We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  Knud Erik made an effort not to sway. "Take me with you," he said in a thick voice. "I want to see what your underwear buys you." It was a plea, but he made it sound like a command. Not that it was the kind of command a captain would give to a crew member if he wanted to maintain respect. Show me the way to the gutter, let us be companions in degradation!

  He'd left his cell to commit weaponless suicide.

  Anton and Vilhjelm weren't there. If they had been, they'd have stopped him. Wally didn't have the maturity or the experience for that. He saw the boy's eyes flicker, but he knew he wouldn't dare raise an objection.

  "Aye, aye, Captain" was all he said.

  Absalon came up next to him. "But Captain...," he said.

  Knud Erik could hear it was the start of a protest. After all, leaving the ship was tantamount to deserting it. The Liverpool docks were bombarded incessantly. They had to keep remooring. A captain couldn't just walk off in circumstances like that. It would be an unforgivable dereliction of duty. Never mind; he'd just have to add that one to the list. He made a deprecating gesture. "Vilhjelm will look after her."

  Absalon looked away.

  He and Wally kept their distance from Knud Erik on the road to the railway station, which ran between rows of bombed-out houses, where lean men and women were sifting through the bricks. There was no hostility in it. He was the captain, and they were just trying to uphold what remained of his dignity.

  He'd once told Wally that he wasn't his buddy—but this was what he was trying to become now. He felt the poison of self-loathing spread. He hoped that it would kill him.

  He fell asleep on the train to London, and Wally woke him when it stopped at the platform. Dazed, he looked around the compartment. Moving between New York and England always felt like time traveling: the Americans existed in a permanent prewar state, with well-nourished bodies and faces that exuded health, while the English, with their skin drained of color, looked like blurred, yellowing photographs of half-remembered people in an old album kept in a dusty attic, vegetating in a shadowland of ever-decreasing rations.

  They'd just left the station building when the air-raid alarm sounded. It was night, and a dense darkness lay between the houses. They stopped short, not knowing what to do. Spotting some people running, they took off in the same direction. Somewhere a faint red light glowed, marking the entrance to an air-raid shelter. The irony wasn't lost on him. At sea, a red light meant yet another life on his conscience. Here it meant salvation. For a moment he had the urge to simply stand there and wait for the bombs to rain down on him. Seeing his hesitation, Absalon grabbed him by the arm.

  "This way, Captain."

  He let his legs take charge and followed the others.

  There was no light in the air-raid shelter. They sat tightly packed together, surrounded by pitch-black darkness. He could hear whispers, a cough, a child crying. He'd lost track of Wally and Absalon, and it was a relief to be among strangers. There was a powerful smell of unwashed bodies and musty clothes. An anti-aircraft battery right above the bunker started firing, making the air tremble. Then the bombs started falling. Chalk and dirt dropped from the ceiling: it felt as though death had grown hands and was tentatively feeling their faces before it grabbed them. He heard gasping and whispering. Someone began sobbing uncontrollably and someone else murmured words of comfort, then broke into a panicked "Shut up for Christ's sake!"

  "Leave her alone," another voice interrupted.

  "Please, can we go home?" a child's voice begged.

  A little girl screamed for her mother, and the voice of an old woman responded with the Lord's Prayer. A bomb exploded nearby, and the whole floor shook. For a moment Knud Erik expected the shelter to collapse on top of them. Everyone fell silent, as if death itself had hushed them.

  Then he felt a hand on his. It was a woman's: small and delicate, but with a work-hardened palm. He stroked it reassuringly. He felt her head rest on his shoulder, and he held the unknown woman to him in the darkness. Another bomb fell, and the concrete walls of the shelter groaned from the pressure. Someone started screaming. More screams followed, and soon the darkness vibrated with panicked shrieking as the confined people surrendered to mass hysteria, while the bombs drummed outside in accompaniment.

  The woman put her hands around his neck and started kissing his mouth greedily, then fumbled at his groin. He slid his hand inside her coat and felt the contour of her breast. Her burning hot sex welcomed him. The screaming surrounded them like a wall as they took each other in blind, brutal lust, with the bombs dictating the rhythm of their thrusts. Yet there was selfless tenderness in the soft, anonymous body that united with his own. She offered him the warmth of life itself, and he offered it back until their moans of pleasure mingled with the cacophony of terrified voices.

  And for a moment he escaped the little red lights.

  Some hours later the anti-aircraft battery above the air-raid shelter stopped rattling, and the sirens sounded the all clear. The door opened onto a dark street. It had to be the middle of the night.

  He lost her in the crowd heading for the exit. Or perhaps he'd let her go deliberately. And perhaps she'd let him go too? Fires burned outside. He scanned the faces in the flickering light. Her? Or her? The young girl with the scarf around her head and her eyes fixed on the ground? Or the middle-aged woman with the hard face, trying to fix her smeared lipstick in the glow of burning houses? He didn't want to know. Both he and the unknown woman had found what they were looking for. Faces and names were irrelevant.

  He stayed in London for three days.

  He did it in back yards, in pub toilets, in hotel beds; he did it to the thunder of bombs and he did it without any accompaniment other than his own panting and that of his arbitrary partner; he did it until he reached a place where silence and darkness met and took him. He drank with men and he had sex with women who felt just the same way he did. When the bombs dropped, nobody knew who would shortly be joining the rapidly growing numbers of the dead, or whose workplace had been reduced to rubble or whose family was buried under a collapsed house. They all lived so steeped in fear that the losses they had yet to suffer had already consumed them. Every single second was a rebirth, every kiss a stay of execution, every shuddering breath in the arms of a stranger a declaration of love to life. Every drunken stupor—the permanent stupor he'd sought and found—was a gift, because just like a bullet to the brain, it eradicated all he was—his face, his name, his past—and unleashed all the hunger in his body. For three days he was his own ruthless appetite for life and nothing more.

  On their last night they gathered up the remaining contents of their suitcases: underwear, nylon stockings, coffee, cigarettes, and dollars. Dollars especially. They behaved like Yanks and paid for a night in a hotel suite that took up an entire floor. They brought in the girls themselves and tipped the waiters generously. The porter kept an eye on their bar account to warn them when their money was running out. They ate, drank, danced, and whored through yet another night of bombing. Wally was in charge of the gramophone. They danced to Lena Horne and knocked back beer, whiskey, gin, and cognac.

  The air-raid alarm went off at eleven o'clock. The waiters hammered on the door and called out to them to go to the basement.

  "I suggest we stay here," Knud Erik said. He'd dropped the commando tone. He wasn't the captain now, but a mate among mates.

  "Aye, aye, Captain." Wally saluted him and poured himself another cognac.

  They switched off the light and opened the curtains. Outside, searchlights were strafing the night sky. The first bombs fell, far away to begin with, then closer. It sounded like a drummer testing his kit before his great solo. The building shook, and they dived under the beds. They knew that a mattress was no protection. But the intimacy of another body was. Their instincts took over: sex made them invincible.

  The bombs came closer and closer. Outside a purple light flickered sporadically and a fiery glow dappled the ceiling. Every time common sense wo
rmed its way into their muddled brains with the message that they should leave this minute and head for the safety of the basement, they grabbed their women tighter and thrust deeper, lust and fear driving them to ecstatic heights. Then they collapsed together, limp and exhausted, flung out their arms, and dozed briefly but blissfully, as if they'd already made it safely through the night.

  But they hadn't. The bombs wouldn't let go of them. The fear returned, with its constant companion, ally, and friend: desire. From the darkness beneath a bed, someone would suggest, "Change? Who wants to swap?" And then a scramble would start, and they'd shuffle across the floor on their stomachs to a fresh, uncharted love nest, where new arms, a new greedy mouth, and new moist openings awaited, while the German bombers beat their kettledrums on the roofs of London.

  At last all went quiet. They crawled out from under the beds, closed the curtains, and lay down next to one another on the untouched beds.

  They'd won.

  KNUD ERIK WAS there when the Mary Luckenbach was blown up.

  The Nimbus was sailing in a convoy north of the Arctic Circle, on its way to Russia, with supplies for the Red Army. The weather was fine and visibility good. They were half a nautical mile behind the Mary Luckenbach.

  The men on the bridge of the Nimbus watched in total silence. They'd seen tankers take a direct hit before; they'd seen two-hundred-meter flames. But they'd never seen anything like this. Neither had Knud Erik. It wasn't terror that silenced him. It was relief.

  The German Junkers flew in so low over the water that it seemed to skim the waves. Just three hundred meters from the Luckenbach, it dropped its torpedoes, then roared across the ship's deck and got caught in the machine-cannon fire. Small flames darted from one of its engines.

  Then the torpedoes reached their target.

  One moment the Mary Luckenbach was there. The next, nothing but a stillness as terrifying as the explosion itself. There was no sign of fire, no wreckage floating on the sea: just a black cloud of smoke that rose with majestic slowness, as if it had the power to lift up thousands of tons of steel and carry them off.

  The smoke rose unbroken to the clouds, several kilometers up, where it slowly spread out until it covered half the sky. Black soot fell silently as snow over the sea, as if the explosion had come from a volcano, rather than the war they were in the middle of.

  There would be no little red lights: that was Knud Erik's only thought. Fifty people had just been wiped out, right in front of his eyes. A minute ago, through his binoculars, he'd seen gunners crouched behind the machine cannons and a black mess boy calmly crossing the deck with a tray. Now they were gone and all he felt was relief: he'd been spared. Not his miserable life, which he no longer valued, but his wrecked conscience.

  They attacked in waves of thirty to forty aircraft, flying only six or seven meters above the water, swarming blackly over the gray sea. The sirens mounted on their wings let off a terrifying howl designed to drive the enemy mad and short-circuit his ability to react. Their twenty-millimeter machine cannons pounded the ships, and white and red tracer bullets sprayed the deck as the planes dropped their torpedoes one by one. The inexperienced gunners on the decks panicked and aimed wildly, their bullets hitting lifeboats and the wheelhouses of surrounding ships.

  It made them shudder with reluctance, but they were forced to admire the German pilots' courage. With suicidal determination, they flew into a wall of fire intensified by the four-inch cannons aimed at them from the escorting destroyers.

  The Wacosta and the Empire Stevenson were hit next, then the Macbeth and the Oregonian.

  It was all over in five minutes. A Heinkel made an emergency landing on the water at the center of the convoy. The aircraft stayed afloat, and the crew crawled out onto one of the wings and held up their hands in surrender. They were no longer enemies. Without their machines they were just defenseless human beings. They kept looking around as if they wanted to catch the eye of every single one of the sailors crowding the rails of the surrounding ships. Then they meekly lowered their heads, awaiting sentence.

  A shot rang out. One of the men clasped his shoulder and turned halfway around before sinking to his knees. A second shot finished him off. He slumped forward into the water, but his lower body stayed on the wing. The three remaining crew started running around him in a panic, looking for cover. One of them tried to crawl back into the cockpit. He was shot in the back. He fell and rolled into the water. The two survivors threw themselves to their knees and clasped their hands beseechingly.

  They'd realized what was happening. They hadn't been transformed: they hadn't become human beings. They were still the enemy, and the proof hung over their heads in the shape of the black cloud that had been the Mary Luckenbach. The Oregonian was lying close by, capsized and sinking slowly after being hit by three torpedoes on her starboard side. Half her crew had, mercifully, drowned. The rest had been rescued by the St. Kenan, where they lay on the deck, vomiting oil, their limbs so frostbitten they'd probably have to be amputated.

  Knud Erik remembered the nights on the Nimbus when they'd tuned in to the RAF frequency. Every one of them had longed to come face to face with a German he could empty his revolver into. At last the enemy was standing before them, not in the form of a war machine, but as a living, vulnerable human being they could hurt and take revenge on. Finally they had a chance to redress the massive imbalance of their lives. In those days, he'd desperately wanted to be on the receiving end of an enemy bullet. Now he felt the same blood lust as the others. It was urgent and strong. The imbalance in him was greater than in any of his crew.

  He saw the two men kneeling on the wing of the aircraft that had been shot down, and the sailors in their hundreds, teeming along the rails of the surrounding ships, some with rifles in their hands, and the gunners in their positions behind the machine cannons. They fired lightheartedly, as if at the shooting gallery of a summer fairground. They probably felt that they were men again, because men aren't cut out to take a pounding and not fight back. They were fighting back.

  The bullets whipped at the water around the aircraft. One of the two remaining airmen shot backward from the wing, as if a mighty hand had come to sweep him off and in doing so, prove just how pointless his life was, how futile his prayers to preserve it. The shot must have come from one of the heavy-caliber machine cannons. He landed in the water and vanished instantly.

  The survivor slumped. He unclasped his hands and settled them on his thighs, leaning forward and baring his neck as if awaiting the mercy shot.

  The rattle of bullets stopped: the men lowered their rifles, and the moment became a solemn one, as if they were all holding their breath before completing the execution. Slowly it began to dawn on them what they'd just done. Even before the enemy had been annihilated, their thirst for blood was quenched.

  Knud Erik pushed the Nimbus's gunner aside. He was an untrained shot. At first the machine cannon spat its bullets straight into the sea, drawing a long stripe of foam across the water, before starting to strike the aircraft wing. Then they hit their target.

  Now he'd killed another human being, and everything inside him collapsed. He fell on the machine cannon, sobbing, oblivious to the hot metal burning the skin of his palms.

  THEY'D SAILED NORTH around Bear Island, on the seventy-fourth parallel, when a new order came from the British Admiralty: spread out. From the briefing Knud Erik had received in Hvalfjörður on Iceland, where the convoy had set out, and from his experience of every other convoy he'd been with, he knew the order was a death sentence. Many rules applied to convoy sailing, but one overrode them all: Stick together. You'll only get through if you're united. On your own, you're lost, and an easy prey for the U-boats, with no protection and no one to pick you up if you're sunk.

  How often had his crew heard that message over the megaphone from a passing destroyer, when, despite Anton's efforts in the engine room, the Nimbus lagged behind: "Stragglers will be sunk." This wasn't so much a warning as a sent
ence, a farewell unaccompanied by the usual encouraging assurance: we'll meet again.

  They knew one thing for certain: the cargo had to arrive. The tanks, vehicles, and ammunition in their hull would continue via some complex route and end up on a distant front, where the fighting between the Germans and the Russians would determine the outcome of the war—and ultimately their own fate. They knew it because that's what they'd been told, but they'd never been sure about the actual mechanics of it. The only part they were familiar with was the sea, the Junkerses and the Heinkels attacking them, the wake of the torpedoes, the ships exploding and sinking, and the men fighting for their lives in the icy water.

  Their contribution to the war effort was important. They needed to keep faith in that. But the moment they received the order to give up their place in the convoy and fight their way to Molotovsk on their own, they realized such faith had been pointless and supplanted it with speculation about the reason for the fatal order. And as always, in a shaky situation involving immense pressure, their guesses hardened to suspicion, and they recalled the rumor that had dogged every single convoy they'd ever sailed with to Russia, a rumor that clung with the persistence of smoke to a funnel, the wake to a propeller, and a torpedo to your precious cargo: they were bait.

  In one of the Norwegian fjords a forty-five-thousand-ton German battleship, the Tirpitz, lay in ambush. She was the biggest battleship in the world, a threat to everything that moved in the North Atlantic and a symbol of the Nazi dream of world domination. Probably the battleship's greatest value lay in simply being that symbol: certainly she rarely ventured out of her hiding place in the fjord, with its protective mountainsides. Instead she lay chained there like the great wolf of myth, threatening a Ragnarök that never came. But now that Ragnarök was imminent: the wolf at the end of the world was going to snap its chain at last and grab the bait.