Sigmund Lukas—Bernard Jakkelsen

Sigmund Lukas’s bond with his younger brother, Bernard Jakkelsen, is an anxious, protective attachment that shapes their lives aboard the Kronos. Lukas gives Bernard a place on the ship in the hope of keeping him safe and close; Bernard conceals both his continuing vulnerability and the circumstances of his disappearance. When Lukas receives a telegram that appears to be Bernard’s resignation, he is left with grief and unanswered questions, while the message itself exposes how little he knows about what has happened.

Brothers aboard the Kronos

Bernard explains his presence on the ship through the family tie: he says he is Lukas’s brother, that this is why he is aboard and has a key, and that Lukas believes he is clean. The statement makes the arrangement sound like trust, but it also reveals the pressure beneath that trust. Bernard’s access depends on his brother’s belief that he has overcome his drug dependence, a belief Bernard invokes while speaking to someone else rather than affirming it directly to Lukas.

Lukas’s protective purpose becomes clearer when the narrator understands his panicked concern after Bernard has apparently left the ship. He wanted to protect and rescue his brother, keep him sailing, and keep him out of jail and away from bad influences in the cities. His decision to take Bernard on a voyage like this one is part of that effort, whatever its cost. Protection, however, cannot give Lukas control over Bernard’s choices or shield him from the danger surrounding the voyage.

Disappearance and the resignation telegram

During a blackout, Bernard apparently disobeys orders not to go ashore and leaves the Kronos. The ship later receives a brief resignation telegram sent from the Greenland Star and addressed to Captain Sigmund Lukas. Its formal brevity seems, at first, consistent with Bernard’s manner: Lukas calls it typical of his brother, and the narrator recognizes the combination of brevity, arrogance, secrecy, and enthusiasm for formal clichés as something Bernard might have written.

The apparent explanation does not hold. The telegram repeats the text of a paper the narrator took from Tørk’s cabin the previous night. The message attributed to Bernard was not written by Bernard, though Lukas does not know this when he waves the telegram and asks what his brother might have been doing ashore. The forged resignation turns an already painful absence into a deliberate concealment: Lukas is responding to a message designed to make him believe Bernard has chosen to leave, not to an account Bernard himself supplied.

Loyalty, grief, and the limits of protection

Lukas’s reaction shifts from suspicion to exposed distress. When he suspects the narrator was also ashore during the blackout, his officer’s composure and sarcasm give way to anxiety bordering on desperation. He asks whether the narrator knows anything about Bernard, takes hold of the narrator’s arm, and later waves the telegram with tears in his eyes. His concern is not merely a captain’s response to a missing sailor; it is a brother’s attempt to recover someone he has repeatedly tried to keep safe.

The narrator briefly recognizes a reflection of herself in Lukas’s torment: both have made irrational, blind, and vain attempts to protect others from something they do not understand, only to see it return. That recognition does not become disclosure. She lets the impulse to tell him what she knows fade, concluding that she can do nothing for Lukas and that no one can do anything for Bernard anymore. Lukas, meanwhile, gazes across the water without seeing it, already absorbed in the painful speculations that the false telegram will set in motion. His loyalty remains; the protection it was meant to provide has failed, leaving him with grief and uncertainty.