Читать книгу White Shadow - Roy Jacobsen - Страница 12

The wind had shifted to the east, and the weather had cleared. But Ingrid didn’t row to the village. She walked around the island with the sheath knife and her father’s old spritsail, following the flocks of birds and finding several nameless bundles, slimy, mutilated masses, which once had been joy and sorrow, with cobalt-blue sludge in gaping eye-sockets the size of fists, spongy, yeast-coloured dough, and bones that were green from the sea and salt, rotten flesh, algae and hagfish.

She covered them and laid rocks on the sail corners, walked the long way north, fetched the rowing boat and towed the bodies to the quay and hoisted them up, oblivious to whether she was freeing the island of the monster of the deep or because all death makes demands that have to be obeyed.

She had the shotgun with her, rested the oars at regular intervals and fired a flurry of shots, causing the flock to explode and rise like a mushroom to the sky before falling again and enveloping both her and the boat and what she was towing in an impenetrable frenzy of noise and wings – now the wind would definitely carry the shots seawards.

She went home, undressed, burned her clothes and washed without shame in front of his coal-black eyes, which yesterday, or was it the day before, she had felt drawn to like no others, and of which she now knew she would never get enough, that was what gave her strength, she had never been stronger.

She cooked some food and they ate, she sitting on a chair, longing to go back to the bench and his body. She made some coffee, and each of them drank in silence, until she had to get up and go to the loft to find something for him to wear, her father’s old clothes, which she began to try on him, her fingers against his body, he looked like a young boy on his first fishing trip, a fisherman, a skipper, a farmer and a pioneer.

They chuckled, he pointed at himself and said Alexander and at her and said Ingrid, he never tired of these words, and nor did she. Then she undressed him again and clipped his toenails, held his unscathed marble-white feet and slowly washed him as they each spoke their own language and understood every word.

Before night fell, she went around the island again with the gun and pieces of sail and found what she found, went home, undressed and burned another set of clothes and stood naked in front of him and scrubbed every inch of her body. She washed her hair, and her body again with several changes of water, and combed and plaited her hair, and he didn’t say a word and didn’t take his eyes off her; after they had eaten, she said he should get up and walk, could he walk a few steps?

He struggled to his feet and shuffled towards the window, then to the larder, turned and grimaced, not without some silent laughter, and looked down at his bare feet. He walked to the hallway door and back to the window, stared at his own reflection, stepped back, turned and looked at her in despair, until she got up, took him by his bandaged hand, led him into the hallway and up the stairs into the North Chamber and lay with him for the rest of her life.