We, the Drowned

  The future that lay ahead of us consisted of more thrashings and death by drowning, and yet we longed for the sea. What did childhood mean to us? Being tied to life ashore and living in the shadow of Isager's rope. And life at sea? We had yet to learn the meaning of it, but a belief that nothing would ever change while we stayed on dry land took root in us. Isager was still Isager. His sons hated and feared him, and so did we. No one knew whether his wife hated and feared him too, but she'd stopped beating him up. She lived in a world of her own now. We'd robbed him of his dog, his house, and his wife's reason, but he remained unchanged. He thrashed us as he'd always done, and taught us nothing. We battled back as we'd always done, and learned nothing. We no longer persecuted him when he walked home on a winter's night after his two-finger toddy with Mr. Mathiesen, the grocer, or threw foul waste into his drawing room on New Year's Eve. But we still filled the inkwells with sand, blocked the stove, jumped out the windows, played hooky, and stole his books. Soon it would be Niels Peter scuffling with him on the floor, and one day it would be Albert.

  Isager was immortal.

  JUSTICE

  WE KNEW THE ROPE. But now it was time to meet the sea.

  Was it true, as Hans Jørgen had said, that the thrashing would never stop?

  Laurids Madsen had once told Albert about punishment on board the Neversink, the naval frigate on which any wretch who transgressed was tied to the mast and whipped till he bled. They beat seven kinds of shit out of him, Laurids said. It was not an expression we were familiar with, but Laurids told us it was American. "Seven kinds of shit": we couldn't help but think that the world beyond our island was like that. The great America was like that. They had more of everything—shit included. We'd never noticed much variety when it came to our own shit. The color might change, and the texture might be either on the runny or on the lumpy side, but shit was shit, wasn't it? We ate everything—cod, mackerel, herring, sweetened gruel, pork sausage and vegetable soup, cabbage—and we knew of only one basic type of shit. So this was what the wide world would do for us. It would change our diet, so we'd be eating deep-sea monsters that our local fishermen never caught: squid, shark, jolly jumpers, bright coral-reef fish; and fruits unknown to our farmers, like bananas, oranges, peaches, mangoes, and papayas; curry from India, noodles from China, flying fish in coconut milk, snake meat and monkey brains. And when they thrashed us, we too would shit seven kinds of shit.

  But in those days we mainly sailed grain to the German and Russian ports on the Baltic Sea, calling at Norway and Sweden for timber. No foreign spices, strange fish, or new fruits for us: peas, porridge, salt cod, and sweetened sago soup with barley dumplings and prunes were our daily fare. All our sauces and soups contained syrup as well as vinegar, the sweet with the sour, but we struggled to find the sweet side to life at sea. And when we were beaten, the same kind of shit still came out of us.

  We said goodbye to our mothers. They'd been around all our lives, but we'd never properly seen them. They'd been bent over washing tubs or cooking pots, their faces red and swollen from heat and steam, holding everything together while our fathers were away at sea, and nodding off every night on the kitchen chair, with a darning needle in hand. It was their endurance and exhaustion we knew, rather than them. And we never asked them for anything because we didn't want to bother them.

  That was how we showed our love: with silence.

  Their eyes were always red. In the morning, when they woke us up, it was from stove smoke. And in the evening, when they said good night to us, still dressed, it was from exhaustion. And sometimes it was from crying over someone who would never come home again. Ask us about the color of a mother's eyes, and we'd reply, "They're not brown. They aren't green. They're neither blue nor gray. They're red." That's what we'd say.

  And now they've come down alongside the wharf to say goodbye. But between us, there's silence. Their eyes pierce us.

  "Come back," their stare pleads. "Don't leave us."

  But we won't be coming back. We want out. We want to get away. Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that's how we're connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.

  Some elements of our new life we'd already learned at home. We knew how to splice a rope's end and strike knots. We could climb the rigging, and the height of a mast didn't scare us. We knew our way around a ship. But we'd stood on the deck only in the harbor, in winter. We had yet to learn how big the ocean is, and how tiny a ship can feel.

  We started out as cooks.

  "Here," the skipper said, shoving a tarnished copper pot at us.

  This pot was the entire equipment of our galley, and in those days the galley was nothing but a clay stove in the fo'c'sle, with a flue made of four boards nailed together, poking up through a hole in the deck. When it rained, the water swept inside, and in stormy weather, when the waves washed over the deck, seawater would cascade down and put out the fire; there were times when we were up to our knees in water. The slightest wind caused the ship to pitch, and then we had to hold the pot in place to stop it from sliding across the floor; we pulled down the cuffs of our sleeves to protect our fingers from the hot handles and watched the sago soup with smoke-stung eyes. Nothing we did was ever good enough. Someone had to be the whipping boy on a ship, and if there wasn't a dog on board, then it was us.

  We were roused at four in the morning and had to be ready with coffee at any point during the day. There'd be time for only a quick nap between any two cups, and then a kick would wake us: "Damn it to hell, you sleeping again, boy?"

  We never had a single hour ashore to visit the towns where we loaded and unloaded. After a year at sea we'd been to Trondheim, Stavanger, Kalmar, Varberg, Königsberg, Wismar, Lübeck, Antwerp, Grimsby, and Hull. We saw rocky coastlines, fields and woods, towers and church spires—but we came no closer to them than to castles in the air. The only land we ever felt under our feet was near the wharf, and the only buildings we entered were warehouses. The wide world we'd come to know consisted of the ship's deck, the smoky cabin, and the permanently damp berths.

  Every night when we were in port, we had to wait until after midnight for the skipper, just to pull his boots off.

  "Are you there, boy?" he'd say in a thick voice as he sat down on the berth, blotchy and panting, with his legs outstretched.

  It was not until then that we could turn in—only to be roused a few hours later.

  We met every winter, when the ships came home to wait for spring and waters free of ice.

  "Do you remember what Hans Jørgen said?" Niels Peter asked. "That the most important thing Isager taught us was to take a beating?"

  "He should have taught us how to keep awake," Josef said.

  He was Isager's son, but he'd gone to sea anyway, while Johan had stayed home to take care of his mother—who since the fire had taken to wandering the fields dressed in rags and calling out for Karo. He was hoping to become a schoolteacher like his father.

  We nodded in agreement. This was roughly the sum of our experiences during our first year at sea: beatings and the never-ending night vigils.

  "The coffee ran out," Albert said. He had sailed on the cutter Catrine for a year. "I was given a quarter pound. It was supposed to last three men for seven days, and the skipper said it had to be strong, and they were always shouting at me because it was too weak. But I got my own back in the end."

  "What did you do?" Niels Peter asked. He'd sailed a year longer than Albert and was still wrestling with the coffee problem.

  "We've got plenty of dried peas, so I burned some and mixed them in with it, and the skipper said, 'That's a fine cup of strong coffee; this will keep a man on his feet,' but then he and the second mate got the bellyache, and that's how they found out. I used four measures of peas to one of coffee, but I never told them that. Anyway, then I had to come up with something else, so I burned a pot of rye instead. And now I'm getting praise for my strong cof
fee."

  "We always get the blame," Josef said, "when the porridge is burned or the peas won't soften or the rye bread goes moldy."

  "My skipper thinks I should eat the food if it's spoiled. 'Eat that moldy bread,' he goes to me one day. 'Swallow those raw peas.' And I said to him, 'No, I'm not some pig that you can just throw any old swill at.'"

  Albert straightened his back. We could tell that he was proud of his reply, but we knew what it would have cost him.

  "So what happened?"

  "I got no breakfast or dinner for two days."

  Lorentz turned up. Johan stepped back and stared at the cobbles, but Josef sent him a challenging look, which Lorentz returned: his days of sucking up to us were gone. He was still huge, but there was a strength to his bulk that hadn't been there before. We had never fantasized about his fat white body the way we'd fantasize about women, though a warm tickling had gone through us when we thrashed his soft flesh. If you were to hit him now, you'd damage your knuckles.

  He said nothing, and we retreated a step. Did his balls finally drop, once he'd climbed the rigging of the Anne Marie Elisabeth?

  Albert sailed another two years on the Catrine. He landed at Flekkefjord, Tønsberg, Fredrikstad, Gothenburg, Riga, Stralsund, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Hartlepool, and Kirkcaldy—and saw nothing. So he signed off. He wanted to get away from the copper pot and the coffee war. The sea was ever-changing, and yet it left him with an impression of sameness. In the autumn he saw it congeal beneath low-hanging layers of stratocumulus cloud. The water moved sluggishly, like liquid mercury. The temperature fell, and when winter announced itself, he saw his own life reflected in the slowly freezing surface of the water.

  The clouds above the frozen sea changed, but he was already familiar with them all. There was plenty for the eye to feast on, but nothing for the soul. He had a hunger for something that no sky could satisfy. Somewhere on the planet there had to be a different kind of light. A sea that mirrored new constellations. A bigger moon. A hotter sun.

  The skipper offered to sign him on as an ordinary seaman.

  "You're a sailor now," he said one night in Stubbekøbing, as Albert helped him pull off his boots. "You can fix a flying jib and a topsail. You know the compass and you can sail by the wind and run before it."

  But instead, Albert did as his father before him: he went to Hamburg to find a ship that would take him farther out into the world.

  Before he left, he went up into the loft at home. Here, among the sacks of potatoes and grain, sat the sea boots his father, Laurids, had abandoned when he left home for the last time. That had been an omen: they'd realized it later. In stormy weather, when the roof shook and the gable quaked, Albert's mother thought she could hear the empty boots stomping about up there on their own. But no one ever dared go up and look.

  Rasmus and Esben had never touched the boots. Out of fear, perhaps—or simply because they'd never matched their father's considerable height and their feet weren't big enough. Only Albert took after Laurids.

  He came down the stairs holding the boots, their wooden soles still scorched from Laurids's famous trip to Heaven.

  "What are you doing with those?" his mother asked. Her eyes were anxious, as though she both hoped and dreaded he'd be throwing them out.

  "I want to wear them," said Albert.

  "You mustn't!"

  Her hand flew to her mouth. Did she fear that bad luck would follow him if he put them on? Was it superstition or premonition? It was hard to tell. There was a mother's worry, certainly. Perhaps she sensed that this time he would be going far, and would be gone many years. Which for her was the same as death.

  "I'm going to" was all he said.

  He had to stoop now to walk through the doorway, and his shoulders filled it.

  "You promised my father to make them like new again," he said, when he arrived at the workshop of Mr. Jakobsen, the cobbler, in Kongegade.

  "That was twelve years ago. You've got a good memory," Jakobsen said. "But a promise is a promise. You can pick them up on Saturday."

  Albert worked seven months as an ordinary seaman on board a Hamburg brig that sailed to the West Indies. He saw palm beaches and flying fish. He saw people whose skin was black and brown. He saw the cowed look in their eyes and their bowed backs and needed no one to tell him that that they knew the thrashing rope. Men like Isager weren't schoolteachers here. They were rulers of these sunny isles, including those where Danish was spoken, and they all ruled by the rope.

  He drank coconut milk and ate alligator meat, which tasted like chicken. He shat seven kinds of shit, but none of it was beaten out of him.

  He'd escaped.

  "It never stops" was what Hans Jørgen had said. But it does. When you become an able seaman, when you're seventeen years old and big and strong enough to defend yourself, then it stops. Albert watched the black and brown men who loaded and unloaded the brig. They didn't have ownership of themselves, and they were forever in thrall to the rope. He wondered what would have happened if he'd been born one of them, to be flayed all the way to the grave. Would he have broken eventually? Or would he have looked for someone he could pass his humiliation on to, just so that he could feel vaguely human? Would he have found a dog to kill, a house to burn down, a woman to drive mad?

  When we met every winter in Marstal, we sized up one another. We were becoming men. Our eyes seemed deeper-set, and our cheekbones jutted: it was as if the beatings we'd suffered over time had led to something permanent. Our hands had grown big, our palms were tough, our biceps bulged, and sinews and veins fought for space on our forearms beneath the blue spider webs of tattoos. We'd grown bigger and stronger, to spite the rope.

  Albert didn't come home. He returned to Hamburg and left again, this time for South America. On his return, he signed off in Antwerp and joined a Liverpudlian bark going to Cardiff to load coal. He wanted to learn English.

  When the bosun yelled, "All hands up anchor!" and "Heave, my hearties, heave hard!" he heard his father's voice, and felt his papa tru close by him once more. He remembered the American words that had so irritated his mother and so delighted him and his brothers.

  "Hanggre," he said in the mess.

  They shook their heads and laughed at him.

  "Monki," they said.

  It was a good while before he realized that his papa tru hadn't been speaking American but pidgin, the Chinese and Kanak version of English. That was what his papa tru had taught him. Pidgin English: the language of cannibals.

  Albert crossed the equator and was baptized, as his papa tru had been before him. They forced him to kiss the ocher-colored Amphitrite, from whose pockmarked cheeks sharp nails protruded. They covered him in tallow and lamp soot, and mermaids and nigger boys held him underwater until his lungs were close to bursting. They shaved him with a rusty razor and gave him a scar that he hid under a beard from then on.

  He learned a song that he sang to us for many years. He said it was the truest song ever written about the sea:

  Shave him and bash him,

  Duck him and splash him,

  Torture him and smash him,

  And don't let him go!

  He sailed south around Cape Horn, where he heard penguins squawk in the pitch-black night and was finally made able seaman. He called at Callao and Lobos, the guano island, just south of the equator. He sailed back to Europe and signed on to a three-masted Nova Scotian full-rigged ship headed for New York. There he went ashore, looking for a job on an American vessel, where the wages would be higher. Perhaps papa tru's dreams of America haunted him.

  But it wasn't his papa tru he met on board the Emma C. Leithfield. It was something else: Isager and his rope, all over again. And this time the battle would have to be settled.

  Later, he told us that he would never forget the moment he first set foot on deck.

  But, we asked him, had he really not heard about conditions on board American ships? Didn't he know that the crews would often mutiny, and that first mat
es were chosen not for their sea skills, but for their physical strength and their fighting prowess? And that the fist or the revolver gave the orders more often than the captain? Had he not known this?

  Albert looked away and chuckled a little, as if deep down he had known, but couldn't bring himself to admit it.

  He looked us in the eye.

  "No," he said, "I didn't know it could be that bad. It was ten months in hell. I'd been there before. But finding the exit was one thing that blasted Isager never taught us."

  THERE WERE SEVENTEEN men before the mast of the Emma C. Leithfield, of whom six were Scandinavians—and in Albert's opinion, the only decent sailors on board. It didn't seem odd to us that he felt this way because we always prefer our own. But he based his opinion on a single observation: they were the only ones who didn't keel over when they boarded the ship.

  When the launch brought the newly shanghaied sailors alongside the Emma, a bunch of dead-drunk Frenchmen had to be forcibly shoved onto the deck, an operation performed by two brutal-looking crimps—land sharks in cahoots with a boardinghouse, where the Frenchmen had already been relieved of their cash. A party of boozy Italians and Greeks followed, while a third boat brought some drunken English and Welsh. Each sailor bore under his arm a small parcel of clothes. That was all he owned. Their hair was unkempt, their faces scarred, and half-empty bottles of whiskey poked out of their pockets. They may have jabbered and shouted in a chaos of languages, but they all came from the same place. They were the dregs of every port on God's earth.

  They were all incapable of doing any work that day. They stared at the anchor chains but clearly hadn't the slightest idea where they led, and after gazing up at the rigging and grinning dizzily, they simply staggered to their quarters. Disappearing down the ladder to the fo'c'sle, they threw themselves on their berths or on the bare floor, where they fell asleep, snoring.