We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  "Look," we said to one another, pointing to the model of a Marstal cutter. "Only twenty-four registered tons. And next to it, a three-masted schooner built at Sofus Boye's shipyard, with a carrying capacity of five hundred tons. And it's already twenty-five years old."

  Albert was mainly interested in the collection of curiosities that the town's seamen had brought back from all parts of the world. The conches, the stuffed hummingbird, and the set of teeth from a sawfish took him back to the days of his youth. But when he came to the telegrapher Olfert Blach's Chinese hoard of rugs, embroideries, and a complete and very precious Mandarin costume, he stopped to reflect.

  "Yes," he said to Pastor Abildgaard. "A sailor knows from experience that there's no such thing as tradition. Or rather, that there are many kinds of tradition, not just his own. This is how we do it here, says the farmer on his ancestral land. Well, that's not how they do it there, says the sailor. He's the one who's seen more. The farmer provides his own yardstick. But the sailor knows that won't do for him. Right now the whole world is at war; it's not even two weeks since Russia, England, and France declared war on Turkey because Turkey became an ally of Germany. Many millions of people are fighting one another, but does the world get any bigger because of it, or any smaller? The ships lie still. The sailors can't go to sea and come back with tales of new things. All we can do now is sit here on our little island and grow as stupid as the farmers."

  "You shouldn't say that. You're being unfair to them."

  The minister wasn't from the island. He had an outsider's curiosity about anything local that he considered to be an amusing oddity, and he'd been responsible for that part of the exhibition. Albert knew that the pastor was even writing an account of the town's local history because every now and then Abildgaard would ask for advice. A friendly, if not warm, relationship had developed between them. But Albert had often thought that the minister would have been better suited to a rural parish than a shipping town like Marstal. Given his shackled life, the farmer, after all, fit the basic Christian vision better than the sailor did. All those messages about bowing your head and throwing yourself on the mercy of fate were made for him. Of course a sailor was also subject to the whims of nature, but he challenged the weather and the sea; he was something of a rebel.

  Still, there was no conflict between the minister and the rest of us. The inner circle of his congregation was made up of old women who devoutly slept through his sermons, and there was no hint of rebellion in its outer ranks either. We felt it was right and proper to have a minister, and as Abildgaard never questioned our way of life, our relationship was characterized by mutual tolerance.

  "You really shouldn't call the farmers stupid," the minister persisted. "The farmers support the notion of public education, which I know you also favor. Just look at the adult high schools. But sailors—well, is anyone more superstitious? And the new radical newspaper in the town—why isn't that prospering if the sailing profession is, as you say, so very enlightened and informed about international affairs? And at election time, haven't you noticed that people here inevitably vote conservative? How do you explain that?"

  Pastor Abildgaard's tone had become teasing.

  "It's the concept of ownership," Albert said. "If the cabin boy has a hundredth share in the ship, that's enough to make him feel like a captain. He believes that their interests are the same."

  "And what's wrong with that?" the minister went on. "Look at your own dictum. You've gone to the trouble of having it chiseled into fourteen tons of granite and unveiled to the sound of patriotic songs. Its message is precisely that there's strength in fellowship."

  "I meant that in a socialist sense." Albert had grown irritated with the minister and wanted to rile him. "Where would this town be if its inhabitants didn't know how to unite? We have the second-largest fleet in the country, though the town itself, in terms of population size, is in hundredth place at best. We have mutual marine insurance, financed by the town's sailors. And we have the breakwater. No outsider built it for us. We did it ourselves. I'd call that socialism."

  "Which is something to mention in my next sermon. I'll inform the staunchly conservative citizens of Marstal that they are, in fact, socialists. I normally find laughter in church inappropriate; however, I'll make an exception next Sunday."

  Albert was aware that he wasn't acquitting himself well, but he refused to give up. For a moment it seemed as if his old fighting spirit had been rekindled.

  "Take a sailor," he said. "He signs on to a new ship. He's surrounded by nothing but strangers. Not only do they come from other towns and parts of his own country, but often from completely different nations. He has to learn to work with them. His vocabulary's broadened, he learns new words and grammar, and he comes across new ways of thinking. He turns into a different man, unlike the one who spends his life plowing the same old furrow. These are the men the world needs, not nationalists and warmongers. I fear that this war will cut to the heart of a sailor's life."

  The minister laughed again, ready with a new riposte.

  "Yes, and then this cosmopolitan returns to Marstal, speaking in a broader Marstal dialect than ever, and claims that the farmer, simply because he lives a few field boundaries away, speaks a foreign language that no one understands. And therefore must be stupid. Yes, you've created a proper world citizen, Captain Madsen. I still prefer the nationalist. His sense of solidarity is more inclusive. It embraces high and low, farmer and sailor, as long as they share a language and a history. And I see no sign of this fellowship being destroyed in these unhappy war years. On the contrary, I think it's growing stronger."

  Such a long time passed before Albert spoke again that Pastor Abildgaard, with a little feeling of triumph that he did his best to conceal, assumed that the conversation was over and prepared to continue his inspection of the exhibits. But Albert, who'd been standing with his hands behind his back, contemplating his toe caps, finally cleared his throat and looked Abildgaard firmly in the eye.

  "In the years before the war, you'd often take a walk to Dampskibsbroen to see the ferry leave, wouldn't you?"

  "Yes," Abildgaard said. "Dare I say it, it's the only entertainment the town has to offer. Well, apart from the ferry's arrival, obviously. Which surpasses the excitement of its departure. So, yes, of course I did."

  "Did you notice anything in particular?"

  The minister shook his head. "Not as far as I can remember."

  "The unusually large number of farmers, weighed down by baggage?"

  "Ah, I see where you're going with this."

  Abildgaard smiled disarmingly, as though he knew he was about to be robbed of his earlier minor victory and was willing to be a good sport about it.

  "Yes, I'm sure you do. But there's no harm in my pointing it out anyway. Those farmers were immigrating to America. There they were, the country's spiritual and cultural backbone, with ancient family farms whose soil their ancestors have cultivated for hundreds of years, saying a faithless farewell. Whereas the sailors, the rootless, restless, stateless freebooters—"

  "I never said that." Abildgaard interrupted him.

  "—brawlers and vandals, ruffians and half criminals, drunkards and debauchers with a girl in every port, whose Danish is so mixed up with words from every continent that not even their own mothers can understand them when they come home, with their arms and chests as tattooed as a deck of cards—hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs—"

  "I must protest," the minister said. "My respect for the breadwinners of this town is too great to speak of the seafaring profession in such terms."

  "In that case you have good reason. Because you've never seen Marstal sailors lining up on Dampskibsbroen, with chests of valuables on their backs, to immigrate to America. We might be gone for years. But we always come home again. Because us sailors, we stay."

  WHEN SPRING CAME the harbor emptied because a new insurance policy had been established to ensure that shipowners wouldn't suffer financially if a ves
sel was lost through war. After that the freight market went only one way, and that was up. We sailed like never before, not just to Norway and western Sweden and Iceland, but to Newfoundland, the West Indies, and Venezuela, even right across the war zones to England and the French ports in the Channel. Everything was back to normal, only better, although we moaned about the English, who introduced endless complicated sailing restrictions and charged exorbitant prices for piloting and towing. In this respect the Germans were far more reasonable. There was free piloting and towing assistance in German ports along the Baltic coast. So far, Marstal had yet to lose a single ship.

  Then the submarine war began.

  Our first loss was the schooner Salvador, which went down in flames on June 2, 1915, in the middle of a warm day. Albert made a note in the right-hand column in his account ledger. Now it would start to fill up.

  No one had died. The crew returned home and behaved as if they'd achieved something important. Ha, they chuckled in the bars and streets, where curious onlookers crowded around them. It had been a picnic. All right, so they'd lost their ship, but the U-boat responsible had towed their lifeboat for a while. Their first mate, Hans Peter Kroman, had been presented with a pipe and some tobacco—Hamburg brand tobacco, very good quality, incidentally—and Captain Jens Olesen Sand had received two bottles of cognac for the voyage home. The German U-boat crew? Very nice people; a bit on the pale side, perhaps, from being down deep for so long, but otherwise very respectable sailors.

  "What a shame," Sand had remarked to the U-boat captain, as they stood on the sub's deck, watching the Salvador burn up.

  "That's war for you," replied the German, shrugging apologetically.

  True, he was no Englishman, but a gentleman all the same. When the submarine crew finally unhitched the tow rope, they asked politely whether the crew from the Salvador were sure they had sufficient provisions on the lifeboat. The cook who had lost his cap was given a sou'wester in its stead. Then, after exchanging mutual assurances that this misfortune really was nothing personal, the Danes and the Germans parted. The next day the lifeboat was picked up by an English trawler, whose crew also turned out to be nice people.

  Some months later a letter arrived from the German government, stating that the sinking of the Salvador had been unwarranted. Captain Sand received an apology from Kaiser Wilhelm himself, along with twenty-seven thousand Danish kroner, the amount for which the ship had been insured.

  A few months later, another schooner went up in smoke, and Albert wrote the name Cocos under Salvador in his right-hand column.

  Again the crew returned home, speaking of the war as nothing but high jinks. The U-boat had sailed them to another Marstal schooner that happened to be in the vicinity, the Karin Bak, which was allowed to pass through unharmed after its captain, Albertsen, agreed to take the shipwrecked men on board. Then the U-boat sailed away, only to return with the crew's clothes, which in their hurry they'd left behind.

  "Well, I must say! The level of service isn't bad when you're dealing with German U-boats!"

  "Why didn't you ask them to wash your underpants while they were at it?" Ole Mathiesen joked, and laughter erupted once more.

  Telegrams stuttered with news of terrible losses on all fronts. But in Marstal we all agreed that the war was a hoot.

  Albert Madsen continued to keep his accounts, and as the war progressed they became his obsession. He believed they contained a message, as yet undeciphered. Convinced that figures had the power to prove things, he made lists of the prices of life's necessities in Marstal: rye bread, butter, margarine, eggs, beef, and pork. He knew the crews' wages, their war supplement, their bonus for European or overseas voyages, and their accident insurance in case of death or disability. He kept an eye on the freight market and the price of ships, on exchange rates and quotations.

  A shipowner needs to do all of these things to carry out his job properly. But does he also need to keep long lists of ships sunk by mines, of ships destroyed by torpedoes and fires, of the number of fallen men from North Schleswig, and English losses as of January 9, 1916? Of 24,122 officers dead and 525,345 killed among the junior ranks? The numbers Albert jotted down are incomprehensible. And that's precisely why they make no impression. So why, then, did he write them down? Why did he constantly mention them in his conversations with us?

  Why did a ship broker and owner in a small coastal town, in a country that wasn't taking part in the world war and was thus, in a sense, not taking part in the world, keep a two-column list of lost ships, a left-hand column of ships he saw sinking in his dreams, and a right-hand column showing the same ships sunk on real seas? What was he trying to prove?

  In the first year of the war, the town lost six ships, and in the second year only one. No Marstaller had been killed, though millions were dying elsewhere, beyond our field of vision. Within that field there were no dead; on the contrary, what we saw, and found so easy to understand, was that the freight market shot up so high that newly built ships earned back their startup capital in a year, and sailors' wages trebled. The price of ships started to rise as early as 1915. Even older wooden vessels, battered from their many years at sea, could be sold for almost double their prewar value. By the end of the year prices had tripled; they continued to rise throughout the whole of the following year. The Agent Petersen, the most famous ship in Marstal, which in 1887 had completed the fastest voyage ever recorded between South America and Africa, was valued at twenty-five thousand Danish kroner but sold for ninety thousand.

  Marstal had started to lose its fleet, but not to the U-boats.

  Albert realized that between his right- and left-hand columns a third column was called for, one that his dreams had never warned him about: the list of ships that had been sold. It filled faster than the other two columns, and soon outstripped them. But there was no drama in this particular list. It contained neither dreams nor dead, but instead marked the strangely frantic wealth that flooded our town. Houses were repaired and painted, women who once dressed modestly now wore their Sunday best every day, and the shops stocked new and more expensive goods. The people of Marstal, once renowned for their thrift, were living as if there were no tomorrow.

  This wasn't some frenzy brought on by the mortal fear of war. It was the dizziness that comes from having too much money.

  THEN, FINALLY, the war came to Marstal with a face that wasn't cheerful. Finally: that was the word Albert used in his notes. The wall between him and the rest of us was about to topple, and we'd all soon know what he knew. It was no longer just in his lonely dreams that people would perish. In real life they'd be shot down, drown, freeze to death, and die from exposure and thirst. Survivors came home and brought his visions to life with their stories. Others vanished without a trace.

  A message came from the royal envoy in Berlin: the Astræa had been lost. There was no information about where or how. Seven men were missing, including two from Marstal, the skipper, Abraham Christian Svane, and the first mate, Valdemar Holm. A man from the Faroe Islands and an able seaman from Cape Verde were among the others.

  Albert had seen them die. He'd seen them jump for their lives through flying shards from a lifeboat under fire. It had been a calm, overcast day. The sea lay like gray silk. He'd seen the water close over them as their lungs gave out and the last air bubble burst.

  Germany had declared unrestricted submarine war. Marstal, which had lost only seven ships in the previous two years, now lost sixteen in a single year, then four in a month. The returning survivors didn't get drunk and brag of their experiences; instead, they avoided attention. The crew of the Peace, who'd seen their captain and their bosun shot down in front of them and afterward drifted for days in a sinking lifeboat while two more men perished, stayed at home with their families. If an acquaintance approached them in the street, they'd quickly veer down the nearest alley.

  The Hydra disappeared without a trace, with six men on board. Not all of them were from Marstal, but the losses could be fel
t across the town.

  Gaps began appearing in our ranks.

  PASTOR ABILDGAARD went to Jørgensen's grocery shop in Tværgade. The owner, whose full name was Kresten Minor Jørgensen, was a former first mate who'd come ashore and now sold groceries and ship's provisions. He manned the large wooden counter himself, a small stooping man with a bald head that shone as if polished; on a summer's day when he strolled around in his short khaki jacket, it would reflect the sun, forcing passersby to squint.

  The small bell that hung above the door rang out, a noisy, irritating sound, as Abildgaard entered the shop. A couple of old skippers were chatting on a long wooden bench to the right of the door, but Abildgaard never learned what they were talking about, because the moment he closed the door behind him, a deathly silence descended.

  Deathly was indeed the word, for death itself might have entered the shop with him. Jørgensen took a step back behind his wooden counter, his jaw dropping and his eyes widening. Abildgaard turned around, thinking that the grocer must have seen something shocking in the street through the open door. Meanwhile the two skippers eyed the minister and the grocer alternately, as if waiting for an incident of immense significance to unfold.

  "Good morning," Abildgaard stuttered, hesitating to utter such a pleasantry in this laden atmosphere.

  Jørgensen didn't answer.

  When the pastor approached the counter, ready to order his goods, Jørgensen took another step back and splayed his raised hands. His mouth was still open, and he looked as if he'd stopped breathing. They stared at each other, the grocer seemingly on the verge of fainting, the sensitive Abildgaard paralyzed.