child known as the Terror of Marstal. Asking him if something was wrong was the same as asking him who he really was, and she knew from bitter experience that the only response he'd give her was a shrug.
"Do we have a chamber pot?" Anton asked.
"Are you ill?"
"Yes," Anton said.
"This isn't about trying to get out of going to school tomorrow, is it?"
"I'll go to school all right. Now get me that chamber pot."
With a puzzled look, his mother handed him the pot. In his room he emptied his bowels of their contents, which were impressive: he'd been holding out all day. When Herman returned that night and started calling out to him, Anton tipped the pot right over his head.
That worked. Herman didn't return, but Anton's victory didn't lift his mood. He started carrying a knife and he stopped eating. At night he slept with Albert's boots on. He didn't know why, but he felt safer with them than without. Perhaps he was preparing himself for death. His features grew stern and sunken, and his horn-rimmed spectacles, which had once made him look like a little boy, now turned him into an old man. Coal-black rings formed under his eyes. Once his head had been covered in bruises, cuts, bumps, and even cheerfully blazing black eyes that turned purple and later faded to yellow. In a boy these were all signs of good health. But black rings weren't: they seemed more a mark of death, like the chalk mark a forester puts on a tree he's going to fell. His mother started worrying about him in earnest, and for once she didn't threaten him with a punishment from his father when he returned home.
"Leave me alone," he said, every time she came near him.
He was always fidgeting with his knife. He wanted to kill Herman, but he couldn't work out how to do it. He could run much faster than Herman, but what good would that do? You can't kill a man by outrunning him.
He went outside less and less, and when he did he was always looking over his shoulder. Before, he'd had a gang behind him. Now he was alone.
Not long after the incident with the chamber pot, he heard his name being called from the vegetable garden in broad daylight. He'd begun locking the doors of the house even in daytime, and now, as the rays of the afternoon sun came through the gable window and he heard a voice, he was pleased at his foresight. But it was calling him only by his first name, and the voice wasn't the usual hoarse whisper: it was a boy's voice, like his. Deciding to risk it, he went to the window to look down and saw Knud Erik standing below.
"Is it you?" Anton asked stupidly.
Knud Erik said something he'd wanted to say for a long time. No matter how many times he'd rehearsed it, it always sounded wrong and hopeless, even desperately girly. But it was something he felt driven to say by his useless urge to help and comfort, an urge that had no outlet now that his relationship with his mother had changed and his little sister Edith needed him less.
"I miss you," he said.
He'd known in advance how pathetic this would sound. He was the younger boy, Anton was the older, and, of course, the one always missed the other. But why would the older boy care? The older ones were fine as they were. They certainly didn't need the little guys. He hadn't dared to imagine Anton's response, and when it came it terrified him.
Anton started crying.
Anton wasn't like anyone else, and he didn't cry like anyone else. His tears were full of resistance. It sounded as though a ferret had crawled under his sweater and was ripping his stomach open, as though he suffered terrible physical pain rather than unhappiness. More than anything he looked as if he wanted to stop the sobs, but they escaped him anyway. He covered his mouth with both hands and wailed through his fingers. He cried away Herman, he cried away his fear and his loneliness: you might even think he was crying away his belief that he lived only for himself and had no need for anyone else. But he wasn't. When he eventually regained the power of speech, his voice was utterly matter-of-fact, even though the eyes behind the lenses were bloodshot.
"What the hell do you want?" he asked.
Knud Erik already felt defeated.
He'd come out with it, and it had cost him, jeopardizing his still shakily formed manhood. "I miss you." Were those words so hard to understand? What else could he say? I want to help you, to be there for you, to hold out my hand to you? What good would it do, saying that. So Knud Erik said nothing. He'd run out of courage as well as words. He didn't know what else to say, and that's in fact what saved him, because in the pause that followed, Anton was able to compose himself and invite his friend up to his room.
There he blurted out the whole story. Knud Erik was too young to have heard about Jepsen's disappearance on that trip between Marstal and Rudkøbing, so he needed everything explained to him. The story was terrifying enough in itself, but it was more the way Anton told it that frightened Knud Erik. He heard a fresh sob hidden in every pause, which Anton managed to hold back only through considerable effort. The ferret was burying itself deeper and deeper in his intestines, and soon he'd start to scream again.
"He killed Tordenskjold," he said.
Knud Erik hadn't known Holger Jepsen, but he'd known Tordenskjold. He'd often joined in feeding the seagull fish and the sparrows that Anton could no longer sell to the farmer from Midtmarken because they were too far gone. The horror started to take hold of him as well.
"He's definitely going to kill me too." Anton closed his eyes as if he expected the killer blow at any moment.
"Why don't you just give him the skull?"
"I can't." For a moment it was still there, that old stubbornness. Then his despondency returned. "It's hopeless. He'll kill me anyway."
"Nonsense," Knud Erik said, summoning up more courage than he knew he had. "But it's definitely Kristian who told Herman about the head. He was the only one, apart from you, who knew who it belonged to."
Anton flared up in anger. "I'm going to kill Kristian," he hissed. "I can't get Herman, but I can get him."
"You've already shot his eye out. Don't you think that's enough?"
Knud Erik was increasingly astonished at himself. He'd never imagined himself talking to Anton like this. But Anton wasn't the boy he used to be. Which made Knud Erik free to change too.
"I've got an idea," he said.
AS HERMAN LEFT Weber's Café a few days later, he saw two boys hanging around on the other side of the road, staring at him. He walked up toward Kirkestræde, and they followed him on the opposite sidewalk. At first he thought it was a coincidence, but when he turned the corner to head south, they were still there. He didn't know either of them. He stopped and turned around: he wanted them to see that he was on to them. As he'd expected, they stopped too. But they kept staring. He stamped his foot on the cobbles. Startled, they retreated a step. But they continued to stare. When he reached the end of Kirkestræde, they disappeared. But then two more of them popped up in Snaregade, and when he started walking toward the seafront, they followed him, their eyes fixed on him in a persistent and mysterious manner.
"Do I look different from anybody else?" he roared at them. "What are you staring at?"
They didn't reply. He could see them freeze, out of fear, most likely. But they didn't run off. Nor did they taunt him. This baffled him more than anything. There was no point in chasing them. He was big and heavy, and they were better runners than he was. He just had to control himself and pretend they weren't there.
He was used to people in Marstal staring at him: he was a man who lived his life in full public view. He hadn't planned it that way, but he'd known how to exploit it when it happened. He had power, not over people's minds perhaps, but at least over the excursions their minds took. He was of the stuff that gossip and fear feed on, and in his case, both applied. They gloated when he fell, as he'd done when Henckel went to prison and the steel shipyard went bankrupt and he lost everything. But they only gloated because they feared him. They'd thought, back then, he was finished. But Herman was never finished. He'd always bounce back. He recognized the things he saw in them: hate, fear, glee, envy, and attraction. And he took nourishment from it all.
But he didn't comprehend the boys' staring. They were waiting for him outside the boardinghouse in Tværgade, where he stayed when he was in Marstal. He could enter a shop and leave it, or take a stroll along the harbor, or hang out in Weber's Café and always they'd be there, waiting for him. More and more he began to feel the need for shelter and for places to hide. A door to something unknown was opening up inside him. He'd done something once, something on board the Two Sisters. At times the memory made him feel stronger. At other times he avoided it. Now he felt dread at the thought of being found out and of the punishment that might ensue, and he understood instinctively that the boys' inscrutable stares held a power he couldn't fight. He'd believed he could scare off that damned Anton. But now every boy in Marstal was Anton's co-conspirator. And there were hundreds of them, with new faces all the time, an unpredictable people's court where he knew the charge but had no idea of the laws, or the nature of the verdict. Their eyes persecuted him everywhere, eventually following him all the way into the darkness around his bed and into his dreams, like a madness that threatened to overpower him. He couldn't kill the whole lot of them after all, though his fists began flexing as they used to in the old days, when something was gearing up inside him. He drank more than before and got into fights more frequently at Weber's Café. That kept the fists busy.
Dutch gin was no longer to his taste; Riga Balsam, famous for a century among the skippers of Marstal, lost its power to cure; whiskey, the greatest healer of them all, had no more effect on him than water. His hands started shaking when he raised his glass to his lips. Shunning the company of others, he drank alone.
Finally he gave in. One day he stomped down to the ferry with his sea bag slung over his shoulder. His intention was to go to Copenhagen and sign on at Jepsen's Shipping Office. The boys knew it. It was as if they could read his thoughts. He didn't bother counting them. But a farewell committee of at least twenty to thirty boys was waiting by the ferry to see him off.
In the usual inscrutable silence, their gaze followed him as he disappeared on board the ferry. He didn't go straight to the saloon to smoke a cigarette, which was his habit when saying goodbye to the town he hated but was linked to inextricably. Instead he stayed in the darkness of the enclosed deck, among the horse-drawn carts and trucks, breathing in engine oil and dung until he was certain he was no longer visible from land.
When he finally entered the saloon and lit the first cigarette of the crossing, he had trouble controlling the shake of his hands.
The idea had come to Knud Erik through a very straightforward process. He'd tried to come up with the most unpleasant thing he could think of, and then made the assumption that Herman would share the feeling. A good thrashing wouldn't work: it was beyond their abilities and besides, he wasn't sure Herman would have minded a fight even if he bore the brunt of it. But burned into his soul was the memory of a worse persecution: the look his mother had fixed on him after his father's death. He couldn't call the look reproachful. It was just a silent searching, and it had followed him everywhere with a question he couldn't answer. What did she want?
He'd collapsed under the weight of that look, which seemed to challenge everything he did without suggesting an alternative. That was the worst thing: when someone looked at you constantly, and you had to guess what they meant by it, while knowing that nothing you could say could ever lighten the burden. He imagined how one could put the same kind of burden on Herman. How the pressure of a silent stare might cause a hardened and unscrupulous murderer, who'd killed even as a boy, to crack.
And Herman would never guess what had hit him. That was the most satisfying part of all. Although he'd got the lads fired up about it, Knud Erik hadn't told them the real reason for their persecution of Herman. It was far too risky to tell them the secret of Holger Jepsen's murder. Who's Jepsen? they might well have asked, and been stupid enough to take their question to the adults, and then there'd have been trouble. No, he'd done something else. He'd taken them to An
ton's home and dug up Tordenskjold, right in front of their eyes. He'd shown them the gull's limp neck, its dead eyes, its wide-open beak, the feathers that had lost their shine, and the broken, dislocated wings. The body was crawling with maggots. "Look," he'd said. "Herman did this."
After that, they'd itched to see the seagull killer lying at their feet, transformed into a mass of bloody pulp. His bones should be ground to meal, his skin should be flayed and hung from a tree, his guts should be dragged through the streets. But Knud Erik proposed something far better. They could make him shrink into something less than a man. They'd see his hands shake with fear.
The stares that had haunted and followed the terrifying killer everywhere he turned had been nothing but a boy's imitation of a mother's reproachful look.
No, Herman would never guess what had driven him out of town. We hadn't accused him of a man's murder.
We'd accused him of a seagull's.
HERMAN WAS GONE, but the horn-rimmed spectacles still sat smack-dab in the middle of Anton's face, and he still had no future. The Foreigner wasn't due home until the summer, and in the meantime the boys' confirmation was coming up. Without discussing it with his mother, Anton went up to his teacher, Miss Katballe, and informed her that after seven years he was now quitting school. It was the best day of her life, she replied. With unexpected politeness he bowed, thanked her, and said, likewise.
He was confirmed and publicly swore to denounce the devil and all his works. He didn't know if Hell meant the singe of fire or the gnawing of worms. All he knew was that he was already there, because for him, Hell was a life cut off from the sea and the world it offered. He'd never find out if French girls were the liveliest, or if Portuguese girls really did stink of garlic, or even what garlic was. During the service, he stood beneath the marine painter's altarpiece, which depicted Jesus saving his disciples from the raging storm. He wasn't seeking salvation from the sea, but access to it.
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