The Boatmaker

by John Benditt

  The front door is standing open. In the doorway is a man dressed in the uniform of the House of Lippsted. Behind him at the curb the boatmaker sees a familiar two-wheeled carriage with matched black horses shaking their heads and snorting under stiff plumes. The shades are drawn over the windows.

  “Miss Rachel Lippsted to see you, sir,” says the servant, his throat clenching around the hateful words.

  “Rachel Lippsted?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well . . . send her in,” the boatmaker says, trying to recover and speak words appropriate for a gentleman receiving a lady, absurd as such words might seem, spoken by an unshaven man in overalls and stocking feet at the door of a house that has come down many rungs in the world.

  The servant retreats to the curb, opens the door of the carriage and extends a gloved hand. Rachel Lippsted steps out, wearing a dress of emerald green with a short cape. She is unveiled, but there is no one on the street to witness her sail across the curb and up the stone steps to the landing, where the boatmaker is standing still as the house, candle flame flapping.

  “I apologize for coming unannounced. I know it’s not civilized. I hope I’m not intruding.”

  “No.”

  “Good. You may go, Karl. Return for me in two hours.”

  “Very good, miss,” the servant says, choking on his outrage. He returns to the carriage, takes his whip and abuses the horses through the deserted streets, their hooves loud on the cobblestones, black plumes bobbing.

  The boatmaker leads the way up between the landlady’s ancestors to his room, holding his candle high. Castor and Pollux escape from the landlady’s open door. She rushes out to shoo them back before they can follow the boatmaker and his guest.

  Rachel sees the portraits and is struck by the contrast between the shabbiness of the boardinghouse and the nobility of the lineage. Unlike the boatmaker, she knows exactly who the landlady’s family is. As she climbs the stairs, feeling each step give and then spring back, Rachel has a moment of fear, wanting to turn back. But it is too late. It was too late the moment she stepped from her carriage to the curb. Perhaps the moment she gave the address to her driver and saw him attempt to conceal his surprise at her poor judgment. Possibly even before that.

  She follows the boatmaker to the top of the stairs, turns left down the hall and into the small room with its window overlooking the alley. He offers her his only seat: a simple oak chair from a country kitchen. She removes her dove-gray gloves and drops them into her emerald-green lap. The boatmaker pulls the bedsheets into a semblance of civilized respect, pushes Crow’s account book under the pillow and sits on his bed.

  “I hope you can forgive the rabbi for his talk about the Secret Jews.”

  “Where I come from, there aren’t any Jews.”

  “Small Island.”

  “Yes.”

  “And how did you get to the capital?”

  “I built a boat and sailed to Big Island. I was there for a while. Then I sailed to the Mainland. I landed on the other coast and walked here. I hitched some rides on wagons. But mostly walked.”

  Rachel Lippsted, astonished with herself but not turning back, knows she has seen this man. Not in her drawing room and not in the compound. Before that. And the memory is connected to big things, important things. But she still can’t bring back the scene. The irritation caused by this unsatisfied curiosity is part of the reason she is here—but only a small part.

  The boatmaker, on his side, remembers each time he has seen the woman sitting in his worn country-kitchen chair, everything she said and did. He wants to talk to her about all of that. But he is silent.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “No.” He offers her one of his cigarettes and takes one for himself, lighting both from the candle. For a while they sit smoking. From the Mint he remembers the stains on her fingers.

  “I hope you can forgive the rabbi. He is really all the family we have. Our parents died when we were young. Jacob is two years younger than I am, although he thinks he’s my father.” She laughs, holding the cigarette up, the ash long, looking for a place to put it.

  The boatmaker stands and offers the candlestick, which he has been using as his ashtray. She tips ash into the upturned brass base and looks up at him. He rubs his cigarette out in the candleholder, takes hers and puts it out, sets the candleholder on the washstand and pulls her into his arms.

  She resists at first, holding herself back, turning her mouth to avoid his rough face. Her turning away makes him more forceful and demanding. She begins to give in. She knows this is what she has come for. Asking for forgiveness for the rabbi. It embarrasses her. The rabbi doesn’t need this man’s forgiveness—or anyone’s. The boatmaker’s kisses heat her. Shame heats her. She gives in.

  The boatmaker undoes her elegant clothes a layer at a time until he has freed her body into his hands. She is small, but fuller than he imagined, smooth and resilient, folded and secret. He puts the candle out and, though no one can see into the room, draws the curtain.

  He stands over her while he removes his clothes. The last thing he does before entering her is to feel under the pillow for Crow’s notebook. He takes it out and lets it fall. She hears the notebook hit the floor, but she is already lost, and the sound could be anything: a pushcart in the alley, the cry of a peddler, a bird on the windowsill, confused about the direction from which the sun will rise.

  Afterward, they lie smoking, looking at the ceiling, each engaged in very separate thoughts. Rachel Lippsted cannot decide whether what she has done is in obedience to her brother’s wishes or a terrible defiance of them. Surely, she thinks, a single act cannot be both compliant and defiant.

  Rachel has great respect for her brother’s knowledge of the world. He has tried to guide her into marriage, arranging proposals from the sons of wealthy Jewish banking houses in Berlin, Paris and Vienna. She has rejected all of them, some quite abruptly. Her brother has never chastised her for refusing, but she can feel his concern that she will never marry and leave the deeply familiar routine of the townhouse where the two of them live together like jewels in a black velvet case.

  In all those situations, she understood her brother’s intentions clearly. But now she is confused. Didn’t Jacob invite this strange man to dinner? And wasn’t that an act almost as unexpected and mad as what she has done tonight? Isn’t her act, impulsive as it was, an extension of his? She thinks and thinks, but cannot decide. Still, she is sure that her opposing currents of feeling toward her brother are part of what is drawing her to this strange man.

  She turns on her side and reaches over to stroke the boatmaker’s face, feeling the roughness of his beard, the prickle of mustache. She raises herself over him where he is lying on his back and slaps his face lightly, teasingly. She feels so much more worldly than he is. It is as if they are from different realms: she the sky, he the earth. She saw from the way he behaved in their drawing room that she knows a thousand things he does not know, may never know. She knows she could tease and mock him—and she will. At the same time she cannot deny that, regardless of the enormous differences between them, regardless of her tangled motives, she has given herself to this strange man from Small Island. The gift is irrevocable.

  She remembers how she felt with her father when she was eight years old: cherished, in her place, his love restoring order to a universe that had become chaotic following her mother’s death. Her brother and the rabbi, each in his own way, give her some of that feeling. But for reasons unfathomed and unfathomable, the boatmaker, with his Small Island smell of earth, stone and sea, gives her much more. She has surrendered. She is not afraid. Surprised—very—but no longer afraid. They crush out their cigarettes, close the distance between them.

  When she leaves, he pulls his longjohns on and stands in the center of the cold room watching what has just happened play through his mind over and over again. He sees the chair where she was sitting when he pulled her up to him. The narrow bed where he stoo
d looking down at her waiting for him, watching him, her body white and smooth, dark at the center. He walks to the window and pulls the curtain back, looking down into the alley, where he saw Crow and White alive for the last time. Crow’s notebook sits on the floor under the bed where he dropped it.

  He picks the notebook up and skims through it in the moonlight. Finding nothing new, he closes the notebook and lifts the lid of his cache. Even with what he keeps in the sealskin bag, there is quite a bit of money under the floor. In this moment, his questions about money seem as childish as the red and blue sails on the boats the boys push out into the center of the pool in the Royal Gardens. Perhaps the secret of money, the secret he has been searching for all these months, is simply that to be happy you need to have enough money that you don’t have to think about it. He laughs at himself. Rachel Lippsted makes him want to laugh at himself. She makes him feel foolish, a little crude, possibly even childish. He feels a little of the anger he felt toward the woman of the town. But he softens quickly, because he knows that, deep down, this woman, in spite of her teasing superiority, her wealth and breeding, belongs to him. The boatmaker has accepted Rachel Lippsted’s startling surrender. There will be none of the rage he felt on Big Island.

  He puts the notebook back in the cache and sets the green floorboard in place. He lies down and twists the rumpled sheets around him. Through the window, he can see that the sky has begun to change. Everything is smiling. Outside, a miracle is about to take place: the dawn of a perfectly ordinary spring day. In an hour the boatmaker will dress and then drink his coffee from the bowl offered by the landlady. The landlady will say nothing about the events of the previous evening. He will treasure her silence. He will pull on his canvas jacket, finish his coffee and go out into the Old Quarter, its streets alive with the smell of food and the sound of business waiting to be conducted.

  CHAPTER 22

  Rachel’s third visit to the boardinghouse comes on a beautiful spring night with a sliver of moon in a blue-black sky. The boatmaker is standing with his back to the room, looking out the window. The moon and sky make him think of his journey to Big Island: how huge the sky was, how well his boat sailed. He thinks of where the boat is now, wonders whether he will ever see it again. Asks himself whether Small Island is still his home. And if it isn’t, what is?

  At that thought he feels her touch on his back and smells her scent, which reminds him of spring flowers under rain, beneath it the smell of her. She leans into him, her head resting on his back, reaches around and joins her hands on his chest. They stand that way for a while in the moonlight. Then they enter the world that they create together between the Old Quarter and the moon.

  After, he rises from the twisted sheets to bring them cigarettes. She is pleased by the leanness of him. At the center of his body his skin is white, but there is color in his neck, face and forearms, even after the long Mainland winter.

  They lie back, smoking, safe in their world, which for the moment exists only on his narrow bed. When they are in this world, neither of them wants to leave it to enter everyday reality. For that reason they have shared little about themselves. Even the few stories they have told each other have been told the way you would tell an acquaintance, not an intimate. But as he lies smoking, feeling her beside him, the boatmaker knows he is about to bring them out of their little sphere into the outside world—or bring the outside world onto this bed with them.

  Raising himself on an elbow and looking down at her, he says: “I saw you once before.”

  He is giving her room, not touching her. She is not interested in talking, wishes he would be quiet, press closer. She resents the space between them, which is oddly shaped, filled with cigarette smoke and moonlight.

  “In the compound? Yes, I saw you. I still see you sometimes, standing there in your canvas jacket. But I am proper, you know, well brought up. I was raised in the capital and educated in Paris. And so I say nothing. What would people think if I stood in the courtyard and shouted to anyone who could hear me: Look! Look! This is the man I love. Look at him there in his jacket, his arms full of wood! Imagine how their faces would change! But I don’t do that. I am nothing if not well behaved. At least I was before I met you,” she says, exhaling gray smoke through a smile that is about to turn into the laughter the boatmaker now cannot imagine his life without.

  She is surprised he seems so serious. She knows he is a serious man, but until now, she has always been able to make him smile, even laugh at himself—and has taken great pleasure in those acts.

  “Not in the compound. Before I came there.”

  “When?” She lets ash fall on them and on the sheet. He takes her cigarette, gets out of bed, crushes both cigarettes in the base of the candlestick and comes back to sit on the edge of the bed.

  “At the Mint. On the king’s birthday. Not last year. The year before.”

  She sits up and looks at him. “So that’s where I saw you! I couldn’t remember. I knew I had seen you before. You seemed so familiar. But I couldn’t remember where or when. It was like an itch in my brain; I couldn’t scratch it. So that’s where it was!” Her face shines. The mystery is solved. There is no reason for him to keep on being so serious.

  She reaches for him. He knows she wants him to close the distance between them, take her again. But he stops her. Not roughly, but firm.

  “You were giving your lecture. There was a man yelling about the Jews. You did something with the desk. The police came and took him away. But not roughly. I know how the coppers can be when they want to. They were gentle with him. It was a game.”

  “Rademacher,” she says, her face clouding. “A very dangerous man.”

  “Who is Rademacher?”

  “An agent of The Brotherhood. And the police also, no doubt. There is often so little difference between them.”

  “The Brotherhood newspaper?”

  “They publish that hateful paper, yes. And do other things. They are a secret society that is in fact not so secret. At the heart of it is a small group of powerful men: retired army officers, businessmen, politicians, high men of the Church. My brother knows all of them. We have been to their houses and they to ours. In public they are polite enough to us. But deep down they are frightened—of losing their country, of us, of things changing. And as a result they are filled with hatred. So far the king has kept them in check. But there are limits to any man’s power—even the king’s.”

  He can tell she wants to smoke. He gets them another pair of cigarettes and stands before her. “Why would he show up at your lecture, this Rademacher?”

  “Who knows? Perhaps he was drunk. Drunk and full of whiskey courage. Then again, he might not have been afraid even if he was sober. Perhaps it was just an amusement. A pleasant way to pass the holiday when he was liberated from his other duties.” Rachel Lippsted laughs without happiness.

  The boatmaker doesn’t like to see her in this mood. But he does not want her to stop talking. Someone is finally telling him at least a few of the things he has wanted to know for a long time. He lights the cigarettes and hands her one. They sit side by side on the edge of the bed, smoking.

  “Rademacher is a powerful agent of The Brotherhood,” she says. “A man to be feared. But also a man with a wild streak. Perhaps that is why he is still out there in the field running his stable of corrupt little agents. I must admit that in a strange way—very strange, coming from me—I admire Rademacher. With his connections and experience, he could be sitting in a wood-panelled office somewhere, shifting papers from box to box. But he remains on the outside, in the middle of the action. I admire that in a man—even an evil man.”

  She pauses and exhales, long and slow, gazing at the green floorboards. Then she turns to look straight into the boatmaker’s eyes.

  “And here’s something that may surprise you. You know Sven Eriksson, the foreman you admire so much? He and Rademacher were childhood friends. They grew up together in the same village. Now they hate each other. What kin
d of world do we live in, where boyhood friends from the same village grow up to be sworn enemies who would kill each other if they got the chance?”

  The boatmaker hears her question, but his mind is still engaged with the riddles he has been pondering so long.

  “You handled it well—when he got angry.”

  “I was upset. You can imagine. But I wasn’t afraid for my life. I have no doubt that Rademacher is capable of great violence. But he wasn’t going to spill my blood in the Royal Mint on the king’s birthday. He knew that. I knew that. Still . . .”

  She reaches for him, and this time he doesn’t stop her. Their coming together is as powerful as before, but also different: The outside world has entered the space between them.

  Two days later the boatmaker is deep in the storeroom when the foreman comes to stand over him and his work. It is late in the day. Sven Eriksson looks from man to wood and back. “You are again invited to dine—upstairs.” He turns and leaves.

  In the boatmaker’s room the dinner suit hangs in the wardrobe. The landlady has been brushing it every few days, hoping it will be worn again. He takes it out and dresses slowly. His fingers, so skilled with tools, are less deft when it comes to putting on an old-fashioned dinner suit. The landlady will help him with tie, cufflinks, studs for the boiled shirt. The boatmaker, who has never before wished he had a mirror to see himself in, now wishes he had one.

  He tucks himself into the trousers, pulls the halves of the shirt together, pulls up the braces. Fingers his nose, wondering how much the scar has faded, how obvious it still is. He has told no one how he got it. Rachel has asked, of course. He gave her the usual story—an accident on a building site—a story that is little more than a painted wooden toy given to a child to stop its crying. Rachel knows that, but she already understands the boatmaker well enough not to press further. He sits on his bed, waiting for the landlady to come and help him finish dressing. It is late in spring, still light past seven.