She stepped back and watched him walk over to the side of the ship. The général paused and nodded to her, then disappeared down the rope ladder.

LIKE A GRIEVING MAN

On the horizon, a black speck sailed across the white line of sky and sea, bound the long way for Paramaribo after erratic winds and waters had forced a change of course. From its decks and with the naked eye, it was impossible to see the Anne-Laure (its opposite and equal black speck) clearly, to see it being boarded by the Portuguese and the général arrested and descending the rope ladder, or Elisabeth von Hoffmann on deck, uncertain and yet enthralled by the circumstances in motion that were her life now. Impossible to see and yet Krüger was looking exactly in that direction as Elisabeth stood and experienced her presence in the world as though for the first time. He was gazing intently down the invisible line that linked their momentary cartographic perfections of latitude and longitude, two lives only a few nautical miles apart and yet unknown to each other (though of course the gods knew them both).

Krüger, as he stood there on the deck contemplating the sea, sank into the feeling of his unboundedness, blissfully adrift. The ship had taken his life out of his hands and placed it at the whim of air and water. He was free and the sensation overwhelmed his inner self. Air and water, endless, simple, content, all that it took to be free! But Krüger didn’t consider that these were gods too, old gods waiting around, frolicking, playing, shouldering and enforcing, nature at their fingertips, nature soothed, pressed, palpitated, struck (raging Tiamat of the saltwater seas and thunderous Tlaloc of the rain, Enlil the sky god, wielder of storms, the sisters called Djunkgao who stroked the ocean currents with the palms of their hands). Krüger sensed these otherworldly forces (who cannot sense them?) but could not forge the words that might describe them. Without words, he was denied their dimensions, and thus their maps could not be drawn by his imagination and they eluded him. And so Krüger remained upon the surface of things. Like a grieving man, he understood his relief as freedom from the world that had grieved him, rather than a deeper immersion, as young Elisabeth von Hoffmann had understood it, as she had understood it during her own relief, in the aftermath of her own storm of gods. She was inside and present and Krüger was on the surface of things and absent, yet to understand the true dimensions of the world.

‘What are you looking at?’ Christophe Bergerard said.