We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  They hailed her. "Where are you going?"

  "To a dance on Langeland," she replied.

  They invited her to a dance in Marstal instead, and both she and her bicycle were pulled over the rail.

  "You look frozen stiff," said Henning Friis, the handsomest of them. And she was indeed cold. Under her dress her legs were bare. He took her down to the fo'c'sle to warm her up in the top berth. And that was how she became his, with her blue lips trembling and cystitis lying in wait in the wretched block of ice that was her inadequately clothed body. She didn't get pregnant right away. Knud Erik came later. So did Henning's drinking, and pub crawls, and endless voyages.

  One year Henning came home with a stuffed guenon monkey. "The guenon is the most ungodly of all the animals," he said. "The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Injustice." An Arab had told him that.

  "And what am I supposed to do with it?" she asked.

  "You can look at it when you miss me," he replied, his voice laden with contempt. That was how things had grown between them.

  "The worst thing about the sailor isn't that he steals your virtue. The worst thing is that he steals your dreams," she said to the marine painter's widow.

  Now the Hydra was gone, and Henning with it.

  "One day Marstal will be a good place to grow up in," she said, "instead of a place where boys are raised to become fish food, and girls to be their widows."

  "Do you really think you can take the sailor out of a Marstaller?" asked the widow.

  "Yes, I do. I have the means. And I know how to do it." A new stubbornness had entered Klara Friis's voice, and her face grew ugly with defiance.

  Wondering if the younger woman's mind might have become dislocated by grief or her vast inheritance, the widow quickly steered the conversation back to the orphanage, and to her relief Klara Friis became sensible and practical again.

  But Klara never mentioned the most important part of her plan.

  THE SAME DAY that Albert died, Mr. Henckel was declared bankrupt.

  At a general meeting of Kalundborg Steel Shipyard Limited, to everyone's astonishment he voted in favor of liquidating his own company; he owned 99 percent of its shares. It was subsequently revealed that the shipyard owed Kalundborg Bank twelve million kroner. The bank collapsed, dragging other businesses along with it. Including, finally, Marstal Steel Shipyard. Peter Raahauge, the ship worker, had warned Albert that there was no way in hell things could last. His prophecy had now been fulfilled. The nearly one million kroner that had been invested in the Marstal enterprise was lost, and the yard was auctioned off for just thirty-five thousand kroner. Mr. Egeskov, owner of the Ærø, would survive. He had his hotel to fall back on. But Herman had ransomed his house in Skippergade, along with the Two Sisters, and he was left with nothing but debts.

  Court cases followed. Both Edvard Henckel and the manager of Kalundborg Bank were arrested. Not even the devil could make head or tail of their accounts. Henckel had been too smart for them. You could argue that he was a kind of genius who happened to forget the laws of the land and ended up on the wrong side of them. He was quite open in admitting everything. He'd been irresponsible, even thoughtless. But his intentions had been good.

  We pictured him standing in the dock, broad and mighty in his wide-brimmed hat, his coattails flapping as though he'd brought the fresh breeze of enterprise into the courtroom with him. His bloodshot eyes were bright with energy, and the way he flung out his arms and confessed to all his mistakes, you'd think he was inviting the judge, the journalists, the defense, and the prosecutor to a champagne party.

  It turned out he wasn't an engineer at all. Like everything else about him, the title was a concoction. Now he was off to prison. He took the announcement of his three-year sentence like a man, refusing to let it break him. He'd stormed through life bursting with grand plans for himself and for others; if he had to make a detour to a locked cell, it was only a temporary interruption. He'd come back out again eventually, and then he'd show us.

  We no longer frequented Hotel Ærø. Our starched shirts stayed at home, once again reserved only for weddings, confirmations, and funerals. Back in Weber's Café, we reacquainted ourselves with flat beer. We didn't gloat when we heard about the prison sentence. We couldn't even get properly angry with Henckel. Yes, he'd cheated us, but fraud takes two: we should have exercised better judgment. We certainly didn't regard him as evil. His enthusiasm and his spirit of enterprise were genuine. His problem was simply that he'd had too many ideas and he'd lost track of them until they became hopelessly entangled. But the man was willing to take a risk. We respected that. It was what we did all the time. We acknowledged something of ourselves in Henckel: not his fraudulence, but his get-up-and-go.

  We toasted him the way we'd have toasted a ship that was lost with all hands.

  Herman did the rounds of the shipping offices, looking for work. We'd expected him to run away from it all, just as he'd done when Hans Jepsen put him in his place and refused to sign him on as an ordinary seaman on the Two Sisters. He'd come back as a big shot: he'd talked big and had a wallet to match, but then he'd lost it all and ended up where he'd begun. He'd been sold a pig in a poke. But then again, he wasn't alone. Quite a few of us had bought one. In that respect we were all in the same boat.

  We never expected Herman to be humbled by his fall. It wasn't in his nature, which was stubborn-minded and arrogant. We just imagined that he'd flee the humiliation and reappear only when he had money in his pocket and was ready to start bragging again. Instead, he stayed in the town that had witnessed his downfall and signed on to the Albatross. We couldn't help but think that he must have finally learned his lesson and accepted that life had no plans to treat him differently than anybody else and that a certain amount of humility was therefore in order. Apart from that he was just the same Herman, as aggressive and unpredictable as ever. But he knew his way around a deck, so he had no problem finding a job.

  He returned from his first voyage a war hero, though the war had ended long before. He'd fought in the defense of Denmark in a pub in Nyborg, together with two other men from Marstal, Ingolf Thomsen and Lennart Krull, fellow crewmen on the Albatross.

  He sat in Weber's Café, holding forth about his deeds, while Ingolf and Lennart nodded in affirmation. From time to time they'd interject. But under Herman's stern eye, it never amounted to more than "Yes," "No," or "Exactly."

  So they'd been in this pub in Nyborg with the rest of the crew, and they'd started talking to this car mechanic. Ravn was his name: greasy little fellow with a potato nose covered in blackheads, engine oil on his hands. When he learned they were sailors from Marstal, he pulled out his wallet and showed them a photo of a schooner in flames. It was the Hydra, which had vanished without a trace in the Atlantic in September 1917. So had the six hands aboard, including two from Marstal: the captain and the ordinary seaman Henning Friis, who left behind a widow, Klara, and a son, Knud Erik. Vanished without a trace: that meant never seen by anyone, no bodies to recover and bury, no flotsam found afterward, not even a life buoy with the name of the ship—nothing.

  Ravn was from Sønderborg in South Jutland. He'd been drafted to fight for the Germans and had served on a U-boat. Photographs had been taken of all the ships the U-boats had sunk, and every man got a copy. He had a whole album of them at home.

  "I've got the photograph here," Herman said. "Do you want to have a look?"

  He passed it across the table and turned to order a new round.

  We instantly recognized the Hydra, and the sight of it in flames shifted a weight inside us. The black-and-white photograph echoed our own experiences of shipwreck.

  "Anyway," Herman said, "Ravn won't be going around bragging about sinking Danish ships anymore."

  "Perhaps we were a bit too rough with him," Lennart said. We could hear the uncertainty in his voice.

  "It was a fair fight. Ravn could have fought back. We've got nothing on our conscience." Herman sounded like a priest offer
ing absolution. "He got what he deserved," he added, turning to us. "I beat him up for the men who died. And for the Hydra."

  Herman paid a visit to Klara Friis, intending to tell her the story of Ravn. We imagined he was hoping to profit from it. Only this time he'd say, "I beat him up for Henning."

  Klara opened the door. "What do you want?" she asked tersely, when she saw Herman on the doorstep. The last time he'd paid her a visit, his intentions hadn't been good. "I've got news of Henning," he said.

  She listened to his story in silence. She'd paled when he informed her that he had news of Henning; now she reddened as he sat there boasting about having beaten to a pulp the man who sank the Hydra. When he concluded by claiming that he'd beaten him up for Henning's sake, her face whitened again and her mouth became a thin line. She stared at him through narrowed eyes. Completely unable to's interpret her expression, he felt temporarily at a loss.

  "Perhaps you disapprove of fights, Mrs. Friis?" His manner had suddenly become very formal. Still she didn't speak. He shifted in his chair and regretted having come.

  Finally she broke her silence.

  "I'd like you to accompany me to Copenhagen," she said.

  By now Klara Friis had hired a maid who could take care of the children in her absence. She'd been to I. C. Jensen and ordered new rugs and consulted Rosenbæk, the carpenter, about a new bed suitable for her widowed status. She was filled with energy, but no one knew what she planned to do, apart from rearranging her life to suit her new financial status.

  She revealed nothing to Herman while they were on the ferry. He'd not expected her to be forthcoming, nor had he speculated about what the trip to Copenhagen might involve. When she asked him to accompany her, he'd sensed no promise on the horizon, so it was purely out of curiosity that he'd agreed. He was on the lookout for new opportunities in life, and although he couldn't determine the nature of this expedition, he felt it held possibilities.

  "You know the moneymen in Copenhagen, Mr. Frandsen," she said to him.

  She addressed him formally, and he preferred it that way. It established a businesslike tone between them, and he was up for doing business.

  "I want you to introduce me to them."

  He stared at her. Was she stupid or just hopelessly naive? Was she practically asking to be robbed? He hadn't given much thought to Klara Friis's intelligence, but there was no reason to assume she was a fool. Was this a test?

  He decided to be honest with her—which in turn demanded a rare moment of honesty with himself.

  "Are you referring to Henckel? But he was a fraud. Surely you know that he's in prison now?"

  "I'm well aware of that. But you must have known others. You've been to the stock exchange. I need to speak with someone who understands finance."

  "You mean people like the Negro Thug or the Rolling Sidewalk? I'm afraid they're cut from the same cloth as Henckel. If you value your money, then don't entrust them with any of it."

  "They can't all be frauds."

  "Possibly not. But it's hard for ordinary people like us to tell the difference."

  He looked down at his big hands. For a moment he listened to his own voice. It sounded humble. He wasn't used to talking like this. He spoke about his own defeat in a frank, even regretful tone. Who could say if it was false or not. He was the shooting star who'd crashed and repented and learned from his mistakes.

  "I've become wiser," he pronounced, "since I allowed myself to be robbed. Why don't you just leave your money where it is? I imagine it's well invested."

  "You don't understand," she said. "I have other plans."

  But by the time they arrived at Copenhagen Central Railway Station, her confidence had deserted her. She took Herman's arm like a child grabbing its father's hand, terrified of becoming lost in the crowds. He'd sensed this fear when they boarded the train in Korsør: she'd tossed her head haughtily when she stepped onto the running board, but a shudder seemed to pass through her, hinting at a feral panic she couldn't control. She'd sat straight up on the seat opposite him and avoided looking out the window. Later, as they passed Slagelse, she'd snapped out of her trance and turned to look at the scenery, but she'd had to shut her eyes right away. For most of her life, her only landscape had been the flat meadows of Birkholm. To her, Marstal was "the city." But you could fit its whole market square, church, and high street beneath the vaulted roof of Copenhagen Station, where the buzz of countless travelers gathered into one great shouting echo.

  ***

  The first place he took her was the vestibule of the stock exchange. He deliberately chose late afternoon, when the prices had been set for the day and the brutal circus known as the post-trading period had begun. His intention was quite simply to scare her off. He discovered he had a protective instinct, which, had he been at all interested in his own psychology, he might have described as selflessness. There was no need for her to be conned out of her money, as he'd been. Since he'd been unable to talk her out of the vague plans she was so hell-bent on carrying out, he'd make use of the deterrent power of example.

  In the center of the vestibule was a roped-off area resembling a boxing ring. Inside, stockbrokers roared out their offers all at once.

  From one end of the vestibule a man came walking toward them's with an odd, rolling swagger. Avoiding the swing of his bruising shoulders, the crowd parted to make way for him. He looked like an old sailor trying to keep his balance on a ship in a gale; his colleagues, who'd never stood on a deck, called him the Rolling Sidewalk.

  He raised his bowler hat as he spotted Herman. They were old acquaintances. Herman returned the greeting with an inviting smile, and instantly the man stepped up to Herman and Klara.

  "Ajax Hammerfeldt," he said, and took Klara's hand with an elegant gesture, pursed his lips, and planted a kiss on it.

  The unfamiliar greeting startled her. She looked down and reddened, and forgot to introduce herself. So Herman did it for her, and added, "Mrs. Friis has just inherited a considerable fortune. She's in need of some good advice."

  "Then you've come to the right man, my dear Mrs. Friis," the Rolling Sidewalk said, and raised his hat a second time, as though they were about to become very well acquainted. He threw a quick glance at Herman to secure his consent to what was about to happen: when no reaction came, he took it as acceptance and continued.

  "The shipping industry is enjoying enormous progress," he said. "Have you heard about the ship with no funnel, Mrs. Friis?"

  Klara shook her head, overwhelmed.

  "The steamer succeeds the sailing ship. But the ship with no funnel will replace the steamer. That's the future, and you have the opportunity to be among the first to invest your money in it. You're young"—here he threw her a flattering glance, then added, in a tone that suggested that he was now presenting his decisive argument—"and the future belongs to our youth."

  Herman looked from one to the other. He couldn't help but admire the Rolling Sidewalk. He certainly knew his trade, even if it was a con man's, peddling a fraudulent blend of truth and lies. The ship with no funnel! It sounded made-up, but it wasn't: a ship with a diesel-powered motor, the Selandia, had been launched by B&W Shipyard some years ago. And she was undoubtedly a successor to the steamer. He waited patiently for Hammerfeldt to continue. The truthful part had been conveyed. Now for the lies.

  "Kalundborg Steel Shipyard," the Rolling Sidewalk said. "That's where the ship of the future will be launched. They've just issued the shares. The last one will be sold before the day's out. It's about striking while the iron's hot, don't you agree, sailor?" He winked at Herman, whom he still regarded as an accomplice.

  Klara looked astonished, as if she couldn't believe her own ears. "Kalundborg Steel Shipyard! But that's Mr. Henckel's company, isn't it? He's in jail!" She appealed to Herman, who nodded.

  "Yes," he said. "That's correct."

  They both turned to the Rolling Sidewalk. But the cocksure hawker of future riches had already vanished into the shouting crowd.


  Klara Friis had learned her lesson.

  They crossed the Stock Exchange Bridge and continued down Slotsholmen. The wharf teemed with life: dockers were busy unloading scented cargoes of fresh-cut wood from bark- and brig-rigged ships from Finland. He glanced at her. The anxiety had returned to her face. All he'd wanted was to open her eyes a bit, but now it seemed she'd lost heart. That hadn't been his intention, though he kept asking himself what her true purpose was. What was it she really wanted here?

  They crossed the square at the corner of Holbergsgade and Havnegade. She looked up at the huge bronze statue of the naval hero, whose outstretched arm seemed to be directing the traffic.

  "That's Niels Juel," he said.

  "Just like at home?"

  Marstal was her yardstick for everything, so she was probably thinking of Marstal's Niels Juelsgade. Perhaps she even believed this statue was named after a street in their own little backwater. There were no statues in Marstal, only the stone that Captain Madsen had erected in honor of fellowship. Now Klara could compare the two edifices and acquire a realistic sense of her benefactor's true stature. Copenhagen was the real world. Here, people didn't haul old boulders out of the sea and stick them up somewhere, with a few lines carved into the granite. Here, people thought big and built big.

  Suddenly Herman had an idea. He pointed to a foreign-looking building on the corner. It had tall, narrow windows with pointed Oriental arches, and its roof sat like a heavy lid that was about to slide off into the street. A set of steps led up to a solid wooden door set in walls a meter thick. It was a house that looked as if it had turned its back on the rest of the city.

  "The man who lives in there could give you some good advice."

  She gave him a puzzled look. Then she turned her head and scrutinized the sand-colored building. "Who is he?" she asked.