We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  "Yes, I'm sure he might," he replied, wondering what her point was.

  Suddenly Anna Egidia smiled. It was a beautiful smile that made you forget her thin, bloodless lips. "And then there's you, Captain Madsen, an older, experienced sailor who complains that he's of no use to anyone." Her voice was teasing. She paused and gave him an encouraging look, as though expecting a reply.

  "And then what?" he asked, slow on the uptake.

  "You really have no idea what I'm talking about?"

  Her sunken face grew almost round from smiling. Albert shook his head. He felt dim-witted. She was playing games with him.

  "I imagine that you might be the man who would take a little boy by the hand and go rowing with him in your boat."

  "But I don't even know the family. I can't just turn up and impose."

  "I assure you that the boy's mother won't think you're imposing at all. She'll be both grateful and honored."

  "I've absolutely no experience of children."

  He made his voice brusque to mask his confusion. He felt betrayed. She'd laid a trap for him and he'd walked right into it. In a moment of weakness, of unbearable loneliness, he'd opened up to another human being. He'd been under the impression that they were two old people talking about their lives. When old men met, they talked about the sea—but he had an inner life he couldn't share with anybody. He'd shared it with her. But behind what he had taken to be her sympathy, there'd been a hidden agenda, which she'd now revealed. He was just a pawn in her charity work.

  As he stood up to take his leave, it wasn't the boy he was rejecting. It was her.

  "Don't you want to know his name?" she asked, as she showed him out into the hall.

  "No," he said, "it's of no interest to me."

  THE BOY

  THE NEXT DAY she turned up outside his front door, holding a boy by the hand. Albert stood in the doorway, not knowing what to say. He was bad at estimating a child's age, but he supposed the lad to be six or seven years old. He had blond hair, and his ears, which stuck out, glowed red in the December frost.

  "Aren't you going to ask us in, Captain Madsen?"

  The widow smiled at him. Yesterday he'd loved the way her smile lit up her face and made it round and mild; now he was convinced it had been false. He stepped back, gestured them inside, and helped the widow with her coat while the boy took off his own.

  "Say hello to the captain," the widow said.

  The boy stuck out his hand and bowed stiffly.

  "Aren't you going to tell the captain your name?"

  "Knud Erik," the boy said, frozen in mid-bow, staring at the floor in embarrassment. Albert was moved by his shyness.

  "How old are you?" he asked.

  "Six," the boy said, turning scarlet.

  "Let's not stay here in the cold hall."

  He escorted them into the drawing room and called his housekeeper.

  "Coffee?"

  The widow nodded.

  "Yes, please."

  "And what would you like to drink?"

  "I'm not thirsty," the boy said, and blushed even more deeply.

  "But I imagine you'd like a cookie?"

  The boy shook his head. "No, thank you. I'm not hungry." He shrugged and tried to make himself invisible. Albert took a large pink conch from the windowsill.

  "Have you seen one of these before?"

  "We've got one at home," the boy said.

  "And where does it come from?"

  "My dad brought it back."

  The boy's hunched shoulders looked like the wings of a bird. He bit his lower lip and stared at the Persian rug as if he was deeply interested in its swirling arabesques. He was trembling slightly. Now Albert grew awkward; he looked at the widow. She shook her head silently. He felt like a fool.

  "I might have something you haven't seen before," he said, to break the silence. "Come here." He took the boy by the hand and led him to his office next door. In the window was a wooden model of the Princess, over a meter long and almost as tall. Albert carefully carried it back into the drawing room and placed it on the carpet. "I don't normally let anyone play with this. But you can, if you promise to be careful."

  "I promise."

  The housekeeper entered with the coffee and Albert sat down opposite the widow. The boy was busy examining the model's anchor. Then, very carefully, he turned its wheel. Slowly he pushed the Princess across the rug. With both hands on the hull he rocked the ship from side to side while imitating the sound of waves and the singing of the wind in the rigging.

  Albert kept an eye on him. When he could see that the boy was completely absorbed in playing, he turned to the widow.

  "I told you I don't know anything about children."

  Mrs. Rasmussen laughed.

  "Oh, don't you worry about that. Just treat him as one of your crew. The youngest member. And you just be the captain, like you used to."

  "He doesn't want to be with an old man like me."

  "Of course he does. You'll be like God to him. Just start telling him about your travels and your experiences, and you'll find you have an audience like you've never known. And now you must stop making a fuss because I'm not giving you any more compliments."

  The next day he went to Snaregade to fetch Knud Erik. The boy's mother, Klara Friis, was pregnant, and the time for her confinement couldn't be far off: her body was big and heavy under a black shawl. He couldn't remember seeing her before, which surprised him. Marstal was a small town, and he had lived in it for a long time. Yet he no longer knew it.

  She invited him in for coffee, but he declined, not wanting to inconvenience her. Besides, he wanted this visit over and done with. He felt he'd been tricked into it and he still felt resentful toward Mrs. Rasmussen.

  The boy walked silently beside him down to the harbor. It was a clear, sunny day. The boy had no mittens on and his hands were red with cold.

  "What happened to your mittens?"

  "I lost them."

  They walked along Havnegade to Dampskibsbroen and looked at the water. A thin layer of ice had formed during the night, and the sun sparkled in the white frost around it. Albert felt he should speak but didn't know what to say. What did you talk to children about? His irritation with the widow increased.

  "Come," he said to the boy, who looked lost in thought at the sight of the frozen water. They walked on along the wharf, past the coal depot, and down toward Prinsebroen.

  "What's it like to drown?" the boy asked.

  "Your mouth fills up with water and then you can't breathe anymore."

  "Have you tried drowning?"

  "No," Albert said. "If you drown, you die. And I'm here."

  "Does everyone drown at the end?"

  "Most people don't drown."

  "My dad drowned," the boy said in a tone that implied that this kind of death gave him a sense of pride, and elevated his father. Then his voice grew more hesitant. "If we drown, do we ever come back?"

  "No, we never come back."

  "My mama says my dad's an angel now."

  "You must listen to what your mother says."

  Albert was feeling more and more uncomfortable. He dreaded that the boy might suddenly burst into tears. What would he do then? Take him back home? He couldn't return with a sobbing child. That would be like losing your cargo and letting the sea take your ship. He tried to distract the boy. The harbor was full of moored vessels, some kept back by their owners because of the war and others simply home for the winter. There was nothing to indicate that Marstal's days as a seafaring town were coming to an end. Albert pointed to the ships.

  "Are you going to sea when you grow up?" he asked, and instantly regretted it.

  "Will I drown then, like my dad?"

  "Most sailors come home again. Then they grow old like me and die in their bed one day."

  "I want to be a sailor like my dad," the boy said. "But I don't want to drown and get eaten by a fish, and I don't want to die in my bed, either, because my bed is for sleeping in. Is
there any way not to die?"

  "No," Albert said. "There isn't. But you're very young. You have plenty of years left to live. That's almost the same as not dying."

  "Would you like to die?"

  "I wouldn't mind now. I'm very old. So it doesn't matter if I do."

  "So you're not sad?"

  "No, I'm not sad."

  "My mama's sad. She is always crying. Then I comfort her."

  "You're a good boy," Albert said. He pointed across the water. "Look, there's a steamer. When you go to sea, it'll probably be on a steamer."

  "Can steamers sink?" the boy asked.

  Albert looked at the black-painted steel hull. THE MEMORY was written on the bow in white lettering.

  "Yes," he said. "Yes, they can."

  He'd seen the Memory go down in a dream.

  "A fire always burns at the bottom of a steamer and it's as hot as a washhouse when the kettle's heating up. Men feed the fire. They feed it day and night, and only come out to sleep or eat. They never see the sun or the moon. But high up in the wheelhouse the first mate stands with his hands on the wheel, steering the steamer safely across the sea."

  "That's who I want to be," the boy said.

  "Yes, that's who you want to be. But then you need to pay attention at school. Otherwise you won't get a place at the Navigation College."

  They had passed the boat harbor and walked down to the shipyards. Rhythmic hammer strokes rang out through the red-painted plank walls of the buildings. The only quiet place was Marstal Steel Shipyard's newly constructed building near Buegade. Whenever Mr. Henckel visited, he would boast about all the orders he'd secured in Norway. But so far, nothing had been built.

  The boy seemed lost in thought. He peered up at Albert.

  "What does it look like when a steamer goes down?"

  Albert scanned his memory. He had never seen it happen in his waking life, but his dreams had shown him every detail of the Memory being tossed about before vanishing into the depths.

  "You can hear explosions from the core of the hull," he said to the boy. "That's the cold seawater seeping into the glowing heart of the huge boilers. Then boiling hot steam bursts out through every opening of the ship. Big lumps of coal fly up through the funnel and the skylight. There, and there," he said, pointing at the Memory. "The ship keels over and lies bottom up for a moment."

  "Bottom up!" the boy exclaimed. "Such a big steamer—with its bottom in the air!"

  "Yes," Albert said, astonished at the effect his story had on the boy.

  "Tell me some more," the boy said, looking at him expectantly.

  "The steamer starts to sink stern first. Finally the stem stands almost vertically. The last thing you see before the waves close over the steamer is its name."

  Albert stopped. The boy tugged his sleeve.

  "More."

  "There isn't any more."

  The boy looked at him, disappointed. Albert realized that he'd retold one of his dreams in detail for the first time: a closed door had unexpectedly opened. As far as the boy was concerned, the story was all one great big adventure. You could see it from the way his eyes lit up. Albert could tell him everything. He could even tell him about the source of his knowledge: his inexplicable nightly dreams. And the boy would accept it all as part of the same fantastic world, where nothing needed to be explained and no one would be branded as odd just because he could see the future.

  No, he hadn't known anything about children, but now he'd learned something: a child's mind is open to everything. There was so much death in his dreams; there was practically nothing else. But he sensed that to the boy, death in a story was one thing, while death in the real world another. He'd told him about a ship that had been sunk by a U-boat, and although Knud Erik's own father had disappeared at sea without a trace, along with the rest of the Hydra's crew, the boy had apparently failed to make the connection. As for himself, Albert didn't know precisely why he'd recounted one of his dreams for the first time, but he knew that it was important.

  "There's no more," he repeated, "but I can tell you another story some other day."

  "Do you know lots of stories?"

  "Yes, I do. When spring comes I'll teach you to row. Come on. Time to go home now."

  The boy's face glowed red from the cold. He skipped for a couple of paces, then stuck his icy hand into Albert's. Together they walked back down Havnegade.

  ALBERT STARTED going regularly to Knud Erik's house. Anna Egidia couldn't keep acting as their intermediary, so he fetched and returned the boy himself. In fact, the boy could have made his own way to Albert's house and back home again: the town was small enough for that, though they lived at opposite ends of it. But he felt that Knud Erik had been entrusted to him. With that came responsibility, so he stuck to formalities. He collected him from the front door in Snaregade, and that was where he returned him.

  When he came, Knud Erik's mother answered the door, though shyness rendered her almost mute. She'd given birth by now, and when he appeared she clutched the baby in her arms as if to protect herself from an unsettling presence. The first time he'd declined her offer of coffee because he didn't want to inconvenience her, but the second time he accepted out of concern that she'd interpret his refusal as a sign of snobbery.

  There were differences on board a ship. There was fore and aft, and then there was the captain's unbreachable preserve, which Albert privately referred to as the island of loneliness. But the differences were practical necessities, enforcing rank and authority: he'd never regarded them as a class divide. His eyes were opened in Knud Erik's home. Knud Erik's father, Henning Friis, had been an ordinary seaman. He'd married early and then hadn't been promoted. Most men waited to get married until they were in their late twenties, when they could afford to, once they'd finished Navigation College and owned a share in a ship. But Henning Friis had been head over heels in love. Or possibly just plain careless.

  When someone hadn't got very far in life, Albert had always regarded it as evidence of personal incompetence. Now he became aware that there might be something else. The boy's mother came from a social rank different from his own, one without expectations. He saw that in her almost mute self-effacement. Nothing but half-strangled sentences came from her lips—"There's no need," "It's far too much," "You shouldn't have." Her eyes always sought the floor or the baby. This paralysis in the presence of rich folks was rooted in the behavior of generations.

  Her house was clean and tidy. There were geraniums and wallflowers on the windowsill. But the furniture was a random collection from all sorts of places. No pictures hung on the walls: the discolored patches on the wallpaper had been left by the damp. No amount of cleaning could keep those stains at bay: they came from within the walls, caused by the poor construction of the house, a house built for's poor people. Such a house did not become neglected. Neglect was its essence.

  During winter it was either freezing inside or as humid as a green-house, depending on whether there was money for coal. On days when he showed up unexpectedly, his breath would linger like white clouds in the cold; on days when she knew he was coming and invited him for coffee, the overstuffed stove glowing in its corner turned the room into a steambath. Heated or unheated, the atmosphere was equally unhealthy and unpleasant.

  They'd never had a serious conversation. Her gratitude was expressed in her shy deference. She didn't look him in the eye or say anything that came from the heart. The divide between them remained.

  When the water in the harbor froze, Albert took Knud Erik for a walk among the trapped ships. Between them stood wooden stalls where vendors sold apple pancakes and warm elderberry cordial. Business was brisk, thanks to the crowd of people who'd come out to test their skates, and the clear winter air echoed with cheerful voices. Albert taught the boy to recognize the various types of ships. There were small cutters and ketches with round, fat curves and flat sterns. There were all the different sorts of schooners: fore-and-aft schooners, topsail schooners, topgallant scho
oners, schooner-brig combinations, and then the huge brigantines, which were the boy's favorite, undoubtedly because of their size. How the sails might be set was one big mystery to him, especially now, with all the canvas removed. Only the black lines of the yards and the rigging against the winter sky hinted at their secrets.

  "It's just like learning to read at school. The layout of sails is the sailor's alphabet," Albert told him.

  "Tell me a story," the boy would say.

  So Albert did. He took one from his own life, or from his dreams. It made no difference to the boy and, eventually, to Albert either. He felt as though something inside him that had been violently forced apart had started to grow back together.

  From time to time the boy's eyes drifted to the skaters, and Albert could tell that he was in another place.

  "Do you know how to skate?" Albert asked.

  The boy shook his head.

  "Well, we'd better teach you then."

  Their excursions always concluded with a visit to Albert's house in Prinsegade. Once Knud Erik had deposited his wooden-soled boots in the hall, he'd settle in front of the stove, where he'd take off his woolen socks and wriggle his toes in its heat. Albert would place his boots next to Knud Erik's. In winter he was still known to wear Laurids's old boots, which had plenty of room for an extra layer of woolen socks. There they stood, with their knee-high leather shafts and their metal caps, right next to the boy's.

  The housekeeper would bring them hot chocolate with freshly whipped cream, and Albert would sit at the table, drawing. He was a good, meticulous draftsman, and in his sketches he'd carefully detail the canvas and rigging of different types of ships. He added seagulls and a fair wind, so the ships would heel slightly, offering a view of the deck. Behind the wheel he'd put a man smoking a pipe. There was a galley, a hood, and hatches. In front of the ship he always drew a spiral.