The Boatmaker

by John Benditt

  The boatmaker thanks the foreman and tells him he will follow these rules. They are in any case the rules he wished for. He turns and walks away, leaving the foreman sucking on a pipe that has gone out, watching the small canvas-covered back diminish into a new season that is still merely a suggestion.

  The boatmaker finds an empty place in the back of one of the storerooms where the wood is aged. There is little light in the storeroom, and it’s always cold. But it’s an excellent place for the boatmaker’s project. He begins arriving before anyone else is working, even Sven Eriksson, usually first into the compound.

  The boatmaker begins with a feeling, the way he did when he was building his boat. In his shed on Small Island, the boat taught him how to build it, showing him the next step at every stage, each piece appearing as it was needed. It is the same with this.

  He continues with his other work, silent, efficient and pliable, but he is more comfortable: The disturbing mix of superiority and envy has disappeared into the thing he is making. When he leaves for the day, he covers his work with the heavy canvas used to cover planks being seasoned. As he goes about his other duties, he finds bits of wood left over from other work. Most are too small to be useful, but here and there he finds a piece big enough and sound enough; he carries it back to the storeroom and puts it under the canvas. He does not flaunt his project, and few come to the back of the storeroom. To those few who do have business there, the foreman has given orders to pay no attention to the shape growing under weathered canvas.

  One night when he cannot sleep for thinking about his work in the storeroom, the boatmaker takes out Crow’s notebook and turns the pages he has turned many times without understanding everything that is scrawled there. That Crow controlled White’s wages was obvious long ago. That Crow wagered considerable sums on races and lost regularly in spite of tips from the shadow world is interesting but not surprising. What he can still make no sense of are the increasing payments from R. And in that respect this night is no different from all the other nights he has puzzled over Crow’s untidy accounting.

  He smokes until he needs to close the notebook and sleep. He will read this book until it falls to pieces, if that is what is necessary for him to penetrate its secrets. In the meantime, the thing he has imagined is growing in the back of a cold Lippsted storeroom. It is unlikely and out of place, but also inevitable: demanding entry to the world.

  CHAPTER 20

  Early in spring, on a day when crusts of snow are piled on the curb but the air is mild, Sven Eriksson walks along the wall surrounding the Lippsted compound, pipe clenched between his teeth. Beside him walks the boatmaker, not smoking, lengthening his stride to keep up with the taller man. Around them, the people of the capital no longer need to pull their coats tight or walk with shoulders hunched against the wind.

  “It’s not done!” says the foreman, pulling the pipe out of his mouth so abruptly his teeth rattle. “No one from the workshop has ever been invited upstairs to dine with Herr Lippsted and his sister. Never! Nothing like this has happened to any man in the three generations of men I have worked with here.”

  The boatmaker paces like a pony trotting a thoroughbred. He gleans from Eriksson’s outburst that he has been invited to the beautiful old stone townhouse with its tapering Seventeenth Century façade. If he accepts, he will go up to the Lippsted family quarters, above the storeroom where finished pieces are packed for shipment, to places where the foreman himself, for all his years of service and his high station, has never entered. The boatmaker feels the foreman’s confusion, anger, fear.

  “There is the name, of course,” says the foreman, putting the pipe back between his teeth and slowing down so that his walking, smoking and talking settle into a rhythm. “I suppose that’s part of it. I don’t know. One can’t know everything.”

  He stops and turns to face the boatmaker, causing people on the sidewalk to step around the two men in their canvas coats, one short, one long, who are having what appears to be an intense and serious conversation.

  “You are to appear one week from tonight. You own a suit? No? Well, then: Find one! God knows what you’ll look like. I don’t suppose it matters. I have no doubt you will never be back there. All I can ask of you is: Don’t disgrace us! Even though you come from far away and haven’t been here long, you are one of us. You work with your hands. You are learning your craft. They are different up there, believe me. In ways I am not able to express precisely.”

  Sven Eriksson goes silent, drawing on his pipe. Then he adds: “This must be some odd quirk of Herr Lippsted’s. He is more than capable of it. Yes. It can be no more than that. But for this one time wear a suit and make a good impression for those of us who work down here.”

  And with that, agitation on features that are usually very orderly, the foreman walks away while the boatmaker stands on the sidewalk, continuing the conversation in his mind.

  The boatmaker does not go back to work. He doesn’t know whether he will accept the invitation to attend dinner with the heirs of the House of Lippsted. Like the foreman, he isn’t sure he belongs at their table, even though his twisting path seems to have led him there by a series of coincidences.

  If the boatmaker was a more mystical man, he might have taken those coincidences as signs. Many on the Mainland would have done so. In spite of the king’s devotion to reason and science, many of his subjects remain deeply attached to portents and divinations. Some long for a time when things were clearer: when a cloud of shrieking blackbirds circling the head and shoulders of an earth-smeared peasant announced God’s message to an entire kingdom. In this century of change it is not easy to tell where the voice of God is to be heard. Is it in the humming telegraph wire? In the ultra-modern chemical works overseen by scientists from Berlin? In the monstrous presses, imported from England, that print the Mainland banknotes? In the secret societies that belch their black hatred of the king and “his” Jews? The voice of God might be in any of these—or in none. In these confusing circumstances, a small minority of Mainlanders is passionate, certain they know where the truth is to be found. But most are deeply confused and longing to be instructed.

  The boatmaker, who subscribes to none of these versions of the truth, has his own confusion to sort out. He disappears into his own thoughts. When he reappears in the world, he is standing in front of the Royal Mint, looking up at its imposing brown classical façade. It is a working day, and ordinary citizens are not allowed in. The stone steps are empty. At the entrance two of the King’s Own Guard stand at attention. The tall guardsmen in their scarlet uniforms and round bearskin helmets look out, over and above the man in the short canvas jacket.

  He decides to walk on. Surely on this day of all days the foreman won’t complain. He walks into the Royal Gardens that surround the Winter Palace, down a long allée between plane trees to a round pool within an ornamental stone wall. In the summer there will be boys here, sailing their boats, using sticks to push them out into the center of the pond to catch the wind. In just a few weeks the bravest troublemakers will begin skipping school to come here. But today the pool is empty. Concrete shows at the bottom between crusts of snow.

  The boatmaker walks through the gardens and out, past the Winter Palace, set inside a tall wrought-iron fence decorated with the gold-painted initial of the reigning king. Over the domes and spires of the palace flies the national flag, indicating that the king is in residence. The flag is divided into blue and yellow quarters, the golden crown in the center circled by golden versions of the blackbirds of Vashad. Flanking the gate are sentry boxes, a guardsman before each one.

  As he passes the palace, the boatmaker wonders how much the king can know of what goes on in his kingdom, even with the network of spies and informers that he must have, along with the police and army. The king is only a man, after all, not a god: a small figure somewhere under all the domes and spires, walking from room to room, ringing for coal when the fire in his study goes out and the room turns cool, chilli
ng his fingers as they turn the pages of the latest report on the modernization project, its pages filled with charts and tables, endless bureaucratic sentences.

  The boatmaker passes the Winter Palace and walks on while the afternoon sky contracts to a deeper blue. No plan in mind, he finds himself at the door of the barbershop. He goes in and asks for a shave and a haircut, realizing as he does that at some point on his path his decision fell into place. He will go to dinner at the House of Lippsted. Somewhere he will find the first suit he has ever worn. He will ascend to the living quarters in the townhouse that rises above the rough bustle of the compound. He will see what it is like to sit at a dinner table with Jacob Lippsted, scion of the House of Lippsted, and his sister, with her glowing eyes and small resilient body under the fur wrap. The boatmaker knows he is not the man the foreman is; he never will be. At the same time he is not restrained as the foreman is by tradition and years of service. He has been invited. He will climb the stairs and join them at their table.

  The barber is sprawled in his chair, the Afternoon Post covering his face, his legs dangling toward the floor. Snores bubble up from under the paper, raising it, then letting it fall. As the boatmaker enters, the barber wakes and holds the paper out as if he had been reading. The native islander is on the bench, bent forward under the engraving of The Royal Champion.

  The barber gets up and lays his paper on the counter. On the front page is an engraving of two horses facing each other in silhouette.

  As he sits, the boatmaker tries to decide whether to keep his mustache or shave it off. Perhaps he should grow a beard. He wonders whether there will be other guests at the dinner. He loses patience with his thoughts, irritated with himself for deciding to accept the invitation. He imagines tearing off the sheet and running, half-shorn, out into the street, yelling. He can’t stand the barber’s chatter or the snoring of the native under the engraving of the glossy racehorse. Working to be presentable for others makes the boatmaker ill.

  Something the barber says as he chatters on breaks into this circle of irritable thoughts. “. . . yes, they’re going to race against the king. Against The Royal Champion. Can you imagine? These Jews! Daring to run their horse against the king’s, who’s never been beaten in twenty races. A single challenge at the royal track. In June. Says so—right there in the Post.”

  The barber nods in the direction of the newspaper, on whose front page the two horses stand nose to nose like shadows cut from black paper.

  He finishes with his scissors, lays them down and returns with his mug and brush. Spreading hot lather across the boatmaker’s face, he bursts out: “Outrageous! That the Jews could raise themselves up out of their place and challenge the king! But it’s not entirely their fault. If things had been right in this country, something like this would never have happened.

  “Listen to this,” he says, sticking the brush in his mug, picking up the paper and reading like a public speaker: “The king is said to have accepted the challenge in the spirit of sportsmanship and to show the openness and forward-thinking spirit of the Mainland under his rule. ‘We are moving forward to join a wider world,’ His Majesty said through the Lord Chamberlain in announcing that he was accepting the challenge from the House of Lippsted.”

  The barber snaps the paper shut. “A wider world! Isn’t our world wide enough? He forgets what he is king of, this weak king, with his love of fancy foreign ideas. His father, God rest his soul, would never have thought like this. The old ways were always good enough for him. Under his father there would have been no Jews putting on airs and rising above their station to challenge The Royal Champion to a match race.”

  At the barber’s raised voice, the native sits up, his face framed in fur. The smell of whiskey seeps out into the shop. “No good,” the native says. Then he leans forward until only fur is visible, and his sleeping resumes.

  When he reaches the boardinghouse, the boatmaker goes to his landlady’s door. He hasn’t seen much of her since they went down to the cellar to look for Crow and White’s belongings. She never even asked whether he found what he was looking for. But now he needs her help. He has no idea how to find a suit for dinner at the House of Lippsted. The landlady opens the door after a silence somewhat longer than usual, alcohol on her breath. He explains what he needs. She looks at him carefully, up and down. She is concentrating, but she isn’t thinking deep thoughts or judging: She is appraising the Small Island man with the eye of a seamstress.

  She disappears, leaving him standing in the doorway. He hears doors opening and closing, drawers sliding in and out. He feels dizzy and begins to sweat a cold, uncomfortable sweat. He needs a drink.

  The door, which has drifted shut, opens slowly. Castor and Pollux pad out, rub against his legs, ask him to take them down to the cellar. At this moment he would gladly go down there with them, replace Crow’s notebook and suitcase on the jumble, watch the black-and-white cats in their frenzied hunting and never come out. But the door opens again as the landlady pulls it with her foot. Her arms are filled with a black dinner suit, a white shirt, a bow tie, studs and cufflinks, patent-leather pumps. The tie is in her mouth. The boatmaker gently removes the tie from between her teeth.

  “My husband’s,” she says, breathing heavily. “He won’t be wearing them. You can have them.” The boatmaker had no idea his landlady had been a married woman with an elegant husband. Somehow he had assumed she was always as he knows her: midnight drinker, smoker, reader of Kierkegaard, person without family.

  “You didn’t know I had a husband, did you?” She laughs, and he hears the crackling of fluid in her lungs. “Take these to your room and try them on. I’ll be up to see where they need to be altered. You’re a little smaller than he was, but close enough—and the same in the shoulders, which is the most important part. I’ll be up in a few minutes. You be decent!” She laughs again, crackling and gurgling.

  In the days before the dinner the boatmaker works as if nothing has changed. He wears the short jacket of an apprentice, measuring, cutting and presenting his work for inspection in a line with other apprentices. He sees how seriously the others take the inspections, how relieved they are when their work passes and they are allowed to take the next step up the ladder that leads to mastering their craft. The boatmaker still envies them, but not as much. He knows now that he will not be staying in this compound long enough to become a master in this house. The thing he is building in the back of the storeroom has changed his path.

  These days, the only time he is really comfortable is in the storeroom, working with wood he has picked up before it is discarded or given away. From time to time the foreman directs that the scraps be given to poor women outside the compound walls. The past winter was a long one, even for the Mainland; in most houses there is little firewood left. The Gentile women of the Old Quarter accept the alms, then turn their backs, cursing the Jews as they make their way to their homes, where their husbands have been drinking and not working since snow began falling in November.

  In the storeroom the thing the boatmaker is building has begun to find its form. The outline is there, even if one or two pieces have not yet presented themselves. He knows they will. And they will fit, even if not in precisely the orthodox way. He does not allow himself to envision the finished piece. Instead, he focuses on the task at hand. And a feeling leads him on, a glow that surrounds each piece as it shows him how it should be shaped and where it will fit.

  The boatmaker works early and late, keeping his promise to the foreman not to neglect his duties. From time to time Sven Eriksson enters the storeroom, walks to the back and stands, pipe clenched, towering over him as he kneels among the pieces on the floor. The foreman looks for a while without speaking before turning to leave. As he watches, the foreman has a different look than he did before the boatmaker was invited upstairs for dinner: a look very much like worry. Sometimes, when his work is up-to-date and he has no report to make to Jacob Lippsted, Eriksson paces the wall—once, twice, three times�
��puffing like a locomotive.

  On a warm night, at an hour when he would usually be in the storeroom, deep in his unfinished work, the boatmaker walks through the Old Quarter wearing a black dinner suit in a style dating from three decades before. The landlady has taken in the waist and shortened the sleeves and trousers. She has done her work with skill and care, gratified that one of her lodgers will be dining at a great house in the Old Quarter. Gratified and—very surprised. She would never have expected it of the silent man from Small Island.

  As she bends over the suit to take it in, memories rise in her, stirred by smells from the old fabric. There is the smell of her. From the time she was first presented at court as the daughter of an ancient and noble family she never changed her scent. And there is the smell of her husband, equally loyal to one scent throughout his too-short life. As she cuts and sews, her scent comes up from the fabric, mingling with his for the last time. She drops a few tears as she works, but the stitches are true.

  The suit, like anything made to measure, is perfectly wearable, though almost comically out of date. The boatmaker, walking through a lovely spring evening in the capital, is unaware of changing fashions. To him, the suit simply feels confining. The vest, the stiff white shirt, the tie knotted by the landlady under his clean shaven chin, all of it holds him and shapes him in a way his own clothes never do. But if the suit is confining, wearing it is liberating, as if by putting it on, he has become someone else: a man who belongs at the dinner table in the House of Lippsted. Through the warm air he walks, smoking and carrying a parcel wrapped in paper.

  On reaching the compound he lets himself in, nodding to the watchman, who has seen him many times at this hour leaving for the boardinghouse. He does not stop to see the look on the watchman’s face as he takes in the man of Small Island wearing an elegant dinner suit in a fashion decades old.