We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

I felt that I was holding my entire future in my hands when I felt the weight of the swollen bag. I didn't even need the Flying Scud. I could buy my own ship. I could buy three ships, become a shipowner, and have my own house. Perhaps even the big, beautiful house built after the fire in Øvre Strandstræde, across from the parsonage. In my imagination I started peopling this house with a wife and children: yes, servants, even. I saw my future wife in a violet dress, picking roses in the garden.

  I never described these fantasies to Jim. Instead, I asked him to be my judge. He must make the decision for me. It wasn't the suffering he had endured before he became a shrunken head that qualified him. Rather, it was his silence. I could put any reply I wanted into his mouth.

  "So, Jim," I'd say in the twilight of the cabin, "should I keep the pearls? What do you think?"

  Jim never said yes or no. He just looked at me through his stitched eyelids, and I felt that the answers to all my questions were hidden behind them.

  I began thinking a lot about my papa tru. I'd never asked him for advice and he'd never given me any. We'd parted far too early for that. But now I was looking for him. That was my mission in the Pacific: to find my missing papa tru. But what did I want from him, and what would I do when I found him? Ask him for some good advice? Rebuild our lost relationship? The last time I saw him, I was a child. Now I was an adult and I couldn't turn the clock back. So what did I want to do? Show him that I could stand on my own two feet? Had I looked for him across half the world just to prove to him how easily I could manage without him?

  I realized that I'd never thought past the moment when I stood face to face with him again. I was a skilled sailor. I'd crossed the great oceans, but when it came to this, I felt like a newcomer to the world—not because I didn't know its busy, overcrowded ports, its palm-fringed coasts and wind-lashed rocks, but because I understood so little of my own soul. I could navigate from a chart; I could determine my position using a sextant. I was in an unknown place in the Pacific on a ship with no captain and I could still find my way. But I had no way of mapping my own mind or the course of my life.

  I emptied Jack Lewis's cupboard of bottles and went on deck to throw them overboard. I didn't open a single one before chucking them into the water—not even the mysterious one with the white fluid in which the outline of a dark shape could sometimes be seen. The doors Jack Lewis had opened to me had led to rooms filled with horrors. I watched the bottles fall astern and disappear beneath the waves.

  I knew that I ought to have thrown out Jim as well. But he continued to keep me company. And so did the pearls.

  The days passed. I fantasized about my future. I regarded the pearls at one moment as an unexpected stroke of good fortune, and at the next as a curse that would make me an accomplice in Jack Lewis's crimes, should I ever sell them.

  All the while we held our course for Samoa.

  As long as Jim didn't answer me, I felt I was still free and that nothing had been decided yet. I'd stopped time and I caught myself wishing that I could remain forever in this fuzzy inner world that I'd created with Jim in the twilit cabin, a world where dreams could come true and there was no price to pay for them. I forgot where I really was.

  ***

  I spent most hours of the day alone, but my solitude was no burden. I took my meals in the cabin while the Kanaks ate on deck. They prepared the food: rice and steamed taro. From time to time they'd throw a line over the rail and catch a yellowfin tuna.

  I appeared on deck only to correct the course and adjust the spread of the canvas.

  After a week the trade wind died down. It disappeared one evening with the sun, which sank into the horizon like a red ball while the clouds fanned out on all sides.

  I took that as a bad omen and prepared for a hurricane, but when the next day dawned, the opposite confronted us. The sea was dead calm, as if a heavy lid had been pressed on top of it. The overwhelming heat suggested that a thunderstorm was approaching, but the sky was as blue as a gas flame, and no menacing clouds loomed on the horizon.

  I was still convinced that something was about to happen, but my imagination stretched no farther than my fears of an imminent hurricane.

  The days passed and we stayed put. The sails hung slack and we rigged an awning amidships to provide shade. For a while I had to part from Jim; it was too hot to sleep in the stagnant air of the cabin, and I didn't want to bring him up on deck with me. Should I leave the pearls down there too?

  The dark thoughts I'd nursed down in the cabin wouldn't leave me. I began carrying the leather purse—which contained my entire future—under my shirt, against my bare chest. But it clung to my body in the heat, which had grown so oppressive that I struggled to breathe; I felt as though a gauze bandage gagged my mouth. So I locked the pearls in the cabin with Jim and went bare-chested. From time to time I'd lower a bucket into the sea and pour lukewarm salt water over my body, but neither that nor the arrival of night brought any relief from the heat.

  One night, unable to sleep, I headed for the deck. The Kanaks had attached hammocks to the rigging and were murmuring quietly. For the first time my loneliness felt like a burden, but I knew it would be a sign of weakness to approach them or try to strike up a conversation.

  We'd secured the wheel. There was no course to stick to. With no current on which to hitch a ride, we weren't going anywhere. I gazed up at the sky. There were still no clouds, and the twinkling of the stars had grown faint, as if they'd given up signaling to us. I understood then how utterly cut off we were from the rest of the world. The Flying Scud was like a planet torn from its orbit and about to vanish into the deepest, darkest corner of the universe.

  A groan came from one of the hammocks. I stepped closer. It was the Kanak with the bandaged shoulder. His wound had been healing over the past few days. Did his groaning mean that the fever had returned and that his wound had become infected? I knew what an infection looked like, but I had no idea how to treat it, apart from the primitive method of regularly pouring whiskey over it. It was too dark to do anything, so I decided to wait until morning.

  I didn't sleep that night; it was too hot, and I felt restless and irritable. Not because this dead calm had brought our voyage to an unexpected halt and cut us off from the world, but because it had severed me from something far more important: the interior world of the cabin, where I ran the pearls through my fingers and chatted to Jim on the table in front of me. That was where my life had been unfolding—and now it was closed to me.

  I examined the Kanak's shoulder the following day. There were yellow stains on the white bandage and pus oozed from the gash. It had almost closed, but its edges were red and swollen. I cleaned it as well as I could. The Kanak's blue face stayed passive, but his shoulder twitched every time I touched the swollen wound. So I poured whiskey over it and left it to his fellow Kanaks to change the bandage. I knew they fiddled with his wound too. They had their own medicines, which I wasn't going to interfere with: I already doubted the value of my own methods.

  The Kanak's infection gave me the frightening impression that the stagnant air around us was somehow poisoned. We were in the middle of the sea, yet it felt as if we were in a dense jungle, surrounded on all sides by the toxic breath of rotting plants. Was I the only man here who felt that a giant hand was squeezing his chest?

  I watched the Kanaks. Their movements too seemed more sluggish. Were they suffocating too? Did this calm, which had nailed us to the vast floor of the ocean, sit on them too, like a dead weight? Were anxious questions beginning to show in the dark eyes behind the blue masks? Were superstitious terrors rising in them like bubbles from the bottom of a stale swamp, demanding some explanation for our cursed immobility? And might their answer be me, the stranger, who didn't belong among them and who could be used as ransom in the face of the inexplicable?

  We cast lines, but no fish bit. Again I got the feeling that all life around us had vanished. The depths of the sea had become just as still as its surface. It wasn't the fear
of sharks that prevented me from seeking refreshment in a swim. It was the notion that the sea would suck me down the moment I came into contact with it, and I'd disappear into its darkness forever.

  On the fourth day I checked our provisions. We had half a sack of taro roots and a few kilos of rice left. I wasn't afraid we would starve, for I had enough common sense left to expect that the sea would, at some point, give up some of its riches and land a tuna on our deck. Our big problem was fresh water. We hadn't picked up sufficient supplies on the island and we were about to run out. A good rainfall would have fulfilled our needs, but the sky remained mercilessly blue. I had to ration the water, but I feared that this in itself might trigger a mutiny. So I decided that from now on we'd all eat our meals together on the deck: that way the Kanaks could see that everyone received the same amount of water.

  We weren't equals, nor should we be. A ship's written and unwritten laws must be obeyed. But we had to be equal in our sufferings; otherwise we'd never get through them together. Slowly it began to dawn on me that being becalmed like this could, for a newly fledged captain, prove a far greater challenge than any storm.

  Every day we continued to cast our lines but caught nothing. The fish shunned our ship, and I could see a perplexed look on the faces of the experienced Kanaks, who'd spent their entire lives on these waters. We were in the middle of the sea and there wasn't a single fish to be had! Were we cursed?

  I handed out one mug of water to each man at every meal. One day I peered into the last water barrel and saw that it was close to empty: enough for two more days, at most. Our only hope was that the trade wind would start to blow and bring rain with it.

  On the seventh day, the water ran out. Soft moans came from the hammock where the wounded Kanak was drifting in and out of his fever. No more relief came to his cracked lips, and his eyes rolled upward, as if he hoped to escape via the rigging. When he closed them again, he carried on whimpering. No other sound broke the silence on board. It was at once a sign of life and an omen of the fate that awaited us.

  THE SECOND DAY after the water ran out, we were eating our taro roots, which we'd boiled in salt water, when suddenly one of the Kanaks pointed at the horizon. I looked up and saw a cloud. It hung low above the water, and it was moving rapidly and oddly, like steam coming from a boiling pot except that it didn't rise like steam, but spread in all directions at once, like the flocks of migrating starlings that gather in autumn above the fields outside Marstal. Sunlight shone right through this cloud, which was slowly approaching us, though there was still no wind. It seemed to pulsate, as if there was a whirlwind inside it, shaking the leaves of a dense forest.

  Then the cloud was upon us, and fleetingly we felt as though we were being showered with the withered leaves of an autumn forest. Then I realized it wasn't dead foliage, but living creatures whirling around us, fluttering silky yellow wings. We were at the center of a vast swarm of butterflies.

  There had to be millions of them. A storm, raging far away from the tyrannical calm in which we found ourselves, must have swept them off an island and out to sea. They must have been seeking land—and thought they'd found it on our doomed ship. They settled everywhere, on the ship's rigging and on every single one of its countless ropes, covering the slack sails and transforming them into bright tapestries of yellow. Within minutes this living, breathing mass of exhausted insects had changed the Flying Scud beyond recognition.

  And the butterflies settled on us too, apparently unable to distinguish between wood, rope, canvas, and human skin. Sharing our desperate thirst, they stuck their tiny proboscises all over our skin, to suck the sweat from it. It wasn't painful in the same way as a bee sting or a mosquito bite, but it was soon followed by an unbearable prickling itch that drove us out of our minds. The moment we relaxed, the creatures descended on us again in droves, going for the moist corners of our lips and eyes, which we had to squeeze shut for protection. If we opened our mouths to scare them off with an angry roar, they instantly clung to our teeth, covering our tongues and tickling our palates with their fluttering wings.

  We staggered around, blind and hacking, lashing out at them, but we were their last chance and nothing was going to keep them off. We smashed them against our cheeks, foreheads, and eyebrows, but they kept coming at us, even though they were flying to their doom. I think we'd all willingly have jumped into the sea to escape them, had the water around the ship not been swarming with them. The Flying Scud sat like a coffin on a church floor littered with flowers.

  When I briefly opened an eye just a crack to find my way to the rail, I caught sight of one of the Kanaks, his blue face and head half swallowed by butterflies. For a moment I forgot the danger and let myself be lulled by the lovely sight of his beautifully rounded blue skull clad in lemony insects slowly flapping their half-open wings, his dark eyes staring out from behind those shining fans. But unlike me, he seemed completely at ease. Whether this was simply because he'd accepted and surrendered to his fate, I never discovered, for at the next moment I was hit in the face by a slosh of water: a quick-witted Kanak had lowered a bucket into the sea and started dousing himself and the rest of us. We followed suit, and it was only then that we succeeded in ridding ourselves of the fluttering parasites.

  For a while after that, the butterflies continued landing on our faces and naked torsos, searching for moisture, until finally they gave up. We collapsed on the deck, which now was covered with a sticky mess of trampled and drowned butterflies. It was as if every living thing on board the ship had surrendered to the same lethargy.

  I happened to glance at the hammock where the wounded Kanak lay. In his exhausted state he'd been defenseless, and now he was buried beneath a vibrating mountain of paper-thin wings. We brought the bucket, poured water over him, and scraped handfuls of insects off his skin, not even knowing if he was alive underneath. He'd done the only sensible thing he could, which was to bury his face in his arms, and this was how we found him. His chest was heaving. He was still breathing.

  We cleared a space for him on deck and laid him down. I fetched a sheet for him from my cabin and brought clean shirts for the rest of us. On the ladder and the bulkhead and the floor of the tiny corridor in front of the cabin door, butterflies lay in heavy drifts: I had to brush them off the door handle to get in. As I did so, others immediately took off from the bulkhead to swarm into the new, unclaimed territory. Jim lay in the middle of the table just as I'd left him. They'd settled on his white hair, and it seemed, as they decked him with their beautiful wings, that they were paying some kind of tribute to him—though he was the one human here who could offer them nothing. But at least he was indifferent to their intrusion and didn't beat them off.

  I left Jim and returned to the deck, where I rid myself of the new layer of butterflies that had settled on my face in the cabin. Then we—the captain and his crew—sat down together. We were all wearing shirts I'd taken from Lewis's drawers and my own sea chest.

  We stayed on deck for the rest of the day and slept there the following night. The butterflies no longer stirred. There was no more water, and we'd eaten the last taro roots. The world was exhausted not just of wind, but of everything. There were only us and a million butterflies left. Everything else had died. The sea had stopped breathing, and we were resting our heads on its lifeless breast. Soon our hearts would stop too.

  I'm not superstitious, and I don't know whether the Kanaks are. Most likely they are, though what they'd call faith, we'd call superstition. Yet I felt that the dead calm that smothered us was some kind of punishment—not for something Jack Lewis had done (because if there's a judge in the Hereafter, which I doubt, then Jack Lewis was now facing him) but for a crime that was mine.

  Chance had made me captain of the Flying Scud. I was unprepared and I was young, but that was no excuse. A captain is a captain, and I'd failed as one.

  I'd sat in the cabin with Jim and a bag full of pearls, thinking about myself rather than my crew. If the Kanaks even cros
sed my mind, it was only because I feared that they'd stand in the way of my plans.

  But what should I have done? I couldn't command the wind and make it obey my orders. So how could I be responsible for the calm that had descended on us like a curse?

  It must have been fever, and thirst, and the oppressive heat, and the dying butterflies, and the sight of the leaden lid of the sea, and the gas-flame blue of the sky by day, and the growing remoteness of the stars at night, that had affected my brain and driven my thoughts down this mad path.

  Does anyone fully understand nature? Why does the wind suddenly stop blowing?

  Could it be that nature doesn't care whether we live or die? It seems so much less frightening to blame yourself.

  I stood up, went down to the cabin, grabbed the bag of pearls, returned to the deck, and hurled it as far out to sea as my diminished strength allowed.

  I believed this was the only way I could atone for my guilt and finally free myself from Jack Lewis, because I knew he was still on board. I'd been traveling with shadows and living in a world of ghosts. Superstitious as it was, I feel to this day that my action made complete sense. When my hands were finally empty of something I'd never had any claim to, and my mind was liberated from frivolous dreams, I'd earned the right to call myself a captain. Now I remembered a captain's honor and his only duty: to bring his crew back alive.

  I'd thrown all my dreams for the future overboard, and I had only one wish left: that a storm would come and tear us loose from the becalmment we sat trapped in as if in hardened lava.

  I stayed at the rail, scouting across the sea, but its surface stayed unchanged. I turned to look at the Kanaks, slumped on the deck with their wounded friend prone between them. They gazed at their hands and dozed in the oppressive heat.