The Boatmaker

by John Benditt

  Outwardly the second dinner is not very different from the first. The same group convenes in the drawing room among paintings that resemble colored snowstorms. There is the whiskey, with its luxurious and elegant burn, the table heavy with silver and crystal in the wood-panelled dining room.

  But under the surface different currents are flowing. Rachel Lippsted and the boatmaker glow like fireflies, pretending not to know each other. The rabbi stays away from the subject of the Secret Jews, instead making surprisingly worldly and sophisticated small talk including witty remarks in several languages. Jacob Lippsted, having been a selfless and gracious host at the first dinner, is flushed and full of himself, enjoying much of his own glorious deep red wine as he talks about what is on his mind rather than bringing the others into the conversation one at a time in their turn.

  “We are racing the king. In June at the Royal Racecourse. A challenge match: his horse against ours. Medieval, don’t you think? Two champions enter the lists on behalf of two great houses, sporting colored silks. But this race is the opposite of medieval. The king is a great modernizer. He is opening our small, backward country to the world. The race is a part of that opening. There is no money riding on it, nothing but a handshake. But for the king to shake my hand and take this wager means a deep change in the kingdom. He is the king, but he is meeting me, meeting this house, as he would any of his citizens. That is progress.”

  He lifts his glass, half full of wine the color of a ripe plum: “To our king. To a wider world where we all stand equal.” They drink, his listeners careful with their own thoughts.

  “And may this race, though just a symbol, bring many opportunities to us. May the House of Lippsted grow and prosper. May our partnership with the king lift us beyond even the greatest successes of our past.” All four drink again, tasting the wine and the words.

  Turning to the boatmaker, Jacob says: “Our horse is every bit a match for the king’s. You must come with me to see him.” He gives his sister a look that is meaningful, his dark eyes on hers, speaking the language of a kingdom of two. He is startled to find that her eyes are opaque to him. She is flushed. She has drunk more than usual, he thinks, explaining her opacity that way.

  The rabbi looks at the three young people with pride and affection. How beautiful they are, he thinks. Even the man from Small Island has crept into the rabbi’s open heart. But at the same time he feels a fear that rises from the memory of his people, from all the things Jews have suffered at the hands of Christians. Jacob Lippsted’s pride, his display of power, make the rabbi uneasy. The rabbi knows better than the young people that in the history of his tribe calling proud attention to oneself and one’s power has brought down disasters and punishments. First from Ha-Shem, later from the Gentiles, who might even (who can say?) be themselves an instrument of Ha-Shem. The rabbi knows that if he tries to explain his concerns, Jacob Lippsted will laugh, tell him to abandon tribal superstitions and join a world that is rapidly changing.

  The boatmaker doesn’t know whether he should take seriously Jacob’s suggestion to come and see the great horse that will run for the House of Lippsted. But not long after this dinner, on a fine day when spring is flowing into summer, he finds himself in the black carriage that brings Rachel to his boardinghouse. He thinks he can smell her scent rise from the black leather. By now he is aware that this scent, of spring flowers under rain, has a name: Lily of the Valley.

  As the carriage rolls toward the countryside, the boatmaker is embarrassed by his jacket, the costume of an apprentice. He is not ashamed of his work. Not at all. He is proud to serve under Sven Eriksson, to work among his men, every one a serious and capable worker, some revered masters of their craft. But next to Jacob Lippsted, who leans back on black cushions smoking a cigar and letting his smoke drift out the window, wearing a brown tweed suit cut and sewn by hands as skilled as the ones that make Lippsted furniture, the boatmaker feels poorly groomed.

  Jacob Lippsted’s suit fits him as if it knew him as well as his mother did, giving him room where he needs it, holding him snug where it should do that. It is a suit for the country, matching brown boots and the brown gloves held in his left hand while he smokes with his right. It is not only the suit that makes the man seem so well groomed. Jacob Lippsted seems more at ease with himself than anyone the boatmaker has ever known. It does not surprise him that the man with the dark eyes and neatly clipped beard can speak as a peer to the king.

  “I’m glad you’re coming with me. I am. I want you to see this horse. And meet his trainer. An odd little man, Donelan—but a genius with animals. He knows this horse. No one could have told us when we bought him at auction as a colt that he would come this far. He had courage—no question of that—and raw power. But he was ornery. When he raced, you never knew whether he was going to run like the wind or bolt to the stables when the gun was fired. He was a handful—more than a handful! I was ready to give up on him and put him out to stud. And he will be a great stud horse one day. He has wonderful bloodlines, going all the way back to the Byerly Turk. You can’t have nobler blood than that, even if you are the king himself. Who’s a very good chap, by the way, with a wonderful sense of humor, even about himself.”

  “Donelan?”

  “Yes, Donelan. Oh, you mean the name. He’s an Irishman. I see why you’re puzzled. Not many of those on the Mainland, are there? He came with the colt when we bought him. Refused to be parted. He was as ornery as the colt. But he must have known what the horse could be. There are many kinds of knowledge in this world. The rabbi has one kind. I know you think he’s a cracked old egg, with his babble about Secret Jews, but you will see in time. He’s a man of rare depth, Nachum Goldman. You have another kind of knowledge. My sister has another.”

  Jacob Lippsted leans out the window, exhaling a long stream of smoke, eyes turned from the boatmaker to the rich farmland left by the glaciers when they retreated thousands of years before.

  “When we bought the colt, Donelan knew something about him that no one else could see yet. He was willing to make powerful people angry in his stubbornness and his refusal to be parted from the colt. But he’s been proved right, many times over. He’s made something great of this horse. I wouldn’t say tamed, because he isn’t tamed. You’ll see. You wouldn’t want him to be tamed. The same way you wouldn’t want your best general to be tamed. The way Napoleon was never tamed. They could chain him to a lump of rock no bigger than Small Island—but never tame him. Well, here we are. Soon enough, you’ll see for yourself,” Jacob Lippsted says, tossing half of a very expensive cigar out the window.

  The carriage turns through a gate in a wooden fence. At the end of a gravel drive stands a group of large, well-kept stone buildings. On the front of the largest, in the center, is a metal L. The carriage stops in front of it, and the men climb out, stretching their legs. The black horses snort and shake their heads. The driver leads them around the corner and out of sight.

  Inside the barn is the rich smell of a place where horses live: sweat, hay, grain, manure, saddle soap, leather. Everything is quiet. No one seems to be waiting for the two men to arrive, even though one of them owns everything in sight, right down to the last water bucket and the dipper in it. Each stall they pass has a brass plate bearing a name. They walk through the straw until they come to a stall twice the size of the others, with Bold Prince inscribed on its brass plaque.

  In the stall are a pony and a man wearing a worn tweed suit with a vest and flat cap. Towering over them is a brown horse with a black mane and tail. The horse is tall, but his leanness makes him seem even taller than he is. He tenses at their appearance. The boatmaker remembers the newspaper in the barbershop. One of the silhouettes facing each other on the front page has sprung to life.

  “Hello, Donelan,” says Jacob Lippsted, at his ease but not barging into the stall. “How is the mood today?”

  “Changeable as always, sir. Thunderclouds early, then patches of sun. But we’re always on the lookout for sudden s
torms. It’s spring, after all.”

  Donelan speaks the language of the Mainland well enough to banter with Jacob Lippsted about the horse in their own code. But he speaks with an accent. It is unlike any accent the boatmaker knows, like an English accent but not quite the same. The big horse relaxes at the sound of the little man’s voice.

  “Donelan, this is a friend who has come to us all the way from Small Island. I would appreciate it if you would all make him welcome. Do you think the weather will hold long enough for us to come in?”

  “I think it might,” Donelan says, coming to the gate. At he reaches to open it, the boatmaker sees that the Irishman’s hands are twisted. He uses them like blunt tools.

  Donelan gets the gate open, and they step in. The big horse backs into a corner of the stall, his eyes expanding until white shows all the way around the irises.

  “Come on,” the Irishman says, closing the gate, “it will be alright. We’ll be friends soon enough. Give this to the pony,” he says, pressing a lump of sugar into the boatmaker’s palm. “Here you go, Fannie. Let’s see what this fellow has brought you from town.”

  The boatmaker shows the sugar and the pony comes toward him, looks him up and down, accepts the sugar and lets him stroke her muzzle. Some of the tension leaves the stall. The brown horse takes a step toward the rest, less white showing in his eyes.

  “Ah, yes, your majesty,” the Irishman says, “it’s alright. We’re all going to be friends, whether our bloodlines go all the way back to the days of the prophet Mohamet or only to Small Island.”

  He moves quietly to the big horse and leans into his shoulder, as if he were leaning against a brown-and-black wall. The horse turns his head, reaches down, takes the flat cap in his mouth, holding it up and out of reach.

  “Well, well, well. We are playful, are we not, my prince? The air of Small Island must agree with you.”

  He turns and swats the horse on its shoulder, at which the pony comes to intervene, putting her head under the Irishman’s armpit and demanding her rightful place in this small kingdom.

  After his visit to the barn, the boatmaker’s life settles into a new rhythm. When he is in the compound, he spends more and more time in the storeroom. And he spends his time mostly as he wishes. Eriksson does not come after him to pull him back into his apprentice duties. What he is working on in the storeroom grows toward completion. When he leaves after wrapping the canvas around it, it is taller than the boatmaker himself.

  In the courtyard he sometimes passes Rachel Lippsted stepping down from her carriage. As they pass, neither betrays the other. When she goes into the house, he couldn’t say what she is wearing. She, on the other hand, notices everything about him. The scar on his nose, which is now just two light lines. His brown hair, which is continuing to thin. In the end he will be bald, she sees, unlike her brother, who retains all of his thick black hair. The boatmaker’s baldness won’t matter. In fact, the differences between the two men please her.

  When he is not working, the boatmaker often goes out to the stables. The barns are on the other side of the city from the New Land, in a different landscape. Here it is green and rolling, with big estates among the farms and houses, glossy horses in rich pastures. He rides the tram to the end of the line, looking out the window and thinking about Father Robert and Neck. At the end of the line he gets off and walks the rest of the way or gets a ride in a wagon filled with vegetables.

  He is drawn to the barns by the warmth he feels in the stall with the Irishman, the horse and the pony. Their kingdom is comfortable, though not always peaceful. The Irishman sometimes goes silent, radiating cold melancholy. The big horse rears over his small subjects, showing his teeth. The pony snaps with hers. But these moods pass quickly, and no grudges are held. Although the man from Small Island is only a visitor in this tiny kingdom, they have come to accept his presence.

  Like his time with Rachel, the boatmaker’s visits to the barn are a nourishing secret. He witnesses the care the Irishman takes with the horse: his feed, the well-planned workouts, the rubdowns afterward. Leaning on the fence around the track behind the barns, the boatmaker watches as Bold Prince is put through his paces by his jockey, Staedter. The big brown horse goes slowly to warm up, then circles the track at full power. The horse loves to run; Staedter rarely needs his whip. The ground shakes as they roll past, the jockey in his red-and-white Lippsted silks. Clouds of dirt burst upward. Breath thunders in and out of the horse’s flaring nostrils. Standing at the rail, the boatmaker wonders how there could be another horse in the kingdom capable of giving this one an honest challenge.

  CHAPTER 23

  The race between Bold Prince and The Royal Champion is scheduled for a Saturday just before Midsummer’s Eve. On the first day of June, the handbills begin appearing in the Old Quarter. At first there are just a few, put up during the night. As he walks to work, the boatmaker sees the rectangular sheets on walls, lampposts, doors. At the top, The Brotherhood is printed in the spiky type of the newspaper’s logo. Below, a headline in rounded modern type screams: Stop the Abomination! Below that is a single column of smaller type:

  Brothers! The horse race between the Crown and the House of Lippsted is an abomination. The Jews are foreign parasites, an infection in the blood of our Mainland. It is outrageous that they have the audacity to challenge the king whose ancestor was converted to the love of Christ by Vashad of sainted memory.

  Brothers! We must unite to purge these parasites from our blood! But they are not the only ones who undermine us. The king himself is far from blameless. Even though the spirit of our warrior forefathers runs in his veins, he pollutes himself by stooping to a public display of equality with these worms that invade our flesh and our soil.

  Brothers! We must cleanse our cities and towns, our nation! The Mainland must be made pure again through sacrifice. We must rise and rid ourselves of these rootless foreign oppressors—and all who give them comfort. Help us stop the abomination! Join us! Follow The Brotherhood into the New Land!

  On his way to the compound the boatmaker uses a fingernail to lift one of these handbills from a brick wall. He reads it, folds it and puts it in the pocket of his canvas jacket before walking on.

  As each June day dawns hotter and brighter than the one before, more of The Brotherhood’s handbills appear in the Old Quarter, posted invisibly during the night. Soon they cover the walls, hiding the older layers underneath them: images of the king, posters from the previous summer advertising a circus whose star attraction was a pair of Siamese twins, advertisements for diviners offering miraculous solutions to all manner of problems—drink, rheumatism, failing potency, missing wives.

  In the morning the news is there for everyone to see. Gentiles cluster around the bills and talk, some clucking and shaking their heads, some murmuring their approval. Jews stop and read, then move on without speaking.

  As the handbills appear, the boatmaker sees things he has not seen before on the Mainland. Drunken workingmen bump Jews off the sidewalk into the street. There are broken windows in Jewish shops. The shopkeepers stand on the sidewalk examining the damage, looking puzzled and frightened.

  The weather stays beautiful and warm. Fresh green leaves unfold on the trees that line the long allée in the Royal Gardens around the Winter Palace. The pond near the palace is full. Boys use sticks to push their boats out into the center, where they catch the breeze that comes flowing down between the plane trees.

  At night Rachel comes to him. As they lie together, she reaches out to touch the scar on his nose. Since he refuses to tell her how he really got it, she has been forced to make up her own explanation. In Rachel’s story, the boatmaker’s scar is the remnant of a mysterious Small Island initiation rite. Although her education is not as extensive as her brother’s or the king’s, she is as well educated as any woman on the Mainland. At university she read accounts of rituals practiced by tribes in Africa and on the Pacific Islands. She knows that cutting, bloodletting and scarring are of
ten required for a boy to become a man. She imagines similar things happening in the darkness of Small Island. To her, the boatmaker’s silence, his refusal to discuss the scar seriously, are part of the ritual. The men of the tribe have been sworn never to talk about it with anyone—especially not a woman. Her story began as whimsy. But it soon lost its fictional quality and became a part of her experience of the boatmaker, as real as any other part of him.

  “I don’t believe you got this at work.”

  “No?”

  “No, I don’t believe it. You are too careful. Too careful with tools, at least.” She laughs. “I think this is something you got in a rite of initiation. I think you are a tribesman. Not really civilized at all.”

  The boatmaker is getting used to this woman’s teasing humor; he is smiling at her in the dark.

  She covers his eyes with one hand. With the other she reaches for him and finds him surging toward her. He pulls her close, rolls onto her and holds her down, his eyes covered by her hand.

  He lashes himself to her the way two fishing boats are lashed together to ride out a squall—out of sight of land, yawing and bucking while the thunder shakes them and the lightning passes over in the dark. The two boats remain that way, gunwale to gunwale, until the storm has passed, the wind eases, the rain softens and the sky begins to lighten. Then the sailors check the rigging and the soundness of the hulls to see how they have weathered the storm.

  Afterward, as they lie smoking, Rachel Lippsted’s mind is running over her own motivations. Despite having been in this bed many times, she still cannot decide whether in being here she is following her brother’s will or rebelling: extending their family or leaving it behind her.

  The boatmaker is not thinking about Rachel. He is thinking of the handbills that appear each night in the Old Quarter, their words so much like those of Father Robert’s sermons. He knows how dangerous the priest can be. But he does not share his fears with Rachel. He does not want word to reach Jacob Lippsted, with only days remaining before the race. He knows how important this race is to Rachel’s brother.