We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  He straightened up and paced about the schoolroom. He made Niels Peter his next choice—but instead of thrashing him right away, he paused next to the boy's bowed back and brandished the rope.

  "Take a good look at this," he said, before laying into him. "This is your conscience, and it's the only one you'll ever have. Only the rope can teach you about right and wrong."

  When school was over, we walked across the snow-covered fields beyond town. None of us said anything. We were looking for some farmers' boys to start a fight with. Every now and then we'd steal a glance at Hans Jørgen. Had he let us down? We'd all presented our backs to Isager. But we hadn't expected him to.

  Today the snow had none of the glittering surfaces and bluish shadows it took on when the sun shone. The dull weather cast everything in a uniform gray, and only the bare poplars provided any perspective. There wasn't a soul about.

  "There's no one here," Niels Peter grumbled.

  We stole another glance at Hans Jørgen. He was walking slightly ahead of us, but suddenly he stopped and turned to face us.

  "I don't want you to think that I'm afraid of Isager," he said. "Because I'm not."

  He sounded angry. We didn't say anything and looked down at the snow. A snowflake fell from the overcast sky, and then another. We expected him to add something, but he didn't.

  "Why did you let him hit you?"

  Niels Peter put the question without looking up, almost as if he were talking to himself. Hans Jørgen hesitated. Then he shrugged, as though defeated in advance.

  "It doesn't matter now," he said.

  Albert looked up, squinting into the falling snow.

  "I don't understand."

  Hans Jørgen paused. "Well, we didn't get him," he said. "And now he's come back and he's worse than ever. It's all"—again he flung out his arms—"hopeless."

  "But he was bleeding," Albert protested. He hadn't seen it, but he'd heard detailed, almost painterly descriptions of Isager's dripping blood.

  "Yes," Niels Peter said. "He did bleed."

  "And so what?"

  Hans Jørgen turned around and started heading back to the town. The snowflakes came thicker now. We followed. For the first time, we disagreed with Hans Jørgen. He'd always been our leader. But now we had to answer for ourselves.

  We'd killed the dog, but we'd failed to kill the master. He'd thrashed our fathers and he'd go on thrashing us. We did the math on our fingers. We stayed in school for six years. Albert had five and a half years to go. Hans Jørgen had six months, the rest of us something in between. If Isager claimed six years of our lives, how many more would it take us to forget what he'd done? It sounded like a problem from Cramer's Arithmetic, but whether you solved it through addition, subtraction, or multiplication, none of us knew.

  We had seen Isager bleed one winter's night, and the sight of his blood on the snow had filled us with hope. We'd seen fire lick through Niels Peter's sweater in the schoolroom stove, and we weren't through with contemplating what those flames meant.

  At which point we began to see the potential of fire.

  HANS JØRGEN TOOK confirmation with Pastor Zachariassen and went to sea. Eight months later he returned with the winter ice, having saved up his wages and bought himself a tall hat of the kind the older sailors wore.

  Now was the moment for taking his revenge on Isager, we told him, because he was an adult, and no one could hurt him. But Hans Jørgen said he got thrashed just as much on board ship, so nothing had changed, and now that Isager was no longer his teacher, he'd lost the urge to smash him to pieces. In fact he'd bumped into him in the street, and Isager asked him about life at sea and they'd chatted as though Hans Jørgen had never forced him to his knees by twisting his arm, or lain on the floor being flayed: one adult to another.

  "Do it for us, then," Albert pleaded. "You're big and strong. You're stronger than last year. You can take him on."

  "I've already forgotten him," Hans Jørgen said. "He's of no interest."

  "You're full of it because you've just been paid."

  "You're not listening."

  Hans Jørgen squatted down so his face was level with Albert's.

  "They thrash you on board ship too. It never ends. It goes on and on. You might as well get used to it now."

  "It's not fair!" Niels Peter fumed.

  "No"—the others joined in—"it's not fair!"

  "What's the point of teaching us to do sums, or to read and write," asked Hans Jørgen, "when all we need to know is how to take a beating, if we want to get ahead? And when it comes to that, there's no better teacher than Isager."

  We looked at him uncertainly. Was he mocking us?

  "Did the great Tordenskjold complain when a wave snapped off the foremast? No. What did he say to his men?"

  "We're winning, boys," Niels Peter mumbled, and looked at his feet.

  "There you are. We're winning, boys! Just remember that and stop whining."

  "He's gone really strange," Albert said afterward.

  We nodded. We felt more alone than ever. Hans Jørgen was no longer one of us. He'd become a grownup and he knew more about the world. But we didn't like what he told us. We decided not to believe him.

  However, from that day on, it seemed that we were readier to put up with things. When Isager went on a thrashing round, there was less rebelliousness in the classroom, and fewer of us jumped out of the window to escape.

  Christmas and New Year came around again. Isager had escaped our torments the previous year because he'd been bedridden, fighting for his life, but he'd won, and now it was time for more seasonal fun. We suspected we'd never be rid of Isager, but we couldn't forget those classroom flames, the day Niels Peter used his sweater to obstruct the stovepipe, and it caught fire. Having seen the flames bursting out, we knew that once fire had taken hold, nobody could stop it.

  This too was Niels Peter's idea. How had the big fire of 1815 started? Had men with torches set fire to the thatched roofs at night? No: a candle had been knocked over in a house in Prinsegade. That was all it took! And the blaze had jumped from house to house, until every third house in town was reduced to ashes. The glow could be seen all the way from Odense.

  Albert's grandmother Kirstine still spoke about the fire with terror in her voice.

  "Granny, tell us about the Great Fire!" Albert pestered her, when she came to visit. So as she sat by the stove, Granny would tell the story of Barbara Pedersdatter, the maid who'd been hackling flax on Karlsen's threshing floor in Prinsegade with the tallow dip lit, but then had taken it into her head, the silly girl, to read a letter from her sweetheart because he'd landed her in trouble and she was keen to know what he intended to do, given that it was all his fault. But in the process of opening the letter, the befuddled girl had knocked the candle over and the tow caught fire and soon it wasn't just Barbara Pedersdatter but the whole town that was in trouble. "Whoosh," Granny said, and flung her hands in the air to indicate how the hungry flames shot out through the thatched roof. She'd seen that fire and she'd never forget it.

  "You pray to God that you'll never have to live through what we did," she'd say, as she finished telling the tale.

  But Albert prayed to God that fire would be unleashed again.

  It was New Year's Eve and we did what we always did: we ate our traditional dinner of boiled cod with mustard sauce, and then ran out into the dark winter's night, banging on doors and wreaking havoc. We smashed fences and threw clay pots. We caught a dog and tied a bit of old rope around it and hung it upside-down from a tree until its howls attracted the attention of its owner, whom we then bombarded with more clay pots.

  And now, having stuffed straw into our sweaters, we were waiting for it to get dark enough to surround Isager's house. There was still light coming from the inside, so we threw a couple of clay pots through the windows into the drawing room. We heard his fat wife squeal and, shortly afterward, more noises came from the hallway. Then Isager appeared in the doorway, a stick in his hand. />
  "Louts," he yelled.

  "You can shout as much as you like," we called back, and aimed a few more clay pots in his direction. One hit him on the shoulder and sent its foul, stinking contents running down his black tailcoat. His yelling ended in a strangled cough as if he was about to throw up. Another pot flew past him into the hallway. Josef and Johan stood looking out the window, laughing at their father. They were never allowed to go out mischief-making on New Year's Eve, so this was their revenge. But they had no idea what was to come, because we hadn't told them.

  We legged it down Skolegade with Isager chasing after us, his stick raised, ready to attack. The sound of smashing glass now came from the other side of the house: Niels Peter and Albert Madsen had broken a bedroom window and thrown burning straw inside. The fire had started.

  "Come out now or we'll burn your house down."

  We turned into Tværgade and raced up Prinsegade. We could still hear Isager shouting. We were back at the schoolhouse by this time; we'd tricked him by running in a circle. We felt the wind grow stronger. The day before it had begun to thaw, and most of the snow in the streets was melting, warmed by the mild western wind that always sucked winter away from us. You could hear it howling across town.

  We'd broken the windows on both sides of the house, and Isager had left the door open behind him when he chased us, so now the wind rushed straight through the building, blowing through the burning straw in the bedroom. Flames began to lick the walls. We'd never seen fire like this before, and the sight of it sent shivers down our spines: so this was what a hungry fire looked like! Wilder and fiercer than we'd ever imagined, it shot straight through the roof and lit the house like a thousand tallow candles. Then it burst out of every opening.

  Isager screamed, and we saw his fat wife stumble through the door. She slipped on the stairs and plonked down on her fat bottom. She stayed there, sobbing loudly and plaintively, like a child.

  Isager ran over to her and thumped her with the stick, as if the calamity that had befallen them was her fault. Meanwhile Josef and Johan watched the scene as if it was no concern of theirs. Jørgen Albertsen, from the house across the street, came running.

  Our group, which continued to grow, stood on the other side of Kirkestræde. We wanted to cheer loudly, but we knew it was definitely not a wise move, so we just whispered the Snaily Snaily rhyme, glancing furtively at one another and giggling.

  Our tormentor had got his comeuppance.

  The adults raced over with buckets full of water, but that made no difference at all, because the west wind was blowing in earnest now. And it wasn't just through Isager's house that it stormed like the devil, setting alight curtains, wallpaper, furniture, and the loft; no, it carried on. Flames jumped on the wind's back and rode it from Isager's house to Mr. Dreymann's house, from Mr. Dreymann's house to Mr. Kroman's.

  Little Anders wasn't chanting the Snaily Snaily rhyme anymore: he was screaming. It was his house that had caught fire. He watched his mother rush out with the soup tureen of tin-glazed English earthenware, which was the finest thing they owned. Soon all of one side of Skolegade was ablaze. The snow began to fall again, but this had to be Satan's snow, for it fell black rather than white.

  The fire didn't stop until it reached the corner of Tværgade. Here the streets were wider apart, and the houses on the other side had tiled roofs. But from the near side, glowing embers rained down on the cobbles, and anyone who ventured there came away with burn holes in their clothing. Meanwhile, all along Skolegade, smoke and flames whipped into the sky, like the lashing tail of a fiery dragon.

  Finally, the fire engine arrived. The horses were neighing with fright; they'd never seen a real fire either. The heat prevented them from entering Skolegade, so the fire brigade left the engine on the corner by Tværgade and tried to stop the flames rampaging through the town. Meanwhile efforts to extinguish the fire in Skolegade had ground to a halt, though Levin Kroman had shouted at us to join in, and we had. But the heat was too intense. We couldn't get near the Isager house and could only press ourselves against the houses on the opposite side of the street, clutching our buckets, while we watched the mighty sea of flames through stinging eyes.

  It never crossed our minds that we were the cause of this unimaginable thing. No: the fire itself was the cause. It had a force, a consuming purpose all its own. It had nothing to do with us.

  Our hour had finally come. All our bitterness, fear, and hatred—passions too huge to stay contained in the narrow chests of children—had fueled this fire, whose flames had the awesome capacity to purge us of everything hateful or unnecessary. Entire houses had been turned into sooty carcasses by those flames, and tomorrow that would be a sad and terrible sight to see. But tonight it was a stupendous spectacle. That's what we felt: nothing more.

  But a western wind always heralds rain. High above the flames the storm clouds burst, and a torrent of rain tipped down and drowned both the fire dragon and our joyful excitement.

  The next morning we wandered around and inspected the remains of the burned-down houses. Skolegade was one huge scene of devastation. The walls were still standing: the empty windows gaped darkly, and the townsfolk gaped back. January 1 was a holiday. Men wore top hats and examined the damage with expert faces, as though they were assessors accustomed to major fires—even though almost forty years had passed since the last one. The women, including those who'd lost nothing, wore black shawls over their heads and wailed loudly. It seemed that fear had claimed the women of Marstal just as the fire had claimed the houses the night before. It was the same fear that the sea instilled in them, the fear of losing everything: brothers, fathers, and sons. But the fire had shown more mercy than the sea. It hadn't taken a single life.

  In the midst of all this, we heard Mrs. Isager calling out for Karo. She seemed to forget that the dog was long gone. The other women spoke to her, but she shook her head and went on calling.

  Though the lives of dogs and humans had been spared, many families had lost the things that help us through life, such as furniture and clothes and memories and kitchen utensils. The Albertsen family found a cast-iron pot that could still be used, and the Svanes unearthed a frying pan. The handle had burned away, but Laves Petersen, the carpenter, said he could make a new one.

  The fire had started while we were bombarding Isager's house with clay pots. We did this every year and we were all—even those who had not taken part—punished for it annually. Since we never snitched on one another, we were all regarded as equally guilty. But this year there was no punishment—because set against the scale of the inferno, our clay-pot larks seemed like small beer. They were forgotten, and so were we. Isager had been in the street when the fire broke out and simply didn't connect us with what had happened. Unable to conceive that we might be responsible for such a disaster, he'd underestimated us. Likewise he was unaware of the wickedness he had sown in us. His stupidity was our protection.

  In the days that followed, we learned that his fat wife had lost her reason. She kept wandering around, calling for Karo. She thought that the flames had scared him away, and she put his bowl out every day to entice him out of hiding.

  "She's improved," Josef said. "She keeps forgetting to thump us."

  THE FLAMES HADN'T touched the school, and the teacher's home was rebuilt. Before long, new houses had appeared on Skolegade. But at school, nothing had changed. Isager had been bedridden and fought off death. His house had burned down. And we, his pupils, were behind it all. But he kept coming back. We'd lost. It was hopeless.

  Again we counted the remaining years on our fingers. Sooner or later we would be old enough to leave the school. That was the only hope we had.

  Lorentz was confirmed and became apprenticed to the baker in Tværgade. Appropriate, we thought, given his obese, unmanly body. As he grew older it had become increasingly feminine: he'd developed breasts, and the Isager boys had once taken him out to the Tail and made him strip so they could see what a girl looked like.
Then Josef had held Lorentz in a viselike grip while he twisted away at his fat, quivering flesh, and Johan, who was sensitive and cried greasy, waxy tears at every opportunity, had done things to Lorentz that afterward made them both shoot us knowing glances, as if they possessed a secret that we could share if we begged them hard enough. But we didn't want to know what it was. No. We didn't.

  Lorentz worked for the baker in Tværgade at night, kneading dough. But he lasted only a few months. The clouds of flour next to the hot oven got into his lungs, he said, and he couldn't breathe properly. But that was a load of rubbish. He'd always had breathing trouble because he was fat, and he and his mother were to blame for that. He was an only child and she was a widow and she fed him from morning till night like a goose she was fattening for Christmas. No: the baker didn't want Lorentz because Lorentz was useless; all he could do was hunch his shoulders and wheeze. So Lorentz went to sea and came back that winter with a black eye. Hans Jørgen was right, he said. They hit you on board ship too. And again he gave us that pleading look, which asked, Can I be one of you now?

  But we looked away, as we always did. Afterward we thought that he'd never stand a chance if he looked that way at the crew of the Anne Marie Elisabeth.

  No one respects a weakling who crawls.

  Hans Jørgen wasn't around to say "I told you so!" when Lorentz reported that they hit people on board ship too. He'd gone down with the Johanne Karoline, which vanished without a trace one autumn day in the Gulf of Bothnia.