We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  He'd seen it so many times before and he already knew what it meant: yet another betrayal, yet another piece of his already wrecked humanity sinking to the ocean floor along with the Hopemount.

  Then he snapped.

  Shoving the helmsman aside, he ordered full speed ahead and simultaneously pulled the wheel hard to port. They quickly approached the sinking stern. Knud Erik kept his eyes fixed on the struggling man in the water.

  The swimmer threw back his head toward the overcast sky as if fighting for breath. A heavy wave lifted him up and hid him from sight. When he resurfaced, he seemed to be screaming, though the racket from the engines prevented Knud Erik from hearing anything. Then the water around him turned red.

  For a moment Knud Erik thought the trawler had released its depth charge, and he expected to see the drowning sailor shoot out of the sea with his chest exploding, but nothing happened. Had he been attacked by a shark? It was unlikely. Perhaps he'd been injured before he jumped into the water?

  By now a couple of minutes had passed, and the sailor was very close. But his time was nearly up. No one survived that long in the icy water.

  Knud Erik ordered full stop and ran out of the bridge. He climbed the rail and stood on it for a moment, swaying as though hesitating.

  Then he jumped.

  Later, when he tried to explain it to himself, he'd say, I did it to restore the balance in my life. But when he jumped, he didn't have a single thought in his head. He jumped the way you rub your eye with your finger when something irritates it. A red distress light was on, and it was bothering the hell out of him.

  He'd broken the most basic rule of convoy sailing: a ship must never stop to pick up survivors. The rule wasn't there just to prevent them from becoming an easier target for the U-boats, but also to stop the ships behind from colliding with them. In plenty of cases a single deviation from course had set off a chain of collisions, often with fatal consequences for the ships involved.

  But the Nimbus was at the rear of the convoy, so no one would run into them from behind. When Knud Erik leapt into the sea from the bridge wing, it was only the lives of his own crew he was risking. Like every other act committed during a war, it confirmed one rule only to break another. It was simultaneously right and hideously wrong.

  The icy water hit him like a kick to the head. He instantly felt the cold soak through his clothes. He got his head out of the water, gasped, and looked around wildly, already half panicking. He couldn't see the drowning sailor. Then a wave lifted him up and he spotted him. He swam toward him with furious strokes that made his blood pump faster. The drowning man's mouth was still open, and now he heard his scream, full of pain and ecstasy. Then, as the distress light threw its red glow across his face, Knud Erik saw that the sailor wasn't a man at all, but a woman with short black hair and narrow, Oriental-looking eyes, of which only the whites were visible. If it hadn't been for her scream, he'd have assumed she was dead.

  Then he reached her. Her eyes returned to normal, but her gaze was oddly elsewhere, as if she was concentrating on something happening inside her. He thought she must be in shock. He started dragging her back to the ship. He had to hurry now. The cold spreading through his body was beginning to paralyze him. He'd have to give up soon, and he had no life jacket to keep him buoyant.

  Most of the men at the rail were cheering him on as if he was a runner approaching the finish line. They'd hung a ladder over the side. Absalon was waiting on the bottom step, holding on with one hand and stretching out the other. The raging sea had soaked him through. Someone threw a line; Knud Erik grabbed hold of it and let himself be pulled over to the ladder. Then Absalon grasped his hand and pulled him up. His other hand supported the woman by her arm; she still seemed unaware of what was happening. She'd stopped screaming and a gentle smile had spread across her lips. As he yanked her out of the water, her naked abdomen revealed the guts spilling out of her. It was death that had made her gaze so distant and quelled her screams.

  He tried to throw her over his shoulder, but a soft object blocked him. He looked down a second time. There was something coming out of her, but it wasn't her intestines. It was an umbilical cord. And in her arms she was cradling a baby. A small, creased, puce-colored human bundle, born underwater.

  Her childbirth must have started even before the Hopemount was torpedoed. In the icy water, with only a few minutes' grace before she froze, the mother had fought not only for her own life but also for the baby's.

  Gripping the woman beneath the thighs, Knud Erik lifted her up to Absalon, and from the rail countless hands reached out for them.

  Just then he heard the dull undersea roar of depth charges, followed by the sound of heavily falling water. He closed his eyes and knew that the woman in his arms was now the sole survivor of the Hopemount.

  Dear Knud Erik,

  Last night they bombed Hamburg, and the whole sky was lit up by the glow of the flames. They say that the fire reached several kilometers into the air and that the asphalt in the streets melted. It thundered all night as loudly as if the bombs were falling on Ærø. The cliffs at Voderup started collapsing. The last time that happened was in 1849, when the Christian the Eighth blew up in Eckernförde Fjord, and Hamburg is so much farther away.

  An American pilot was found drowned in his parachute out at the Tail. The Germans ordered him buried at six o'clock in the morning. I think this was to avoid a scene, but we all turned up at the cemetery with a rake and a watering can and told them it was a Marstal custom to tidy family graves early in the morning. I don't think the Germans fell for it.

  Apart from that the Germans here on the island are calm and sensible.

  Everything in Marstal is peaceful. As always, death comes from the sea.

  The fishermen are afraid of catching corpses in their nets, so no one is eating the eels this summer, though they are much fatter than usual.

  Many people are keeping pigs in their back gardens even though there is a ban. Marstal must have looked like this a hundred years ago, when there were still pens in the center of the town. However, it burns to the south, and we hear the bombers day and night.

  Few sailors attend the Navigation College, but those who do get a lot of attention from the many women in this town who have not seen their husbands for more than two years. I don't judge them. There is a shortage of everything, including love. Personally I broke the habit of needing love, but not everyone is like me, and the older I get, the more understanding I grow. I missed out on so much. Some of it is my own fault, some of it not. I had a great mission. I wanted to make it possible for women to love. Today I think I failed. I did achieve a few things, but not for me. On the contrary: I pushed you away, and Edith, who now lives in Aarhus, I see only rarely.

  I used to think that when a woman met a man, she would lose not only her virtue but also her dreams. When she has a son, she is rewarded for losing her virtue, but she loses her dreams all over again.

  There was so much I wanted for you. You wanted something else. I was disappointed and I withdrew my love. I have never learned to love without conditions. I did not think that life had given me anything, so I decided to take what I wanted for myself, but life was not prepared to bargain with me. Perhaps the greatest thing you can achieve is to love without demanding anything in return. I don't know. I don't think I can make the distinction. So much of what is called love seems to me merely bitter constraint and self-sacrifice.

  I think about you every day.

  Your mother

  EVERY COMMUNITY HAS its own myths, including the community of ships that sailed the convoy routes to Russia. Their myths were improbable, verging on the completely unnatural. They made you listen and gawk at the same time. And yet unlike most popular legends, they were true. Take the one about Moses Huntington.

  Moses Huntington was black, from Alabama: as well as a sailor, he was a tap dancer. He had a deep, melodious voice, and he tapped his feet to his music. But it wasn't these talents that gave him his m
ythic status and made men who met him ask for his autograph.

  It was the Mary Luckenbach.

  Moses was the mess boy Knud Erik had seen through his binoculars, carrying a pot of coffee across the deck of the Mary Luckenbach in the last moment of her existence. A second later the torpedo had hit, and instead of a ship there was a column of black smoke rising several kilometers into the sky, where it began to spread and rain black soot.

  The Mary Luckenbach was gone. But Moses Huntington was still there.

  He reappeared half a nautical mile down the convoy, where the British destroyer HMS Onslaught picked him up. No one could explain his survival, least of all Moses himself. It defied nature. Yet it had happened, and here he was to prove it, alive and tap dancing. And all the men who heard his story straightened their backs and renewed their faith that there'd be life beyond the war.

  Then there was Captain Stein and his Chinese crew, on board the Empire Starlight. The Starlight was the most-bombed ship in history. From the April 4, 1942, up to and including June 16, 1942, the ship was attacked almost daily by German bombers: Messerschmitts, Focke-Wulfs, Junkers 88s, you name it, sometimes up to seven times a day. The Empire Starlight took one direct hit after another. She was anchored off the coast of Murmansk, and the crew could have gone ashore if they had wanted to. But they didn't. The Empire Starlight was their ship and there was no way they'd abandon her. Every time she was attacked, they'd fix whatever could be fixed. They took in survivors from other ships. They shot down four enemy bombers. "Come and have a go" was their attitude. They were nothing but a bunch of Chinamen with a Yankee skipper, but they never gave in.

  During the ship's final days they camped on land because by then the Empire Starlight was so wrecked, it was impossible to stay on board. But they kept rowing out to carry on repairing her, so that she grew to be their ship, literally, more and more as each day passed.

  They wouldn't give in.

  Like the story of Moses Huntington, it sounded impossible. It defied nature. But it had happened. Which meant it could happen. And those who heard the story gritted their teeth and held their heads high.

  And then there was Harald Bluetooth, the boy born in a sea filled with U-boats, torpedoes, depth charges, and drowned sailors—a sea where lives usually ended rather than began.

  Everyone believed he was dead when he arrived on deck, and they gathered around him and his mother in respectful silence. But he wasn't dead, and Knud Erik cut the umbilical cord and they wrapped him in woolen blankets, though they all thought that within a few days he'd be heading back into the freezing waters he'd just emerged from. But he didn't.

  The Danes on the Nimbus christened him Harald Blåtand. The ship already had a Knud, a Valdemar, and an Absalon on board, so why not a Harald Blåtand, another early Danish hero? However, the Danes were a minority on board, so of course his name got Anglicized, and he ended up as Bluetooth.

  It was under this name that he became a myth. Like Moses Huntington and the Empire Starlight, he should have died, but he'd gone on living, contrary to all expectations. In his case, the borrowed time was counted from his very first breath.

  His mother had no objection to the name and said so once she'd re-covered, which she did very quickly. New mothers are hardy creatures. She turned out to be Danish as well, though she didn't look it. Her grandmother and her mother were from Greenland, and even the Eskimos there are a kind of Dane. Her grandmother had been a k'ivitok, an oddball who ran around the icecap on her own and refused to mix with other people. However, she'd done so eventually—and rather thoroughly too. The man she chose was a middle-aged Danish artist who never even saw the daughter he fathered. The daughter had married a Canadian called Smith.

  They were sitting in a semicircle around her as she told her story. She was lying in the berth in the captain's cabin—nothing less would do. But it was Bluetooth who was the guest of honor. He was snuggled at his mother's breast, sound asleep, as if nothing more astounding had happened to him recently than a perfectly ordinary birth.

  It was when she mentioned her Canadian father that Knud Erik leaned forward and studied Bluetooth's mother.

  "Miss Sophie," he said, hesitantly.

  "No one's called me that for a long time. Neither Missus nor Miss, though I happen to be unmarried. Not that it's relevant. I still go by my maiden name, Sophie Smith. Yes, that's me."

  "Little Bay?" Knud Erik said. He wasn't checking that he was right. He just didn't know what else to say.

  "Yes, Knud Erik, I recognize you. You don't need to introduce yourself. You called me a bitch when we said goodbye. You're still the same handsome boy. You've grown taller. But then you hadn't quite grown up then. And your eyes—they're not quite the same."

  "When you disappeared, I thought you'd died."

  "Yes, I guess I owe you an explanation. I was wild in those days. I wanted to see the world, so I ran off with a sailor. He soon got tired of me and I got tired of him. So I became a sailor myself. I was the steward on board the Hopemount." She looked around at them. "Where are the others?"

  "You're the only survivor."

  She looked down at Bluetooth and caressed his face with a finger. A tear rolled down her cheek.

  "It was Knud Erik who...," Anton said.

  She looked at Knud Erik. "I once said that you'd drown. But I was just trying to make myself interesting. Instead, you saved me from the water."

  "I still have time," he said. "To drown, I mean."

  Sophie didn't say who Bluetooth's father was, nor did she seem to attach much importance to it. He hadn't been one of the lost men of the Hopemount, as they'd originally believed, and they got the impression that Bluetooth was the fruit of one of the many casual encounters that wartime so lavishly offers. She assured them that she hadn't planned to give birth on the open sea in the middle of a convoy on the most dangerous route the war could offer. She'd intended to be back in England before her due date, but the Hopemount had been stuck in Murmansk for five months, and given the choice between a Russian hospital and the sea, she'd definitely preferred the latter.

  She helped out in the mess with Duncan and Helge. A stoker cobbled together a cradle for Bluetooth. Herman sat in the mess, as usual, except when he was sent to the bow to keep a lookout, and when he wasn't washing down his vodka according to his scientific method, he used his jerking-off hand to gently rock the baby. Together, Old Funny and Bluetooth, the ugly idol of war and the small growing seed of defiant, promising life, formed the core of the ship.

  The Nimbus sailed to Iceland and from there to Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax they returned to Liverpool. They celebrated Christmas on the Atlantic.

  Old Funny told his stories. For the time being, all the crew demanded of Bluetooth was his existence. And exist he did. He wet and soiled his diapers, which were improvised from dishtowels and dishcloths; he burped and gurgled, sucked and cried; he got diaper rash and then colic. But most significant were the happy times when his eyes, like telescopes, would examine the mess as though it were the universe, whose secrets he was trying to discover. Twenty sailors stared back at him as if they were at the movies. They all wanted to hold and tickle him, they all wanted him to chew at their fingers and tug on their ears. They volunteered for diaper changing and babysitting and gave advice on care and diet. Together they possessed a wealth of knowledge about babies that Sophie had to admit exceeded hers. She'd given birth to Bluetooth, but he was her first, so she was no expert, and if anyone offered good advice, she was happy to take it.

  "He's a degausser," Anton said.

  The degausser was the electrical cable that circled the waterline. It reversed the ship's magnetic charge, to prevent her attracting magnetic mines. That was Bluetooth's function too: not only to unite the crew but also to protect them, mostly from themselves. He helped them take some kind of root in the middle of the heaving sea.

  Your roots aren't to be found in your childhood so much as in your child. It's he who provides your link to t
he world, and home is wherever he is. It suddenly dawned on Knud Erik that it was Bluetooth he felt connected to, not Sophie.

  They'd met twice, both times by coincidence, but two coincidences don't make a pattern. The first time had been nothing but an immature infatuation, and on Sophie's side not even that, but just a frivolous game with an impressionable boy. She admitted so herself when they happened to talk about it. He'd barely got to know her. The only thing that had tied him to her was the unresolved way they'd parted, and her sudden disappearance.

  Knud Erik was no longer attracted to her. But then, he wasn't attracted to any women. That was the problem. He was attracted to a moment's ecstasy in the thunder of an air raid, and nothing else. He preferred to make love in the dark and he only wanted to see a face in a flash of phosphor from a bomb detonating close by. He suspected that, deep down, Sophie was a kindred spirit and that Bluetooth had been conceived during a blitz.

  Something united them, but it was no longer budding desire. It was those icy minutes they'd spent together in the water, close to death, when he'd leapt into the sea to save her. Really, it was he himself he'd been trying to save, he supposed. She'd just been the random pretext.

  They spoke a lot, and that was what made the greatest change in his life. She'd moved out of the captain's cabin into Helge's; Helge now bunked with the second mate. Though she'd stopped sleeping there, the captain's cabin was no longer a solitary den. She was a few years older than Knud Erik, and both were experienced and disillusioned. She'd lived the dream of her youth to excess, but in the meantime she'd outgrown it and hadn't found a replacement. She'd seen the world too: he could reel off one port after another, and she could match his list, as one sailor to another. That was the note they struck together.

  It was a stage he never got beyond, nor did he try to. He never sought out the feminine in her, and perhaps that was why she accepted him. Once she'd hidden behind the stilted, literary language of a bookish and dreamy young girl. Since then she'd acquired the manner of a hardened sailor. It was a world he knew and felt safe in and he had no need to explore what lay behind it. He had neither the energy nor the courage. Anton's advice was still valid: it was better to forget.