The Boatmaker (27 page)

But something about the small man's determination makes the foreman hesitate. Though Sven Eriksson is a
man of tradition, he is not lacking in imagination. He can see how things might be done differently. After all, he has chosen the boatmaker to be an apprentice in this place, which to the foreman is as sacred as the massive cathedral consecrated to Vashad.

As he smokes, inhaling and letting the smoke flow out in a long stream like a flight of wild ducks, he finds himself, to his own surprise, acceding to the boatmaker's plan. He feels lightheaded, as if a heavy grip on his mind has been loosened.

That unfamiliar sensation lasts only a moment. The strictness of tradition returns immediately as he lays out the conditions of his permission, which can be revoked at any time. The work must be done on the boatmaker's own time, using nothing intended for any piece of Lippsted furniture. It is not to be a secret, but he should keep it covered when he is not working and avoid making a public display of his heresy. If even one of these conditions is violated, the project ceases on the spot.

The boatmaker thanks the foreman and tells him he will follow these rules. They are in any case the rules he wished for. He turns and walks away, leaving the foreman sucking on a pipe that has gone out, watching the small canvas-covered back diminish into a new season that is still merely a suggestion.

The boatmaker finds an empty place in the back of one of the storerooms where the wood is aged. There is little light in the storeroom, and it's always cold. But it's an excellent place for the boatmaker's project. He begins arriving before anyone else is working, even Sven Eriksson, usually first into the compound.

The boatmaker begins with a feeling, the way he did when he was building his boat. In his shed on Small Island, the boat taught him how to build it, showing him the next step at every stage, each piece appearing as it was needed. It is the same with this.

He continues with his other work, silent, efficient and pliable, but he is more comfortable: The disturbing mix of superiority and envy has disappeared into the thing he is making. When he leaves for the day, he covers his work with the heavy canvas used to cover planks being seasoned. As he goes about his other duties, he finds bits of wood left over from other work. Most are too small to be useful, but here and there he finds a piece big enough and sound enough; he carries it back to the storeroom and puts it under the canvas. He does not flaunt his project, and few come to the back of the storeroom. To those few who do have business there, the foreman has given orders to pay no attention to the shape growing under weathered canvas.

One night when he cannot sleep for thinking about his work in the storeroom, the boatmaker takes out Crow's notebook and turns the pages he has turned many times without understanding everything that is scrawled there. That Crow controlled White's wages was obvious long ago. That Crow wagered considerable sums on races and lost regularly in spite of tips from the shadow world is interesting but not surprising. What he can still make no sense of are the increasing payments from
R
. And in that respect this night is no different from all the other nights he has puzzled over Crow's untidy accounting.

He smokes until he needs to close the notebook and sleep. He will read this book until it falls to pieces, if that is what is necessary for him to penetrate its secrets. In the meantime, the thing he has imagined is growing in the back of a cold Lippsted storeroom. It is unlikely and out of place, but also inevitable: demanding entry to the world.

CHAPTER 20

Early in spring, on a day when crusts of snow are piled on the curb but the air is mild, Sven Eriksson walks along the wall surrounding the Lippsted compound, pipe clenched between his teeth. Beside him walks the boatmaker, not smoking, lengthening his stride to keep up with the taller man. Around them, the people of the capital no longer need to pull their coats tight or walk with shoulders hunched against the wind.

“It's not done!” says the foreman, pulling the pipe out of his mouth so abruptly his teeth rattle. “No one from the workshop has ever been invited upstairs to dine with Herr Lippsted and his sister. Never! Nothing like this has happened to any man in the three generations of men I have worked with here.”

The boatmaker paces like a pony trotting a thoroughbred. He gleans from Eriksson's outburst that he has
been invited to the beautiful old stone townhouse with its tapering Seventeenth Century façade. If he accepts, he will go up to the Lippsted family quarters, above the storeroom where finished pieces are packed for shipment, to places where the foreman himself, for all his years of service and his high station, has never entered. The boatmaker feels the foreman's confusion, anger, fear.

“There is the name, of course,” says the foreman, putting the pipe back between his teeth and slowing down so that his walking, smoking and talking settle into a rhythm. “I suppose that's part of it. I don't know. One can't know everything.”

He stops and turns to face the boatmaker, causing people on the sidewalk to step around the two men in their canvas coats, one short, one long, who are having what appears to be an intense and serious conversation.

“You are to appear one week from tonight. You own a suit? No? Well, then: Find one! God knows what you'll look like. I don't suppose it matters. I have no doubt you will never be back there. All I can ask of you is: Don't disgrace us! Even though you come from far away and haven't been here long, you are one of us. You work with your hands. You are learning your craft. They are different up there, believe me. In ways I am not able to express precisely.”

Sven Eriksson goes silent, drawing on his pipe. Then he adds: “This must be some odd quirk of Herr Lippsted's. He is more than capable of it. Yes. It can be no more than that. But for this one time wear a suit and make a good impression for those of us who work down here.”

And with that, agitation on features that are usually very orderly, the foreman walks away while the boatmaker stands on the sidewalk, continuing the conversation in his mind.

The boatmaker does not go back to work. He doesn't know whether he will accept the invitation to attend dinner with the heirs of the House of Lippsted. Like the foreman, he isn't sure he belongs at their table, even though his twisting path seems to have led him there by a series of coincidences.

If the boatmaker was a more mystical man, he might have taken those coincidences as signs. Many on the Mainland would have done so. In spite of the king's devotion to reason and science, many of his subjects remain deeply attached to portents and divinations. Some long for a time when things were clearer: when a cloud of shrieking blackbirds circling the head and shoulders of an earth-smeared peasant announced God's message to an entire kingdom. In this century of change it is not easy to tell where the voice of God is to be heard. Is it in the humming telegraph
wire? In the ultra-modern chemical works overseen by scientists from Berlin? In the monstrous presses, imported from England, that print the Mainland banknotes? In the secret societies that belch their black hatred of the king and “his” Jews? The voice of God might be in any of these—or in none. In these confusing circumstances, a small minority of Mainlanders is passionate, certain they know where the truth is to be found. But most are deeply confused and longing to be instructed.

The boatmaker, who subscribes to none of these versions of the truth, has his own confusion to sort out. He disappears into his own thoughts. When he reappears in the world, he is standing in front of the Royal Mint, looking up at its imposing brown classical façade. It is a working day, and ordinary citizens are not allowed in. The stone steps are empty. At the entrance two of the King's Own Guard stand at attention. The tall guardsmen in their scarlet uniforms and round bearskin helmets look out, over and above the man in the short canvas jacket.

He decides to walk on. Surely on this day of all days the foreman won't complain. He walks into the Royal Gardens that surround the Winter Palace, down a long allée between plane trees to a round pool within an ornamental stone wall. In the summer there will be boys here, sailing their boats, using sticks to push them out into the
center of the pond to catch the wind. In just a few weeks the bravest troublemakers will begin skipping school to come here. But today the pool is empty. Concrete shows at the bottom between crusts of snow.

The boatmaker walks through the gardens and out, past the Winter Palace, set inside a tall wrought-iron fence decorated with the gold-painted initial of the reigning king. Over the domes and spires of the palace flies the national flag, indicating that the king is in residence. The flag is divided into blue and yellow quarters, the golden crown in the center circled by golden versions of the blackbirds of Vashad. Flanking the gate are sentry boxes, a guardsman before each one.

As he passes the palace, the boatmaker wonders how much the king can know of what goes on in his kingdom, even with the network of spies and informers that he must have, along with the police and army. The king is only a man, after all, not a god: a small figure somewhere under all the domes and spires, walking from room to room, ringing for coal when the fire in his study goes out and the room turns cool, chilling his fingers as they turn the pages of the latest report on the modernization project, its pages filled with charts and tables, endless bureaucratic sentences.

The boatmaker passes the Winter Palace and walks on while the afternoon sky contracts to a deeper blue.
No plan in mind, he finds himself at the door of the barbershop. He goes in and asks for a shave and a haircut, realizing as he does that at some point on his path his decision fell into place. He will go to dinner at the House of Lippsted. Somewhere he will find the first suit he has ever worn. He will ascend to the living quarters in the townhouse that rises above the rough bustle of the compound. He will see what it is like to sit at a dinner table with Jacob Lippsted, scion of the House of Lippsted, and his sister, with her glowing eyes and small resilient body under the fur wrap. The boatmaker knows he is not the man the foreman is; he never will be. At the same time he is not restrained as the foreman is by tradition and years of service. He has been invited. He will climb the stairs and join them at their table.

The barber is sprawled in his chair, the
Afternoon Post
covering his face, his legs dangling toward the floor. Snores bubble up from under the paper, raising it, then letting it fall. As the boatmaker enters, the barber wakes and holds the paper out as if he had been reading. The native islander is on the bench, bent forward under the engraving of The Royal Champion.

The barber gets up and lays his paper on the counter. On the front page is an engraving of two horses facing each other in silhouette.

As he sits, the boatmaker tries to decide whether to keep his mustache or shave it off. Perhaps he should grow a beard. He wonders whether there will be other guests at the dinner. He loses patience with his thoughts, irritated with himself for deciding to accept the invitation. He imagines tearing off the sheet and running, half-shorn, out into the street, yelling. He can't stand the barber's chatter or the snoring of the native under the engraving of the glossy racehorse. Working to be presentable for others makes the boatmaker ill.

Something the barber says as he chatters on breaks into this circle of irritable thoughts. “. . . yes, they're going to race against the king.
Against The Royal Champion
. Can you imagine? These Jews! Daring to run their horse against the king's, who's never been beaten in twenty races. A single challenge at the royal track. In June. Says so—right there in the
Post
.”

The barber nods in the direction of the newspaper, on whose front page the two horses stand nose to nose like shadows cut from black paper.

He finishes with his scissors, lays them down and returns with his mug and brush. Spreading hot lather across the boatmaker's face, he bursts out: “Outrageous! That the Jews could raise themselves up out of their place and challenge the king! But it's not entirely their fault. If
things had been right in this country, something like this would never have happened.

“Listen to this,” he says, sticking the brush in his mug, picking up the paper and reading like a public speaker: “The king is said to have accepted the challenge in the spirit of sportsmanship and to show the openness and forward-thinking spirit of the Mainland under his rule. ‘We are moving forward to join a wider world,' His Majesty said through the Lord Chamberlain in announcing that he was accepting the challenge from the House of Lippsted.”

The barber snaps the paper shut. “
A wider world!
Isn't our world wide enough? He forgets what he is king
of
, this weak king, with his love of fancy foreign ideas. His father, God rest his soul, would never have thought like this. The old ways were always good enough for
him
. Under his father there would have been no Jews putting on airs and rising above their station to challenge The Royal Champion to a match race.”

At the barber's raised voice, the native sits up, his face framed in fur. The smell of whiskey seeps out into the shop. “
No good
,” the native says. Then he leans forward until only fur is visible, and his sleeping resumes.

When he reaches the boardinghouse, the boatmaker goes to his landlady's door. He hasn't seen much of her
since they went down to the cellar to look for Crow and White's belongings. She never even asked whether he found what he was looking for. But now he needs her help. He has no idea how to find a suit for dinner at the House of Lippsted. The landlady opens the door after a silence somewhat longer than usual, alcohol on her breath. He explains what he needs. She looks at him carefully, up and down. She is concentrating, but she isn't thinking deep thoughts or judging: She is appraising the Small Island man with the eye of a seamstress.