The Whispering Muse

XI. homecoming

MY NEIGHBOURS SAY I have changed since I came home from my voyage. And I respond with the following question:

‘What is the point of travelling if not to broaden your mind?’

They like this answer and we chat a little about our travels, past and present, for most of us who live here are getting on in years. One sign that I am an altered man is that I have changed the topic of my conversation at the Café Sommerfugl. I haven’t entirely given up discussing the influence of seafood on the Nordic race but I spend less time discoursing on this and more on the fittings on board the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen. Everyone is amazed at how well I was treated. ‘Is that right?’ and ‘You don’t say!’ are the most common reactions to my tales, and I am often asked to describe my quarters or explain certain events in more detail. In particular, they are interested in the fact that I witnessed a possible crime, and I have often been called on to repeat the story of my dealings with Chief Constable Knud Hamsun.

Sometimes a disgruntled voice will pipe up:

‘I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t it heard with my own ears that a fascist like Magnus Jung-Olsen had it in his stinking bones to be kind to an old addle-pate like you…’

But only one man speaks like that; the owner of Café Sommerfugl. He lost an ear in a German penal camp and has been bitter ever since; he can’t bear people to talk about anything other than that ear of his. We discussed it for the first year and a half after he came home — and from time to time after that — but have long since tired of this topic. When he starts on his ear, we regulars say:

‘Everyone prefers what’s there to what’s not.’

Another thing that has changed is my attitude to Widow Lauritzen. Before I went on my travels I thought her foolish and tiresome, and neglectful of her garden. I am still of the opinion that she could take better care of her apple trees and currant bushes, and I am not alone in that. She is the only one of us who has the chance to do any gardening since the other flats do not come with plots of their own. But I don’t find her tiresome any more.

Shortly after my return to Copenhagen the lady turned to me in the queue at the fishmonger’s and said archly:

‘Oh, so the Viking has returned?’

For everyone here knows that I am an Icelander.

The waves and the hull were clashing,

the surf on the rails was splashing,

the winds in the sails were lashing;

the ocean my ship was smashing.

I recited by way of reply. She laughed, saying she always loved hearing Icelandic spoken even though she couldn’t understand a word. And one thing led to another until we had become the best of friends.

Now we dine together twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays, and the meal is held at my flat because I like to be host. We contribute to the spread jointly, and if Madame Lauritzen wishes to eat meat I have decided not to object. She brings it herself as her grandson is a butcher and often slips nice treats to his grandmother, while I have a herring salad or buy myself a deep-fried plaice from the sandwich shop in the next street. In this manner we avoid conflict and the evening passes in cosy chat about life and everything.

The widow is well-informed about all kinds of current affairs as her husband was some sort of poet, so she can tell me news from the world of theatre, music and literature. She does this in her frank and cheerful manner, and her accounts are always diverting, though the subject matter is undeniably often lightweight. I myself speak of international affairs and the most topical issues in contemporary science, chiefly dietetics, the importance of which has greatly increased as a result of all the reconstruction following the war.

I have mentioned before that I live in a flat consisting of two rooms, one of which performs a threefold role as kitchen, dining room and sitting room, with a bedroom opening off it (I share a lavatory with others on my floor and the showers are in the basement). When the widow comes round for dinner I leave the bedroom door ajar and turn the kitchen table sideways on so that one or other of us has a view inside.

We make it a rule that if Madame Lauritzen is ‘not in the mood’she will sit in the chair nearer the kitchen while I sit with my back to the bedroom door, but when she is ‘in the mood’ she sits on the bedroom side and I sit facing her. From there I can see both the lady and the door half open behind her and beyond it the bed that awaits us. So we need never discuss whether the lady is ‘in the mood’ or not. I, on the other hand, am always ‘in the mood’ and this is the most significant change that has taken place in me since the voyage with Captain Alfredson and his crew.

I have placed a decent desk under the bedroom window and spend my days sitting on the edge of my bed, writing these memoirs or else articles for fishing periodicals in Iceland. On the top right-hand corner of the desk there is a small bundle that at first sight might appear to be nothing more than a folded napkin from the Kronos shipping line. The company’s logo is embroidered on it in wine-red thread:

A winged hourglass hovers over the sea with two crossed sledgehammers beneath, both pointing to the right.

But inside this innocent-looking napkin I keep the object that, with its odour and unusual properties, has reinvigorated my potency in the sexual arena. Yes, the night I stayed in Caeneus’s cabin I discovered the splinter from the bowsprit of the Argo in the inside pocket of his officer’s jacket, which was hanging over the back of a chair. And I spirited it away with me when I left the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen on Easter morning last spring. It was some compensation for my luggage, which never turned up.

Yesterday evening when I took out the splinter of the Argo and began to toy with it, as I always do before burrowing under the bedclothes with Widow Lauritzen, there was a tap on the bedroom window. We were both startled as I live on the third floor; the drainpipe is next to the sitting-room window, and it is unthinkable that any human being could climb so high. There was another tap, louder than the first. I drew back the curtains.

A herring gull was perched on the sill outside. It struck its yellow beak against the windowpane, flapped its wings and squawked:

‘ARRK! ARRK!’

To the lady’s great amusement I mimicked it:

‘ARRK! ARRK!’

And drew the curtains again.