The Boatmaker (14 page)

CHAPTER 11

In the classroom the semicircle of folding chairs shows a gap where one chair lies flat on the floor. The two whelks glitter on the desk, their checked surfaces reflecting light from bare bulbs. Rachel Lippsted resumes her lecture, slightly unsteady but determined, proceeds to the end, locks the pink-and-green bill in the desk and puts the whelks back in their case. Turning the lights off and closing the door, she escorts her six remaining pupils out of the classroom and down broad worn stone stairs. At the bottom is a heavy door guarded by a soldier who nods them past.

They enter a huge space in which they must stop to let their eyes adjust to the dimness. Light trickles from small windows high on the walls, at the level of the street outside. The floor is bedrock. Cut into it are four bays. In each bay sits a huge piece of machinery, as tall as two men and much longer. A serpentine of rollers of different sizes leads the eye from one end of the machine to the other.
Over everything is the smell of oil and ink and the melancholy of machinery stopped in the middle of its task.

Rachel Lippsted, neatly buttoned into her purple dress, toes of black boots peeping out from under her skirt, explains that the presses are as modern and powerful as any in Europe. Made in England and brought by specially reinforced ships upriver to the capital, they can print thousands of banknotes an hour. The Mainland has moved out of the second phase of the history of money, she says. The country's wealth is no longer tied to gold or to conquest: It increases with the skill and productivity of its workers.

At the end of the tour the group assembles in the high-ceilinged entrance hall, and the five other men leave without a word. In spite of the strange events of this day, the boatmaker still wants to exercise his privilege of exchanging worn bills for new ones. The woman in the purple dress shakes his hand goodbye. The boatmaker has never shaken hands with a woman. Her palm is cool and dry, smaller and smoother than his.

After leaving her, he climbs stone stairs and walks through offices, asking for directions, until he finds himself in a small room with frosted glass rising from a wooden divider. There are two arched openings in the frosted glass. Etched in the glass between them is an oval enclosing the king's initial surrounded by an intricate
floral design. Against the far wall, under the familiar portrait of the king, are benches. The benches and the arched openings in the frosted glass are empty.

Although no one can see him, the boatmaker turns away, screening his sealskin bag. Reaching under his overalls and long underwear, he opens the bag and draws out three notes: one each in blue, buff and yellow. Money in hand, he turns back.

A woman appears in one of the openings in the glass, next to the oval bearing the king's initial. She is middle-aged and small, her hair pulled back in a neat silver bun. At the throat of her blue blouse is a gold pin shaped like a beetle. Her blouse is dotted with yellow butterflies, their wings spreading until they almost touch.

“May I help you?” she asks in a tone that is correct, even chilly.

“I've come to change,” the boatmaker says.

“Change?”

“Exchange, I mean,” he says, blushing under the color of a man who works outdoors. “I was told I could exchange old bills.”

“Let me see.”

The boatmaker moves forward, stiff and apprehensive, as if one cross look from this teller, a small woman behind frosted glass, could vaporize him. He places his
bills on the counter, its oak worn smooth by thousands of banknotes moving back and forth—the silent, invisible pressure of money.

The woman picks his bills up by the edges and sets them aside. The forefinger of her right hand is covered by a rubber tip. She reaches for a ledger bound in red leather and pushes it through the arched opening, indicating with the rubber tip where the boatmaker should sign. He signs his name and hands the book back. She reads the name, looks at it again, picks the book up and carries it down the counter to another woman about the same age. They peer into the book, gray heads poised over the fine blue lines bearing the names of the people of the capital. Without leaning forward, the boatmaker tries to hear their whispers, but he can't make out the words.

The woman with butterflies on her blouse returns and puts the red ledger down. She reaches into a drawer and removes three crisp notes. She counts them once, twice, then a third time with her rubber finger and pushes the bills through the opening. Although it is not hot in the room, the boatmaker is sweating under his overalls. He takes the bills and turns, slowing his legs so that he can depart at a dignified pace.

He retraces his steps through the warren of walls, stone stairs and wooden doors to find his way out into
the July evening, still noon-bright though it is past six. The broad stairs leading to the Mint are deserted. It is the evening of a holiday; the festive energy has been spent. Everyone is home with family or in a tavern settling down to a nice quiet drunk to avoid thinking about what awaits the next morning. The boatmaker has no family and tries to avoid taverns, especially when he is alone. This evening he is tempted, but he knows it isn't just one drink he is avoiding: It is a whole world, with many places he would rather not revisit.

He returns to the boardinghouse. The landlady's room is on the first floor. She is in her fifties, straggles of iron-gray hair pulled into a disorderly bun. She is rarely without a cigarette and a volume of Kierkegaard; she often smells of drink. Sometimes she darts out at the slightest sound on the stairs, cigarette burning, wiry hair flying. Other times, nothing rouses her for days, and then she reappears wearing a look the boatmaker knows all too well from the inside. This time, as the boatmaker passes the door stays closed. No sound comes from within.

Lining the walls of the narrow stairway to the second floor are portraits of the landlady's ancestors, the oldest at the bottom and the newest at the top. Most of the portraits are paired: man and wife. At the foot of the stairs knights with rude faces under bowl haircuts stare
out of severely carved gothic frames. A little higher up, burghers in urban black with ruffs that curve and recurve like mathematical functions gaze from frames heavy with gilt. Higher still, elegant patrons of the arts, slightly bohemian, lounge in simple frames with classical lines. At the top is a portrait of the landlady herself as a young woman, painted in a daring style, then new, with patches of bright color that make her face resemble the flag of an unknown country; the frame is a simple line of black.

As the boatmaker climbs, the landlady's ancestors regard him with their varying degrees of piety and pride. Although her home has become a shabby boardinghouse in a questionable neighborhood bordering on the Jewish quarter, the landlady's family is one of the oldest and noblest in the land. The boatmaker, who has no lineage to consult, cannot imagine what it must be like for her to live among pictures of her stock going far back into the history of the Mainland, almost as far back as the time of the sainted Vashad. At the top of the stairs he turns left and goes down the hall to his room. He lies on his narrow bed without taking off his corduroy jacket or boots.

Since he arrived on the Mainland, understanding money has become something like a mission for the boatmaker. Now, after what happened at the Mint, he knows the Jews are somehow bound up in his questions.

Lying on his back, he reaches into his sealskin pouch and pulls out the three banknotes the woman in the butterflies gave him. He holds them above his head to look at them. Pulls them down and smells them. Rubs them against one another, feeling the very slight roughness, like that of unimaginably fine sandpaper. If you worked with new bills a long time, they would probably sand your fingers to the bone, he thinks. No wonder the woman at the Mint wears a rubber tip.

He holds the bills up toward the ceiling, squinting at the image of the king. It brings back the image of the Jew on Big Island, silently estimating the value of his compass, the whispered words of the woman at the Mint over her red ledger, the violent outburst in the classroom, the shaky determination of Rachel Lippsted to continue her interrupted lecture, the enormous power of the machines that print the banknotes. The boatmaker knows that all these things fit together, but he does not see how. When he came to the Mainland, he wanted to understand more about money, which seemed to him like just another part of everyday life. But the desire to answer some apparently simple questions has led him into a dark confusion. Lying on his bed, he feels as if a swarm of bees, trapped and angry, is buzzing in his head.

He lets the bills drop and fumbles a cigarette and matches out of his pockets, lights the cigarette and watches smoke rise to the ceiling, flattening like the cap of a mushroom as it meets ancient plaster. He wonders how many thousands of cigarettes it would take for the ceiling to be as stained as his fingers, Rachel Lippsted's and his landlady's are. He wonders whether he should simply lie on his bed and smoke until answers appear on the ceiling.

He hears a knock on his door, and Crow enters without waiting for a reply. Behind him, White is an enormous shadow.

“Why are you lying there?” asks Crow. “Are you ill?”

“I'm thinking.”

“
Thinking?
” The little man gives a laugh that shows his opinion of the boatmaker's capacity for thinking deep thoughts. “Better leave the thinking to me. Or better yet—to our friend White here.” He gestures with his thumb at the man behind him, who fills the room like a polar bear. White chuckles at Crow's cleverness.

The boatmaker says nothing while he lets smoke drift to the ceiling. He knows that Crow understands all the curves and angles of the world, all the places where things are fastened—and what holds them in place. The boatmaker is often amused by Crow and impressed by his worldliness. But today the little man's words seem to be
coming from far away. Outside the window the July day is ending slowly, the sky covering itself up like a boxer seeking respite from the unrelenting assault of daylight.

“I went to the Mint. For the king's birthday.”

“Wanting to find out about money, eh? Well, aren't we all, my friend from Small Island? You're not going to get any closer to it at the Mint, though, I can tell you that. They don't leave it lying around loose over there.” White laughs a white bear's rumble. To Crow and White, the boatmaker is the king of the rubes. They like him partly because in his presence they feel tougher and smarter than usual. Even White feels superior in worldly knowledge to the man from Small Island.

To Crow, the boatmaker, with his remarkable skill at working wood and his Small Island origins, is something of a novelty. As always when confronted by novelty, Crow has been trying to figure out how to turn it to profit. When it comes to calculating how to get his cut, Crow has nothing but patience. And he knows a drunk when he sees one. The boatmaker's dryness is a ruse Crow will sooner or later penetrate. He's not worried. He's been getting past deeper ruses, from much trickier customers than the boatmaker, all his life.

“At the Mint,” the boatmaker says, looking at the ceiling, “there was an argument with the woman giving the
lecture. Rachel Lippsted. A man was yelling that the Jews are parasites. The police came and took him.”

“What did he look like?” asks Crow, senses alerted.

“Tall. Curly hair. Tweed suit. Like someone you don't want to mess about. The girl was cool. Frightened. But tough. I think she pushed a button in her desk to call the coppers. They came and hustled him out. But they weren't rough. More like acting.” The boatmaker feels as if the two men, one small and dark, one large and white, are making an effort not to exchange glances.

“Well, not everyone likes the Jews,” says Crow. “Even all the way out on Small Island, where they dress in animal skins, you must have learned that.”

Another time the boatmaker would have laughed. Not now. “Never knew any. Oh, and another thing, the man who yelled about the Jews had a copy of a newspaper called
The Brotherhood
. What's that?” He raises himself on an elbow, cigarette burning down, so that he can look directly at Crow and White. They stand still, expressionless.

“Forget all of that,” says Crow. “It's not important. Come on out and have a drink with your friends for a change.”

The boatmaker knows he shouldn't go with them. But his head is buzzing like a beehive, and so he agrees. He
won't drink, he thinks. He'll sit in the Grey Goose with them and watch while the men of the Mainland drink themselves into oblivion to mark the end of the king's birthday and the imminent return of the working week.

After that night the boatmaker is drunk without stopping for three months: from the first week in July through the blinding Mainland summer, when night is no more than a single inheld breath in an endless day, through August and into September. He continues to work, not drinking quite as much when he is actually on the job. When he's on the building site, he removes his corduroy jacket and works in long underwear and overalls, letting alcohol steam out of him in the sun. He doesn't say much, and people keep away. He accepts beer from White and the occasional pull on Crow's flask while he's working, enough to keep his hands from shaking.

As soon as the crew stops for the day, the sun still high in a white sky, the boatmaker starts in again. He drinks on the tram back to the city and in his room. He goes to the Grey Goose with Crow and White and spends his wages on alcohol, letting it burn its way into him. He's never cared for beer, hates the feeling of it sloshing inside him when he's drunk. He likes grain-spirits: ethereal and burning, whispering demon-thoughts in his brain. He gets in fights, beating or being beaten, waking up in
his bed or on his green floor with no memory of what happened the night before, his mind no more substantial than a fresh shaving of wood from a chisel.