The Boatmaker (23 page)

When the boatmaker has worked for a month under Eriksson's guidance, the weather begins to turn colder, and the crew shifts to the interiors of buildings so they can keep working as long as possible. Most outdoor work on the Mainland halts from early December into March, and sometimes later, depending on how severe the winter is. This pause is deeper than custom: It is instinct.

The boatmaker has made no plans for the time when construction work halts. He knows he will continue to live at the boardinghouse, taking meals with his landlady
or going out to eat in the dark taverns and restaurants of the Old Quarter. He has begun to eat in some of the Jewish restaurants, with their food from down to the south and east: strange grain dishes, pastes of chicken liver, purple soups dotted with sour cream. He eats this food with more pleasure than he would have imagined. And he could go on this way all winter; he has enough money not to work. But he has his own reasons for wanting to keep working, and when the foreman asks to meet him on a street corner a block or two from their latest site, the boatmaker is willing to go.

The next day he meets Eriksson, and they walk together through the no-man's-land where some stores are Jewish, some are not, and the peoples flow by each other without touching.

The foreman's strides are long, but he is in no hurry. The boatmaker keeps up without trouble, hearing the swish of the foreman's canvas coat, seeing the large pencils poking up out of his breast pocket. Everything about Eriksson looks well broken in, and it all fits easily together. It is a look the boatmaker, still wearing stolen clothes that make him feel patched together, can only envy.

After walking for a while, the man in the canvas coat stops, takes out his pipe and turns to face the boatmaker. His jaw is square, his nose long and straight. His eyes
are a weathered blue-gray, not a clear, icy blue like Father Robert's.

The foreman tamps tobacco into the pipe, which has a short, curved stem. Clamping the stem between his teeth, he takes out a wooden match, lights the pipe and sucks to get the tobacco going.

“You are good with wood. You have the feeling for it.”

The boatmaker feels as if he should say
thank you
, but something in him will not allow him to say the words. It is too soon since he was brought to a dangerous place by kindness, by gratitude.

“Very good with wood. But taught by yourself, yes?”

“I learned from watching others. Beginning with my father.”

“Where are you from?”

“Small Island.”

“As far away as that? Well, I knew you weren't from here. You don't talk enough to be from the capital.”

“Maybe.”

“You don't hate Jews enough, either, do you?”

“Hate Jews?”

“Yes. Do you?”

“No.”

“Good. So you wouldn't be opposed to working for them?”

“I don't think so.”

“That's good. Seeing as how you already are.” The foreman takes out another match and relights his pipe, which has gone out while he was speaking.

“That's not the important thing, though. As I said, you have the feeling for wood—and that is something one cannot teach. But there is more for you to know. Much more. I don't think you've ever been in a shop where men make things using old methods, where every man has been trained by someone who was also trained by a master of his craft.”

“No.” The only thing remotely like that on Small Island is the clan of boatbuilders, and they never take in anyone who is not of their blood.

“Would you like to learn?”

The boatmaker hesitates. Learning a tradition rooted in working with wood sounds very tempting. And he does want to learn. But he is in no hurry. The last time he decided to be part of something larger than himself, he wound up leaping through a window and running for his life, his face covered with blood. Without thinking about it, he touches the bridge of his nose. The angry red has receded, but the crisscrossing pink ridges will be there a long time.

“I don't ask everyone,” says Sven Eriksson, swinging to a stop at a crowded corner. The stream of people on
the sidewalk parts to give the tall man room. “I leave most of them alone. And not just because of their mutterings about Jews.”

The boatmaker looks surprised. The foreman fills his pipe, tamps it, lights it with a wooden match and smokes while looking at the boatmaker.

“You're surprised. But of course I know about their muttering. They shut up when they see me coming. But I know what they're saying. They forget that I was one of them, that I come from where they come from. But I had a conversation like this one long ago, with a man I can never hope to equal. And after that things were different for me. They could be different for you. You have the gift. It's waiting to be called forth and developed. But you'll never get there on your own. The knowledge you need is something built up generation after generation, not by one man alone.”

Sven Eriksson inhales, then lets smoke run from his nose and mouth. He senses a hesitation in the smaller man, and he doesn't understand why it should be there. Usually the foreman is utterly dispassionate when he makes this offer, which happens once every year or so, but for some reason he wants this man to join them. He knows the value of the offer he is making; few refuse. This one could, he thinks.

The boatmaker waits, aware that the foreman is puzzled by his slowness. He turns the offer around in his mind, looking at it from different angles. The foreman does not seem to want him to join a family or give up everything to join his brothers. The offer seems to be about the wood, the secrets of tradition. He thinks of the workshops where the six great panels depicting the life of Vashad were made centuries ago. Of the men working in silence for decades, each knowing his part in the great enterprise.

“Yes.”

“Good,” says the foreman, relieved. “You've made a good choice. You won't regret it.”

Sven Eriksson takes out his black notebook and holds it open while he draws on his pipe and writes something with a carpenter's pencil. Tearing the page out, he hands it to the boatmaker.

“Be at this address tomorrow. Seven sharp. Don't be late. We don't tolerate that. And know that when you arrive, you'll be no more than an apprentice—regardless of what you think you already know.”

The foreman snaps his notebook shut and extends his hand. The two men shake hands. Then the boatmaker stands watching as the canvas-covered back recedes, smoke billowing over its shoulder, blooming and crumpling like the trail of a powerful long-distance locomotive. Around
him stream the workingmen of the Mainland, Jewish men in their varied costumes, even a few native islanders, hollowed out by drink inside their fur parkas—all giving off the rich smells of life and decay. The stores are full of food and dry goods. The streets are filled with horses, wagons and blue-and-yellow tramcars. The spaces between the cobbles are packed with dung.

CHAPTER 17

After his conversation with the foreman the boatmaker stops in at the barbershop. The barber is sitting on his throne, holding a newspaper. On a bench under the engraving of The Royal Champion is an unusual sight: a native in his fur parka. On the small islands in the north, the natives still follow their traditional ways. On the Mainland, they are mostly single men, far from the sea, often drunk. They aren't hated the way the Jews are. Instead, they are despised and pitied, treated more like animals than human beings. Most of the capital's shopkeepers do not allow native islanders into their stores.

Seeing the boatmaker, the barber closes his paper and jumps out of the chair with surprising agility for a large man. He sets the paper down next to the cash register. Since returning to the capital, the boatmaker has had the opportunity to read copies of
The Brotherhood
. By now he is familiar with its black hatred of the Jews and the king.
Though he has no more interest in reading the paper, he is still wary of it, half-expecting to see it everywhere he goes. But the newspaper the barber sets down by his register is not
The Brotherhood
; it is
The Commercial Register
.

“Welcome, my friend,” the barber says, rubbing his hands. “Haircut and a shave? Just the thing. Hope you don't mind our friend here,” pointing with both hands, palms together, index fingers pointed like a pistol, to the native, who is slumped over, head covered by the parka. From under the fur comes the smell of whiskey.

“No.”

“That's good. So many in this presumably Christian nation of ours forget that these men are our brothers.”

From this remark the boatmaker concludes that the barber is trying to convert the native to the barber's own Christian church. He loses interest in the native's presence. He eases himself onto the throne, leans back and allows the barber to begin.

In the mirror behind the cash register the boatmaker examines himself. He knows he looks different from the way he looked when he put his boat in the water and sailed from Small Island. But he's not a man who has ever spent much time looking in mirrors, and it's difficult for him to see exactly where the difference lies. He is older, which shows around his eyes. He barely notices the scar across his
nose. He knows his bald spot is expanding and his hairline receding. At some point the two will meet, and the dome of his head will be shiny and hairless. When that happens, he decides, he will wear his hair cropped short. His mustache is the same: full and drooping, gold shot through the brown. Perhaps as he loses his hair he will keep the mustache and grow out the whiskers on his chin underneath it, leaving his cheeks bare, as he has seen men of the capital do.

The barber finishes the haircut and spins him around for the shave. He looks up at the horse with the turbaned man holding its lead. Part of the engraving must be fanciful: There are no turbaned men on the Mainland. But the horse must be a good likeness. Below the colored image the fur parka moves up and down like a bellows, pushing the smell of alcohol out into the shop, where it mingles with the scent of shaving cream, the barber's aftershave and the odor of cut hair. No matter how lowly the apprenticeship the foreman is offering, the boatmaker thinks, it will be enough to keep him from drinking through another winter on the Mainland. That in itself would be enough. But perhaps it will also give him a taste of what the men felt in the workshops where the great panels showing the life of Vashad were carved.

The next day the boatmaker goes to the address the foreman has written in script that is as clear as a
mathematical equation. Sven Eriksson is waiting outside an old stone wall of the kind that enclose the grandest townhouses in the Old Quarter. An arched gateway filled in by wooden doors painted brown was probably originally built to allow carriages to pass. A smaller door set into them stands partially open. Through it, the boatmaker sees men in canvas coats carrying tools and wood across a paved courtyard.

“So you've come.”

“Yes.”

“Are you ready to work?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know where you are?”

“No.”

“Can you guess?”

This teasing question reminds the boatmaker of the riddles of the New Land. The sensation makes him uncomfortable. For a moment he thinks perhaps he has made a mistake in coming here. But he stands his ground.

“My apologies,” the foreman says. “There is no need to guess. It's just that a man from the capital would probably have guessed already. Or been told by the men on the building site.”

“I don't gossip.” The boatmaker's face flushes with irritation.

“No,” says the foreman. “And that's a good thing.” He pulls out his pipe, tamps, lights, inhales. “This is the House of Lippsted.”

The foreman waits. When there is no response, he continues: “I've asked you to become an apprentice of his house because I have no doubt you'll learn to be a craftsman in the Lippsted style—over time. I won't mislead you: It's a slow process. Many don't have the patience to follow it all the way through. Others, even some very gifted ones, drink themselves out of a job in their impatience. I don't tolerate drink. We must be clear about that from the beginning.”

Sven Eriksson inhales and exhales pipe smoke, looking over his newest apprentice. A strange one, he thinks, but a man with a definite gift. It is a gift that might go in any one of several directions. The foreman likes gifted apprentices—though not too many at any one time. He knows that in any enterprise there must be the right mixture of the brilliant and the steady. As in making concrete, sand and gravel must be balanced.

“You'll begin at the bottom. Maybe you think you're already a carpenter. And out there you are,” he says, pointing with his short, curved pipestem at the world beyond the fine stone wall.

“Out there, you are a carpenter. And not a bad one. Plenty will take you on right now, no questions asked.” The
foreman lets smoke run out of his nose and mouth. The morning air is pleasantly cool.

“In here, you'll be less than that. Much less—a boy in the yard, doing anything anyone asks of you. Starting with stacking boards and carrying them where they're needed. By the time you're allowed to form an oak peg, you'll think you've been given a huge promotion. But you'll still be an apprentice. And for a long time. It takes years to absorb this: the way Lippsted makes furniture. Not a pin, not a screw, not a nail. And when you learn our way, you don't learn it with the mind only. No, you learn through your skin and get it into your bones.”