We, the Drowned

  "Who says I even want another ship? Oh, shipowner sounds grand as hell. But perhaps it'll soon be an empty title."

  The lack of respect wasn't lost on Albert. How dare this upstart tell him his time was over and his experience worthless? He felt a brief surge of anger as he eyed the young man who stood in front of him, his legs planted apart and a contemptuous look on his face. His shirtsleeves were casually rolled up in the warm summer evening, so you could see the lion getting ready to attack, and the words SMART AND POVERFULL.

  "There are two spelling mistakes on your tattoo."

  Albert instantly regretted his words. He'd allowed himself to get carried away. It was pointless, rising to the bait. Herman was hard, callous. But his brutality was that of the era they lived in. And Albert? His time was over. But so was the town's. That was what no one seemed to realize.

  Herman took a step forward. His huge fists were clenched, but Henckel placed a hand on his shoulder. He immediately froze, as if obeying a secret order. Albert was preparing to take his leave when the engineer spoke.

  "There's a great deal of truth in what you said earlier. Am I right in thinking that these are the words of an old sailor? I grew up in Nyboder myself and my first apprenticeship was at the naval shipyard. I recognize a sailor when I see one, and I know what it means to love the sea."

  Herman stiffened. A dangerous scowl appeared in his eyes, as if he'd been ambushed. Ignoring him, Henckel continued. "It's true that Danish shipping is experiencing a renaissance. The war has brought us prosperity, and we need to maintain that growth." He nodded toward Herman. "More ships! Shipyards! That's what this country needs. Marstal is to have its own yard for building steel ships. You've heard of the Kalundborg Steel Shipyard, and the Vulcan yard in Korsør? Well, allow me to inform you that I'm the man behind them. Now it's Marstal's turn. And it was Herman here who gave me the idea. He's already agreed to be the yard's joint owner. Of course, he's far too modest to mention that himself. But he's put in the considerable sum he raised from the sale of the Two Sisters. Which makes him our first investor. We're building Marstal's future, and the future of Danish shipping." His large freckled hand, with its dense cover of reddish blond hair, gave Herman's shoulder a comforting squeeze. "Indeed, Herman, Marstal has reason to be proud of you. You're a true son of the town."

  Albert looked at Herman, who placidly allowed Henckel's hand to rest on his shoulder, and he understood that the engineer from Copenhagen had succeeded where everyone else had failed: he'd tamed Herman Frandsen. How had he done it? Perhaps, when the young dreamer had bragged about his grandiose schemes, he'd simply nodded his head instead of shaking it. But there was more to it than that, Albert reflected. Henckel had tamed Herman by appealing to his's recklessness. Mentor and pupil were cut from the same cloth.

  Albert raised his stick by way of goodbye. He wanted to be alone with the summer evening before returning home to his bed and his tormented dreams.

  As he left, he heard the engineer invite the men to come and drink champagne at Hotel Ærø. They responded with enthusiastic laughter. He didn't turn around, but continued up toward the memorial stone. He suddenly had the feeling that he'd lived too long.

  He didn't believe in Henckel's promises or Herman's boasts, but Henckel and Herman belonged to the land of the living.

  He belonged with the dead.

  ALBERT SAT IN the church, composing himself, preparing to deliver more bad news because Pastor Abildgaard had cried again. In his days as a captain he'd often be called on to bear tidings of a sailor's death. Back then, he'd have been personally acquainted with the deceased and could speak of him knowledgeably, without resorting to empty generalities. And even though as a captain he kept his distance from his crew members, he knew enough about human nature to notice the men's quirks and tailor his words to the occasion. Albert knew that the captain's utterances mattered a great deal—even more than the minister's. The minister was closer to God, but he wasn't closer to life and death and the line that separates them. And that was what it was about. The captain's words, not the minister's, were on the invisible gravestones people erected in their memory; as for funerals, the minister was always underemployed in a town of sailors.

  Marstal was a small town, so even when Albert hadn't known the dead man well, he'd know enough about him. When the war took a young man, he'd know the father, and could place him that way. If the man was older, he'd know him too. Albert might even have had him as a crew member. So Albert became a presence, a fixed point in the void that yawned open when death came. And in a way, he blocked death, standing in the doorway as a buffer that absorbed the initial shock and anguish of the bereaved, enabling them to succumb to their grief the sooner, and in grieving begin to heal.

  But there was one thing he knew about the dead that he couldn't share with anyone: their final moments, as he'd witnessed them in his dreams. He'd seen them surrender to the foaming waves. He'd seen them shot to shreds by bullets. He'd seen them with frostbitten faces, slumped lifeless across the thwart of an open lifeboat after a day on a winter-chilled sea. This knowledge he kept to himself, yet even as he concealed it, his words of comfort were informed by it. He lied as only a man who knows the truth can lie. He lied away the horror and the pain, but he didn't lie away the death. He didn't speak of the Hereafter because he wasn't Pastor Abildgaard. And that was why they believed him. He was old and he'd been born in Marstal: he'd been one of the town's fixtures, with his broad shoulders and neat beard, ever since he came ashore. Even in the presence of death, he kept his captain's authority. He sat in a family's parlor, where he might never have sat before, and his presence gave death a meaning the family might not otherwise have felt. He helped the mourners guard themselves against the darkness. They didn't feel alone, for it wasn't just Albert who sat with them, but the whole town and all it represented: fellowship, kin, the past and the future. Death was already half-beaten, and's life would go on.

  No one asked to hear about Jesus when Captain Madsen was there, or about where the deceased was now, or whether he was happy. The captain's message was simple: this is the way things are. He taught us a vast, all-embracing acceptance, which allowed life's realities to come at us directly. The sea takes us, but it has no message to convey when its waters close over our heads and fill our lungs. It may seem like strange consolation, but Albert's words offered us a foothold: things had always been this way, and these were conditions we all shared.

  Albert knew that some couldn't get through their crisis without the savior, and he left those to Carl Rasmussen's widow. He didn't regard their faith as a sign of weakness. He knew that people have different ways of coping, though personally he had none. His dreams were haunted. He felt alone, his faith in fellowship shattered. He walked tall when he left the grieving homes, but inside he'd shrunk.

  He didn't know what he needed, so he sat in the church, gathering his thoughts. Most of the time he studied his hands, but every now and then he'd look up at Rasmussen's altarpiece depicting Jesus calming the Sea of Galilee. Outside, the war raged on. More sailors were being killed than ever before and he noted the losses in his ledger. At times he thought he was just like Anders Nørre, an imbecile whose only hold on sanity was the endless lists of numbers that flashed like lightning through the dark night of his mind. What would Jesus have done in the midst of a world war? One crucified man with a spear in his side seemed a trifle when millions were trapped in barbed wire, dying, with their intestines hanging out.

  For his own part, Albert wrote down numbers. In what other way could he contain all this incomprehensible destruction? If anyone ever found his ledger, what would they think? That it had been written by a madman?

  He got up from the hard blue-painted wooden pew, shivering. It was chilly inside the whitewashed church. He glanced again at the telegram in his hand, officially notifying the shipping company of the loss of the three-masted topgallant schooner Ruth: "Location: Atlantic Ocean, traveling from St. John's to Liverpool. Description of l
oss: missing. Wind and weather conditions: unknown. Since she left Newfoundland, the Ruth has not been seen. The ship is presumed lost with all hands."

  His job was to translate that terse verdict into human speech. A ship had been sunk somewhere in the vast Atlantic, within a radius of a thousand nautical miles, by ice, or a storm, or a freak wave. Or by an ironclad prehistoric monster rising out of nowhere, spitting torpedoes, mercilessness incarnate: a reminder that the sea wasn't the only enemy. The result: a young Marstaller gone missing, never to be seen again, and this news about to be thrust in the face of Hansigne Koch, a sailor's widow who two years previously had lost another son, a seven-year-old, in a boating accident in the harbor. This was Albert's task: to guide the woman safely to port, ensure that she wasn't swallowed by the depths as she received the message.

  Earlier, from his bay window, he'd watched Lorentz cross the street with the telegram in his hand. He'd let him in. Having hung his overcoat in the hall, Lorentz eased himself painfully onto the sofa. His many active years had taken their toll. He'd already had one heart attack, and his childhood frailty had returned. He was often short of breath, especially during the cold winter months. His shoulders heaved, and he breathed in rasping, wheezing gasps, exhausted from crossing a single street in the stiff, sleet-filled wind. He'd forgotten to put on his hat: his wet, thinning hair clung to his scalp and his Buddha face was flushed red. He'd brought his indispensable walking stick with him into the drawing room.

  "This time it's the Ruth" was all he said.

  He'd lost two ships before her, and each time he'd informed the bereaved families personally. He probably intended to do so now, but in his condition a walk through town would be a feat of strength that might cost him dearly, and he'd become too old to mount his horse.

  "You've forgotten your hat," Albert said. "Let me do it."

  ***

  So Albert had walked up Kirkestræde to inform Pastor Abildgaard, then gone to the church to compose himself. And now, finally, he stood in front of the house in Vinkelstræde. Hansigne Koch opened the door to him herself.

  "I know why you're here," she said, when she saw Albert's towering figure outside. "It's Peter." When she uttered her son's name, a shock seemed to run through her. The skin beneath her eyes paled and her lips began to tremble. "Don't just stand there," she said suddenly in a brusque tone, and he knew it was to stop herself from collapsing. She disappeared into the kitchen to make the coffee no visitor could escape, no matter how bad the news he bore. Albert entered the parlor and sat down. The room wasn't in daily use and the stove was cold, but he knew that this was where she'd wish to serve him. From the kitchen he heard the clatter of the coffeepot, the scritch of a match, the whoosh of the gas flame. But nothing from Hansigne. If she was crying, she was doing it silently.

  She entered with the coffee cups. They were English tin-glazed earthenware, a gift from her husband perhaps, or an heirloom. When she bent to light the stove, he didn't offer to help, nor beg her not to bother, nor suggest that they drink the coffee in a room that was already heated. He knew that the small household task was holding her together in this moment, just as other daily routines would help her survive the times to come. Coffee was a ritual, as significant as the funeral she'd never be able to give her son.

  She sat down opposite him and poured the coffee. He accounted for the circumstances of the lost ship as well as he could. There wasn't much to say. "Missing" meant only that it had failed to arrive at Liverpool, but it was important that she not draw hope from this uncertainty, for then her mourning would never end. Perhaps it never would, anyway. But hope stops time, and time only heals when it passes. He knew that much.

  He hadn't mentioned the war.

  "Do you think it was a U-boat?" she asked.

  He shook his head. "No one knows, Mrs. Koch."

  "I got a letter from him two days ago. Posted in St. John. He wrote that a lot of sailors had jumped ship. The Ægir couldn't even sail—there wasn't a single hand left. Men deserted from the Nathalia and the Bonavista too, even though they had rye bread on board. On the Ruth they had only ship's biscuits. 'If only I had the crusts that Granddad gives to his hens,' that's what he wrote to me. Oh, I always worried that they weren't feeding him properly."

  She still wasn't crying.

  "A mother never has peace of mind." She went on. "Sometimes I think I won't stop worrying till the day I die. I've been scared since his first minute at sea." She fell silent. Then she said suddenly, "Why does it have to be this way? Always the same fear. But a U-boat's the worst."

  Albert took her hand. He knew it had been a U-boat. He'd seen it himself, in his dreams. The crew had been shot down before they could leave the ship. Peter had been on deck, preparing the lifeboat, when a bullet ripped his chest open and he collapsed. Then the U-boat crew had boarded the ship, doused it with petrol, and set it alight. The rigging and sails flared into a blazing pyre, and the Ruth vanished into the waves with a hiss.

  This was always the hardest moment. He had to stop his hand from trembling too as he clasped hers. He was lonely. But his loneliness was nothing compared to hers; she'd lost her husband and two sons.

  She looked directly at him. Still she held back her tears, as if subjecting herself to some terrible endurance test.

  "Captain Madsen, I feel nothing." There was disbelief in her voice, the disbelief of an accident victim who has been paralyzed from the waist down and suddenly discovers that she can no longer feel her legs. "I knew it," she said to herself.

  "What did you know, Mrs. Koch?" His voice was gentle.

  "When little Eigil drowned, I knew I'd never cry again. I'd never worried about him. What can happen to a child out playing? And then he drowns in the harbor. Oh, Captain Madsen, my heart stood still that day. I think I counted the seconds, and nothing happened in my heart. Not a beat, or a pounding—absolutely nothing. It was completely still inside my chest. Peter was at home. He hugged me and held me close the way I'd done with him all those years ago when he was little. 'Mama, I'm so glad that I've still got you,' he said, and though he couldn't take away my grief, my heart started beating again. He never ever wrote without asking me to say hello to Eigil at the cemetery." Still her eyes were dry. "And now he's gone too," she said. Her words came out disjointed. "Now there's no one I can remember to little Eigil."

  She bowed her head, and her tears fell onto Albert's hand.

  Time passed. Albert said nothing.

  "Well, it turns out I haven't run out of tears after all," she said eventually.

  He could hear the relief in her voice. Her endurance test was over. She'd recovered feeling.

  "There's something else you haven't run out of," Albert said. "Don't forget that there's still someone who needs you."

  Mrs. Koch gave him a perplexed look, then jerked upright as if someone had just called her. "Ida!"

  Lorentz had told Albert something of the family; Ida was Mrs. Koch's middle child, a girl of eleven. Today she'd be at school in Vestergade.

  "Ida," Mrs. Koch said again, and rose with a bustling movement. "I must go and get her."

  Quickly she put on her coat and was soon standing in the hall, ready to go out. They walked together up Vinkelstræde and along Lærkegade. Albert offered to accompany her to the school, but she declined.

  "You said something very true a moment ago, Captain Madsen."

  She shook his hand as they parted.

  "There's always someone who needs us. We might forget it sometimes. But it's what keeps us alive."

  Albert turned into Nygade and shuddered. The sleet blew directly into his face. Was he useful? Did anyone need him?

  He stamped the slushy ground in irritation and wiped his wet face.

  THE WIDOW OF the marine painter often visited the church too. She sat alone on a pew, staring up at Jesus and the troubled sea. Perhaps she was thinking about the savior, or about the children who had been taken from her, one after another, until only one remained. Or perhaps she was po
ndering her late husband. It was impossible to know. The first time Albert entered the church and found her sitting there, with her back to him, he'd left quietly, not wanting to intrude. He'd even checked the time—perhaps she had regular habits—and started coming earlier in the day. If he stayed long enough, she'd always turn up. She didn't leave when she saw him; she simply sat some distance away and began her own quiet worship. He could hear the rustling of her dress and the scraping of her shoes. Once, when he rose to go she looked up, and he nodded briefly to her on his way out. After that he arrived every day at the same time. Eventually, she too would appear. Two old people, sitting quietly at opposite ends of the church.

  Albert wasn't a man who knew how to seek solace. He knew how to be useful to others, and sometimes the two things are one and the same. But the burden he bore was something he couldn't discuss with anyone, and since he didn't believe in God, it followed that he couldn't talk about it at all. Yet he still came to church every day, half an hour before Anna Egidia Rasmussen, and he sat there as though waiting for her arrival.

  If he didn't visit the church to find God, perhaps he went to find a human being.

  One day she sat down next to him. He wondered if that was what he'd been waiting for. He looked up from his hands and greeted her.

  "So you're here again, Captain Madsen?" she said.

  He nodded, not knowing what to say next. The Hydra had been reported missing and he had another message of death to deliver, for the widow of Captain Eli Johannes Rasch. Mrs. Rasmussen had one too.

  "Will this dreadful war never end?" she sighed, as she sank into her usual contemplation of her late husband's altarpiece.

  "No. It'll never end." He spoke in a burst of anger. Suddenly he was doing what he had sworn never to do in the presence of the bereaved: voicing his opinion about the war. "It'll never end as long as someone profits from its continuation."