The Boatmaker

by John Benditt

  The relationship between Crow and White is unlike any relationship the boatmaker has seen before. White’s wages vanish into Crow’s purse, re-emerging at Crow’s discretion. White seems to accept this arrangement as a law of nature, gazing at Crow with the same wonder that comes over his face when he watches the boatmaker’s hands. Crow doesn’t appear to mind that White is growing attached to the boatmaker. In fact, he seems to enjoy it, nodding and winking from behind White’s back when only the boatmaker can see him.

  After their work for the day is done, the boatmaker follows Crow and White into the city. The three of them go to cheap restaurants in the Old Quarter, where they tear into lingonberry pancakes or share big bowls of steaming goulash. As the weather turns cold, they invite the boatmaker to sleep on the floor of their room, which is on the second floor of a boardinghouse that was once an elegant townhouse; their landlady is the last member of the family that built the house centuries before. The upper floors, once richly appointed living rooms, drawing rooms and smoking rooms, have been carved up into rooms for boarders.

  As snow falls and construction stops, a room opens up at the boardinghouse, and the boatmaker moves in. His room is up the stairs on the left, across the landing from the room where Crow and White sleep in one large bed. It is an easy move, since the boatmaker wears all his possessions.

  The room is small and spare, the floor painted dark green by a previous tenant, perhaps an absinthe drinker. The walls are covered in antique paper splotched with roses, the pattern cut off arbitrarily where new walls were built. On the wall above the bed is a single window looking down onto a narrow alley paved with cobblestones. On moonlit nights, the rounded stones break the moonlight into islands of brightness.

  Outside the boardinghouse, the streets are packed with crowds far larger than any the boatmaker imagined before landing on the Mainland. During the day there is a steady drumming of hooves. But even that noise is swamped by the sound of thousands of people shouting to make themselves heard, doors slamming, hammers smashing paving stones, police whistles, buggy whips cracking, crates of produce landing with a crash on sidewalks, coal rattling down tin chutes. The noise of the streets is a whirlwind, always howling, except very late at night.

  As it turns bitterly cold, the air fills with the smell of coal dust. Snow sifts along the streets. Amid the snow and noise, portraits of the king are everywhere: on kiosks set up for them, on telegraph poles, looking down from tall buildings. The image on the posters is always the one on the banknotes: the narrow face, dark eyes behind oval lenses, mustache shaved to a thin line, military tunic with high collar, diagonal sash, medals.

  Slowly the boatmaker gets used to the constant movement, the noise, the smells, and he sleeps soundly. Having no work, living on what he’s saved, he wanders the streets with his new friends, accompanying them to dark taverns and houses filled with women of the town. But he doesn’t join in, just watches.

  One thing the boatmaker does on his own is visit the main cathedral to see the famous carved panels that tell the story of Vashad. Leaving the boardinghouse around mid-day, he makes his way to the cathedral. Inside it is cold and dim, the light filtering from clerestory windows high above. There is no one visible and the huge interior of the church is quiet.

  The boatmaker takes his time moving from panel to panel, examining the wood and the craft. Each panel is twice as tall as he is and six feet across. They were carved over decades, centuries after the death of Vashad, in workshops established by the king specially for that purpose. The panels are oak, polished and darkened by age. The carving is detailed, adoring, the carved figures raised above the surface, glowing and lifelike.

  In the first panel Vashad is a peasant boy among farm animals, listening to the blackbirds, who have just arrived to change his life. In the second he has left his father’s farm and is living in a tiny Christian community—at a time when Christians were persecuted and such communities were illegal. In the next he is shown on the road to the capital. In the climactic panel Vashad is in the palace, the blackbirds a mighty halo around him. The king is lying face down in surrender. Behind him three of his knights stand astonished, mouths open.

  After the king was converted, the blackbirds flew away, never to return. Vashad moved to a tiny hut near the river, living on alms left at his door by grateful Christians. The fifth panel shows him there. In the sixth and final panel Vashad, now a saint, smiles down from Heaven on a rich, peaceful Mainland. Smoke drifts up from cottage chimneys; cattle are well-tended and fat.

  The boatmaker doesn’t have any particular feelings about Vashad. But he does admire the workmanship of the panels. As he puts a few coins in a box and leaves the cathedral, he is thinking about the workshops where the panels were made, the men working in silence, each knowing his task, the work unfolding with meticulous care over decades. Outside it is late afternoon and almost dark. But the days are already slightly longer.

  As the snow recedes and the ground unfreezes, construction begins again at an even faster pace than the year before. The modernization program is accelerating, bringing with it increased speculation in land. The currency is inflating, the price of land soaring. Speculators are snapping up the best parcels and building ever more houses for the workers of the city, especially the government employees, whose wages are rising faster than anyone else’s.

  Sadly, the royal treasury, depleted after centuries of rule by weak kings and cliques of barons and earls, cannot bear the weight of the modernization program. His funds exhausted, the king has been forced to turn to the only source of capital on the Mainland capable of supporting his ambitions for progress: the House of Lippsted.

  The House of Lippsted is a merchant bank owned by an ancient, aristocratic Jewish family. Its roots are in Vienna; it has interlocking relationships with fraternal banks in Paris, Berlin and London. The Lippsted holdings on the Mainland include thousands of hectares of the country’s richest farmland, plants for making cheese, a railroad and provincial banks, as well as fisheries, mines and rich stands of timber.

  None of these enterprises is visibly connected to the House of Lippsted. The only businesses that bear the family name are the merchant bank itself and a furniture workshop in the capital, which produces furniture known throughout Europe for the unchanging simplicity of its designs, the remarkable quality of the wood used in its manufacture and the fact that not a single nail or screw is used in making any of the pieces.

  Hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, the king has turned to the House of Lippsted to finance his modernization program. As the boatmaker is finding his footing on the Mainland, the relationship between the Crown and the House of Lippsted continues to deepen. A bond has grown between the king and Jacob Lippsted, who is the head of the family on the Mainland. The two are the same age, both educated in Europe, the king in Berlin, Jacob Lippsted in Paris.

  The rates of interest Lippsted charges the royal treasury are always reasonable; Jacob Lippsted sees to that. But repaying the loans depends on the modernization project coming to fruition, increasing the kingdom’s productivity and the revenues flowing into the treasury. As long as the project lies everywhere unfinished, the principal and interest the Crown owes the House of Lippsted will grow even faster than the project itself. By now the debt is so large that both sides are fearful of the consequences if it were to be revealed.

  Although the relationship between the House of Lippsted and the Crown has not been made public, there have been whispers about it in the capital. With these rumors in the background, the modernization program and the construction boom are moving forward rapidly. The boatmaker is finding more—and better paid—work than he has ever known. He has accumulated so many banknotes he no longer keeps them all in his sealskin pouch. Some are hidden in a cache that he built by pulling up a section of green floorboard in his room and refitting it so the hiding place is invisible to a casual examination.

  In spite of having piled up what seems to him like a lot of
money, the boatmaker has not made much progress in understanding more about what money is and where it comes from. But he has not given up trying to answer those questions, along with all the questions he still has about what he is seeking in the capital. Late at night the city quiets, and in his little room over the alley he takes his mother’s handkerchief out of the sealskin bag yet again. He has folded and unfolded the cloth so many times he must be careful to prevent it from falling to pieces like a map read once too often. He smooths the linen across his knee and looks at the scene, trying to read the message embroidered there for him.

  CHAPTER 10

  Just before Midsummer’s Eve the boatmaker hears of an opportunity to learn more about money. Every year on the king’s birthday, the Royal Mint is opened to the people. In the old days on his birthday the king gave each of his subjects a gold coin; the kingdom was smaller and richer then. Now in place of a coin, the king offers his people knowledge. Volunteers, mostly women from aristocratic families, educated in Europe, give free public lectures on the history of money. After the lectures, citizens are taken on tours and shown the huge presses, imported from England, that print the kingdom’s banknotes. At the end of the tour, they are allowed upstairs to a special room where they may exchange a few old bills, soiled from being passed through many hands, for fresh new ones.

  The birthday of the current king is on the fourth day of July, in the middle of the brief, brilliant Mainland summer. The weather is always beautiful on that day, the sky still light at midnight. After the endless darkness of winter, the people of the capital are in a frenzy of eating, drinking, talking and dancing, feeling no need for sleep. The boatmaker decides he will go to the Mint for the lecture and tour, hoping to learn at least some of the secrets of money.

  On the morning of the fourth, the boatmaker rises early to a sky already bright and rushes out to join the queue around the Mint. The oldest portions of the building are the remains of an ancient armory. Around that ancient core, the Mint has been expanded many times; it now presents to the world an imposing façade of dark brown stone. The queue circles the building before snaking up broad stone steps, passing under a round arch and entering massive double doors. In front of the doors stand two large policemen with brush mustaches wearing dark-blue dress uniforms. At parade rest, rocking on the balls of their feet, they look like twins.

  The line inches forward, starting and stopping. The people on the pavement stand and talk, feeling the July sunshine on their faces. They are in no hurry. There are not many holidays on the Mainland, and most of them are religious, requiring the pious to spend long hours kneeling on stone church floors, cold in winter and hard always. The king’s birthday requires little of anyone. Families picnic and drink on the grounds of the Winter Palace, which on this day are open to the public under the eyes of the police and the King’s Own Guard in their scarlet tunics and round bearskin helmets. Some people choose to visit the Mint, drawn by the opportunity to enter another place that is off limits three hundred and sixty-four days of the year—and to be in the presence of vast amounts of money.

  Most of the people in the queue are workingmen in their Sunday clothes. Here and there a man has brought his wife, or a woman not his wife who makes a living in the taverns, but mostly it is a long file of workers: stevedores, hoopers, teamsters, carpenters, ironworkers, roofers, butchers, delivery boys, clerks, fishmongers who squeeze lemon on cracked hands to hold down the smell before coming out to join the crowd, boilermakers, laborers from farms on the edge of the capital, printers, tram drivers, conductors. They stand laughing and talking, shuffling forward, sweating under wool suits worn a few times a year, wiping creased necks with big handkerchiefs. Many eat bread and sausage from paper parcels and drink from flasks or bottles stowed inside their jackets. It is a day of celebration; the men of the capital are at their ease.

  After two hours the boatmaker is two-thirds of the way to the doors flanked by the burly policemen. He moves forward haltingly with the line, speaking to no one, wearing the only clothes he owns: blue overalls over longjohns, brown corduroy jacket, heavy boots. The same clothes he wore when he pushed off from Small Island, though by now somewhat the worse for wear. His landlady has offered to have her maid wash his clothes, a service she performs for Crow and White. The boatmaker always refuses.

  Standing in the sun, he notices a man four places ahead of him in line. The man isn’t drawing attention to himself, and yet he commands respect. It isn’t his clothing that is noticeable: an ordinary brown tweed suit, like those worn by hundreds of others in the queue. Nor is it his body, lean and hard under his clothes, or his face, which shows the red of someone who has spent much time outdoors. What draws notice is the eyes. They are cold, clear and blue, like the water in a mountain stream running over spring ice. The boatmaker notes the man, the newspaper folded in the pocket of his jacket, the sausage he is finishing and washing down with a pull from a flask. His curiosity satisfied, the boatmaker turns his face up to the sun of the capital, which feels different from the sun of the northern islands.

  The city, twenty miles inland on the brown flux named for Vashad, does not smell of the sea. Instead, rising into the air is the smell of horses, their droppings bursting green on the pavement, day after day and week after week. The droppings pile up and are ground into a dust that floats up in every season of the year and can be sensed even on a holiday, when the workshops and factories are closed and tramcars run infrequently. Beyond the dust and the smell, the sky is an infinite blue.

  The man four places ahead takes the newspaper out of his pocket and spreads it open like the wings of a seabird. At the top of the page The Brotherhood is printed in the old-fashioned spiky lettering that not all residents of the Mainland can read, even those who can read the modern letters. The narrow columns below are set in round modern type. The newspaper gives the impression of seriousness, anger—and a message not meant for everyone. The lean man with the ruddy face is absorbed. When they reach the steps leading up to the Mint, he folds the newspaper and puts it back in the outside pocket of his jacket.

  The line climbs the steps and eases between the twin policemen. Inside, the boatmaker is out of the heat in a hallway with a stone floor and ceilings so high they seem like another sky. Light comes down over a balustrade from windows on the floor above. In the hall everything is shaded and cool; everyone keeps their voices down without needing to be told. As they enter, the boatmaker sees that the man reading The Brotherhood, the three who were in between them and the two who were behind the boatmaker, along with the boatmaker himself, make up a group of seven that is being guided to the right.

  The seven of them go down the hall toward a lighted doorway on the left and turn into a room resembling a classroom, lit by bare electric bulbs. At the front is a heavy desk with wooden folding chairs set facing it in a semicircle. Behind the battered old desk is a chalkboard and two glass-fronted cases. In one case the boatmaker sees three shells he knows: whelks prized by the natives who long ago made their summer homes on Small Island.

  As the men enter, a woman stands writing on the dusty chalkboard, her back to them. She is slight. Her hair, drawn up at the nape of her neck, escapes in unruly black curls. Her purple dress is high at the throat, long in the sleeve and skirt. In a clear, unfussy hand she is writing: The Three Epochs of Money. She finishes writing, sets the chalk in the tray at the bottom of the board and turns to face the seven men of the capital in a semicircle before her on folding chairs.

  “Good morning,” she says, brushing her hands together to remove chalk dust. Although this woman carries the scent of wealth about her, the only jewelry she wears is a cameo with a woman’s profile, ivory on a black background. The profile on the cameo bears a striking resemblance to her own. She smooths the front of her close-fitting purple skirt.

  “My name is Rachel Lippsted. I welcome all of you to the Royal Mint on this occasion of the king’s birthday.” The boatmaker feels a subtle tremor go through the men at the name L
ippsted spoken in this place. “We’ll talk here awhile and then go for a tour of the Mint, on the one day of the year we’re allowed here, a place that is normally closed and under the highest level of security in the kingdom—second only to the palace when the king is in residence, and of course the person of the king himself.

  “Let’s begin at the beginning,” she says, “or near the beginning.” She smiles, trying to put her audience at ease. She’s small and trim, but there must be a boldness in her, the boatmaker thinks, to be here, giving a lecture to seven workingmen of the capital. Not many women could do that. He wonders how the others feel about being lectured by a woman. The boatmaker himself is both pleased and irritated.

  Rachel Lippsted walks to one of the glass-fronted cases, the toes of her black boots showing beneath the skirt. She takes a key from a pocket in the front of her dress and opens the door, reaching in to remove two of the three whelks, which are conical and delicately flecked in black and white. The boatmaker knows that these whelks need just the right conditions in order to thrive. They must be covered by the sea most, but not all, the time, living in water that is cold but not too cold, with the right amount of salt. If any of these conditions are not met, the whelks will disappear. On Small Island they grow in several places, holding tight to the rocks in clusters of three or four, always covered at high tide. To the natives these whelks and the places where they grow are sacred.

  Rachel Lippsted holds up the pointed shells and asks: “Does anyone recognize these?”

  The boatmaker does. But there is no reason for him—an anonymous carpenter from Small Island—to draw attention to himself in the Royal Mint on the king’s birthday. He says nothing. None of the others speaks.