We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  Instead, they were reduced to watching the good fortune of others from a distance. Down there, at the other end of the bar, for instance: the underage boy with blue eyes and a lock of blond hair falling across his forehead. For him there was no end to the backslapping, the flirtatious looks, the free beer, the invitations to an all-expenses-paid night in a room where a mattress with broken springs would squeak the night away. The kid didn't even speak English, apart from the crucial words "I'm from Norway."

  They were fighting the Germans in Norway; the king and the government were in exile in London; thirty thousand Norwegians sailed in the service of the Allies, and they sailed under their own flag. The Norwegian merchant fleet had been assigned to the state, and the king was now its official owner.

  Scandinavians were popular wherever they went. But to English ears, Scandinavian meant Norwegian. Denmark had dropped off the map, and if a sailor mentioned that was where he came from, it sounded as if he was offering a shameful reminder of the past. On April 9, 1940, the crew of the Dannevang had become stateless. They were in the line of fire, but they were buck-naked.

  They downed their Guinness in silence.

  The end came the following January, one day at around four o'clock in the morning. The Dannevang was on her way from Blyth to Rochester, with coal. Afterward they were unable to decide whether it had been a vibration mine, an acoustics mine, a magnetic mine, or just an old-fashioned horn mine—but her bow was ripped apart. The ship started to take in water immediately, but she didn't sink right away. They'd been blacked out during their voyage, and when they climbed into the lifeboats, Captain Boye ordered the lights turned on. They rested on their oars as they bid farewell to their ship, and a bottle of rum was passed around. They'd rarely drunk on board. On New Year's Eve, Boye had held long discussions with his officers before he decided to give each man a glass of cherry brandy. When the bottle of rum came back to him, it hadn't even been emptied. Seventeen men! He gave them a look of approval.

  The Dannevang keeled over. The sound of explosions came from the engine room as the water reached the hot boilers, and lumps of coal flew out of the shattered skylight. The stern rose up in the water, and the screw gave a brief screech as it spun around for the last time. Then it stopped, and all over the ship the lights went out.

  Knud Erik closed his eyes. Albert had dreamt this moment. He'd seen a sinking steamer and he'd described everything. Just as it was happening now.

  When he opened them again, the sea had closed over the Dannevang.

  The men sat in the lifeboat and watched, their wool-lined Elsinore caps in their hands. No one spoke. Knud Erik felt the captain ought to say a prayer. Or recite the funeral text from the Book of Sermons. How the hell were you supposed to send off a ship?

  The steward was puffing on a cigarette; its tip glowed red in the night.

  "A cigarette would be welcome right now."

  It was Boye who broke the silence. He looked at the steward. "Hammerslev, did you remember the cigarette cartons?" The steward nudged the mess boy, who looked miserable. "The cigarettes, Niels."

  The mess boy dived under the stern thwart and triumphantly pulled out a carton. They got a pack each. They'd been forced to leave their sea chests and sea bags on board—there wasn't room for them in the lifeboat. Now all they owned were the clothes they were wearing, their discharge books, and their passports, which proved that they belonged to a nation that no longer existed because the war had swallowed it up. And a pack of cigarettes.

  It was all right. They would manage. They were alive, and soon their lungs would be filled with smoke.

  "The matches," Boye said. "Where are the damn matches?" He looked sternly at the mess boy. "I'm throwing you overboard if you've forgotten them."

  The mess boy flung out his hands in desperation. "It all happened so fast," he said. So the steward passed his lit cigarette around, and soon seventeen tiny red dots glowed in the winter darkness. Dawn was still a few hours away.

  "Niels," the captain said to the mess boy. "It's your job to make sure that at least one cigarette is always lit, even if you have to smoke in your sleep. Is that clear?"

  The mess boy nodded gravely and puffed away as if his life depended on the orange spark in front of his nose.

  Knud Erik looked around. It had been a good crew. He'd been first mate on the Dannevang for three years. On board were seven men from Marstal and one from Ommel. The rest were from Lolland and Falster. Now they'd be scattered all over the place.

  A couple of years later he would return to this moment and do the math. Of the seventeen survivors of the Dannevang, eight were dead: the captain, the second mate, the steward, an able seaman, two ordinary seamen, a junior ordinary seaman, and the chief engineer. Five were Marstallers. Captain Boye was run down by an American convoy ship. The junior ordinary seaman was on board a munitions ship when she was torpedoed. There'd been only three survivors out of a crew of forty-nine, and he wasn't one of them.

  But right now they were all together, waiting for dawn. They were close to the English coast and they knew they'd be spotted soon. Death was the last thing on their minds. Their only concern was keeping the red glow of the cigarettes going until they were picked up.

  THE CREW OF the Dannevang remained unemployed for a few weeks in Newcastle, where they spent most of the time at the newly opened Danish Seamen's Club, honing their pool skills. It wasn't exactly that they missed the air raids, mines, and U-boats: any nostalgia for bombs could be easily satisfied by taking a stroll around the docks. It wasn't as bad as London, but almost. No, the fact was they'd made a choice, and it seemed ludicrous to spend a world war playing pool. Besides, the food ashore was disgusting. Powdered eggs, Spam, and gray bread smeared with a reeking, oily substance known as Bovril. Meat inevitably meant corned beef. The British diet wasn't dictated by stinginess but by the war, and it showed on the British. Their patched-up, prewar clothes were a fair measure of how much weight they'd lost. The food on the Dannevang had been better: from time to time they'd had real eggs or a piece of fresh beef. "The Brits eat the way we did on the old Newfoundland schooners," Knud Erik commented.

  He hadn't sailed the Newfoundland route since the fatal voyage on the Kristina, and the Claudia had been his last sailing ship. Once he'd passed his navigation exam, he'd decided to crew on a motor ship. He'd applied to the Birma and the Selandia, vessels belonging to the Far East Asia Corporation, but they'd both turned him down. Knowing nothing of the connection between his mother and the owner of the company, old Markussen, he'd never understood why. So he'd taken jobs on steamers.

  Helge Fabricius, the second engineer of the lost Dannevang, laughed at what Knud Erik said about the food. He was in his mid-twenties and not old enough to have sailed the Newfoundland route. Knud Erik was thirty, less than ten years older, but they'd been born on either side of the great divide between the age of sail and the age of steam. They weren't even separated by a generation and yet they were children of two different worlds.

  Behind the pool table hung a blackboard with VACANCIES written on it in chalk. Under this was scrawled NIMBUS OF SVENDBORG. Nothing else. What were they looking for, a first mate, a steward, a chief engineer? Knud Erik and Helge went to see the Danish consul, Frederik Nielsen, to find out. To their surprise, he offered them the whole vessel: its crew had jumped ship. The Nimbus was theirs if they wanted her. Knud Erik would be promoted to captain.

  This was the other side of the war. It imposed restrictions, but it also offered opportunities. They went to inspect the ship. On the bow you could make out the letters that had once spelled Nimbus and more marks on her stern that had probably said Svendborg. But you had to apply your imagination.

  As they walked up and down the wharf, inspecting the vessel, Helge Fabricius started counting. Knud Erik didn't need to ask him what he was up to. "There's no way that crew jumped ship," he said. "They're all dead."

  "One hundred and fourteen...," Helge intoned.

  "The only ch
eese they ever got on that ship must have been Swiss."

  "I'd like to see them make a cup of coffee," Helge said, abandoning his numerical litany.

  They both laughed and walked up the gangway. They'd seen ships with half the bulwark ripped away, with the superstructure blown off, with craters in their sides, that had nevertheless managed to stay afloat. But they'd never seen anything like this. The Nimbus had received not one direct hit, but a thousand. The steamer was riddled with bullet holes. She was intact yet utterly destroyed. Waves and waves of Messerschmitts must have strafed her. Not one of the Germans' aircraft bombs or torpedoes had struck her; if they had, the Nimbus would be at the bottom of the sea. But their machine guns certainly hadn't missed. There was something awe-inspiring about the sight of the ship's perforated superstructure: it exuded a defiance that seemed almost human.

  They entered the galley, where a blue enamel coffeepot still sat on the stove. As if to give the lie to Helge's joke, it was still in one piece.

  "I'll be damned," said Helge.

  They found some English coffee substitute, made from acorns, in a cupboard, and sat down at the table while they waited for the water to boil.

  "We'll take this ship," Knud Erik said. Helge poured the boiling water and shot him a questioning look. "She's a lucky one."

  "You mean her coffeepot was lucky. It's the only thing on board that doesn't have holes in all the wrong places."

  Knud Erik shook his head. "No, the whole ship's lucky. Have you ever seen so many direct hits? But the Nimbus is still here. She's still afloat. And she'll share her luck with us."

  They were both well aware that this was pure superstition. On the battlefield—and the sea was a battlefield—no rules govern who will be spared and who will fall. Whatever decides a soldier's or a sailor's fate is unfathomable and random, so they might as well call it luck and trust it as such. On the Dannevang they'd had a Lewis. On the Nimbus, they'd have the more effective Lady Luck.

  They returned to Consul Nielsen and told him that they'd take over the ship. He looked relieved.

  "These are our terms," Knud Erik said. "We won't be needing all that ventilation on the Atlantic, so we want the holes mended. We want some decent tackle on board so we can defend ourselves. And we'll be in charge of the hiring. We want to decide whom we sail with."

  The Nimbus was taken to the shipyard to be repaired, and Knud Erik and Helge returned to the Danish Seamen's Club to find her a crew. On the chalkboard under VACANCIES they wrote a list of the crewmen they needed. Then they settled themselves in a corner near the pool table and waited.

  Within a few days they'd hired a first mate, a mess boy, a donkey-man, and a couple of able seamen. They were still looking for a second mate, a steward, a chief engineer, and a few more able and ordinary seamen. It would be a crew of twenty-two.

  Knud Erik hadn't expected to become a captain this early in his career. He didn't doubt his abilities, but he wasn't sure he had the necessary authority. Could he judge a man well enough to make the most of his strengths and help him forget his weaknesses? And what about twenty-two men all at once?

  On the fourth day Vilhjelm stepped through the door and asked to sign on as second mate. It was two years since he and Knud Erik had last seen each other, and that had been in Marstal. Vilhjelm had a family now: a son and a daughter with a woman of his own age, who was the daughter of a fisherman from Brøndstræde. His stammer had never come back, and whenever he was in Marstal he went to church every Sunday. He kept the Book of Sermons from the Ane Marie at home. He didn't need it with him on board. He still knew it by heart.

  "How's your father?" Knud Erik asked.

  Vilhjelm's father had stopped his hard job as a sand digger a long time ago. Now he fished instead, though he was actually too old for that as well. But he persisted doggedly, trapped in his own deaf world.

  "He was fishing over at Ristinge when the Germans came. He couldn't hear the sound from the aircraft, of course. He looked up because shadows were crossing the water, one after the other, too fast for clouds. Apart from that, he didn't give it a second thought. He was more interested in how many shrimp he'd caught. That's the war, as far as he's concerned."

  The next man to turn up was also from Marstal: Anton. He was appointed chief engineer on the spot, and he wanted to know everything about the engine.

  When he heard that the Nimbus had only eight hundred horsepower, he said, "I have my doubts," and fiddled with his black horn-rimmed glasses. "Don't think there's much top steam in that old tub." He wanted to know what type of coal they'd be using. "I'd like it to be Welsh coal," he said. "Coal from Newcastle gives off too much soot."

  "You'll get all the coal you want," said Knud Erik.

  It was a joke, of course: he didn't know the first thing about coal, and he had no idea what they'd be able to get hold of.

  Anton sulked over this for a while, and Knud Erik suspected he'd get up and leave. They'd been friends once and they still were, though they were often on opposite sides of the globe. But Anton wasn't sentimental; he was a professional and wanted a decent vessel on which to exercise his talent for mechanical work. So his answer took Knud Erik completely by surprise. "Well, what the hell," he said. "We Marstallers should stick together. I'll take the job. I'll get this old tub to shift."

  The third man to approach the corner table that day had applied for the job of able seaman. Under his open shirt he wore a white T-shirt that emphasized his gleaming black skin. They assumed he must be an American.

  "Fritz says hello," he said in Danish.

  Knud Erik's jaw dropped. Fritz! He didn't even notice that the man had addressed him in his own language. "I thought Fritz was in Dakar?"

  "He is," said the man. "Or at least he was the last time I saw him." He stuck out his hand. "I'd better introduce myself. Absalon Andersen from Stubbekøbing. Yes, I've heard it all before. I'm a Negro. Black Sambo and all that. But I grew up in Stubbekøbing and if you promise not to ask me where I learned Danish, then I promise not to ask you where you did."

  He smiled at them as if pleased that introductions were now out of the way and they could get down to business. "I was in Dakar with Fritz," he went on. He pulled out a chair and made himself comfortable. Knud Erik offered him a cigarette. "Well, that bit of the story you're familiar with, I suppose?"

  Knud Erik nodded. Dakar, in French West Africa, was every sailor's nightmare. There was nothing wrong with the town itself. But when France fell to Germany, the governor of Dakar proclaimed, initially, that he was on the side of the Allies. A few days later he changed his mind, and the many ships that had come to the port to enter Allied service were interned instead, dooming the sailors who had been willing to sacrifice themselves in battle to months of idleness on their own sun-baked decks. Vital engine parts were confiscated to prevent them from escaping. And when the British bombarded the port, they'd suddenly found themselves on the wrong side. It was one hell of a situation. One Norwegian ship managed to escape: the crew claimed that the ship's engines would rust unless they were run from time to time, so the idiot French handed over the missing engine parts and the crew gave them back replicas, then made their getaway in the middle of the night. The other ships—six Danish ones among them—were still rotting there. The war was calling out for them and they couldn't go. They must be feeling absolutely and utterly useless.

  "But you're not Norwegian," Knud Erik said. "So how did you get out?"

  "I'm something even better than Norwegian," Absalon Andersen said with a self-assured grin. "I'm black. I just walked out of Dakar. No one tried to stop me. I looked like all the other Negroes. After various detours I ended up in Casablanca. By the way, Captain Grønne says hello too. You boys from Marstal, you're just about everywhere."

  "How did you manage to get here?"

  "I have beer to thank for that."

  "Beer," Helge said. "You're telling me you paddled from Casablanca to Gibraltar in a beer crate?"

  "That's not the whole sto
ry," Absalon said. "But almost. Many try to escape, but only a few succeed. The French don't miss a trick. A few of us found this rotten old dinghy upriver. The French knew about it, but they never suspected a thing. It would have been sheer madness to try to go to sea in a tub like that. The problem was water for the crossing. We couldn't just stroll through town with a whole water cask. The French would have seen what we were up to right away. So Grønne gave us a couple of crates of beer. The French just grinned when they saw us carting them along. They thought we were off on a picnic. We rigged a mast and some sails and set off late at night. We had to bail out the whole voyage. That tub took in water like a herring crate. We reached Gibraltar after four days. The dinghy sank right under our feet as we sailed into the harbor."

  "So you made it at the very last minute." Knud Erik said. He was impressed.

  "Damn right we did," Absalon said, nodding gravely. "Damn right it was at the last minute. We'd just run out of beer."

  When the next man appeared, Knud Erik gave him a curious look, and raised a hand before he could open his mouth.

  "Let me guess your name. It's Svend, Knud, or Valdemar."

  "Valdemar," the man said, without batting an eye.

  "How can a Chinese end up being called Valdemar?" Helge asked, looking him up and down. He was young and slender, with the high cheekbones and narrow eyes of the East. A mocking smile played on his well-formed lips. He was handsome, in a surprisingly gentle, almost feminine way.

  "I'm not Chinese," he said, in a patient tone of voice. "My mother's from Siam. And my father's surname is Jørgensen."

  "You have a Danish passport, I hope?" Helge needled him. The young man's reply had unsettled him, and he wanted to recover his authority.

  "Don't worry about that, as long as your discharge book is in order," Knud Erik said, to smooth it over.