I.6

[What is this, you may wonder? Explanation and beginning of the series can be found here] 


Knudsen

Knudsen was in a rage.  In order to calm himself, he played a game of Patience*.  The day before yesterday, Brägevoldt had visited him from Rostock and had appointed a Party instructor for today, after noon.  Knudsen told Brägevoldt: the Party can lick my ass.  The Party should have shot him, instead of sending an instructor now.  But this new Five Person Group System, Brägevoldt had said, is very interesting, you'll see.  Rubbish, Knudsen had answered, in Rerik there is only one Single Person Group, and that's me.  Brägevoldt: and the others?  Knudsen: shit scared.  Brägevoldt: And you? Knudsen: no interest.  Moreover, I have to get to the cod.  Brägevoldt had said something about a shock effect as a result of the increase in terrorism that would subside, and then he shoved off after he had arranged the meeting betwen Knudsen and the instructor.

While Knudsen laid down the cards, he could think about it.  Brägevoldt or the Party had put him in a difficult position.  The other boats had already sailed the day before yesterday.  Knudsen aroused suspicion if the "Pauline" stayed in the harbor  much longer.  Too, the youth was innocent.  Quite apart from the income, the tide was ebbing.  The pretty cod.  Knudsen yearned for cod.  His lost his Patience and flung the cards aside.

He went into the little garden that lay behind the house, a tiny space of dull, darkened greenness, in which a pair of white asters glowed.  On one side stood a rabbit hutch; Knudsen heard the animals rustling.  Bertha sat on the bench, knitting, despite the cold.  Put on an overcoat, said Knudsen, if you must sit outside.  Laughing happily, she went into the house and came back a few seconds later, wearing the coat.  Knudsen watched her, how she returned to sit on the bench.  She smiled.  Knudsen glanced at the part in her blond hair; she was blond and gentle, a pretty young woman of forty.  I must tell you a joke, she said.  Anxiously, she looked up to him and asked: Listen?  Yes, I will listen, said Knudsen, as he pondered about Brägevoldt and the Party instructions.  In Machnow, related Bertha, a man once watched how the lunatics jumped from a diving board into the pool in the middle of winter.  He said to them: there is absolutely no water in there!  They called back to him: we're just training for the summer, as they rubbed their blue bruises.  Why had she chosen this cruel joke, thought Knudsen, as Bertha expectfully watched him.  He smiled and said: yes, yes, Bertha, it's a good joke.  If I don't pay attention, he thought, they would take you to the lunatics also, even though you're not even crazy.  She just had a little quirk, he reflected.  It started a few years back, when she had begun to tell this joke of the lunatics who jump into the empty pool.  Otherwise she was friendly and gentle, a good woman.  He had never made out when and from whom she had heard this through-and-through bad joke.  She told it everywhere, but she had been telling it for years, and after a while the city stopped gossiping about Bertha Knudsen.  But a year ago one of the Others came to Knudsen and had said: your woman is mentally disturbed, we must put her in an institution.  With help from Doctor Frerking, Knudsen had prevented them from taking her away.  He knew what they did to the mentally disturbed when they put them in an institution for the first time, and he held on to Bertha.  When he was out to sea with the trawler he was always afraid that he would not find Bertha upon his return.  He had gotten the impression that they wanted to blackmail him with the threat of putting Bertha in an institution.  They wanted him to keep quiet.  They would use poor Bertha as a weapon against the Party.

Make my provisions ready, he said, I will sail later, and he saw her cheerful laugh, her perpetual and fatal laugh on her pretty, ever-youthful face, as he went back inside the house.  He sat on the bench by the oven and lit a pipe.

He had to decide now, if he'd keep the meeting with the instructor.  It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and he had one hour's time.  The boat was ready for sea; the youth had been aboard for two hours; at four o'clock they could already be far outside the pilot island.

But it wasn't about the one hour.  Knudsen thought harder. To meet the instructor meant to get involved.  The others had grasped this faster than he: they had already cleared out.  Elias had said it straight to his face: listen, we're not going to talk anymore about the Party.  It had happened remarkably: two years of preparation for the illegalities, then two years of sticking together, afterwards stagnation.  And now, in the year 1937, since no one was afraid anymore, the Others suddenly tightened the screws.  One heard of arrests in Rostock, in Wismar, in Brunshaupten, on the entire coast.  They smash the wood to pieces since it had begun to crumble.  They are preparing for war, Knudsen had said to Elias.  Elias just turned away.  The comrades still all spoke to Knudsen, but not about politics.

This was preferred, though, for this way the Others don't discover who leads the Party.  They knew that there were Knudsen, Mathiasson, Jenssen, Elias, Kröger, Bahnsen, and a few others more.  But to arrest them all wouldn't do in such a small town as Rerik. The Others had to be able to depend on the fact that nothing more about the Party would be spoken.  When no more is said about it, the Party exists no longer.

Naturally they knew that there was one -- at least one -- who led the Party further.  Knudsen was convinced that they reckoned with that one.  So it was dangerous for him that the "Pauline" lay still docked in the harbor while the entire fishing fleet had sailed.  But it was not dangerous if he didn't meet the instructor.  By the rules of the Party, the instructor didn't know Knudsen.  If Knudsen didn't go to the meeting, the instructor could turn black from waiting.  Then Knudsen was out.  When the new instructors from the Central Committees of the Party didn't arrive in Rerik, then there was no more Party in Rerik.  Then for Knudsen, just like for everyone else, there were just the cod and the herring.  And Bertha.  But if he went, then he involved himself in the measures that the Party took, thought Knudsen.  He couldn't go and then not carry out the instructions of the Party.  If he wanted, he really didn't need to go.  Now I'm the fish, thought Knudsen, the fish before the angler.  I can bite, or not.  Can the fish decide? he asked himself.  Of course it can, he thought with his ancient fisher's faith.  And with his ancient fisher's contempt: the fish is stupid.  But I've spent my entire life long biting at this bait, he remembered.  And the hook has always hurt.  Always has it yanked me into the air in which one could hear the screams of the fish.  I'll be damned, thought Knudsen, full of rage, if I am to be a silent fish.


*"Patience" is a european name for what americans call "Solitaire."  I decided not to change the name in translation here, because the subsequent play on words ("He lost his Patience") is a close and true approximation of the original, one of those rare instances where a translated phrase works really well.  ("He lost his game of Solitaire" just doesn't have the same effect.)