We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  They thought the future would bring them money and adventures. They had the fever of youth in their veins and feared nothing. Albert was the one who carried fear on their behalf.

  He had odd thoughts about the war and its causes. He visited the church regularly these days. They were just laying the copper lining of the new spire, and the nave echoed all day with the sound of hammering, so Albert visited in the evening, when the day's work was done. He was looking for tranquility. Behind the thick walls, in this cool, white room where dusk arrived early—almost a different version of the rhythm of day and night—he felt he had time to think.

  And what he contemplated was death. Some people complained when death came too early and claimed a child, a young mother, or a sailor with a family to provide for. He'd never understood that. Of course, it was a tragedy for those left behind and for the person who'd been robbed of the greater part of life. But it wasn't unfair. Death was beyond such notions. It seemed to him that the bereaved often forgot their grief at a death in favor of railing fruitlessly against life's injustices. After all, no one would dream of saying that the wind was unfair to the trees and the flowers. True, you might feel uneasy when the sun switched off its light, or ice gave your ship a dangerous list. But indignant, outraged, or angry, no. It was pointless. Nature was neither fair nor unfair. Those terms belonged to the world of men.

  He was well aware of why he felt this way. He was thinking ahead and looking back at the same time, and he didn't focus on anyone in particular. He thought about the generations, living on from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters, who in turn grew up to be fathers and mothers who had sons and daughters. Life was like one big marching army. Death ran alongside and picked off a soldier here and there, but that didn't affect the army. Its march continued, and its size didn't seem to diminish. On the contrary, it grew on into eternity, so that no one was alone in death. Someone else would always follow. That was what counted. Such was the chain of life: unbreakable.

  But this war had altered everything. He'd take a walk along the harbor and see how few ships were lying idle along the wharves or moored to posts in the middle of the harbor entrance. There were still shipowners who weren't prepared to risk lives, but most ships sailed. There were mines and unrestricted submarine war, and still they sailed. Six ships might go down in one month, four the next. Never before had the sea demanded such sacrifices, but owners and captains who'd have kept their ships in the harbor while a storm raged sent them into the far greater storm of war.

  Where did this contempt for death, this total heedlessness, come from? Surely ten lost ships and two missing crews in two months was a lesson already dearly learned?

  Along the one and a half kilometers of Marstal's harbor hundreds of ships were laid up for winter, bobbing on the water, waiting for their spring departures. That was our town. It was a sight no one would see again. The chain had been broken.

  What had happened to fellowship and to what he thought of as kinship, in whose spirit he'd erected the stone only four years earlier? He'd thought at the time that he was erecting a monument to something living. Now he understood that it was a gravestone, marking the end of the spirit that had created the town. And the cause of death was in the third column in his account ledger: profit. The high prices, the high wages, the freight that had risen tenfold, the premium on ships. Responsible owners who kept their vessels in the harbor had to watch their crews sign on elsewhere. Everybody wanted to take part in the spoils of war.

  And so we sold our ships. What was the point of having them lie idle when they could be sold for three to four times their worth? The cost of building them could be recouped in a year, and so it wasn't just old, worn-out ships we disposed of, but also those freshly launched. We all spoke in pious terms about the dreadful war and vowed that this would be the last one. And dreadful it was for the millions who were killed in battle. But we, who were spared, benefited from it.

  Denmark kept out of the war, taking no sides. But did we really think we'd be spared just because the Danish flag was painted on the side of our ships? A sailor needs a cool head—but this was recklessness. Marstal lay in the heart of the war zone. There were fronts on dry land, but the sea had its fronts too, and half the town's sailors were at them every day.

  What drove us? Was the prospect of profit the heartbeat of this war? Was it bare greed that Albert now saw, even in people he'd thought he knew well? Had he simply grown old? Had something definitive changed? Or had it always been this way, without his realizing it?

  Albert suddenly felt ridiculous. He'd worried about losing his mind because of dreams that contained information so terrible, he dared not convey it to others. So what if he'd told us what he knew? Would we not have laughed at him and dismissed his words, even though we didn't doubt the truth of what he was telling us?

  Die? Well, maybe.

  Him and him, a first mate, an able seaman, a skipper. We might have pointed to others. But not to ourselves. Greed made us think we were immortal. Were we thinking about tomorrow? Our own, perhaps, but not that of others.

  Skipper Levinsen had protested when the breakwater was going to be built, saying, "You should provide only for yourself, not for posterity." Once, the whole town had heaped shame on those words.

  But now the shortsighted Levinsen had become our role model.

  HERMAN RETURNED home with a walking stick of white bone in his hand, made from the vertebrae of a shark. He wasn't the first man in Marstal to come back from the East Indies or the Pacific with a shark's spine, but he was the first to stroll around with it in the streets as though it were a scepter, and he a king. Self-importantly greeting old acquaintances, he'd use it to swipe the air with a fancy flourish.

  It was with the same stick that he knocked on the door of his guardian, Hans Jepsen. As he did so, a group of boys watched him from a safe distance, chanting, "The Cannibal's loose! The Cannibal's loose!"

  When Hans opened the door, Herman waved his sailor's record book in his face. He was an able seaman now, and he wanted to show that he was entitled to respect. Without greeting Hans, he announced his age: twenty-five. He spoke it like a punch. He'd come of age, and he was announcing the dethronement of Hans Jepsen as the official owner of the Two Sisters and the house in Skippergade.

  But Hans Jepsen didn't seem to be listening. He observed the white stick that Herman was waving.

  "I see you staged an eating contest with the sharks," he said. "And that you won. Shame it wasn't the other way around."

  Herman's stick sliced the air, but Hans had already slammed the door. The shark's spine struck the green-painted wood and snapped, its vertebrae flying in all directions. The boys shrieked with laughter, scattering and yelling, "The Cannibal's loose! The Cannibal's loose!"

  Some time later they returned and picked up the remains of the stick, which Herman had discarded. We didn't know why they called him the Cannibal. Boys have their own reasons. They were probably scared of him and so they did what boys do around any object of fear: they went up close, pointed a finger, gave it a nickname, and masked their terror with roaring laughter. They kept the salvaged vertebrae in tins and boxes and brought them out to use in secret rituals or to decorate their hiding places inside the hollow poplars that bordered the high roads outside the town.

  Every day for a whole week Herman bought a round at Weber's Café to celebrate his new status as a man of property. His cheeks were flushed and he had a combative, I-dare-you look: he was constantly testing us, as if preparing to demand some oath of loyalty, a solemn agreement to submit to his whims or face the consequences. A quick glance at the way his huge hands impatiently clenched and unclenched, as though eager for something to grab and crush, gave you an idea of what those consequences might be. He'd grown even bigger since the last time's we'd seen him, with broader shoulders, impressive biceps, and a chest like the front of a truck—but he'd also grown a belly. Although still young, he was already running to fat.

  We asked him if he
ate at Larsen's Chops or Nielsen's Pancakes, I places we frequented for stew and mixed hash when we were looking for work in Copenhagen.

  "I'm used to better things," Herman said.

  At Inky-Hans in Nyhavn, he'd had a crouching lion, ready to attack, tattooed on his right arm. The banner above it read SMART AND POVERFULL in English.

  He ordered another round.

  "Just you wait and see, damn it," he said. "Just you wait and see!"

  Something about his voice made us think that he might surprise us the same way he'd surprised Holger Jepsen that day when, somewhere between Marstal and Rudkøbing, he fell, or jumped, or was helped overboard.

  Herman had traveled far. We all had, but he'd been to one place we'd never gone: Børsen, the Copenhagen stock exchange. When he talked about that, the man we'd known as a boy, with a fixed scowl and a sullenness that possibly concealed a crime, burst into an unfamiliar eloquence. But it seemed just as suspicious as his shiftiness over his stepfather's death a decade earlier.

  Of course, we knew what Børsen was. It was a place frequented only by the rich and those skilled in arithmetic, where everything could be measured in money that could grow or shrink; where people could be victorious one hour and vanquished the next; where life could shift from triumph to tragedy in the space of a second. Oh, we knew that. We also knew that we too were subject to the laws that governed money, and that the rate of freight was not simply determined by its weight and the number of nautical miles it had to travel, but also by supply and demand. And what we didn't know, Madsen, Boye, Kroman, Grube, and Marstal's other ship brokers and owners did. But though we knew the laws that controlled all this circus existed, we also knew that they were beyond us, and that any one of us was more likely to survive a typhoon than to stroll out of Børsen with money in his pocket. Yet Herman seemed to have spent half the years he'd been away sailing the maelstrom of money and bonds, where people and fortunes were swallowed up and spat out again. He called it the New America.

  "You don't have to travel all the way to America to get rich. Just drop anchor in Copenhagen. Even the milk boys speculate on the stock exchange. You can deliver churns one day and be a millionaire the next."

  He spoke to us as though we were a bunch of illiterate, bare-assed savages and he was a missionary come to enlighten us about the promised land. His voice was larded with a condescension that didn't suit him, and which annoyed us. Thorkild Folmer, first mate on the Ludwig, grimaced and retorted defiantly, "Marstal housemaids have shares in ships too." Herman laughed.

  "Ha-ha! Yes, a hundredth share. A hundredth of what? How much can one miserable old tub earn in one season? Who can become a millionaire from that? A tightfisted man from Marstal, probably, if he lives to be two hundred and doesn't eat or drink in the meantime."

  And he renewed his unpleasant laughter, which supposedly proved him smarter than the rest of us.

  New words were forever on the man's lips. Margin, bull, bear— magic spells for those who understood their meaning, but to the rest of us pure unfathomable gibberish. He mentioned the names of his friends at Børsen, who were visionary men of courage: indeed, pioneers in this new country. The Negro Thug, the Rolling Sidewalk, the Tooth Extractor, the Red Jew, the Track Changer: these men, as informal and straightforward as their happily worn nicknames implied, welcomed anyone into their club as long as he had the right attitude and wanted to get rich quick. Including an ordinary seaman. Or indeed a cabin boy.

  "All I had to do was mention my inheritance and they lent me money. On the strength of my blue eyes. Me, a cabin boy." Herman's face darkened briefly, and he looked around the circle at Weber's Café. "Unlike others I could name."

  He hadn't forgotten that no one in Marstal had been prepared to sign him on as a cabin boy, let alone an ordinary seaman. But Børsen hadn't rejected him. He was good enough for the fine moneymen of Copenhagen, who included him in their circle. We'd shunned him. But now he was back.

  "Just you wait and see," he repeated for the umpteenth time, narrowing his eyes to slits. "Just you wait and see, damn you!" He took a swig from his beer and spat it onto the floor. "Beer—ha! No one's drinks this dishwater in Copenhagen. We drink champagne for breakfast there."

  Weber's Café was packed, and Herman was the star attraction. He'd rolled up his sleeves, and we stared at the lion on his right arm. SMART I AND POVERFULL. Perhaps he was a murderer. Perhaps he was just a fool. But then again, perhaps everything he told us was the truth, and we were the fools, and he was the SMART AND POVERFULL one. We weren't like the boys who'd trail him through town, ridiculing someone they secretly feared. None of us grownups dared laugh at Herman; we were too scared of becoming the butt of his derision. Instead we nodded and looked knowing and hid our disgust. Champagne for breakfast! Damn it! Champagne was served on the patios of Buenos Aires whorehouses, the kind with palms, fountains, and dirty paintings on the walls. It was the syrup of pleasure girls. No self-respecting man would choose to drink it except when he had a hard-on. It was the lubrication required to moisten a señorita. "You nice. Please buy vun small bottle champagne." Champagne was part of the tariff.

  We gazed at the bubbles rising from the bottom of our glasses. They looked like the last air squeezed out from the lungs of a drowned man. We could have spat on the floor. But we didn't. We drained our glasses and thought the beer tasted strangely flat and bland.

  A GROUP OF men, young and old, were gathered on Dampskibsbroen one warm summer's evening when the water and the sky were like a pastel drawing, all light blue and pink, and the sea was as flat as a floor you could walk on all the way to Langeland. The young men were the new breed who spoke boldly and frankly in the presence of their elders. They'd only dipped their toes in the ocean, but they regarded themselves as experienced because of the war and the money in their pockets. But today their attention was fixed on a stranger in their midst.

  For once even Herman was silenced. He stared intently at the stranger: a tall, energetic man with a wide-brimmed straw hat and a light-colored summer jacket that hung loosely from his broad shoulders. He had full lips and reddish blond hair that flopped casually across his forehead. Only his bloodshot eyes told you that he wasn't just another of the summer residents who came here for some coastal relaxation. Ever smiling, he flung out his arms, his voice rising with excitement as he spoke, clearly delighted with the attention he was receiving from his young audience. Meanwhile the older skippers had withdrawn to the periphery: whether this was due to their instinctive dislike of Herman, who stood within it, or the fact that the stranger was so obviously Herman's ally (and indeed even resembled him in his large physique and bragging manner) was impossible to tell.

  Herman's face wore an expression we'd never seen on it before: admiration. Not only did he never take his eyes off the speaker's lips, but his own started to move, as though silently echoing the stranger's words and preparing to repeat them at the first possible opportunity.

  Herman wasn't in the habit of looking up to anyone. Albert Madsen had once saved his ship from a serious collision, but the incident had made Herman feel resentful rather than grateful, because on the same occasion Albert had struck him, and he'd borne a grudge ever since. Spotting Albert now, out on his customary evening stroll along the harbor front, he invited him to join the circle, but his intentions weren't friendly. "Good evening, Captain Madsen." It was immediately clear that his politeness was only in honor of the outsider. "Allow me to introduce Mr. Henckel, the engineer."

  "Edvard Henckel," said the stranger, offering Albert his hand, with a broad smile.

  Albert had never forgotten the look Herman gave him the day he'd jumped onto the deck of the Two Sisters. He hadn't expected the boy to lash out at him, but he'd easily dodged his blow and saved the ship. It wasn't the first time he'd made short work of a useless helmsman by landing him one. He might have believed that Herman, then fifteen, had lashed out at him in panic, but the boy's eyes had betrayed nothing but reckless fury, and Albert didn't doubt th
at Herman was capable of murder. There was a harshness about him. That in itself wasn't a bad thing, but beyond the harshness, something about Herman seemed dead to the core. Like fossilized wood, no shoots would ever sprout from him, and his life wouldn't blossom in unexpected ways. There was no vitality there. Just brutality.

  Albert was well aware that the young man saw him as an enemy. The feeling wasn't mutual. He felt an almost physical unease in the younger man's presence, but he felt pity too. Most of all, though, he felt old and resigned. He approached Herman with the wariness he'd feel toward a dangerous animal stuck in a trap, with a bleeding paw.

  He shook Henckel's hand, then turned to Herman.

  "You've sold the Two Sisters, I hear. What a shame; she was a good ship, a joy to behold, and she did the town proud." He heard the pomposity in his own voice and felt annoyed with himself.

  "Possibly," Herman replied, "but I made a good profit. That's the important thing."

  "To a businessman, yes, but not to a sailor. Surely other things bind us to our ships besides the prospect of short-term gain."

  "Now you listen..." A note of impatience entered the young man's voice, as though he was talking to someone hard of hearing. "I could sail the Two Sisters to hell and back again, and even with the recent rise in the freight—tenfold—I'd never earn the same amount by sailing as I did by selling."

  "You're only thinking short-term," Albert repeated.

  They were clearly the principal players now, and their audience encircled them as if they were two duelists. Henckel clasped his restless hands behind his back, an expectant smile playing on his lips.