We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  "He's found the treasure! He's found the treasure!" Helmer yelled.

  Knud Erik and Vilhjelm looked at each other. Could he really have found the head of James Cook?

  Anton staggered up onto the beach. His face was pale blue, and his teeth wouldn't stop chattering, so that for a few minutes he was incapable of saying anything. He squatted, breathing deep and gurgling as if he'd swallowed a lot of water, hugging the treasure all the while. He exchanged a quick glance with Knud Erik and shook his head. Then he got up and stretched out his arms triumphantly. His torso was still shivering with cold, but his face was lit up by a grin.

  "Look what I've found!" he shouted.

  We all stared at the object he was holding in his hands. At first we couldn't make out what it was. Then Helmer gasped.

  "It's a dead man!"

  The others could see it now too. Anton was holding a skull, green from long years in the water and covered with seaweed, which hung from the cranium like a drowned man's hair. The lower jaw was missing. Where the eyes used to be, two gaping holes stared with the inscrutable glare of the dead. The bared teeth in the upper jaw grinned in malicious triumph, as though the head anticipated the fate that awaited us when we too became sad human remains.

  "No," Anton said. "This isn't a dead man. It's much better. It's a man who was murdered." He lowered his arms and held out the skull to us. "See for yourself."

  We formed a circle around him. He turned the skull of the murdered man so we could view it from all angles. At the back of it we saw a big hole.

  "It's a Stone Age man," Knud Erik said. "Someone whacked him with an ax."

  "No, this is no Stone Age man," Anton declared. He looked around at all of us in turn, pausing between each of us to heighten the suspense. "I know who it is."

  "Who is it?" we asked at once.

  "I'm not going to tell you right now. But this was the treasure I asked you to find."

  Knud Erik and Vilhjelm were well aware that Anton was lying. We hadn't found the head of James Cook. But we'd found something, and Anton always knew how to turn the unexpected to his advantage. "I want you to place your hand on the head of this murdered man," he said, "and swear not to breathe a word to anyone. Or I'll never tell you who it is."

  We all placed our hands on the skull. The slimy weed that sprouted on it was disgusting to the touch, and we shuddered. "Swear," Anton commanded. And we swore in unison that we'd never reveal the secret.

  "Now tell us who it is."

  "Later," Anton said, and made a calming gesture, as if asking us not to get too excited.

  We rowed out to the perches and retrieved the rest of our clothes. The sun and the wind had dried them, but none of us had remembered to gather the clogs. We supposed that after Helmer capsized the boat, the current had taken them.

  Vilhjelm couldn't find his trousers either, and his embarrassment worsened his stammer.

  "Give him yours," Anton said to Knud Erik. "That'll make your mother really cross." This remained Anton's recipe for freedom: annoy your ma and pa as much as you possibly can.

  People stared at the bunch of barefoot, trouserless boys walking home through the streets. We were clearly in for a thrashing.

  But we didn't care.

  Nothing could touch us the day we found the murdered man's skull. We had a secret. And a secret meant power.

  A COUPLE OF days later Anton went to see Kristian Stærk to suggest they join forces to form a new gang, which, he reckoned, would be the mightiest in town. Though "the strongest" was the phrasing he chose, quite deliberately, to flatter Strong's leader. He'd taken Knud Erik and Vilhjelm with him as deputies. Their most important task was to bear the wooden casket containing the murdered man's skull, which Anton considered to be vital leverage in the delicate negotiations ahead.

  With Kristian Stærk, Anton's biggest disadvantage was his age and his height. Kristian was fifteen and much bigger than Anton. He had broad shoulders and a thick neck, with a remarkably small head perched on top. The prominence of his ears once prompted Anton to remark that his head had "unfolded its wings because it was planning to fly off and find a body that fitted better." But no one came out with things like that when Kristian Stærk was within earshot, because he loved nothing more than dealing out horse bites and Chinese burns, gripping the skin of your wrist between his clammy hands and twisting.

  He was an apprentice at an ironmonger's, Samuelsen's in Kongegade, and no one understood why he still bothered running around with a gang of boys and getting into fights. The adults didn't think much of Kristian Stærk, but all the children were scared of him. Maybe that's why he carried on behaving like them. He preferred company that guaranteed his position as the biggest and the strongest.

  In Anton's case, it was all the opposite. The adults were no fonder of him than they were of Kristian; the mothers, especially, looked askance at the boy who'd blacked out half of Marstal with a single shot. But we town boys idolized him. Anton never minded whether people were bigger or smaller than him because he was always more ingenious, and that was enough.

  Kristian Stærk received him more favorably than he'd expected; his reputation preceded him. But Anton was well aware that his strongest card in their forthcoming talks was the contents of the wooden casket borne by his two deputies, Knud Erik and Vilhjelm. He was adamant that the name of the gang should be the Albert Gang, and he'd extended his plans for the initiation ritual: now, potential gang members would not only wear Albert's boots to pledge allegiance but also place a hand on the head of the murdered man. He'd scrubbed off the seaweed and polished the skull, hole and all, till it shone. Anton had decided that the name of its owner should remain a secret to all but the two leaders of the gang: Kristian Stærk and himself.

  He asked Knud Erik to lift the lid of the casket, then solemnly took out the skull and handed it to Kristian Stærk. As he took it in his hands, his protruding ears rocked back and forth: we could tell he was frightened of it, but we could also see the cunning boy's brain, trapped in its adult body, racing at full tilt. The head appealed irresistibly to his imagination and he knew instinctively that it would have the same effect on his peers. Whoever owned the head would have the biggest and strongest gang. He nodded wordlessly, signaling that he agreed to Anton's terms.

  "And we're not talking about some Stone Age man clobbered with an ax here," Anton said. He made Kristian squat so their heads were level and whispered the name of the murder victim in his ear. Then they looked each other in the eye to seal their pact.

  The first task awaiting the newly formed gang was to procure weapons and equipment for the new recruits. The Margarine Man, who sold butter and margarine from his horse-drawn cart, gave us lids from his empty barrels. We attached straps to them and they became our shields. Kristian Stærk proved himself especially useful by procuring bamboo canes from the ironmonger's, which we turned into bows. We used garden stakes as arrows, but they weren't really much use, though they could give you a bruise if you got hit on the forehead with the blunt end. We tried sharpening one with a knife, but the wood wasn't hard enough to take a point. It was Anton who thought of tying sail needles to them. They not only hurt more, but they pierced the skin too: after a battle, some of us looked like hedgehogs. Especially in the summer, when we had less clothing to protect us, the needles went straight into bare skin. This was the life. Our games were becoming dangerous, and danger was what we wanted. We had a name to honor and the skull of a murdered man as a mascot. Only the actual threat of death made fighting worthwhile.

  We had certain rules. All members had to be more than ten years old. Knud Erik and Vilhjelm, who'd only just turned ten, were exceptions; other boys their age weren't admitted. The initiation test wasn't for the weak of spirit. You had to jump into the harbor clutching a big stone, sink to the bottom, walk under the keel of a ship, and surface on the other side. If you dropped the stone while you were down there, you could wave goodbye to membership in the Albert Gang. Few adults would have been able to
pass, but instead of scaring off applicants, the test attracted us in huge numbers. We all longed to prove our abilities, and we staggered around in the bottle-green darkness with bursting cheeks and eyes popping out of our heads from oxygen deprivation while the keel of a ship, alive with undulating seaweed, mussels, and barnacles, loomed above us like the overgrown abdomen of a sperm whale. We surfaced like bubbles popping from a bed of mud. As soon as we'd filled our lungs with air, we'd erupt in a yell of triumph while struggling not to sink again with the stone, which lost its weightlessness the moment we raised it above water.

  Did we ever think that we'd just been down to the place where so many of our fathers had ended up? We swore that we'd die with our boots on. But then, that's what you do when you drown.

  We drew members from every street in town, including the half that had always been South's turf. But the test also meant saying good-bye to some of the old members of North. The most important thing was passing the test; it overrode where you were from. South had a hard core that refused to surrender, but this suited us just fine: we needed someone to fight. We gave them a hard time, and mostly, they got thrashed. Sometimes we'd fight on rafts in the harbor or have sea battles in stolen boats. But most of the time we met in a field in Vestergade where the adults never came. We didn't want to be disturbed while we inflicted cuts and bruises, black eyes, and battered skulls on one another.

  Until the terrible thing happened to Kristian Stærk, the leader of South, Henry Levinsen was the only one of us to receive a permanent injury. He'd been wearing a copper flowerpot holder as a helmet, and Kristian Stærk gave it a whack with a stake from a fish trap, ramming it right down over his ears and breaking his nose on the way. Groth, the plumber in Vestergade, had to cut the pot free, and Henry's nose was crooked from that day on.

  The adults called us pickaninnies. This meant "children" in a language that wasn't English, German, or French, but one they used in a faraway place. And that's just how the word made us feel: as foreign as natives and savages from an undiscovered island.

  If we'd ever bothered to count the members of our gang who were fatherless, we'd have realized just how many of us had at some point started blubbering in the street or the playground, suddenly remembering the father we'd lost when a ship went down. Whether in peacetime or in war, it was always the same: death by drowning, and no's funeral afterward.

  But we didn't bother ourselves with thoughts like that, even though there was undoubtedly a reason why some of us punched harder than others when we got into fights, and didn't care how much it hurt when we got punched back. We clobbered one another the way a blacksmith clobbers red-hot iron. We did it to forge ourselves into some kind of shape.

  Anton claimed that the murdered man appeared below his gable window every night and called out to him in a hollow voice that he wanted his head back. We didn't believe it though. How can you shout from the garden when your head's up in the attic?

  Hadn't we noticed that his lower jaw was missing? Anton asked us. That was where the voice came from. He showed us the footprints in the potato bed at the end of the garden.

  We reckoned he'd made them himself.

  Anton sighed and said that being disbelieved by those nearest to him, even though he possessed great and burdensome knowledge, was a cross he'd have to bear. Not only did he know the identity of the murdered man; he knew the murderer too. He gave us a look that sent shivers down our spines. We didn't believe everything he said, but he had the power to unsettle us all the same.

  We didn't know it at the time, but a night would come when there really was a man in the garden calling out for Anton. It wouldn't be the dead man wanting his head back though.

  It would be the murderer. And Kristian Stærk would have sent him.

  IT ALL STARTED when Anton found he had less spending money than usual and had to cut down on his daily quota of Woodbines. Smoking them gave him a manly voice that made him sound much older. He said that the lack of money stemmed from a problem with Shooter, as he called his cousin's air gun. He'd been taking out fewer local sparrows than usual. He dismissed as pure nonsense the theory that he'd finally eliminated the population. Shooter was to blame.

  As a result he decided to put the weapon to a conclusive test by bringing down a really big bird. Marstal's biggest, in fact. It was a decision that in our opinion showed his true stature, but at the same time it worried us; indeed, it made us feel uneasy. Everyone in town was fond of this bird; it even had its own name. Of course, so did the many macaws, cockatoos, nymph parakeets, mynah birds, and canaries that sailors had brought back to Marstal over the years. But those birds sat in cages, begging for sugar lumps—and even Anton's Tordenskjold was half tame. This was different. This bird, whose life Anton planned to end, was a free and noble creature that flew just as far, every year, as the men of Marstal sailed. We were honored that it had chosen to nest in our town. It was a stork, and it lived on the roof of Goldstein's house. We called it Frede.

  Goldstein's roof was a strange place for a stork to pick for its nest. Storks like being high up, but Goldstein's house, which lay at the end of Markgade, was a low half-timbered building, painted yellow, with a red-tiled roof that looked set to skid right off the sunken walls. Abraham Goldstein was a white-bearded, mild-mannered shoemaker who never looked at you. There was a reason for that: some said he could give you the evil eye. Any skipper who passed him on the way to his waiting ship postponed his voyage until the next day. What's more, Goldstein had been sighted standing in Market Square early one spring morning, hypnotizing sparrows. They'd flown onto his outstretched hands and hopped all the way up his arms and along his sloping shoulders, even settling on his hat. Others said this was all nonsense and that Goldstein was a completely ordinary man who should be judged only on his ability to resole a pair of boots. As far as that went, no one had any complaints.

  We went over to Goldstein's house on a Sunday afternoon in July. The heat had driven everyone to the beach, so Anton could shoot the stork without worrying about witnesses. The whole thing felt infinitely sad. And yet we had to watch. We were sure we'd shut our eyes the moment the stork flapped its black and white wings for the last time and tumbled out of its big nest of twigs, its red legs in the air. We had a vague sense that great men and pointless, sad events went together, and we saw the whole business in that light. Convinced that Anton was destined for greatness, we wanted to be there when it happened.

  Anton raised the gun and narrowed one eye. He stood like that for a long time, as if unsure of his aim, and we thought we saw his hand shaking slightly. Looking at the stork, we understood. I felt we were bidding it farewell, and Anton surely felt the same. Then he pulled the trigger.

  We all shut our eyes tight, as if on command, and kept them shut as the shot rang out. It seemed loud enough to carry all the way to the Tail. Absolute silence followed. Then Anton cursed. We opened our eyes and looked up at the ridge of the roof. The stork was still standing there, motionless on its pile of twigs, as if it had fallen asleep.

  Was that how storks behaved when they were shot? The bullet should have reduced the noble bird to a pathetic heap of feathers and long red legs; instead, it stood upright, as if it had been stuffed.

  It took several minutes to figure out why. Anton had missed.

  Furiously, he reloaded the air gun and fired again and again, until he had no pellets left. The stork didn't so much as twitch. It was like it was deaf. But deaf or not, one thing was sure. Despite Anton's cannonade with the air gun, Frede remained unharmed.

  Suddenly the door to Goldstein's house flew open and a man appeared: not the little old shoemaker, but a giant who had to bend to exit the tiny door. Beneath his blue overalls, his tanned torso was bare; we could see his massive biceps and the blue and red tattoos that snaked around his muscles. It was Goldstein's son-in-law, Bjørn Karlsen, who worked as a rigger at the steel shipyard. He'd been enjoying his afternoon nap and Anton's shooting had wakened him.

  "What the hell
do you think you're doing, boy?" he shouted, threatening Anton and the rest of us with his clenched fist. "Have you been shooting at the stork?"

  But Anton seemed not to have heard. He was staring at the gun in his hand with a look of intense hatred—a look we fervently hoped he'd never direct at one of us. We wanted to scamper, but we didn't feel we could desert him, so we just backed off a few steps. Which left Anton alone on the pavement when Bjørn Karlsen crossed the street with a couple of giant bounds and grabbed him by the neck. He lifted him up by his shirt collar so that his feet dangled in the air, as if he were nothing but a little kid. And perhaps, to a furious, six-foot-five rigger, that's all he was. To us Anton was anything but that. Yet now we began to realize that there were several ways to see Anton. Bjørn Karlsen dragged Anton down Markgade, bawling him out.

  "Is this gun yours?" he demanded, and Anton replied that it was. He couldn't be bothered to explain that it was really his cousin's: it was irrelevant now anyway.

  "Let me show you what happens to the likes of you," the rigger said.

  He crossed Market Square still holding firmly on to Anton. We followed at a safe distance. We couldn't understand why he didn't say anything. No one ever impressed him, and we'd never met an adult the fast-talking Anton couldn't get the better of. Now he seemed indifferent. As for us, a strange, passive curiosity kept our mouths shut. We could have yelled words of encouragement or hurled abuse at Bjørn Karlsen, but we said nothing.