The Boatmaker

by John Benditt

  He wipes the blade and passes it to Number II, who takes it, his soft hand shaking. Number I buries the tip of his nose in the cotton wool. Red spreads around the spot. He pulls a tuft from the floor and holds it to his face. He pulls another tuft and applies it. His bleeding slows. Over the cotton held to the tip of his nose, he looks meaningfully at Number II.

  Number II closes his eyes, reaches over and slices a small tip from his left earlobe, stifling a scream. Trembling, he holds the flesh out for the others to see. He hands the blade across the circle to Number III, puts the nub of flesh into the cotton wool and pulls a tuft for his ear.

  The boatmaker cannot see the wound, but he assumes it must be bleeding less than I’s. III does the same to his own left earlobe. As III puts the flesh down and stanches the flow with cotton wool, the boatmaker sees that although the wound is not deep, it is bleeding heavily.

  Number III hands the knife to the boatmaker, who hefts the blade and wipes it across the knee of his robe. The blade is just as he thought: a beauty, remarkable for its strength, sharpness and balance. He would like to take time to puzzle out the inscription on the blade, but he feels the eyes of the others on him, staring in anticipation, while each man presses cotton wool to his bleeding flesh.

  He tests the blade with his finger; the slightest pressure draws blood. No one has explained the rules to him. What part should he cut? An earlobe, like II and III? They are followers. Presumably he should do as they did.

  The boatmaker had sensed that their task might be a deep sacrifice—possibly the ultimate sacrifice. And he prayed for the strength to see it through. But now that the moment has come, it is not fear that makes him hesitate: It is the absurdity of it. What strikes him most is not the wounding or the sacrifice. It is the tiny details. Something about the blood seeping through the cotton wool makes the room seem like something from an asylum for the insane. The boatmaker feels giddy, crazed from hunger and the scene before him. He has to stop himself from laughing or shrieking.

  The urge to howl becomes almost too strong to resist. As he struggles to hold it in, the urge changes into something else: a rage like the buzzing of the bees on the New Land, growing louder and louder until it fills the sky.

  Without intending to move, he finds himself standing, already moving. In two steps he is across the room, leaping over the three stunned brothers in their flaming-heart robes, dotted with blood, cotton wool falling from their hands in astonishment.

  Without knowing how, he is crashing through the radial window. Glass showers around him as he hits the ground. He lands on his shoulder and rolls to his feet. Running into the woods in the fine white robe, his feet bare, is clumsy work. Blood flows from a cut on his nose, which feels as if it might have glass in it, but he does not stop to check. He is surprised that his legs carry him so well after weeks of fasting. He finds a fierce pleasure in the animal act of running away to save himself.

  His bare feet slip and he falls, bruising and cutting his body, but he does not stop to inspect his wounds. He had no idea how deeply imprisoned he felt until he crashed through the window and began running. He thought all he felt was gratitude. Number IV, he thinks. I am no one’s Number IV—Father Robert’s or anyone else’s. He wants to rip the beautiful robe to shreds and tear out the flaming heart.

  He runs until he reaches a stream at the edge of the woods. On the bank he stops and holds still, listening over the thudding of his heart. He knows Father Robert, Neck and the other brothers, with dogs and guns, will soon be after him. To his surprise, he finds the knife still in his hand.

  He touches his nose, finds an open wound, probes gently with the tip of the knife and removes a shard of glass. Undoes his belt, pulls off the robe, cuts it into pieces, binds his nose with a long strip, winding it round and round his head. Wraps the knife and strips of fine white wool into a bundle he holds over his head.

  As he reaches the muddy bank that leads to the stream, the crazed exhilaration that has carried him this far ebbs, and he feels pain and hunger surging in. Blackness begins to cover him, but he knows he cannot allow himself to pass out here. He holds on to a sapling as he steps carefully down the muddy incline to the stream. At first the stream is so shallow that he must use his free hand and his feet to keep moving, but soon it deepens and widens.

  In the deeper water the boatmaker turns on his back and floats, holding his bundle up to the sun with both hands while he allows the rippling water to carry him downstream toward the mighty brown tide named for the peasant boy who, led on by a flock of screeching blackbirds, converted the king of the Mainland to faith in Jesus Christ.

  CHAPTER 16

  A week later the boatmaker stands on one of the bridges that cross the Vashad and connect the two halves of the capital. On his way to the city he has stolen clothes from clotheslines outside farmhouses, and he looks something like his old self. The wound on his nose has closed. He is no longer wrapping it in strips of wool, but he will have a scar that looks like the letter X.

  Standing on the bridge, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out the knife from the little house at the edge of the woods. He looks down at the blade, which still has a crust of blood on it. In the ancient spiky script one side reads: Behold the lilies of the field, they spin not, nor do they toil. He turns the blade over. On the other side it says: Yet Solomon in all his glory was ne’er arrayed like one of these.

  He holds the knife up to the sun and then lets it fall. The knife spins and spins, circling its point, the blade fluttering in sunlight. It sails downstream above the river, still spinning, strikes the surface and disappears under the surging, rippling brown water.

  When he reaches his room in the boardinghouse, he is surprised to find that his money is still under the green floorboard. As White was beating and kicking him down into the cobblestones Crow kept saying: “The money! Where is it?” Yet his cache is undisturbed. The room is mostly as he left it. The landlady has cleaned after her fashion. But the room hasn’t been rented since he left it the morning of the beating.

  There haven’t been many looking for rooms to rent. Times have changed since the boatmaker left the capital. There is an unease in the streets, a feeling that hard times are coming. The roads, dams, schools and telegraph lines that have been started are still going up, but no new construction is being undertaken. Jobs aren’t as easy to find as they were the year before at the height of the boom. Some of the workers who were drawn to the capital by the modernization program are returning to their villages.

  The boatmaker sits on the edge of his narrow bed, holding his money, still wrapped in brown paper. Beside him on the blanket is the piece of green floorboard that covers his cache. He opens the paper and removes a few bills. He has no need to count: It would all be there or it would all be gone.

  He wonders where on the New Land Crow and White are buried. Perhaps they are not buried there. It is consecrated ground, after all, and they were strung up as thieves. He slips the bills into the pocket of his stolen overalls, rewraps the rest, slides it back and replaces the floorboard. Then he sits on the bed with his head in his hands while it gets dark outside his window. The boatmaker has enough money so that he doesn’t need to work for a while. But he knows he will begin looking the next day. If he does not, he will drink.

  There is a soft knock on his door. The door, its inner face painted the same green as the floor, opens, and the landlady stands in the doorway, without Kierkegaard but with a cigarette burning between her knuckles.

  “Is there anything you need?”

  “No. The room seems the same.”

  “No one’s been in it since you left. Except me, to clean. And your friends.”

  “They were here?”

  “I let them in. They said you’d been hurt and they were helping you out. I thought perhaps they would take some of your things to you, so I let them in. But I don’t think they took anything. There wasn’t much here, to tell the truth. I watched them while they were here. For your sake. I don’
t know why I bothered. You never even came back to give notice.”

  “I’m sorry. I was away.”

  “I would say so,” she says, looking hard at him to see if she can tell where he’s been in the many months since he walked out of her house on an otherwise unremarkable day. The X across the boatmaker’s nose is healing, but the crossed lines are still an angry red. A dark beard is attempting to join his mustache.

  “I’ll pay for the room—the time I was away.”

  “But that’s nearly a year. It’s too much.”

  “The room’s been empty.”

  “Yes. But that’s not your fault. No one came around wanting to rent it. Believe me, if anyone had wanted to rent it, I would have. I didn’t keep it intact as a memorial to you.” She laughs. A crackling, gurgling sound rises from her lungs.

  “I’ll pay.”

  Giving her the money for a year’s rent will take a good bit of what he has under the floorboard and force him to find work sooner, which is all to the good. He is surprised by how deeply relieved he feels to be back in this room, with its green flooring, single window, washstand, candlestick and view of cobblestones and sky. He is moved by the landlady, too. He can tell that, whatever she may say, some part of her hoped he was safe and waited for his return.

  “God bless you,” says the landlady. No tenant has ever offered to pay for a room he hasn’t occupied for a year. She feels guilty. But she tells herself that the man from Small Island won’t change his mind once he’s made it up—and so there’s no reason to argue.

  She offers the boatmaker the memory of a curtsey and pulls the door closed behind her. Before it has closed all the way, it swings open again. “And where are your friends? They never gave notice, either. There was just a tremendous commotion in their room one night and then—poof!—they were gone.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, that’s what happened. Do you think they’ll be returning?”

  “I wouldn’t hold their room for them.”

  “That’s too bad. Tenants are scarce these days. Well, if they don’t come back, and you do happen to hear from them, let them know a few things of theirs are down in the cellar. Good night.” This time the door closes all the way.

  After the landlady leaves, the boatmaker sits for a long time on the bed. His nose itches, but he wills himself not to scratch. If he scratches, the scar will be worse than it is already going to be. It is bad enough that his face will be marked permanently. He must work, and he knows he would never hire a man who looked the way he did a week ago. Since then he has eaten and been in the sun; he looks healthier, less strange. Still, he is afraid that people can see where he has been and what he is running from. He is sure the brothers from the New Land are still after him. Father Robert will never give up.

  For a few days he walks the city, enjoying the end-of-summer heat, feeling the strangeness of being outside and free, an ordinary workingman, not a monk in a white robe. The boardinghouse is in the center of the old city, surrounded by many houses like it, built centuries ago by titled nobility and now divided into apartments or turned into rooming houses. Only a few streets away, the Jewish quarter begins. Under the current king, the Jews are no longer confined to a few crowded streets. Their neighborhood has begun to spread, its once-clear borders blurring.

  The boatmaker walks through the Jewish neighborhood, looking in shop windows lettered in the unreadable alphabet of the Hebrews. Some windows display nothing but black garments and hats, some strange cuts of meat, others only books. There are no women on the street, only men in a variety of costumes. Some wear black knee breeches and white stockings from the previous century. Others are dressed in black suits suggesting no particular time or place. All wear hats of one kind or another, some of them large round fur hats that have the look of countries far down to the south and east. Most of the men, bearded or clean shaven, have sidelocks curling down their cheeks. They speak to one another in their Jewish language, moving quickly on urgent business. They do not seem to see the boatmaker, and he does not mind being invisible.

  He turns into a shop with a striped pole outside next to a sign that says Chirurg. It’s a narrow space, with a chair like a throne in the center. Leaning against the chair reading a newspaper is a man in a white apron, the sleeves of his striped shirt gathered in by garters.

  “Welcome, friend. You have come to the right place,” the man says, folding his newspaper and dropping it on a shelf next to the cash register, which sits on a shelf in front of a mirror covering much of one wall.

  The boatmaker sits in the chair, tensing as the barber binds the white sheet around his neck. He relaxes as he realizes he is safe, free.

  “Haircut and shave?”

  “Yes.”

  The barber twirls the boatmaker toward the wall opposite the mirror. High on the wall in a thin black frame is an engraving of an elegant, muscular black horse, its coat shining, led by a dark-skinned man in pantaloons, slippers with the toes turned up, a short jacket and a turban with a jewel and a feather. Underneath the picture are the words The Royal Champion.

  “Beautiful horse, yes?” says the barber, approaching from behind and stirring the contents of a white mug with a brush. “The king’s,” he says, covering the boatmaker’s face in small white circles. “Never been beaten. Which is as it should be. Now, I’m not so sure we can say that about the king. There’s something wrong there. Possibly very wrong. There are rumors about.” He sets down the mug, picks up a razor and begins to strop it on a fat leather belt.

  “But this is right, this horse. The king’s champion against all comers. He may not be much of a man, let alone much of a king. But by God his horse can run. For some reason that makes me sleep just a little better at night when I lay meself down next to the missus.” The barber tests the razor on his thumb and, having determined that it’s plenty sharp, spins the boatmaker toward him.

  “It’s little enough, mind you—a racehorse—given everything that’s going to hell in this kingdom. But at least it’s something.” The barber whistles a broken melody as he shaves the boatmaker, saying nothing about his scar, though of course he is curious. It’s not the kind of scar you see every day.

  The boatmaker relaxes into the pleasure of the shave and the haircut that follows. When the barber is finished, he pulls the white cape away like a sculptor revealing his creation to the public: suitably modest but in the confident expectation of sustained applause.

  “A new man!” He brushes the boatmaker’s shoulders with a horsehair brush. The man from Small Island appraises himself in the mirror. Not a new man, he thinks. But at least he will be able to look for work without feeling he needs to hide his face. For that alone, it has been worth enduring the barber’s nonsense.

  “Quite a scar you have there, friend.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I most certainly do. Between the scar, the hair and the beard . . . Well, when you walked in here you were enough to frighten the demons of Hell, but now you’re fit for polite company.”

  “Maybe.”

  “How’d you get that scar anyway, friend?”

  “An accident. At work.”

  “I can imagine,” says the barber, ringing the register. “And what trade do you follow, friend, to have such an accident?”

  “Carpenter.” The word hangs in the air behind the boatmaker, who is already on his way out of the shop into the streets of the Jewish quarter.

  “Carpenter,” mutters the barber. “Carpenter. Now, I wonder . . .”

  The boatmaker doesn’t seem like a fool. Too close-mouthed for that. In the barber’s experience of men, which is vast and superficial, close-mouthed men are generally shrewd. But only a foolish carpenter would wind up with a scar like that across his face. Something about this carpenter doesn’t add up, he thinks. But then, so few things do nowadays, with everything as disarrayed as it is in the kingdom—and a weak king reigning. The barber lifts his newspaper and opens it, looking for a place to pick up
his reading about the shameful world he lives in.

  In spite of the slowdown in the modernization project, it takes the boatmaker only a little longer than usual to find work. With the Jewish quarter overrunning its old strictly enforced legal limits, the neighborhoods around it are changing rapidly. The Jews do not seem to have been affected as much as others by the running down of the king’s ambitious program. They are taking over many buildings. Townhouses like the one his landlady owns are being turned into apartments for six or eight families.

  As always, the boatmaker quickly acquires a reputation for having a wonderful touch with wood, for working hard without complaining about the materials or tools supplied to him and for saying little, all of which endears him to his employers. He is hired by one landlord, then another, before being taken on as part of a crew that is steadily employed by a large property owner.

  The carpenters, plasterers, roofers and brickworkers on the crew are all Gentiles. The Jews do not appear to work very much with their hands. They keep shops and run after each other in the street waving important slips of paper. The construction crews are made up of Mainland Christians who work with rough hands for their pay and mutter among themselves about the Jews taking over the Old Quarter like insects eating overripe fruit from the inside out. On the construction site, they whisper over their lunch buckets and then continue after lunch while pulling surreptitiously from bottles and flasks.

  The boatmaker sits on his own and says little, refusing the offer of drink after lunch. Talk swirls around him, but he makes no effort to enter its stream. He is happy to have steady work and not to have to find a new employer after each job, but he is wary of the crew and their alcohol. The scar on his nose is becoming less noticeable, particularly among workingmen who bear many scars.

  Although the boatmaker’s employer has crews working on several sites, there is only one foreman for all these projects. When the foreman comes around, the mumbling about the Jews stops. He is a tall, lean man with curly reddish hair graying at the temples, a pipe smoker who wears a long tan canvas coat. The men respect the foreman, but they don’t fear him. They are familiar, calling him by his Christian name, Sven, rather than the more respectful surname, Eriksson.