Floating islands can be man-made, like the Urus’ rush islands in Lake Titicaca, their floating home, or they form naturally in large rivers and drift out to sea, sometimes overgrown with trees and full of wildlife. There was the island where St Brendan landed with his Irish monks, 81which turned out to be a whale. There were the islands Scottish seafarers drank into existence from a thirst for land, glimmering amid the banks of fog. The hovering paradise isles of Chinese myth and the floating, shadow-populated islands of the Celts. Everywhere, always, people had dreamed of floating islands, found them, built them—a welter of geological migration throughout history, mythological islands, literary islands, technological islands. A fleet. I saw it before me now, Aeolia at its head.

I knew that areola, the dark-red area around the nipple, meant ‘open space’. The obscure connection this implied between two of humanity’s most basic needs was comforting.

82

THE GOLDEN BREAST

The weather lies across the port of Copenhagen like a grille. Fritz casts a practised eye towards the low, porous covering of clouds. Yes, it’ll stay dry now. He’s grown accustomed to the Danish weather, plodding as a draught animal. To talking about talking about the weather. This morning, when the train rolled up to the platform at Vordingborg and he climbed on, it was raining slightly. The droplets clung to the windowpanes, sifting down across the fields and hiding in the earth. He sat and watched it.

This, the last day of August, is grey and nervous.

Earlier in the month, two foreign ministers, one German and one Soviet, signed a fateful pact, but Fritz barely keeps up with that sort of thing, if he’s aware of it at all. In any case, the wide world holds no interest for him now, not now he’s standing here.

In front of him he has the busy industrial harbour. A contented mumbling drifts across the canal from the city. The harbourside has its own subdued echo, splintered now and then by a yell, a chime, the rumble of a tram. 83

The breeze scrapes at the masts along the quay, and from the big warm warehouses he thinks he hears the pleasant murmur of the air circulating beneath the ceilings. The smell of tar and mouldy goods.

A matron in navy blue sails past with her little dog in tow. Chug chug chug, thinks Fritz, chuckling to himself as he watches a fat pigeon strutting in her wake like some sort of mime.

There’s been no news that the boat from Tórshavn is delayed. He’s not nervous either.

What will she think, his Marita? About all of this? The broad, cobbled streets along the harbour, the avenues of faintly blushing trees, the glow before the glow, and these corn-fed pigeons nobody would dream of eating? What will she see, his own delicate bird, as he goes to meet her and lifts his hat?

A man, certainly.