We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  "What's that?" the boy asked one day.

  "A maelstrom."

  "What's a maelstrom?"

  "It's a whirlpool that sucks everything down. The ship will disappear in a moment."

  The boy looked up. Then he pointed to the matchstick man behind the wheel.

  "The helmsman will save the ship. He'll just sail it somewhere else."

  "He can't," Albert said. "It's too late."

  The boy stared at the drawing of the doomed ship. Tears welled up in his eyes.

  "That's not fair," he burst out. He quickly snatched the drawing and started tearing it to pieces. Albert was about to grab his arm, then stopped himself.

  "I'm sorry," he said.

  "You always do that," the boy said, "you always draw that..." He couldn't get hold of the word. "That thing. Why do you do that?"

  "I don't know," Albert replied, realizing that he was telling the truth. He'd never wondered why he drew a maelstrom in front of the bow every time he drew a ship. The spiral simply pulled his pencil along, like an irresistible force. He drew according to a secret command that only his pencil, but not he, could follow.

  "I feel sorry for the ships," the boy said.

  "Yes," Albert said. "So do I. But their time is over. The age of sailing ships has gone."

  "But there are plenty in the harbor," the boy objected.

  "Yes, that's right. But no one wants to go to sea anymore."

  "I do," the boy said. "I want to be a sailor." He turned and gave Albert a defiant look. "Just like my dad."

  THE GRIEF no longer showed in Klara Friis's face these days, and she seemed carefree: Albert thought that it was life, calling her back. Her husband had died, but she held a living child in her arms, and as time went by, the balance of her feelings had to shift from one to the other. The child, a girl christened Edith by Pastor Abildgaard, needed her. And her grief had to surrender to that need. She didn't grow any more talkative, but her eyes were no longer fixed stubbornly on the floor.

  Knud Erik had broken the ice between them. He'd long since abandoned his own shyness in Albert's company, though it returned somewhat when his mother was present, as though she and Albert were two different worlds that he couldn't bridge. But now he would report to her in a loud, clear voice the many adventures each day had brought. In the beginning his mother would hush him. However, as she had no conversation of her own to contribute, she eventually let him speak.

  At times Albert caught her glancing furtively at him, and then she'd instantly look down again. But her face was no longer tear-swollen, and the shine had returned to her hair. She also made an effort to dress nicely for his visits. This too he thought had something to do with the difference in their social rank: she was smartening up for the gentry.

  "I can skate now, and Captain Madsen will teach me to row and swim. Then I won't drown. And then I can become a good sailor."

  Knud Erik made this announcement one day as they sat in the parlor, drinking the obligatory coffee.

  "I won't hear of such talk! You're not going to be a sailor!" His mother's voice was sharp; her face tightened visibly under the soft curve of her cheeks. Knud Erik looked down. "Go to the kitchen right now!"

  The boy disappeared, his head still bowed. Klara Friis turned to Albert. He had stood up.

  "I think it's time for me to get going."

  "Please don't go," she said. Her voice was suddenly filled with anxiety.

  Albert remained standing. "Don't be too hard on him," he said.

  She got up from the chair and came over to him. "Please don't misunderstand—I wasn't trying to..." She stopped, unable to continue; she did not know where to look. Then tears welled in her eyes. He placed a hand on her shoulder. She took a step forward and stood close to him. Then she rested her forehead against his chest. Her shoulder trembled under his hand. "I'm sorry," she choked. He could hear her swallow as if trying to suppress her sobbing. "It's just so—difficult."

  He let his hand stay on her shoulder and hoped that the weight of it would calm her somehow. She remained standing as she gave in to her tears. He could feel the heat from her body. She held on to the lapels of his jacket as though she was afraid he'd push her away. He towered above her; she seemed to disappear between his huge shoulders. The forgotten feeling of being a man standing opposite a woman surged up in him.

  He gave her an awkward pat on the back. "There, there," he said, "sit down. Have some more coffee, you'll see it'll all..." He took her gently by the shoulders and steered her back to her chair. She slumped forward and buried her face in her hands. He poured a fresh cup of coffee and held it out to her; then, overcome by sudden tenderness, he stroked her hair. She looked up, but instead of taking the cup, she clasped his other hand in both of hers and gave him a beseeching look.

  "Knud Erik needs you so much. You can't possibly know what it means to him—to us. I didn't mean to..." She stopped, and Albert seized the opportunity to free his hand. He sat down opposite her.

  "Believe me, Mrs. Friis," he said. "I do understand you. I know how hard your situation is. I'll do everything I can to help you." The final words came as a surprise to him. He'd always drawn a clear distinction between the boy and his mother. He'd got involved with the boy. But now another barrier had fallen away.

  She'd found her handkerchief and was wiping her eyes. Her voice was thick. "No, that's not it," she said. "We can manage. It's just..." Again she struggled to stop herself from crying. "It's so difficult..." The tears slid down her cheeks. The hand holding the handkerchief lay in her lap. She had forgotten it was there.

  Suddenly Knud Erik appeared in the doorway to the kitchen. His eyes were wide with fear.

  "What's wrong, Ma?"

  Incapable of speech, she gestured to him to let her recover. But he ran over and she pressed her face into his chest. He flung his arms around her.

  "Don't be sad, Ma."

  There was an adult tone to his voice. Albert realized that Knud Erik was a child when he was with him, but at home with his mother, he was a grown man, with a grown man's responsibility and duties.

  "I'm going now," Albert said quietly. Neither of them looked up.

  As he closed the door behind him, he heard Knud Erik's voice.

  "I promise you, Ma, I promise. I promise I'll never be a sailor."

  IF THE WEATHER made going for walks out of the question, Albert and the boy would pay visits instead. Before, Albert had been an eccentric who kept himself to himself. But now we saw him everywhere. One day he knocked on Christian Aaberg's door, and when the captain, who was in his midfifties, opened it, Albert introduced the boy.

  "This is Knud Erik. He'd like to hear about Africa."

  The boy bowed and stuck out his hand, as he'd once done with Albert, but this time he didn't stand staring at his shoes but followed the men cheerfully into the drawing room, where Captain Aaberg recalled the time he traveled right across Africa and was put in charge of twenty-two Negroes in a boat on Lake Tanganyika.

  "D'you want to see my Negro spear?" he asked.

  Knud Erik nodded.

  Aaberg had two iron chests in his drawing room. "They've traveled with me all the way to Africa and back home again," he said, pointing.

  "Did you carry them yourself?" Knud Erik asked.

  Aaberg laughed. "A white man doesn't carry anything himself in Africa," he said. He opened one of the chests. "Look, a Negro spear. And a shield. Why don't you try holding them?" He handed Knud Erik the spear and showed him how to grasp the shield. "You're a proper Negro warrior now."

  Knud Erik straightened up and raised his arm as if to throw the spear.

  "Watch out," Christian Aaberg warned him. "That spear can kill a man."

  Mr. Blach, the telegrapher who had been to China, showed them Mandarin costumes and chopsticks. But they didn't visit Josef Isager: Albert was of the opinion that severed hands were unsuitable for children. Instead, they called on Emanuel Kroman, who'd rounded Cape Horn and could do a terrifying imitatio
n of the howling of a storm in the rigging in the world's most dangerous sea.

  "I heard penguins squawk in the pitch-black night," he said. "We were at sea for two hundred days. The water ran out, and we drank melted ice in wineglasses. When we got to Valparaiso, we ate a whole sack of potatoes. We didn't even bother cooking them first. We were that hungry."

  "Really? You ate raw potatoes?" The boy gasped.

  Everywhere they visited, there were sea chests filled with strange objects: shark jaws, porcupine fish, sawfish teeth, a lobster claw from the Barents Sea the size of a horse's head, poisoned arrows, lumps of lava and coral, antelope hides from Nubia, scimitars from West Africa, a harpoon from Tierra del Fuego, calabashes from Rio Hash, a boomerang from Australia, riding crops from Brazil, opium pipes, armadillos from La Plata, and stuffed alligators.

  Every single object told a story. Each time the boy left one of the low houses with its high roof, he was dizzy with excitement at the world's infinite variety. Everything whispered in his ear: a leather tom-tom from the Calabar River, amphoras from Cephalonia, an Indian amulet, a stuffed mongoose fighting a cobra, a Turkish hookah, a tooth from a hippopotamus, a mask from the Tonga Islands, a starfish with thirteen arms.

  "Half a kilometer in that direction," Albert said, and pointed up Prinsegade toward the Market Square. "That's where the countryside begins. The people who live there know only their own soil. They know nothing about the world beyond the boundaries of their fields. They'll grow old there, and when it's time for them to die, they'll have seen less than you already have."

  The boy looked up at him and smiled. Albert could feel how his longing stretched in all directions. Knud Erik was fatherless, but Albert was giving him new fathers. The town and the sea.

  Spring came and Albert taught the boy to sail.

  "What a good sound," Knud Erik said as he sat on the thwart, listening to the gurgling of water lapping against the side of the clinker-built boat, where the narrow planks had been layered on top of one another. He'd heard it before, but only from the edge of the wharf. Now he was surrounded by it on all sides. That was something else.

  Albert took his hands and placed them on the oars.

  Albert was well aware that he was encouraging the boy, but surely he was only promoting something that was natural for a Marstal boy? Things couldn't be otherwise. But he couldn't tell Klara Friis this to her face. He saw how vulnerable and uncertain she was in the unfamiliar role of widow. Perhaps he was cowardly not to champion Knud Erik's cause, but he simply thought it was too soon. Life would have to be Klara Friis's teacher. She'd said goodbye to her husband. And then one day she'd have to bid her son goodbye too. It would be a different goodbye, though: not a farewell to a dead man, but a parting with a living one who was going out to stare death down.

  So Knud Erik lived two lives. One was at home, where he had to promise his mother that he'd never go to sea. The other was with Albert, where he lost himself in dreams of following in his father's footsteps. The blue of the sea and the white of the sail were the only colors in the boy's mind. He was going to be a seaman. You might as well shorten that to "man." It was the promise of manhood that drove a boy seaward.

  Why did a woman fall in love with a sailor? Because a sailor was lost, bound to something distant, unobtainable, and ultimately unfathomable, even to himself? Because he went away? Because he came back home again?

  In Marstal the answer was straightforward. There were few other men to fall in love with. For poorer people in Marstal, there was never any question about whether a son would go to sea. He belonged to it from the day he was born. The only question was which ship he'd first sign on to. That was all the choice there was.

  Klara Friis came from Birkholm. It was a small island; we sailed past it when we left the harbor in springtime and went to sea through Mørkedybet. Albert remembered those spring days, when the sky was high and the wind brisk, when the ice broke up and a hundred ships left from Marstal. It was as if the whole town greeted the spring by setting its sails, as white as the scattered, rapidly thawing ice floes. It felt as if the sun, rather than the wind, filled the canvas: its bright, stirring warmth propelled us. We could fill half the archipelago with our spring parade. We sized each other up from deck to deck. We were on our way to a hundred different ports, but this moment united us. There was a sense of fellowship that swelled until it broke into a kind of joy.

  Farmers on the small islands would come down to the beach and wave as we passed them. They stood there, tiny, rapidly dwindling specks on the white sand, tied to their own limited plots of earth, surrounded on all sides by the endless sea that beckoned them daily and whose invitation they daily declined, happy just to wave instead.

  Was this how Klara Friis had found her sailor? Had she wanted to escape her little island, and so had fallen in love with someone who wanted out even more than she did? Had she seen promises in those white sails, but failed to understand that these promises were for the men, not the women?

  As they drank coffee, he asked her about Birkholm. She hadn't been born on the island and it was unclear when her family had arrived there. He asked about her parents. Anna Egidia had told him they'd died, but she'd not said when.

  She bit her lower lip. "Our teacher was a real monster," she said, sounding as if she'd felt pressed to tell him something about Birkholm and had found a way to stop him from getting too close. "My ears were always aching. He loved to twist them."

  Albert nodded. He knew a bit about educational provisions on the island, which had to share a teacher with the neighboring island of Hjortø. There'd be two weeks of school, then two weeks off. Precious little knowledge was imparted to Birkholm's young minds.

  She studied her hands for a while, brooding. She looked up and he saw darkness in her eyes: not her earlier grief, but something deeper, like the terror in an animal that fears for its life but doesn't know the nature of its enemy.

  "Have you ever been to Birkholm?" she asked.

  He shook his head. "I've sailed past it. There's not much to see. I believe the island's very flat."

  "Yes, its highest point is just two meters above sea level."

  She smiled briefly, as if to apologize for this. Then her eyes darkened again.

  "There was a storm surge," she said, and shuddered. "I'll never forget it. I was eight. The water kept on rising and rising. The land disappeared completely. We couldn't see it at all. Only the sea. Sea everywhere. I hid in the loft. But I got scared—it was so dark there. So I climbed onto the roof. The waves were crashing against the house. The spray soaked me right through. I got so wet. I felt so cold."

  She shivered as if she was still chilled to the bone.

  As she spoke, she curled up and her voice faltered: she was a helpless, terrified child, confiding in him. And although he was unaware of his own change of tone, it was that helpless child he addressed. In his mind, he didn't so much ask about her parents as summon them: where on earth were they in this story? Surely someone had been looking after her? He wanted a rescuing hand to appear, a father to clasp her in his strong arms, a mother to hold her tight and warm her with her body. But she spoke as if she'd been up there on a roof in the midst of a flood all alone.

  "Wasn't there anyone else on the roof?"

  "Yes, Karla was there."

  "Was Karla your sister, Mrs. Friis?"

  He still addressed her as Mrs. Friis. Anything else would have been patronizing. But at this moment it was like being formal with a child.

  "No, Karla was my rag doll."

  "But what about your parents?" he finally asked.

  "I sat on the ridge of the roof, clinging to the chimney. And it grew dark. I couldn't see anything at all. It was like someone had pulled an empty coal sack over my head. In the whole world there was just me and Karla. The wind was howling in the chimney something awful. The waves crashed against the house like it was a ship. I thought the walls would come down. But still, I must have fallen asleep. It could only have been for
a minute. But when I woke up, Karla had gone. I must have let go of her, and she must have slipped down the roof. I kept calling and calling. But she never came back."

  Suddenly she smiled. "What a chatterbox I am. You make me tell you the silliest things. It must sound like pure nonsense to you. All those years you've been at sea—I'm sure you've had far worse experiences."

  He looked at her solemnly. "No, Mrs. Friis, I haven't. Nothing has ever happened to me that comes even close to your night alone in that flood."

  She blushed. He'd seen the terror in her. And in that moment a bond was forged between them that he'd never be able to break. She'd given him something precious, told him a secret from the very heart of herself. He still knew very little about her, but the fear she'd shown him sufficed. It bound him to her.

  "Karla," he said, pondering, almost speaking to himself. "That's very similar to your name. As if she were your twin."

  "Yes" was all she answered. "Almost like Klara."

  She gave him a look of gratitude. Now he would leave her in peace and intrude no further into her privacy. He knew about Karla and Klara; he didn't need to know any more. She no longer had anything to prove, to explain, or to answer. With him she could be something she'd never been before: a blank page. She got a fresh start.

  He never asked about her parents again.

  SUMMER CAME AND the war continued. Albert had fewer dreams these days, and those he had didn't affect him the way they used to. He had Knud Erik now.

  "Have you had another dream?" the boy would ask him when they met.

  "Not last night," he would reply.

  "Not last night," the boy would repeat, sounding disappointed. "I hope you start dreaming again soon."

  Knud Erik's own dreams were distorted and strange, as most dreams are. But he always told them with the same happy wonder in his voice.