The Lover From an Icy Sea (41 page)

“
And?” she said.

“
And so, I know about his suicide.”

“
What about it?”

If Kit had thought that modulating the tone of his voice would convey sympathy, empathy, a shared anything—anything, that is, but a wish to do battle with her—he’d sadly overestimated his own authority.

“
I know that he killed himself when you were only fifteen. I know that the pain of losing a parent at that age—by whatever cause, but particularly by suicide—would leave most people crippled for—.”

“
You don’t know shit, Kit.”

Her pronouncement all but knocked the wind out of him. “All right then. Tell me.”

Daneka took a long moment to compose herself. She was not in the habit of taking commands from anyone, least of all from Kit. She’d answer when she was damned well ready to answer. Until then, she’d maintain her composure—and maintain, too, total control of the situation. She stared at him long enough to make him blink.

“
My father was a moody man. ‘Depressed’ is a more accurate way to describe him—for as long as I was on earth. His death was just a logical conclusion to a sorry life.”

Logical conclusion to a sorry life?
Kit stared at her in amazement. Is that how a child describes the suicide—a word, he noted, she’d carefully avoided—of her own father?

“
Let me tell you something else. In high school. Another boy. A schoolmate. A boy from elsewhere in the village. Months earlier, he’d also lost a father. He came to me when he heard. One day, before the start of school, I didn’t know what he wanted. I wasn’t interested in what he wanted. As far as I was concerned, we had nothing in common. He mumbled something. I told him to shut up and go away. I wanted to read my book. He never tried again.”

Kit looked at Daneka. She’d maintained perfect control and had said everything she intended to say. The case, for her, was closed.

He shifted his gaze, looked out and studied the landscape for a long moment. The panorama reminded him of Lancaster County: frothy fat, piebald cows lounging in tessellated fields of chartreuse or civette green; the occasional russet-stained tractor; the still more occasional sorrel- or umber-colored farmhouse; next to each, a vertical grain silo standing tall, its aluminum top hat straining for just the suggestion of the sun’s rays. Kit looked at it all through the glaucous grey filter of dew or fog or mist, or maybe of a light rain, which collected on the pane, spread out in odd, wind-painted patterns, then simply blew off, dropped to the tracks, and disappeared.

He turned to Daneka. “It’s beautiful, your Denmark.”

She said nothing, ignored his remark, and continued to stare out of her half of the same window.

Chapter 51

Their train arrived at 15:09:50—ten seconds earlier than predicted by both conductor and schedule. Denmark was, Kit suspected, one of those countries in which punctuality mattered. He and Daneka hauled down their luggage from the overhead racks, descended to the station platform and walked towards the wharf.

Their ferry to the island of Bornholm stood ready, its hold taking on passengers on foot—like them—as well as others in cars or trucks. Kit looked at license plates as he and Daneka walked along the line of waiting vehicles. The tell-tale “S,” “DK,” and less frequent “D” or “N” told him the likely nationality of each vehicle’s occupants. He tried to catch snippets of conversation as they walked past open windows. It was easy enough whenever they’d come across a “D.” As with Americans—Kit thought—the lever for volume control with Germans always seemed to be broken. With “S,” “DK” and “N,” however, the task was trickier. Swedes, Danes and Norwegians tended to say little. When they did, they spoke in clipped, quiet syllables. What’s more, all of it—to Kit’s ear—was simply inscrutable.

Kit and Daneka made their way up the gangplank of the ferry—the
Villum Clausen
—towards the main passenger deck. Just ahead of them, and by unhappy coincidence, trundled an American family—or at least the semblance of an American family—an older woman with two adolescent children: the one, a gangly girl with pale skin and straight, blond hair; the other, a much darker-skinned boy, Polynesian-looking, with an attitude problem. His hair—sleek, black—peeked out defiantly from under a baseball cap, which he wore “ghetto-style” with the bill to the rear. The woman was attractive, Kit thought. Remarkably tight body and a quietly stunning face, if also ageing less than gracefully. The lines seemed to come from some hidden strain, at least one source of which Kit was about to discover.

As the family entered the enclosed main passenger deck, the boy announced his presence in plain English. “It smells like shit in here!” he shouted for the benefit of any receptive ears within a hundred yards. He then tossed his knapsack in front of the most accessible banquette and sat down—on the knapsack, that is, rather than on the banquette. “Christian!” the woman said, though with a curious French inflection. American children, Kit knew, came in all shapes, sizes and attitudes; their names, however, weren’t subject to nasalization except by way of affectation. Maybe, he thought, affectation was another source of this woman’s strain.

Wearing earphones attached to a CD player, the girl took a seat on the same banquette and stared off into space. She was certainly pleasant enough looking, and neither her demeanor nor her behavior gave the least offense. She might one day, Kit thought, become a real beauty. He just wasn’t sure on which planet.

“
Get up off the floor, take your cap off, and sit down here like a human being for a change!” the woman ordered. The boy ignored her. Apparently exasperated, she snatched the knapsack out from underneath him. His bottom hit the floor with a thud.

“
Goddamn it!” he said, injecting a few extra decibels for the benefit of ears beyond the hundred-yard perimeter of his earlier exclamation.

“
Watch your mouth,” the mother squeezed out under her breath and with rather too much control. The boy’s mouth, Kit surmised, might just be a third source of this woman’s strain. In any case, she was losing the fight. She probably lost the entire cause years earlier, Kit thought. She just doesn’t know it yet.

Kit nudged Daneka along in an effort to get as far away from this bunch as possible. After they’d moved on a few steps, Kit caught one last exclamation: “
Skit också!
” He turned around. The woman lowered her eyes in a ready confession—but only after theirs had met, briefly. He didn’t know the word—or the language. But he also knew that people didn’t frivolously curse in some foreign language at a moment of real frustration. He made a mental note to ask Daneka later for a translation, if he could somehow recreate the sound of the words. At the same time, he looked again at the woman and registered a fact: she, at least, was not American—as he’d suspected earlier.

They moved on and found a whole row of vacant seats on the other side of the cabin—in fact, one row of seats facing another, all vacant—and sat down opposite one another. They both looked out the window in silent longing for the ferry to get underway.

After a few minutes, a group of five or six young women arrived at their location.

“
Är det ledigt här?
” one of them asked, looking at no one in particular, yet apparently quite certain that some answer would alight upon her ear from somewhere.

“
Ja … det är det
,” Daneka said. The tone and pacing of her answer suggested to Kit—whatever the girl may’ve asked, and whatever Daneka may’ve answered—that she wasn’t overwhelmingly pleased at the prospect of sharing her relative privacy with an unruly bunch of strangers—to boot: young, female and attractive. Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether she was pleased or displeased. The girls all sat down on the long banquette next to her, opposite Kit, then stowed their knapsacks under their seats and settled in for the ride.

From Kit’s perspective, each seemed to be attached to a CD player as if by umbilical cord. Player-placentas fed in whatever particular nutrients each girl required. They were all in private wombs, seemingly indifferent to their surroundings, intent on nothing more than sucking in the next bit of musical pabulum. A great invention, he thought, the CD player. And even greater, earphones—for all concerned.

“
Den här låten är det!
” one of the girls suddenly screeched out in rapture, apparently trying to communicate something or other to the other little hawks alongside her, all of whom were lost in their own sonic delirium. Her body began to sway to the rhythm of her particular nutrient. Kit felt embarrassed—not just for her, but for her whole CD-enslaved generation. She started: first to lip-synch, until it simply wasn’t enough; then to sing along with the lyrics. She was as tone-deaf as a sponge. At the same time—even Kit could recognize the butchered vowels and consonants—the language was clearly not hers. And yet, she insisted upon declaring her love to some unseen Apollo in, of all things, French.

“
Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir
…?”

The irony—the utter irony. Here he was on the Baltic Sea, thousands of miles from home and, at least in his mind, in a setting deeply romantic—or tragic—or at least Baltic. He was a simple boy from a simple state, from the comparatively simple United States. ‘Pacific Ocean’ meant little more to him than a necessary trip to the West Coast to make some quick cash. To a certain Spanish explorer of the early sixteenth century, however, ‘Pacific Ocean’ had been an invention—two words to describe to an old world a body of water and a horizon far beyond any western horizon any of them could possibly imagine.

Kit tried to visualize Balboa standing at the far side of the isthmus at the instant at which he’d pronounced the two simple words. He next looked at the girl opposite him and tried to imagine what far-distant ear on what far-distant continent would strain for the threnody of her pitiful siren song. He blinked; looked again; tried to fathom why he’d thought all of this would somehow be different from what he might find in any small town in America.

Daneka, apparently, had had enough. She abruptly stood up and, without a word to Kit, walked to the nearest exit door. He watched her profile pass from window to window as she walked towards the bow. At the same time, he heard—then felt—the rumble of engines down in the bowels of the ferry. Stasis now stripped while Kinesis dressed; only their shared hangar of Inertia remained constant.

Chapter 52

As the ferry made ready to land at Ystad, the girls opposite Kit hastily gathered their belongings and then departed, en masse blonde, in the direction of the stern. The ferry maneuvered itself through a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, then reversed engines and slowly backed in towards the wharf. Kit went out to the hurricane deck for a smoke and to get his first view of Sweden: the landmass, home to the blond mass. He stepped up to the railing and watched the captain complete his maneuver. As the ferry moved into its berth, Kit felt the engines throttle back, pause, then start up again. The churn of water beneath the ship’s stern provided the otherwise invisible evidence of propellers behaving like brakes. At the same time, the weathered hands of the ferry’s deckhands assisted, on board and on land, in the last part of the docking and in bringing the ferry to a safe standstill, weaving heavy ropes through fairleads and around cleats. They performed their practiced choreography as delicately as any ballet, but in the certain knowledge that a misstep or lost slipper could, in an instant, crush a man to mincemeat between seawall and ship.

Kit continued to survey the scene from his position on the hurricane deck. He saw Daneka standing alone at the bow and looking out to sea; saw passengers on the ferry eagerly waiting to disembark; saw, in line with the others, the American family with the mother of unknown origin; also heard, through the general din, her voice inveigh against the gangly girl of straight, blond hair and a not-unpleasant demeanor.

“
Ophelia! Listen to me!” The combination of ear-phones and blank expression suggested a deathlike indifference to both the entreaty and its sorry source.

The girl was not listening to her mother any more than the boy was—now; earlier; maybe ever. This mother might have better luck moving a wall, Kit thought—the shrillness of her voice might cause at least a few molecules of brick to crumble. As if the woman could sense she was being watched, she turned her head in Kit’s direction and stared directly back at him. Their eyes met and locked. Even at that distance, Kit could see their soft, tired greenness. The strain he’d noted earlier disappeared for an instant as she seemed to forget—in the uncritical stare of this stranger—her children, her situation, her certain mortality. Head, neck and body started to turn back to all three, but her eyes wouldn’t leave his—couldn’t leave his—and so, shared instead a last moment of quiet communion; accepted a silent benediction; returned a salutation and a last goodbye—and then turned away.

Although Kit was certain he’d never see the woman again, he was equally certain he’d never forget this singular communion of eyes—that her green stare would be fixed in his visual memory as surely as the smell of fresh cut grass was fixed in his olfactory memory; as the sound of the single Danish word Daneka had whispered the first time he’d entered her was fixed in his aural memory; as the feel of the hair on the nape of her neck each time he’d kissed her off to sleep was fixed in his tactile memory. And that he would take it, along with all the others, to the grave.