Daniel Read Free

she threw away the apron and the subservience and headed for the brothel. She was flat-chested but very nice, and he made no other demands on eroticism but that it should be nice, not troublesome or ecstatic. He told her about the journey on which he would be embarking the next year, early in the spring, when he understood it was not yet too warm in southern Africa. She listened, uninterested beyond the fact that now she would have to look for another steady customer.
    Once he had suggested that she come with him.
    â€˜I refuse to travel by sea,’ she replied vehemently. ‘You can die there, sink to the bottom and never come up.’
    And nothing more was said about it.
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    Winter that year was very mild in SkÃ¥ne. In early May he moved out of the apartment on Prästgatan. He told his few friends that he was going to take a short trip through Europe and would be back soon.
    A fishing boat took him to Copenhagen. For three weeks he lived in a cheap boarding house with sailors in Nyhavn. One Sunday he went to watch a beheading. He didn’t go to the theatre or visit the museums. He talked to the sailors and waited. He had reduced his baggage to a minimum; everything was contained in a simple chest he had found in the attic of the building on Prästgatan. He had packed up his maps, colour plates and books, some shirts, a pair of extra trousers, leather boots. In Copenhagen he had bought a revolver and ammunition. That was all. He changed the money he had left into gold. He carried it in a leather pouch inside his shirt.
    He also had his hair cut very short and started to grow a beard. And he waited.
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    On 23 May he found out that an English schooner, the Fox , would be sailing from Helsingør to Cardiff and then on to Cape Town. The same day he left his boarding house and took the post coach north to Helsingør. He paid a visit to the captain of the black-painted schooner and obtained a promise to be accepted on board as a passenger, although
there would be no private cabin at his disposal. For the passage he paid about half the contents of his leather pouch.
    On the evening of 25 May the Fox left Helsingør. He stood by the railing and sensed everything making headway within him. Inside his breastbone he had masts that were raising their sails. Something was pulling at him, as if a line had been lashed around his heart. He was seized by a desire to be a child again, just for a moment. To skip, babble, crawl, learn to walk right there on the scoured deck.
    That night he slept heavily.
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    By dawn the next morning they had already passed Skagen at the northern tip of Denmark and were in another world.
    That world was covered by a thick and immovable fog.

CHAPTER 2
    On the ship he was liberated from his name. He was never called anything but ‘the Passenger’. Without knowing how it happened, he underwent a ritual in which he was stripped of his former identity and became the Passenger. Among these pale but hard-working men he was the only one who did nothing but travel. Without a name, without a past, with nothing more than a bunk in the crew’s quarters. And that was fine with him. When he lost his identity, the past disappeared. It was as though the salt water that splashed up over the railing penetrated his consciousness and corroded all the shadowy memories he carried. The sound of his father’s grinding jaws ebbed away, Matilda became an indistinct silhouette and the house in Hovmantorp a ruin. Of his mother and two sisters nothing was left, not even the memory of their voices. When he was transformed into the Passenger he discovered for the first time that something existed which he had heard of but never before comprehended: freedom.
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    He would always remember the arrival in Cape Town as an extended and surreal dream. Or perhaps it was actually the end of one nightmare that imperceptibly slipped over into another? Even before they reached Cardiff, the captain, whose