We, the Drowned

  The day it was set on its plinth, six torpedo ships entered the bay. Like the ships in the harbor, they were garlanded in bunting and they'd hoisted their flags. The wharf was soon teeming with spectators. It was the first time that warships had called at Marstal, and even Albert's committee stopped its work to walk down to Dampskibsbroen to take a look. That same evening, a festive gathering for the officers from the warships had been arranged at Hotel Ærø, and Albert attended the dinner. The sight of the narrow steel-gray hulls at Dampskibsbroen earlier had filled him with a strange unease, and now he succumbed to a dizzy spell similar to the one he'd experienced the first time he studied the boulder in the sea. He spent the entire meal in an odd state of absent-mindedness, which several of those present commented on, attributing his distraction to the huge pressure he was under during the final phase of the memorial's erection. There were moments during the dinner when he felt that the whole evening was taking place at sea. The tables seemed to be floating on the water, with the chairs bobbing around them on the waves. He saw black shadows dart across the blue-gray depths beneath him.

  He was called back to reality by a voice addressing him directly. It was the commander of the six torpedo boats, Gustav Carstensen, who wanted to present his compliments.

  "I heard about the memorial stone. I heard you're in charge of it and that you mobilized the whole town to put it in place. Well, the young have the energy. It's just a question of coordinating it. As a captain, you know more than most about the importance of discipline."

  "I believe in balance between forces, and I believe in fellowship," Albert said.

  "Fellowship is certainly important," the commander responded, looking pensively into the distance. Albert's remark had clearly provided him with a cue to proceed with his own thoughts on the matter. "But fellowship must be created. That's why we need a great cause that people can rally round. Right now, people think only about themselves. We haven't had a war to unite and focus our young people for several generations. A war's what we need."

  Albert looked at him, his eyes still unfocused from the dizziness.

  "But many perish in war, don't they?"

  "Well, obviously, that's the price of it."

  A note of hesitation had entered the commander's voice. He gave Albert a searching look. It was as if he hadn't noticed the person he was talking to until now, and was wondering if he'd been wrong about him.

  "And anyway, the dead will have a grave and a headstone, won't they?" Albert continued, regardless.

  "Of course, of course, that goes without saying."

  It was now clear to Carstensen that the conversation had taken a wrong turn.

  "Go visit the cemetery here, Commander. You'll find many women and some children. You'll also find farmers, a merchant or two, and the odd shipowner, such as myself. But you won't find many sailors. They stay out there. They never get a headstone. They've no grave that their widow and their children can visit. They drown in distant seas. The sea's an enemy with no respect for its adversary. We fight our own war here in Marstal, Commander Carstensen. And that's enough for us."

  Someone proposed a toast to the navy, and the commander seized the opportunity to get away from his conversation with Albert, who left alone, fell back into his brooding.

  That same night the memorial stone worksite was vandalized. The wooden fence that had been put up for protection while the sculptor finished his inscription was knocked down by a gang of drunken shipyard workers. Albert immediately reported the incident to Chief Constable Krabbe in Ærøskøbing, and received a response within three days: the chief constable informed him that the vandals had I been given fines in the police court totaling 315 kroner for drunkenness and breach of the peace.

  As the day of the unveiling approached, Albert's unease grew. Fortunately, there was still plenty of work to be done. He'd already written a detailed history of the breakwater and had it sealed in a lead pipe, which was sunk into the cement foundation of the memorial stone. Now he began composing a speech to read aloud when the stone was unveiled. He portrayed the stone as though it were a human being with human disappointments and hopes, and he referred to life as "a place where joy, sorrow, and failed hopes intertwine, and where the best-laid plans don't always bear fruit."

  He stopped.

  What do you think you're writing? he asked himself. You were supposed to celebrate the breakwater and human fellowship. But you've written yourself into a corner.

  He shook his head and switched off the desk lamp. Where had these doubts come from? He had no reason to question his life's work. The town was flourishing as never before, and that was precisely what the memorial stone was being erected to celebrate. This blasted dizziness was troubling him again. Premonitions, a swimming head, visions. Old wives' tales.

  He got ready for bed. Sleep might offer some respite.

  He stamped his foot angrily as if to scare off the unsettling spirits. The last thing he needed was to grow afraid of the dark, like a child.

  Finally the day arrived: September 26, 1913. Hundreds of people had turned up, and Albert once more recounted the story of the breakwater's construction. A choir of young girls sang a song whose words Albert had written himself, and he'd succeeded in keeping free of pessimism, to the tune of "I Pledge to Guard My Country." Then he pulled off the huge Danish flag that draped the stone and as he did so, the spectators flung bouquets. The chairman of the harbor commission gave a thank-you speech, and the event concluded with three cheers for King Christian X, whose birthday it also was.

  Afterward there was a dinner at Hotel Ærø for a hundred invited guests, including Chief Constable Krabbe from Ærøskøbing, whose wife Albert escorted in to dinner. The menu was roasted hare, cake, and a selection of alcoholic beverages. Albert gave the main speech and finished by inviting the guests to stand and give His Majesty three cheers. Then they sang "King Christian Stood by the Tall Mast," and Albert read out the birthday telegram that he'd written to the king, which he asked those present to endorse. Afterward there were numerous toasts to Denmark and the Danish flag, and several of the town dignitaries gave speeches in praise of one another. At eleven-thirty a telegram arrived from His Majesty, thanking them. Dancing followed.

  As far as Albert was concerned, the evening went off without a hitch. He was present the whole time and had no sense of foreboding. Nor did he suffer any visions of guests in their finery floating around in the sea among the flotsam of well-laid tables.

  After saying good night to the last guests at about two in the morning, he walked around the corner to Prinsegade and returned home to a dreamless sleep.

  When he awoke the next morning, he felt at peace with himself at last.

  Albert Madsen was sixty-nine years old and he'd achieved what he wanted. Although he hadn't had children, which was a regret, the town he belonged to continued to prosper. The shipyards were busy as never before, and the town's leading shipyard would soon switch to building modern vessels, investing in the construction of steel ships instead of wooden ones. Last spring His Majesty the King had paid a visit to the town, which had been decked in bunting in his honor, and the navy's six torpedo ships had been there too. There were plans for a new post office and a copper spire on the church to replace the turreted section of the roof.

  The memorial stone at the harbor commemorating the breakwater showed that the townsfolk remembered their history and acknowledged their debt to their ancestors. STRENGTH IN FELLOWSHIP ran the words carved in Johannes Simonsen's neat lettering. Now Albert Madsen's creed had become the town's too.

  He knew that the reason for his sense of well-being that morning wasn't just the successful conclusion of his grand project, with the unveiling of the memorial stone and the party that followed. It was something much bigger: the harmony he felt between himself and the continuously prospering world he was part of. He opened the gable window and there in the soft sunlight of an early September morning, beyond the latticework of mast tops, it all lay: the breakwater a
nd the archipelago. The cries of seagulls drifted up, mingling with the clang of hammers and the rasp of saws from the town's shipyards. He knew that these same sounds were heard in every port on every continent, and with a kind of triumph he felt himself to be a part of a much wider world.

  Later he would think of this day as "the end," though he never articulated exactly what had been concluded. Not his life, certainly, for he went on to live for several more years. But they were years spent half in reality and half in a world of dreams, and the two were linked by a bridge of terror, for in his dreams he acquired knowledge he couldn't bear alone and yet could share with no one. He ended up living in a town peopled by the dead, and he became death's silent witness.

  VISIONS

  WHAT DOES A ship broker write about in his log? He'll write about the ups and downs of the freight market, about cargo deals he's made, about ships that never returned home, about crews that were rescued, about insurance questions, about profit margins and the fate of his company. But these days, Albert Madsen didn't write about either business matters or his vessels at sea. Nor did he write about his feelings, and he only rarely made a note of his thoughts. It's true that he recorded certain things that were going on inside his head. But mostly these were things he didn't understand.

  A stranger lived inside his head, and he wrote about that stranger.

  Albert wrote about his dreams.

  But not all of them.

  Like most people of a practical nature, he'd once regarded dreams as things made possible only by the hibernation of the rational mind, a confused summary of accidental and half-forgotten events that might once have had a clear meaning but were now lost in a foggy half-world. Like the rest of us, Albert could make little sense of most of his dreams, and didn't try to.

  Then one December night in 1877, when he was captain of the brig Princess, he'd dreamt of a voice calling out to him, warning that he was heading for danger. He'd leapt out of his berth and run up to the deck, and seen that the ship was indeed about to run aground on a large flat sandbank, where it would inevitably founder. The dream had warned him. It seemed that his head contained knowledge he'd been unaware of. A mysterious guest had moved in.

  Two years later he had a similar experience, when he dreamt that the Princess went down in a hard gale. But on this occasion, even though he suspected that this dream too was a warning, he decided to ignore it and left Grangemouth early the next morning, just as a southwesterly storm was gathering outside the harbor. After sailing the ship along the coast the whole morning, he finally had to drop anchor and chop down the masts to avoid being beached. As he clung to the tilting deck and watched the rigging fly overboard, it dawned on him that more than one kind of reality was possible.

  Albert's gift was not one that everyone possessed. He knew he must keep it to himself. We've read about that in the notes he left us, along with his other papers. He wrote that if the premonitions in his dreams were to become public knowledge, they would almost certainly harm him, or at least tarnish his reputation.

  How often have we sat in a fo'c'sle, listening to tales of the klabautermann, the grim reaper who hangs in the mizzen shroud, with his white face and his dripping oilskins? Or of the Flying Dutchman, or the ship's dog that howls in the night, searching for its lost ship? Albert too, when he was a ship's boy, had listened and been terrified and strangely fascinated, yet deep down he'd remained a skeptic. An explanation existed for every unusual event: science simply hadn't discovered it yet. That was always his conclusion, as we sat there in the dusk, exchanging tales that illustrated how there was more between heaven and earth than we could dream of.

  If he'd revealed his ability to see the future in his dreams, most of us wouldn't have hesitated to accept that he had supernatural powers. His reputation on board ship would have been strengthened, and possibly his authority too. But the awe would have been mixed with fear, and he didn't want that. Albert believed a captain's authority should be based on trust in his skills, not on mumbo jumbo.

  In the period that followed the unveiling of the memorial stone, a gray emptiness opened up in front of Albert. He had dreams in which people he knew died, and the next day he'd be startled to see them walking around in the street, as large as life. His dreams were full of riddles: he didn't know the times of the deaths he visualized, but the visions were always dramatic and terrifying. He saw people shot down on the deck, he saw ships burst into flames, he saw black shadows in the sea, and he understood nothing of what he saw.

  But he never doubted that these dreams were telling the truth. He knew that all the people he'd just greeted, whose hands he'd shaken, to whom he had spoken recently but now increasingly tried to avoid, would die in horrifying and inexplicable circumstances. And they didn't have a clue.

  He was walking around in a town of doomed men.

  ALBERT'S FIRST DREAM about future disasters occurred the night between the 27th and the 28th of September, in 1913.

  He saw a ship he knew, the Peace, a three-masted schooner from Marstal—and then he heard a shot. The crew appeared on the deck immediately, bracing the yards and lowering the topgallant sails, then preparing to launch the lifeboat. For reasons he didn't understand, they seemed to have attached huge importance to that one shot. But there was no visible damage to the ship.

  Then more shots rang out and one of the men suddenly clasped his shoulder. His arm was dangling. The head of another was blown backward as though an invisible hand had pulled his hair, sending a jet of blood gushing from his forehead as he collapsed on deck. The shooting was constant now. Several projectiles hit the descending lifeboat, and when it reached the sea's surface, it started to leak. The men were soon up to their waists in water as they worked to seal the leaks. Intense firing continued. Then one by one the masts went overboard, and the ship itself disappeared into the deep.

  The weather was stormy and the sea was heavy. Clouds raced across the sky. The lifeboat lay low in the water. The men worked the oars hard. At first there was terror in their faces, then exhaustion. The light was dimming. It grew dark, and a long time passed before the light returned. Albert realized that it had been night and now it was morning. It was still stormy and the waves ran high underneath the torn, racing clouds. Two of the men lay stretched out in the boat. The others lifted them up and eased them overboard. He caught a glimpse of a pale face, sunken in death. It was Commander Carstensen. He'd clinked glasses with him at the party to celebrate the memorial stone just two nights ago.

  The following night he saw the schooner H. B. Linnemann send out a distress signal. As in the previous dream, he saw the crew scrambling around on the deck, trying to launch the lifeboat. Again he heard shots and was unable to tell where they were coming from. He instantly recognized the ship's captain, L. C. Hansen, standing on the half-deck, right under a flapping Danish flag. Captain Hansen sank down as he pressed his hand to his thighs, where a large, dark patch was spreading. A moment later he was hit in the head and wiped from the ranks of the living. Afterward three of the crew were shot in quick succession.

  Finally it dawned on Albert what it all meant: the brutality, the mercilessness, the inexplicable killings of peaceful seamen, and the sinking of ships.

  He was foreseeing a war.

  He thought about Commander Cartensen: he was about to get the war he wanted. And what would Albert get? He sensed darkly that in these dreams he was witnessing more than just the deaths of people he knew. He was witnessing the end of an entire world.

  He couldn't explain this feeling in any more detail, only that it gripped him like a deep sorrow and sucked the light out of the panoramic view from his gable window. What use would the breakwater be in a few years' time? Yes, the sailor was at war with the sea, but soon there would be another, crueler war that no amount of seamanship could win.

  Albert had neither the imagination nor the political insight to envisage who might start this conflict, nor did his dreams tell him. But he thought about the battleships he'd seen o
n the sea, and the torpedo boats in the harbor, and the submarines, which he'd read about but never seen. To what object on earth can you compare a sailing ship? None. A ship has her own wondrous architecture. But what about the new floating war machines? The submarine seemed to be made in the image of a shark, while the torpedo boats looked like armored amphibians. It was as if the entire modern war industry had taken as its templates the prehistoric monsters that had lived on earth millions of years ago.

  He'd heard enough about the Englishman Darwin's theories on the origin of species to know that life evolved; it did not regress. But surely regression was precisely what mankind was aiming for with these war machines: a return to the brutal and simple life forms of bygone eras.

  Was this what his dreams were showing him, a future in which humanity returned to its amphibian stage and became its own worst enemy?

  The dreams continued. He saw schooners go up in flames. He saw them blown to pieces by sudden explosions at the bow, vanishing into the sea in minutes. He saw men drifting in sinking lifeboats. He saw the terror in the seamen's faces and heard their cries for help as they were sucked down into the deep. Finally, all he could see was the sea itself and its relentless waves. For a long time he felt as though he were floating on that iron-gray water, all alone beneath a clouded sky. He thought that the world must have looked like this soon after its's creation, before life began.