We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  Knud Erik didn't join in this conversation: he sat alone, scanning the women at the opposite end of the hall. Was his angel of death among them? He wasn't sure he'd recognize her out of uniform. He knew now that it was the unexpected sight of a machine gun in female hands that had attracted his attention. They'd stared into each other's eyes. And he felt oddly convinced that if she was here tonight, she'd try to catch his eye again. He didn't need to look for her. She'd find him.

  Nevertheless, he continued studying the women's faces. Most were fleshy and worn, with a bottomless exhaustion that seemed close to resignation. It provoked tenderness in him, but it wasn't a human being he was searching for. It was the most extreme kind of self-obliteration.

  They visited the club three nights in a row but not once did he feel the unease of that penetrating gaze on him, though women did look at him. He wore his captain's uniform to make it easier for her to recognize him, but the gold stripes on his sleeve and cap attracted women other than the one he sought. A young one in a green dress that matched her eyes kept staring at him, but he turned away and ignored her clear interest.

  The dancing was well under way. Men and women settled down at one another's tables. The barrier between the Russian women and the foreign sailors had fallen. Wally, the experienced boy-man with the big appetite for women, was—as ever—at the center of it all. As for Knud Erik, he stayed on the red velvet sofa and avoided the dance floor.

  That same evening Molotovsk was attacked from the air. The German Junkerses were aiming for the harbor. The midnight sun glowed on the horizon when the air-raid alarm sounded. The Nimbus was the only ship in the port and an obvious target. The half-drunk crew jumped from the deck onto the wharf and started running around in panic. There were no shelters in the area, and the first bombs were already falling. The anti-aircraft guns around the harbor were responding furiously. They too were operated by women.

  A little distance away lay some huge cement pipes that could serve as shelters: the men ran inside them. They were big enough to stand upright in. One of the already destroyed warehouses took a direct hit. Farther away a transport truck exploded. Hard cracking noises resounded in the pipes, and they jumped. It was the heavy-caliber shells from the anti-aircraft guns; they hadn't made it to their target and were showering down from the sky like iron rain. Then they heard the shrill sound of a Junkers spinning, followed by the hollow boom of a bomb. A bomb, or a stricken aircraft colliding with the ground.

  The anti-aircraft guns kept on firing. They saw an unfolded parachute float toward the ground, with the pilot dangling from the cords. The man hit the ground flat and the chute settled on top of him. He didn't reappear and nothing stirred under the thin material.

  The alarm was called off shortly afterward. The Nimbus was still lying by the wharf where they'd left her. She didn't appear to have been hit, but a bomb crater on the wharf showed that it had been a close call.

  A sudden impulse made Knud Erik head for the parachute. Anton came with him. He lifted the fabric and pulled it away to reveal the pilot's face. His blue eyes were wide open, and so was his mouth, as though his own death had surprised him. He lay in a dark red pool of guts. His lower body and legs were twisted at an odd angle; looking closely, they could see that he'd been torn almost in half. He couldn't have received the injury when his aircraft was hit: he'd never have been able to leave the cockpit. The women who operated the anti-aircraft guns must have used him for target practice as he drifted down. The heavy cartridges designed to bring down an aircraft had shredded his body, and dark stains soaked through the fabric of the parachute. He must have landed with the blood squirting from his exposed intestines. Something in them came to a standstill. "It's no use, Skipper," Anton said eventually.

  Knud Erik looked up. Anton had never called him skipper. Yet he felt as if it were the first time in months that another human being had addressed him. "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "I know what you're thinking. It's no use you trying to make any kind of sense of what you go through in this war. No use blaming yourself, either. The only thing that helps is forgetting. Forget what you've done, and forget what others have done. If you want to live, then forget."

  "I can't."

  "You'll have to. It's the same for all of us. Talking about it does nobody any good. It only makes it worse. One day the war will be over. Then you'll be back to who you were."

  "I don't believe that."

  "We have to believe it," Anton said. "Or I don't know what'll become of us." He placed his hand on Knud Erik's shoulder and shook him gently. "Come on, Skipper. Time for us to turn in."

  The next day, he saw her. She was standing on the wharf in her uniform, with the machine gun hanging from the strap. Even before he looked up, he felt her gaze resting on him as if they had a secret connection, a kind of sensitivity to each other's presence that created a bond. He didn't understand its nature; her look never developed into a smile or a nod that might betray her real intentions. He held back too. Only their eyes connected. In her rigid face, unapproachable as any other soldier's, he saw no sign to suggest that this exchange was anything but a test of strength; its only possible outcome would be one of them finally falling on their knees in surrender.

  A sudden thought filled him with terror: she'd execute another German prisoner working in the harbor. And she'd do it for him, as if a dead body might provide a new link in some secret connection that strengthened by the day. To his relief, nothing happened.

  The unloading was proceeding slowly, and they guessed that it would be some months before they'd be able to leave. By now most of the crew had found themselves girlfriends, and all of the women appeared at the club with red lips. Several had eyes lined with kohl, and in the breaks between the dances, there was unashamed hand holding.

  It was another seven days before she appeared in the club.

  He was disappointed when he saw her. Had it not been for those eyes, which, as usual, stirred a tickling sensation at the nape of his neck, he wouldn't have recognized her. Her thick ash-blond hair was parted at the side and fell heavily across her forehead. She'd put on red lipstick like the others, and she stared continuously at him from the table where she sat alone. The other women seemed to keep their distance from her. He immediately stood up and went over to ask her to dance. The others, both men and women, were staring at him now. It was the first time the captain of the Nimbus had joined them on the dance floor.

  She was wearing a white, freshly ironed shirt. She had lines around her mouth and was probably in her midthirties. Life had left its mark on her, but she wasn't unattractive.

  It wasn't her appearance that disappointed him. But now that she'd taken off her uniform and laid down her machine gun, she was just a woman like the others. She was no longer his angel of death. He'd been mistaken about that. She'd simply looked at him the way any woman looks at a man and there'd been nothing else to it. He'd been so affected by all the destruction he saw, and participated in, that his normal sense had evaporated. All he sought was oblivion and he sought it with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from a desire for obliteration.

  He put his arms around her and she pressed herself against him. She was a good dancer and they stayed on the dance floor for a long time. She never took her eyes off him, and he could see the longing in them. She wanted something that he felt he no longer was: a human being. She wanted his tenderness and his embrace. But he had nothing to give to anyone, only a brutal, urgent lust that sought its own relief.

  How could she hope for anything, she who'd shot down a defenseless human being before his eyes and made herself a part of the horror that surrounded him? How could she feel tenderness, love, longings, or even infatuation? Did she see something in him that he couldn't see in himself? Did she think she could find salvation in him, that one night of love could give her back what she had lost forever when she killed another human being? Where did such optimism come from?

  Or was she simply so callous that
she could inhabit two separate worlds at once, that of killing and that of love? He couldn't. He knew it for certain, but his body reacted when she pressed herself against him, as though a part of him still possessed a hope that the rest of him had lost.

  They left the club together some hours later. They hadn't spoken. Unlike the others on board, he hadn't bothered learning the Russian for those few words that pave the way: yes, no, thank you, hello, good night, goodbye, you beautiful, we make love, I never forget. She'd tried exchanging a few words with him, but each time he'd shaken his head.

  It was light outside, the smoldering, dying, yet powerful light that fills the summer nights north of the Arctic Circle. She rested her head on his shoulder. All he knew about her was her name, Irina, though he'd have preferred to go without even this basic information. He wondered if Irina was the equivalent of Irene. He'd never met a girl with that name, in Russian or Danish, but he'd always thought it embodied feminine refinement and fragility. Now he was walking beside one, and she was a cold-blooded murderess.

  They walked in the direction of the sooty, tarpaulin-roofed huts. He supposed that they must be barracks, but there were no guards or blockades. He'd heard a story about a sailor smuggled into such a barracks by a girl. They'd lain down on a bed in a large dark dormitory, and he'd just got his trousers off and was ready for action when the lights came on. And there he lay with a proud erection and a circle of women standing around the bed, gawking.

  These barracks turned out to be empty. They stopped in front of a cubbyhole with a padlocked door. She found a key and unlocked it. Then she rolled down the blackout blind and lit a petroleum lamp. A bed and a table were all she had. On the table stood a photograph of a woman he thought must be her. She stood in a clearing among some trees, with a man in uniform; they held the hands of a girl about five years old. The sunlight dappled the ground, and the man and woman were smiling at the photographer. The soldier had taken off his cap and put his free arm around Irina's shoulder. She was wearing a white shirt just like the one she was wearing tonight.

  Where were they now? The man had to be at the front or dead. God only knew where the girl was. She certainly wasn't in Molotovsk. Perhaps she'd been evacuated to a safer place, deep in this vast country?

  Irina looked away when she saw his eyes linger on the photograph. Her averted face gave him the feeling that both the man and the child had died. She lay down on the bed and waited for him. He slipped in and put his arm around her. He touched her breasts with his hands. How soft and warm her skin felt. He wanted nothing but this softness and warmth. It was need, more than desire, that welled up in him—bestial but without violence. All he wanted was to touch living, breathing skin, even if its warmth came from a woman who was used to killing and did so without so much as blinking.

  What had she thought when she'd looked at him after firing her machine gun? Had she sought forgiveness, understanding? Had she asked herself, and perhaps him too, if he could still look at her and see a human being?

  He felt the warmth of her skin under his palm, its infinitely pliable softness, and he placed his cheek against her naked breast like a shipwrecked man who has got himself out of icy waters and presses his face against the beach and feels solid ground. He wanted to lie like this forever, never stir again, merely exist on a continent of naked, warm female skin that stretched endlessly in every direction.

  Then she started to cry. She hugged him tightly, her hands ran through his hair, she repeated his name in a pleading voice, nothing but his name, over and over. She was drowning, just like him. Everything in him contracted. Two drowning people can't save each other. All they can do is drag each other down.

  He struggled to free himself from her embrace. He couldn't do this. He'd been alone all along, even when he lay with his cheek against her naked breast. And he was doomed to be alone. He'd sought an angel of death and found a human being, and he couldn't cope with that.

  He sat up in bed with a jerk, leapt out, and ran through the empty barracks, where his footsteps echoed as if all the soldiers who'd once filled the building and were now dead had come back.

  KNUD ERIK WAS sent for just after lunch. Sent for: that was how he thought of the summonses to meetings with the local Soviet authorities. A soldier and an English-speaking official turned up, both in uniform and both female. The official was young, and confident in a way that suggested she regarded herself as a representative of something great. The Soviet state spoke through her, in an English superior to his and in phrases that took the form of commands.

  She wore a faint trace of eye shadow and he couldn't work out where it had come from. He'd never seen her in the club, and he was certain she didn't mix with any of the sailors who called at Molotovsk. If there was any truth in the men's rumor that some of the women were spies, then she was an obvious candidate.

  These meetings generally concerned cargo. Endless discussions were sparked by small details that didn't add up, and he always attended them in the same resigned mood. He knew that he'd be wasting yet another day on bureaucratic squabbling and be forced to listen to insulting comments about the Allies' inadequate war effort.

  On one occasion, however, he'd been pleasantly surprised: they'd handed him an envelope filled with checks for the crew. It was a war supplement. The Russians were paying one hundred U.S. dollars to each man; Joseph Stalin had personally signed the checks.

  "You'd have to be stupid to walk into a bank with this and get your hundred dollars," Wally said, when he was handed his check.

  "Anyway, they might be fake," Helge said. "And then we'd get arrested."

  "One of my friends, a guy called Stan, got one of these checks and went to a bank on the Upper East Side to get his hundred dollars from Uncle Joe. The cashier kept turning it over. 'Do you have a moment?' he said, and took him up to the fourth floor to see the manager. He started staring at it too. Like Helge, my pal thought that something was wrong. 'I'll give you two hundred dollars for it,' the bank manager says. 'What?' my friend says, gasping. He doesn't understand. 'Okay, okay,' the bank manager says. 'Three hundred dollars.'"

  "I don't get it?" Helge frowned.

  "It was the signature. Stalin's personal signature. It's worth way more than the check."

  But this time the meeting wasn't about checks or cargo. The official told him he was going to the hospital.

  "I'm not ill," he snorted. It had to be some kind of mistake.

  "It's not about you," the official said sharply. "It's about a patient we want you to take back to England."

  "The Nimbus isn't a hospital ship."

  "The patient is as well as he'll ever be. He can take care of himself. We can't continue to look after him."

  "So can he work on board?"

  "That depends on what you want him to do. By the way, he's Danish. Like you." He'd never told her he was Danish. She was well informed.

  "Let's go," he said brusquely.

  He'd expected the hospital in Molotovsk to be located near the harbor, but it turned out to be some distance outside town, along one of those roads that seemed to lose itself in the wilderness. The hospital was a long, low building, and no signs suggested that there might be hospital activity behind its crude wooden walls. A heavy woman in dirty overalls had turned the floor into a pool of mud and water, which she stirred with a mop in a doomed bid to give the impression of cleaning. Their footsteps splashed loudly as they turned down a long, murky corridor filled with beds of patients who, judging by the sounds that escaped them, were all dying.

  In a ward where you could barely have squeezed in one more bed, a figure sat slumped in a high-backed wheelchair by the window. He appeared to have nodded off, but he woke when the official greeted him, and looked up drowsily. He was wrapped in a blanket that concealed most of his body, but Knud Erik could see that his left arm was missing. His face was swollen and flushed scarlet.

  According to the information Knud Erik had received, the man had been in the hospital for four months, so the
stark color of his face wasn't due to excessive sunbathing. This was Russia, where the vodka doubtless flowed freely even in the hospitals.

  The man's red face broke into an ingratiating smirk when he spotted Knud Erik in his captain's uniform. He was keen to sell himself, and Knud Erik could see why. He was desperate to get away from this backwater and return to civilization, no matter how bombed-out civilization was at the moment.

  "I understand you're Danish," the man said in a cracked voice, as though it had been a long time since he'd spoken.

  Knud Erik nodded. He held out his hand and said his name. The other man clasped his hand enthusiastically, then appeared to hesitate, as if he couldn't remember his own, or was considering giving a false one. Then he came out with it.

  Knud Erik turned to the official, who was standing behind them with her normally pursed lips relaxed in a friendly smile, as if congratulating two long-lost relatives on their reunion.

  "You can do what you like with this creature," said Knud Erik. "You can take him to the basement and shoot him on the spot, for all I care. Or you can send him to Siberia or wherever the hell it is you send unwanted people here in Russia. But there's one place he most definitely won't be going, and that's my ship."

  He marched out of the ward without looking back, splashing his way up the corridor, where the cleaner had resumed her efforts with the apparently inexhaustible bucket.

  "Captain Friis," the official called out after him. Yet again he had to admire her pronunciation. Her English accent was perfect, and when she said his surname, so was her Danish one.

  He left the hospital and started walking toward Molotovsk. He'd got a fair bit of the way and could already make out the low wooden houses of the town when a car pulled up in front of him. The official stepped out onto the road. It wasn't until then that he noticed that she had a black holster attached to her belt.