We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  She can hold her own memorial service in front of that bureau, the only grave she can visit. But at least she has the document and with it, certainty: a conclusion, but also a beginning. Life isn't like a book. There's never a final page.

  But it wasn't like that for Karoline. No official message reached her. Laurids was gone, but how or where he'd disappeared no one could tell her. Hope can be like a plant that sprouts and grows and keeps people alive. But it can also be a wound that refuses to heal.

  It's said that if the dead aren't buried in consecrated ground, they'll haunt us, and Laurids soon began to haunt Karoline. He became the ghost in her heart, and he never left her in peace, because he did not know the difference between day and night, and finally neither did she. There was her yearning during the day, when she should have been busy with domestic matters. There were the practical concerns at night, when she should have been sleeping or crying herself empty from loss. Without rest or relief, she grew gaunt and gray, as if she were made from the same substance as the ghost in her heart.

  Only her hands never lost their strength. She'd draw water from the well, light the fire in the kitchen every morning, wash and mend clothes, weave, bake bread, bring up four children, and box their ears hard enough to remind them of the missing Laurids.

  THE THRASHING ROPE

  THE SUMMER HAD just ended, but the sun's warmth was still in our blood, and we longed for the water. After school we'd run down to the harbor and jump right in, headfirst, or walk out to the long strip of beach known as the Tail. Once we'd swum, we'd lie on the warm sand to dry off and talk about Mr. Isager, our teacher. The new pupils thought he wasn't all bad. Having your ears pulled or getting a slap on the side of the head was no big deal; it was no different from home.

  But some of the older ones warned, "Just you wait. He's in a good mood right now."

  "He said something nice about my dad," said Albert Madsen.

  "But what did your dad say about him?" Niels Peter asked.

  "He said that Isager was a devil with the thrashing rope."

  His mother had then declared that they were not to call the schoolteacher a devil and his father had retorted, "Well, that's easy for you to say. You girls never had Isager."

  Remembering his father brought tears to Albert's eyes. He blinked and looked down. His nose thickened and he wiped it with an angry movement of his wrist. We saw his tears, but none of us teased him. Many of us Marstal boys had lost a dad at sea. Our fathers were often away. But then sometimes, out of the blue, they'd be gone forever. Often away and gone forever: the two phrases marked the difference between having a living father and a dead one. It wasn't a big difference, but it was big enough to make us cry when no one was looking.

  One of us slapped Albert on his shoulder and jumped up.

  "Race you!"

  And we tore across the sand and threw ourselves into the water.

  Every summer we went to the beach, with its border of dried seaweed that crackled and pricked under our bare feet, its carpet of crushed mussel shells, its luminous green seabed, and its swaying submerged forests of bladder wrack and eelgrass.

  When we turned thirteen we went to sea. Some of us never returned. But every summer new boys came out to the Tail.

  One day in August we lay on our stomachs in the warm sand, licking our salty skin, still tanned from the summer, and talked about Jens Holgersen Ulfstrand, who during the reign of King Hans had defeated the Lübecks in a naval battle; about Søren Norby, Peder Skram, and Herluf Trolle, who had all fought on the sea we'd just emerged from; about Peder Jensen Bredal, who was killed at Als by a musket bullet to the chest; about King Christian IV, who boarded his own ship, the Spes, and chased the Hamburgers away from Glückstadt, a town that had been built on his orders. It was also where our fathers had once been held captive, but we never talked about that.

  Our favorite naval hero was Tordenskjold, who spent a whole night g, off the shores of Ærø and Als chasing the White Eagle, a Swedish frigate equipped with thirty cannons, though his own ship, the Løvendals Galej, had only twenty. We knew all about his triumphs at the battles of Dynekilen, Marstrand, Gothenburg, and Strömstad, where so many of his brave men perished, while he survived, safe and sound, though he always gave his utmost.

  "Not this time!" we yelled, recalling the day when Tordenskjold found himself alone on Torekov beach in Scania, surrounded by three Swedish dragoons: he'd hacked his way past them and swum through the surf, with his sharp rapier clenched between his teeth.

  Then there was the story of how, having fought an English captain for nearly twenty-four hours, with just a brief pause between midnight and dawn, Tordenskjold announced to his wounded foe that he'd run out of gunpowder and coolly asked for the loan of some more so the battle could continue. Upon which the English captain had appeared on deck, raised a glass of wine, and saluted his Danish opponent with seven hurrahs. Then Tordenskjold too found a glass and they'd toasted each other.

  Another story we liked was about the time he'd lost the foremast overboard on the Løvendals Galej in a howling storm, but managed to stoke fresh courage in his men by yelling "We're winning, boys!" through the gale.

  We walked home across the headland, on the other side of which lay the wide inlet we called the Little Ocean. In the distance you could see the ships tied to the black-tarred mooring posts in the harbor: a couple of old luggers, two cutters, a ketch, and the fore-and-aft schooner Johanne Karoline, affectionately known as the Incomparable. Distinguishing one type of ship from another with the skill of an experienced sailor was something we'd learned long before Isager started drumming the alphabet into our heads. We often swam in the harbor, egging one another on to dive deeper and deeper, right down to the shell-encrusted ships' keels. Then we'd surface with our hands full of mussels.

  Behind the harbor wharf rose the town, where from the church rose the thin spire that reached skyward like the bare mast of a ship. Just then, the church bells started tolling a long-drawn-out farewell; a funeral procession was coming down Kirkestræde, led by girls strewing greenery across the cobbles. They were burying old Ermine Karlsen from Snaregade. She'd outlived her husband and both her sons. Death was a certainty for all of us, but whether the bells of Marstal would ever toll for us, there was no knowing. If we drowned at sea, there'd be only silence.

  THE FIRST WEEK OF the new school term, Isager paid us little attention. His movements and speech gave him the automatic, dazed quality of a man who has risen before truly waking and is floating in a pleasant dream. Still in dressing gown and slippers, he'd shuffle to the school from his house, the thrashing rope coiled in his pocket like a viper drowsy from the heat. Isager had been a schoolteacher for thirty years, so most of our fathers had felt the snake's lash, and many still bore the scars, like marks of their initiation into manhood.

  The good weather lasted well into September—and so did Isager's benign mood. He didn't bother us with revision questions and on the rare occasions when he hit us, it was never hard enough to draw tears or blood, and the infamous thrashing rope stayed in his pocket. He read aloud from Balle's Textbook, heedless that some of us had only just started school while others had been there five years. He'd concentrate on the first three chapters: "God's Powers," "God's Works," and "Mankind's Corruption Through the Fall," but he'd stop at the fourth chapter, "Mankind's Redemption Through Jesus Christ." There was no need for all that, he said. It was hogwash—as was everything that followed. Then he'd move on to the Old Testament. His favorite story was that of Jacob and his twelve sons, and it always made his eyes soften. "I too have twelve sons, like Jacob," he'd murmur.

  We knew all about Jacob: we'd paid attention. We knew that he was an impostor who stole from his own brother, the hairy-armed Esau, and lied to his father, the blind Isaac, and sired children by four different women, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah, and that when one proved barren, he would simply move on to the next, and that he had a fight with an angel that left him with a limp, but that l
ater he was blessed by God. It was a peculiar story, but none of us dared point out its oddness to Isager.

  Two of Isager's twelve sons were still at the school: Johan and Josef—the latter being the only one Isager had actually named after a son of Jacob. When we told the Isager brothers that their father's Bible hero was a liar, a thief, and a fornicator, Johan burst into tears (he cried a lot anyway because Josef beat him up daily), and teardrops as greasy as candle wax dripped from his bizarrely huge eyes, while Josef, thumping his brother on the head with a clenched fist, merely retorted that their father was no fornicator: he was just a drunkard and a fool.

  We never spoke about our own fathers that way. But from then on we left the Isager boys in peace.

  We knew that the mild weather was over one day in the middle of September, when an east wind brought looming clouds that covered the entire island with a lid of slate gray. The same day, we noticed that Isager's steel spectacles were sitting higher than usual on the bridge of his nose and pressing tightly against its flesh. Some of us had a theory that Isager's swings of mood related to the weather, so we'd developed the habit of glancing at the sky on our way to school, looking for indications in the cloud formations. But it wasn't an exact science, and even its most ardent proponents had to concede that Isager and the clouds weren't always in concord.

  On this mid-September day, however, they were. Dressing gown abandoned, Isager appeared in a black tailcoat, commonly known as the Combat Uniform—and in his right hand he brandished the thrashing rope. His boots clacked on the cobbles as he crossed the yard that divided his house from the school. Then, positioning himself by the school door, he lashed each of us across the back of the neck as we entered, catapulting us over the threshold.

  There were seventy of us in his class and we had to pass through the entrance one by one, tensing our scalps for the lash as we went. The older boys among us were used to violence and could take a beating, but no one could quell the fear in his heart as he waited for it. Pain that you anticipate is always worse than the kind that comes out of the blue. Before they even came close to Isager, the youngest boys' lips started quivering. A blow to the back of the head was their school baptism.

  But worse awaited us in class.

  ***

  We always started by singing "Gone Is the Dark, Dark Night," with Isager leading, in his braying voice. He doubled up as parish clerk, but he had to pay the assistant teacher, Mr. Nothkier, to lead the hymns in church on Sundays because half the congregation had vowed that if Isager led, they'd march out as soon as he opened his mouth—and this was too much for his vanity. But we schoolboys had no such choice, and indeed, we learned to appreciate his voice and to wish that the lengthy, turgid hymn would go on forever, because as long as he was singing, he couldn't clobber us.

  He'd pace restlessly up and down while in full flow; although he knew the hymn by heart, he held the open hymnbook right up to his nose, while his predator's eyes roamed the room over the top of the page. As he reached the last few lines, "God grant us happiness and guidance, may He send us the Light of His Grace," you'd usually catch the sound of someone crying. The hymn always served to drown our sobs—but only until it ended. It was the blow across the back of the head that brought on the tears. And it was fear that kept them welling.

  Albert Madsen pressed his lips together firmly and fixed his eyes on Isager's spectacles, fighting his terror through concentration.

  The teacher's face took on a vigilant expression as he scanned the room again, this time in an exaggerated manner, as though he were in a stage play. He went over to Albert and stared hard into his face. Albert was one of the younger ones, and they were always the first to crack. But Albert just stared ahead stiffly, and Isager let him off and moved on.

  There were a lot of us. He never addressed us by name. He just called out, "You there!" or hit us. His rope knew us better than he did.

  The class grew silent. Those still crying covered their mouths, terrified of summoning a catastrophe with even the smallest squeak. Then from somewhere in our group a raucous sob emerged (clapping your hand over your mouth didn't always work) and Isager jumped, his eyes narrowing behind his spectacles as he looked around and roared:

  "Shut up!"

  "Mr. Isager," ventured Albert, "it was wrong of you to hit us. We haven't done anything."

  Isager paled. Even his red nose lost its color. Then he unbuttoned his tailcoat. That was the sign we'd feared. All through the hymn he'd been holding the rope: book in one hand, tool of punishment in the other. Just a moment ago he'd been singing about joy and good tidings and the light of grace; now he uncoiled the rope with a practiced hand. If it were a whip, he'd have cracked it.

  "You'll get your punishment now"—here his breath caught—"upon my most sacred honor!" And with a single movement he yanked Albert up by the sweater, hauling him from his desk and ramming him down to the floor. Then, trapping him between both legs, he grabbed the lining of his trousers. He'd been saving his strength for this: for an entire long, leisurely summer, he'd had only Josef and Johan to thrash. His moment had come. Deploying skills he had honed over three decades of practice, Isager prepared to land his rope with full force.

  Albert cried out in terror. He'd never been flogged before. Laurids had rarely hit him, and his mother mainly boxed his ears. He was used to that. But now he was being thrust down onto his knees. He squirmed to free himself from Mr. Isager's grip.

  "So, you're being disobedient, eh?" Mr. Isager hissed and hefted him back to his feet by the hair. He looked Albert right in the face.

  "Disobedient," he muttered again, and whipped him across the cheek.

  Then he moved on to his next victim.

  By now, some boys had climbed up onto the windowsill at the back of the classroom and were struggling with the window catches. By the time Isager was aware of it, the window was gaping open and the boys had jumped out onto the playground and escaped through the gate. Isager had the thrashing rope poised for the next flogging, but the boy between his legs wriggled loose and hurtled round the classroom in a blind panic. At this, Isager began storming across the room, lashing out with the rope, left, right, and center.

  "Hurry up, hurry up! He's coming!" we screamed.

  Another boy squeezed through the window just before Isager reached it, thrashing those who remained before hauling them down from the sill. The rope flayed our legs, our backs, our arms, and our bare faces. One boy curled up in a ball on the floor, protecting his head with his hands while Isager whipped his back and booted him in the ribs.

  Hans Jørgen grabbed hold of Isager's arm. He was a big, strong boy who was due to be confirmed the following spring.

  "How dare you lay a hand on your teacher, you lout!" Isager yelled as he struggled to free himself.

  Even though there were enough of us to overpower Isager (and if all seventy of us had mobbed him, our sheer weight would have suffocated him), we simply didn't dare come to Hans Jørgen's aid. Indeed, it never crossed our minds. After all, Isager was our teacher. Most of us stayed in our seats, too frightened to move, even though we knew our turn was coming. But Albert approached the still-scuffling duo and looked our teacher up and down. Isager, busy freeing himself from Hans Jørgen's grip, was oblivious to him. Albert watched the two with the same scrutiny he had applied to Isager's spectacles earlier on. His cheek was red and swollen where the rope had landed. Suddenly, he kicked out with his wooden clog, catching Isager on the shin. The teacher howled in pain and Hans Jørgen seized the opportunity to twist his arm. Groaning, Isager sank to his knees.

  That was the moment we should all have jumped him. But it was beyond contemplation. Isager was a monster you could never slay, even now, when he was on his knees, howling like a wounded animal. We all knew from our own skirmishes that the battle was over now. When you had someone kneeling with one arm twisted behind his back, you'd order him to plead for his life, or apologize, or otherwise humiliate himself. And since you'd never actually break anyon
e's arm deliberately, the unspoken rule was that the fight would end there. But with Isager the thing was murkier. There was nothing you wanted more than to break the hated arm he hit you with, but you couldn't do it. If an adult in our group had ordered us to finish him off, then we'd have done it. But Isager was the only adult around. And so we let him go, without even forcing him to plead for mercy, however briefly.

  Hans Jørgen took a step back. Isager didn't dare touch him now. Without looking at him, he brushed the dirt off his trousers, then lunged out at the nearest boy. It was Albert, who for the second time that day ended up trapped between the teacher's legs.

  Isager was to experience a few more brawls because not everyone put up with his brutality. But the majority of us ended up, like Albert, in the vise of his legs, gritting our teeth and taking a flogging.

  Isager returned to his desk, panting and short of breath; he was no longer a young man, and flogging seventy boys was hard work. But he'd managed it. He put his left hand on the desk for support. The other still clutched the rope.

  "You vile louts, you've just earned yourself another flogging," he snorted.

  But he was too exhausted to deliver it.

  His spectacles were still in place. Not once during his skirmishes with the bigger boys did they abandon their position on the bridge of his nose.