We, the Drowned

  Now!

  The bomb disappeared with a splash into the water a few meters from the side of the ship. He'd mistaken its trajectory. His muscles were still locked rigid. He waited for the column of water and the sudden keeling of the ship, for the water pressure to burst her steel plates and come flooding in. But nothing happened. The bomb was a dud.

  He waited for the next one.

  The noise was deafening. Two oil tanks on the north side of the Thames had caught fire, and a frustrated roar sounded from the sea of flames, like the great mythic wolf of Ragnarök straining on its chain at the end of time, howling to be unleashed on the whole world. The black smoke was a clenched fist headed for the distant stars, extinguished one by one in the roil of darkness and toxic fumes. Beneath its black lid everything was ablaze, as though the sun itself had been shot down and was flaring for the last time in the midst of the ruined oil tanks.

  The whole of Southend was on fire. The windows in the tenement blocks glowed in the blaze; flames leapt from the roofs like strange vegetation growing at explosive speed, determined to consume the very soil it grew in, and the docks shuddered in convulsions of destruction. Fire flashes spurted from the anti-aircraft batteries on the roofs that were still intact. The ships on the river were firing too. Knud Erik could hear the sputter of the old Lewis machine gun that had been mounted on board the Dannevang some months earlier: the British navy had trained four of the crew in the use of weapons. He was one of them. The machine gun, which dated from the First World War, they'd soon discovered to be useless when it came to defending the ship, but it had another more important function. It beat whiskey, and if anyone still remembered to pray these days, it beat praying too. Clutching and firing it gave you a blissful feeling of calm—though its services came at a price. Its overheated metal stock burned your palms, and its explosive coughing deafened you. But for a moment, the waiting stopped.

  You were responding. You were taking action.

  In a strange way the machine-gun position was the best place to be during an attack, even though you were clearly visible on deck, which made you the perfect target for a hail of enemy bullets and bombs. But at least out there, your helplessness didn't drive you insane.

  When the air-raid warning sounded, the crew would instantly re-lease the mooring and head for the buoys in the middle of the Thames. It was procedure for all ships to leave the wharf during air raids because it took weeks to clear the wreckage of a bombed ship and in the meantime it blocked the wharf to other vessels. So, resigned, they'd head for open water, where they couldn't just jump onto land if the ship took a hit. "We're off to the cemetery," they'd joke.

  So it was good to have your hands on a Lewis.

  Several of the ships around them were on fire now. One capsized slowly and began to sink. The crew in the lifeboats rowed haphazardly: the whole harbor was ablaze, and a crane had fallen halfway into the basin. High up above them one parachute after another unfurled and floated down toward the river, swaying calmly. As they drew nearer, Knud Erik was able to see that what was suspended from them wasn't human. The parachutes hit the water and their vast fabric canopies crumpled languorously before settling on the river. They looked like flowers scattered across a grave.

  An hour later the air-raid alarm sounded the all clear. Fires were still blazing on the wharves, and the oil tanks were belching black fumes into the night sky. An acrid smell of oil, soot, and brick dust hung over the river, along with a faint trace of sulfur whose origin he couldn't identify. His eyes stung from exhaustion.

  Knud Erik had been through the same scenario in Liverpool, Birkenhead, Cardiff, Swansea, and Bristol. Sometimes it seemed that they were sailing in an ocean of flames, and the sky was filled not with cumulus, stratus, and cirrus clouds, but a whole weather system made up of Junkers 87s and 88s, and Messerschmitt 110s. When their ship passed into the English Channel, they came within reach of the German batteries at Calais; in the North Sea U-boats awaited them. It was everywhere and it was constant. The whole world had contracted and turned as black as a cannon mouth. They didn't call it fear: it manifested itself as sleeplessness. At sea, they always worked double watches, and when they were attacked, nobody slept. While in port, the whole crew frequently had to move the ship to another mooring point, so their sleep was constantly interrupted. Did they sleep at all? Well, they closed their eyes and they were gone in a moment, free of memories, until death yelled "Boo!" again and they tumbled out of their berths, wide-eyed, as though dreaming of exit. But there was no escape, no hatch in the sky, no trapdoor in the deck, no horizon to escape behind. They lived surrounded by three elements—not sea, sky, and earth, but what they concealed—U-boats, bombers, and artillery. They were on a planet that was about to explode.

  Albert Madsen had been right. He'd seen the end of the world. But the old man hadn't told Knud Erik he'd be trapped in the middle of it.

  Tonight he'd manage two hours' sleep before rousing the crew. They were going farther up the Thames with the tide, and for him, it was a matter of honor to be ready before any of the other ships. He prayed for a dreamless sleep.

  He didn't know that the next day he'd get to learn a new word. He'd expanded his vocabulary over the past few months, with technical expressions that bore witness to mankind's endless ingenuity. This ingenuity was so convoluted and contradictory that he found it impossible to follow, but he knew its mission well enough. A newer and even fancier way had been found to destroy him.

  Yes, he got the sleep he'd asked for. Darkness descended and contained him—that rare, longed-for darkness in which, for a moment, he could renew his strength. This time it held him for so long that when it finally released him, he stumbled out of his berth with those wide, dazed eyes that are the normal reaction to an attack. He'd neglected his duty. He'd overslept.

  He rushed out of his cabin. Many of the other ships already had smoke emerging from their funnels. Then, within the space of a second, more than just smoke was pouring out. A massive explosion that recalled last night's bombardment rolled across the river without warning. Another followed. Nearby, the bow of the Svava rose into the air, then snapped off. The ship started sinking immediately while smoke and flames devoured their way toward the wheelhouse. He saw several men jump into the river, one with his back in flames. Then the bow of the Skagerrak exploded. Two Norwegian steamers blew up next, and then a Dutch one.

  His first thought was to get away. But what were they fleeing from? Where was the enemy? The sky was clear and it couldn't possibly be a U-boat.

  A dinghy approached from one of the British escort ships. At its front a man with a megaphone hailed him with the day's new word: "Vibration mines!"

  Knud Erik needed no further explanation. The mines were triggered when a ship's screw started turning. The objects he'd seen last night, falling gently through the air suspended from parachutes, were vibration mines.

  A couple more ships exploded. Those that remained lay still, their boilers cold. Around them, flaming ships were reduced to sinking wrecks in seconds. A grim regatta of burned bodies floated between the wrecks.

  Later, they were ordered to drift upriver with the tide, without using the engine. The only sound they heard was the lapping of waves against the side of the ship. It was as quiet as if they'd returned to the age of sail.

  THEY WERE ON their way to England in a convoy from Bergen on the west coast of Norway when the radio announced Germany's occupation of Denmark. Their captain, Daniel Boye, immediately called a ship's counsel and presented the choice: to continue to an English port or reverse course and return to Denmark or Norway.

  In a way, they felt the decision had already made itself. They were sailing in a convoy under the protection of British warships. Didn't that mean that they too were at war with Germany, like the ships escorting them?

  The answer was clear. Thanks to a war that wasn't their own, freight rates were high. So were wages, which now came with a 300 percent war supplement. With overtime and various allo
wances, this meant a quadrupling, sometimes a quintupling, of a man's income. The reason they'd sailed was money. Now they were being asked to join this war and to be at its front line. Danish neutrality was no protection: seventy-nine Danish sailors had been killed last Easter and more than three hundred had lost their lives since the outbreak of war, despite having sailed on ships with the Danish flag painted on the side. The torpedoes on the U-boats couldn't tell the difference. A ship on her way to an enemy port was a ship on her way to an enemy port, regardless of the stripe of those on deck.

  All of the seventeen crewmen on board the Dannevang agreed to continue on to England, out of sheer defiance more than anything else. They'd made the decision to go to sea. And now no one was going to frighten them off deck.

  They sensed it was this same defiance that would pull them through and keep them alive, rather than patriotism, or love of the motherland, or ideology, or indeed any understanding of what the war was about. Doubtless these motives played some part, whether large or small, in each crewman's decision, but they weren't being asked to offer their opinion on the war. They were being asked to make a choice that would have unforeseen but crucial consequences for the rest of their lives. In what way they couldn't know, but their sailor's instinct told them it was a matter of life and death. They felt all of the sailor's stubbornness when faced by an overpowering force—a hurricane or a Messerschmitt 110—and they said yes, not to the war that raged this year, but to one that had raged for eons; not to England, but to the road to England: to the sea, and to a challenge that made them feel like men.

  They arrived at Methil, in Scotland, on April 10 and were immediately ordered to sail to Tyne Dock in Newcastle, where their ship would be assigned to the British Admiralty. There was no ceremony to mark the transfer. An officer from the British navy stuck a note to the aft mast: a brief text stating that the ship had been requisitioned by the British in the name of King George VI. The Dannebrog was lowered, and the Red Duster, a scarlet cloth with a Union Jack in one corner, was raised in its place.

  They'd never taken very good care of their Danish flag. It was frayed around the edges, and its white cross was blackened by soot from the funnel. But it was theirs. Among strangers, it was half of their identity. Now they'd lost the right to display it. Their country had surrendered to the Germans without a fight, and so their flag was taken away. From now on, they counted only if they no longer considered themselves Danes. They'd be fighting the war stark naked: their stripping had just begun.

  The second engineer asked what wages they'd get under the British flag.

  "Three pounds, eighteen shillings a week and one pound, ten shillings for victuals," the officer replied.

  The second engineer did a quick mental calculation. He glanced around at the rest of the crew and shrugged. They could do the math too. The pay was a quarter of what they'd been getting. That said, they wouldn't be providing for their families anymore: they'd been severed from them indefinitely.

  "Don't worry, you'll be home for Christmas," the officer said. He'd observed their faces closely.

  They forgot to ask which Christmas.

  ***

  They were ordered to paint the Dannevang gray, as gray as a winter's day on the North Sea. Not even the varnished oak doors and window frames around the wheelhouse escaped. This was their ship. That winter they'd scraped off the rust and painted every square centimeter of her: the black hull, red below the waterline, the white superstructure, the red and white stripe that ran like a ribbon around the funnel. They'd lovingly traced the white letters on the bow, and they'd kept the Dannevang so clean you could walk about on her in shore clothes even after loading coal. They'd maintained the steamer in the old sailing ship style, as they called it, with a scrubbed deck and washed-down bulkheads. It was miserable and hard work, but it gave them pride. Now the Dannevang they'd cherished had slipped through their fingers, almost as if she'd sunk into the wintry sea from which she'd borrowed her new color.

  The Dannevang had once been registered in Marstal. The steamer had been owned by Klara Friis and had been laid up for years before being sold to a shipowner in Nakskov. The captain and the first and second mates were from Marstal, the seafaring town that no longer had its own ships, but whose men had become the aristocracy of the Danish merchant fleet. Marstallers were everywhere, and most commonly on the bridge as first mates or captains: the only ones who sailed as seamen were those still too young to be anything else. Daniel Boye, a distant relative of Farmer Sofus, had been captain of the Dannevang when she still belonged to the family and sailed under her old name, the Energy.

  He'd been among Frederik Isaksen's supporters and he'd stood near the wharf when Isaksen caught the ferry to Svendborg after his defeat.

  "You won't remember Isaksen," he'd said to Knud Erik, "but he remembers your mother." Knud Erik had shuddered slightly. His mother was a sore point. He'd neither seen nor spoken to her in a decade. However, he knew Isaksen well. Isaksen had retained his affection for the people of Marstal and never closed his door to a Marstaller if a voyage brought him to New York. He'd even married a Marstal girl: Miss Kristina.

  Always the gentleman, he'd been waiting for her on the pier in New York when she arrived. Klara Friis had written to him, "I know that you do not owe me anything. But I do believe that you are a man with a strong sense of responsibility."

  Isaksen certainly was. He'd not only taken Kristina Bager under his wing but ended up marrying her. Knud Erik had visited them from time to time. Isaksen was a wonderful father to Ivar's child, but he and Kristina never had children of their own, and Knud Erik couldn't work out whether they were happy together: he had his doubts about Isaksen's relationship with women. He was fond of the vivacious Kristina and he had good reason to be, but as far as Knud Erik could see, he wasn't fond of her in quite the way a man should be of a woman. Although Knud Erik and Kristina Isaksen confided in each other, on this matter he never inquired.

  "My little knight," she'd call him. She used a sisterly tone, though he'd outstripped her in size a long time ago.

  Knud Erik had been in New York when Kristina's daughter was confirmed. It had been a strange experience to sit in a Protestant church in the Upper East Side, watching the fourteen-year-old Klara, a girl named after the mother he hadn't seen since the day she'd declared he might as well be dead. Her kindness to Kristina Bager was a side of his mother he'd never seen himself.

  Whenever anyone tried to talk to him about why his mother had renounced him, Knud Erik always turned away in silence.

  Captain Boye had received two telegrams on the morning of April 9. One was from the ship's owner, Severinsen in Nakskov, ordering the Dannevang to return to Denmark. The other was from Isaksen.

  Boye read it aloud and looked at his first mate. "Isaksen suggests we go to a British port," he said. "It's actually none of his business, as he doesn't own the ship. But I happen to agree with him."

  "Isaksen's a man of honor," Knud Erik said.

  The majority of Danish shipowners had done what Severinsen had done. Møller, who appeared to be well informed, had stayed up with his son the night before the Germans invaded Denmark, telegraphing his ships with orders to seek a neutral port. The crew of the Jessica Mærsk had mutinied, tying up the first mate and locking him in the chart room: the ship had been bound for Ireland, which was staying out of the war. The crew had forced the captain to sail to Cardiff instead. Rumor had it that the Jessica Mærsk too had received a telegram from Isaksen. From his New York office he'd been just as busy as his former boss. As Boye remarked, Isaksen had stuck his nose into something that was none of his business. But this was how a man of honor sometimes behaved.

  On the other hand, it was hard to feel honorable on board the Dannevang. You'd behaved honorably, all right, but you'd been stripped of dignity for your pains.

  They might be in a pub in Liverpool, Cardiff, or Newcastle, downing as much Guinness as they could manage between two air-raid alarms. And always there'd be
someone who noticed their accent and asked them, "Where are you from, sailor?" That was the killer moment.

  They learned quickly. The one thing you never did in that situation was tell the truth. If you said you were from Denmark, the information was received with cold silence or open contempt. You'd be called a "half-German."

  In the Sally Brown, a pub by Brewer's Wharf, a girl with a low-cut blouse and remarkably red lips had approached Knud Erik, and he'd bought her a drink. They'd raised their glasses and she'd looked deep into his eyes across the rim of her glass. He knew the routine and how the evening would end. That was all right with him. He needed it.

  Then she'd asked. Back then he hadn't heard the question often enough to know the effect the word Denmark would have.

  "Why aren't you in Berlin with your best mate Adolf?"

  He was furious. Hell, because he was here, in a pub where half the windows were broken, in a bombed-out city, risking his life for measly wages, cut off from his family and friends! He could have been lying under his eiderdown back in Denmark. Instead, by way of payment for his willingness to face an abrupt end to his miserable life, he daily confronted every kind of explosive devilry ever invented. She wiggled her bottom as she walked off in her tight skirt, determined he should know what he was missing out on, for having the wrong nationality.

  When news came of Denmark's fall, Danish shipowners and the government had encouraged Danish sailors to seek neutral ports right away. But the crew of the Dannevang had done the opposite, risking homes, families, safety, everything. It didn't help. There was no free Guinness from the barman, no sympathy pussy from women with low-cut blouses and red lips.