We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  Bjørn Karlsen continued down Prinsegade and along Havnegade and all the way out onto Dampskibsbroen. We met no one on the way. The town was deserted, like a stage waiting for an important and sad event. Perhaps this would be the day we'd witness the fall of Anton.

  The rigger stopped at the very edge of the wharf.

  "Here's all that this damn gun's good for," he said. Grabbing Shooter from Anton, he slammed it hard against the side of the wharf, splintering the wooden handle. Anton said nothing but continued to stare into the distance. Then Bjørn Karlsen hurled the broken gun out into the water of the harbor, and with a small splash it disappeared below the surface. Karlsen was still holding Anton by his collar; now a he grabbed hold of his trousers too, and with a forceful swing he sent Anton hurtling the same way as Shooter.

  When Anton climbed back onto the wharf, he pretended nothing had happened, even though he was soaking wet. He looked at us through narrowed eyes.

  "Good riddance to that shitty gun," he said.

  There was something he wanted to prove, perhaps to us, but mainly to himself. It had to do with the accuracy of his shot. None of us could fathom how Anton, who'd always been capable of hitting a sparrow from a great distance or a hare running in panic, could miss a stationary stork. So the problem had to be Shooter.

  As long as it was Shooter that had missed, and not Anton, his honor was intact. We could follow this line of thought, but we could see no farther.

  Next, Anton came up with the idea of shooting an apple off someone's head. He'd do it with a bow and arrow, like William Tell. Obviously, it would have to be done on a windless day. An arrow wouldn't let him down. Bows and arrows were ancient weapons and their accuracy depended on the skill of the archer and not, as in the case of the shitty gun that now lay at the bottom of the sea where it belonged, on some random technical issue. Kristian Stærk would provide the head that the apple would sit on. Who else? It wasn't Anton's style to command his gang members to risk their lives unless he too was in the danger zone. But he and Kristian Stærk were equals. All he had to do was drop the hint, and Kristian would volunteer. He was right. Kristian's ears rocked, as they always did when he was scared, but he didn't hesitate. He'd have been finished if he had.

  Over and over we debated the possible outcomes. What if Kristian Stork's courage failed at the last moment? Or what if Anton's aim failed him again?

  The big day came. We went to the field off Vestergade where we'd often met for battles against South. They turned up too, with their leader, Henry Levinsen, who stood there with his new nose, crooked but healed, on show. They hadn't brought weapons. Like the rest of us, they were here to witness Anton's triumph or defeat. All in all we must have been about fifty boys.

  It had just stopped raining, and the black mud made it heavy going.

  Kristian Stærk positioned himself in the middle of the field, and Knud Erik tried to balance the apple on his head, but it kept rolling off. We hadn't held a dress rehearsal, and most of us considered this a bad omen. Kristian had to twist his long, greasy hair into a kind of cushion before the apple would stay put. His ears kept rocking. We were reminded of Anton's joke about them: that they looked like wings getting ready to carry his head off to another body. Without doubt that was precisely what Kristian Stork's ears wanted to do right now.

  Anton faced him and their eyes met, like those of two duelists. Then Anton started walking backward, narrowing his eyes as though in concentration—but he kept going until it was clear he'd have no earthly chance of hitting the apple: in fact we even doubted that an arrow could travel that far. Knud Erik yelled at him to stop and come back a bit. Anton refused, and it took a lot of arguing before he agreed to shoot from a distance of fifteen paces. Kristian, in the meantime, had grown so confused that he'd dislodged the apple again.

  Finally, everything was ready. Anton put the shaft to the string and drew the bow, narrowing his eyes until they were almost shut. Quite a few of us thought the arrow would go as wide as the bullets he'd aimed at the stork, because Anton had lost his knack.

  But this time, Anton didn't miss. It wasn't the apple he hit, though. It was Kristian Stærk.

  We'd barely registered the twang of the bowstring before Kristian doubled up with a howl and buried his face in his hands. The undamaged apple hit the ground, but none of us saw it fall. We could see that the arrow was stuck into something behind Kristian's hands, but not exactly what. Then Kristian straightened up and roared up at the sky as if he'd lost his mind. It sounded scary; after all, he was almost a fully grown man. He threw back his head so he could scream even louder. The arrow stayed attached for a bit, then fell to the ground. Its tip was red.

  Vilhjelm was the first to reach Kristian, a handkerchief at the ready. Anton didn't stir. It seemed he needed time to digest his defeat before he could even begin to take in that he'd shot Kristian Stærk. Later we often discussed which was worse: the damage to his reputation or the injury he'd inflicted.

  Finally he snapped out of it. He ran toward Kristian but stopped a few feet away. "He needs to go to Doctor Kroman," he said, in a voice that he managed to make completely matter-of-fact.

  He was still our leader, and when he spoke we all calmed down, though several of the younger boys continued to shriek in fear when they saw how Vilhjelm's handkerchief had gone red from the pouring blood.

  Anton went over to Kristian, who was still clutching his face and roaring. "Let me see where I hit you," Anton said, sweeping Kristian's hair back.

  "Don't you touch me," Kristian howled. Nevertheless he took his hands away from his face, and we could see that the blood was coming from his right eye, which was now a mess of red.

  Anton took Kristian by the hand, just as he'd done with Henry Levinsen when the flowerpot holder got shoved over his ears. Henry would probably have been reminded of it too, if he'd still been present, but the members of South were long gone. "We'll tell them that he got a twig in his eye," Anton said, and looked around the gang with his old authority.

  Together, with Kristian still screaming his head off, we walked through town toward Doctor Kroman's. To everyone we encountered, we reported the same thing: "He got a twig in his eye." We didn't feel that we were covering up for Anton. We were covering up for ourselves. It was none of the adults' business how blood came to be pouring out of one of Kristian Stork's eyes. That was Doctor Kroman's business. He was the only one who could fix it. We'd leave Kristian's fate to him.

  We didn't know then that Kristian's wasn't the only fate to be decided that day in Doctor Kroman's surgery. Anton's would be too. Soon we'd lose him as our leader forever.

  BY THE TIME we reached the surgery, a large crowd had gathered. The Albert Gang had been joined by twenty to thirty other people. It was outside normal doctor's hours, and Anton had to hammer on the door and call out for Kroman. He opened the door. When he saw Kristian, he immediately put an arm around his shoulder and led him inside. Here Kristian quickly calmed down, as if recognizing he was in safe hands—or perhaps he was just putting on a brave face.

  "What do you think you're doing?" Doctor Kroman said, as the rest of us tried to follow them inside. "Get out of here."

  He let in only Anton, Vilhjelm, and Knud Erik. Then he asked what had happened, never once taking his eyes off Kristian.

  "He got a twig in his eye," Anton said.

  "Can't you speak for yourself?" Kroman asked.

  "I got a twig in my eye," Kristian Stærk seconded. In this moment we liked him enormously.

  Meanwhile Kroman had got Kristian to lie on the couch, and he'd started washing the blood off his face. Carefully he lifted the eyelid to examine the eye fully. We turned away. We had no urge to look.

  "Doctor Kroman," Kristian said, and his voice was completely calm. "Will I ever be able to see out of this eye again?"

  "I'll be honest with you," the doctor said. "No."

  "Will I have to have a glass eye?"

  Kristian's voice was still calm, as though the inform
ation Kroman had just given him was of no particular importance. Our awe of him soared to new heights.

  "No, there's no need for that," Doctor Kroman said.

  "Good," Kristian said. "Because I'd prefer to wear a patch."

  ***

  Afterward, when we talked it over, we realized what Kristian's game was. He'd worked out that Anton was finished and he'd spotted an opportunity. He could now become supreme leader of the Albert Gang. He'd have a patch over his eye, and the murdered man's skull would pass to him. But in the surgery, the only thing we grasped was that Kristian Stærk had finally lived up to his name. Our admiration of the way he took the harsh blow that fate had dealt him knew no bounds. We'd completely forgotten that Anton was present too.

  But Doctor Kroman hadn't. He stared hard at Anton. "Every time someone gets hurt, you seem to be around," he said. "You brought Henry Levinsen here when he got a flowerpot holder stuck on his head, didn't you?"

  "Yes," Anton said. "That's right. But I didn't do it."

  "And you didn't try to kill the stork either?" Doctor Kroman pursued his point.

  Anton said nothing. He stared straight ahead, as if his thoughts were in a completely different place and he wasn't even listening. Again he narrowed his eyes in that irritating manner we'd noted so often recently, as if he was still taking aim with Shooter.

  "And you've got nothing to do with this either?"

  "He got a twig in his eye," said Knud Erik.

  "I got a twig in my eye," confirmed Kristian from the couch.

  "No. It was my fault," Anton blurted. "I shot him."

  We couldn't believe our ears. First Anton had invented the lie about the twig. Now suddenly he was telling the whole story, just as it had happened.

  "I shot at him with a bow and arrow," he added. "I didn't mean to hit him in the eye. I was aiming for the apple on his head. But it's my fault anyway. I'm the one who did it." He looked straight at Doctor Kroman as he confessed.

  A moment ago we'd forgotten all about him. Now we remembered him again, and we knew that no matter what happened, he'd always be our leader. There was only one Anton. And although he might not be the world's best shot, no one could beat him, not even the much bigger Kristian Stærk, three years his senior and sporting a pirate patch.

  Doctor Kroman said nothing. We expected him to start scolding Anton, the way our teachers at school always did. We expected him to call him a rotten kid, a bad example, a thug, and a habitual criminal; to reproach him for his latest irresponsible breach of conduct; and to threaten him with the delinquents' home or even an adult prison. But the doctor was a practical man. He understood the body and its functions and he stuck to what he knew. He told us to get out so he could tend to Kristian's eye undisturbed. We headed for the door.

  "Just a moment, William Tell," Doctor Kroman called after Anton. "I want you to come and see me tomorrow. There's something I want to take a closer look at."

  "Perhaps it's my brain," Anton said afterward. "He wants to find out if I'm the dumbest guy in Marstal." He looked utterly devastated, and no wonder. This was all his fault. He'd wrecked Kristian Stork's eye. Although we'd lied when he'd asked us to, we were well aware that he'd done something so terrible that it was beyond apology.

  The next time we saw Anton, he was wearing glasses.

  His face, which until now had looked so determined, hard even, appeared pale and defenseless behind the dark brown horn frames that seemed to drag him downward. He looked as if he wished he were someone else entirely, and if there was a message in the eyes behind the lenses, it was "Please pretend you haven't seen me."

  Not only did the spectacles mean that he was finished as leader of the Albert Gang. They meant he was finished entirely. He'd wanted to go to sea one day. That had been the whole point of his life: what else would he do? But a sailor can't wear glasses. It's simply forbidden. He needs to have the eyesight of an eagle. He's allowed to become far-sighted when he grows old, but if he's found to be nearsighted when he's young, it's all over. He won't even get his first job.

  And over it was. Going to sea hadn't been Anton's plan so much as what nature intended for him, the culmination of his growth into manhood. He was getting taller, bigger, stronger, and older with every year that passed, and one day all these changes, which no earthly power could stop, would result in his stepping onto the deck of a ship and staying there to the end of his days. The spectacles were a farewell to all that: to Schipperstraat in Antwerp, Paradise Street in Liverpool, Tiger Bay in Cardiff, Vieux Carré in New Orleans, Barbary Coast in San Francisco, and Foretop Street in Valparaiso; they were a farewell to Amer Picon, Pernod, and absinthe. It was as if someone had come and trampled on his destiny and left it crushed.

  Doctor Kroman might as well have told him he'd never be a man. Anton with spectacles was no longer Anton.

  Now we knew why he was always narrowing his eyes, and why he'd failed to hit the stork. It hadn't been Shooter's fault, but Anton's. He'd stopped being who we thought he was, and oddly enough, we felt sorrier for him than we did for Kristian Stærk. Perhaps that was because we'd all admired Anton and none of us had really liked Kristian, with his rocking ears and casual abuse of anyone younger and smaller. Besides, Kristian's life didn't change because he'd lost an eye. He kept his job as an apprentice ironmonger. But everything changed for Anton.

  At first, our teachers interpreted the spectacles symbolically and thought that Anton had become bookish. Perhaps even a scholar. But they soon learned that he was as impossible as ever: the only difference was that they had to make him take off his glasses before they boxed his ears.

  To us, Anton's lenses were like two locked doors. He hid behind them and he shut us out. He left the leadership of the Albert Gang to Kristian Stærk, but Kristian derived little benefit from his newly acquired power. The only advantage he had over us was his strength, and that was exclusively based on our age difference. Beyond that, there was nothing he could do that we couldn't do too; nor was there a single thing he could do that Anton couldn't do much better. He had no specific ideas about defending our position among the town's gangs and couldn't come up with a proper response when South, sensing our weakness following the loss of Anton, attacked us, and he was clueless about how to reestablish their respect for us. Kristian Stærk had run out of ideas. He lorded it over us and gave us horse bites and Chinese burns to cover up his anxiety, but his rocking ears told another story.

  Not even the eye patch, which made him look quite formidable, changed matters. Especially because Anton refused to hand over Albert's boots and the dead man's skull. Without them, Kristian was unable to perform the initiation rites of the Albert Gang, and he didn't have the imagination to come up with new ones.

  Without the boots and the skull, the Albert Gang seemed to lose its soul. In fact, Anton had been its soul, and Kristian Stærk had been nothing more than Anton's right arm. Now he was a right arm with no head, and that was the end of it.

  The gang dissolved and new factions emerged. But things were never the same again. The truth is, Marstal became a more peaceful town once Anton got his spectacles. He sat alone in his attic bedroom in Møllevejen. When we learned about General Napoleon and his exile to St. Helena, we were reminded of him. But we judged Anton's fate to be sadder than Napoleon's, because Napoleon created his own misfortune. He'd lost his final, decisive battle, but Anton hadn't lost anything. He'd just become nearsighted.

  Kristian withdrew from gang life altogether and no longer needed to beat up smaller kids to prove his worth. Instead, he concentrated on his apprenticeship with Samuelsen. He regarded himself as a grownup, and the ironmonger had come to share this opinion. He'd noticed that the chief effect of Kristian Stork's conversion to adulthood was that the stock of canes, which Kristian had considered part of his armory, stopped diminishing abruptly.

  Initially, Kristian had felt that the score between him and Anton had been settled peacefully. Anton had said sorry and Kristian had said that he almost pitied him, t
he poor nearsighted devil, for having to wear those ugly glasses. But when Anton refused to hand over the skull, Kristian realized that he had plenty of reasons to bear him a grudge. First and foremost there was the business of his eye. Second, Anton had always tried to outmaneuver him and make him look a fool. It was his fault that Kristian had lost control of the Albert Gang, a position of power he secretly missed every time he held a cane in his hand. His newly acquired adulthood went no deeper than that. The sum total of all these reasons was the conclusion that he was entitled to revenge. And, vindictive as he was, he chose the most devious and cruel payback he could imagine.

  Anton had entrusted him with the name of the murdered man. And in this case, or so we'd heard, if you knew who the victim was, you'd automatically know who'd killed him. So Kristian decided to tell the murderer that Anton could prove his guilt.

  One day Herman entered the ironmonger's shop to buy a folding ruler. When the two of them were alone for a moment, Kristian blurted, "Anton Hansen Hay knows that you killed Holger Jepsen." He hadn't exactly thought through the wording in advance. His ears were rocking madly. "He has his skull as proof. And there's a big hole in it."

  If Herman hadn't been as clever as he was, he'd probably have grabbed Kristian Stærk by the collar there and then, and given him a thorough shaking until he revealed where Anton kept the skull. Instead, he wisely played the part of the injured innocent—which entailed whacking Kristian across the head and sending him flying into the tool drawers.

  "What the hell do you think you're accusing me of, boy?" he shouted.

  Samuelsen came rushing in from the backroom.

  "What's going on here?"

  His voice sounded frightened. Like most people, he was afraid of Herman.