AT FOUR-THIRTY in the morning on May 3, 1945, they stole a tugboat from Neustadt Harbor.
They'd planned to go to Kiel but had to accept the transport options that presented themselves. Knud Erik's last carton of cigarettes secured them places in the covered bed of a truck that was going to Neustadt. The harbor was deserted; they walked the length of the wharf and looked for a boat that would fit their purpose. Bluetooth was sleeping, curled like a puppy on Old Funny's lap. Anton decided on a tugboat named Odysseus. When they'd quietly lowered Herman's chair down from the wharf, Bluetooth woke and demanded to be put down on the deck, where he stretched and yawned, and his telescope eyes began their eternal search for news in the universe.
"Look," he said, pointing at the sky.
They glanced up. High above them a large bird was flying northwest, with huge, slow wing beats.
"It's the stork," Bluetooth said cheerfully. "It's Frede."
"Do you know, I'm beginning to believe it is," Anton muttered. "Looks like he's heading for Marstal."
On their way out of the Bay of Lübeck they passed three passenger ships lying at anchor, the Deutschland, the Cap Arcona, and the Thielka. Though there was no sign of any crew on the bridges or decks, they were nervous that their theft would be discovered and someone would chase them, so once they were some distance away, they sailed at full speed. They'd planned to head north around the island of Fehmarn. Of course this would mean going far into the Baltic, almost as far as Gedser, before they could turn west and then south around Langeland. It was quite a detour, but they didn't dare sail any closer to the German coast.
It was early afternoon when a hollow roar rolled across the sea. Several more followed, and for a moment they felt the firmament vibrate above them. Tracks of smoke etched themselves across the bay and they guessed that Neustadt was under attack or the three anchored ships had been hit. As the day progressed they realized they might as well have followed the coast. No one would have pursued them. The Germans seemed to have lost control of the Baltic altogether; it was now patrolled by British Hawker Typhoon bombers. Again and again they heard the faint echoes of bombs exploding far across the sea.
There was heavy traffic on the water, but most of it came from the eastern part of the Bay of Lübeck, where the Russians were advancing. There were all kinds of vessels: fishing boats, freighters, smaller motor ships, yachts, smacks, and rowboats with makeshift masts and sails. Columns of smoke drifted up along the horizon. They constantly came across pieces of wreckage and once nearly sailed into a huddle of charred bodies bobbing face-down in the water. From a distance they'd looked like a raft of seaweed; the crew saw their mistake just in time to change course. The drowned—women and children as well as men—were everywhere. None of them had life jackets; clearly they too had been refugees like themselves.
Will it never end? thought Knud Erik.
The euphoria of having escaped was gone. They understood that if they were to get across the Baltic alive, their luck had to hold. They were sailing a German ship, and there was nothing to stop the next Hawker Typhoon from dropping its lethal load on them as it passed overhead. They hadn't flown a Danish flag in five years: now they wished they had one. But maybe not even that was enough. It was as if the sea had turned itself inside out and was disgorging all the thousands of people it had swallowed across the centuries. Crossing it, they felt a fellowship with them.
Knud Erik was at the helm. He ordered everyone to put on a life jacket, but there weren't enough to go around. He glanced briefly at Herman in his wheelchair. Then he shrugged. Captain Boye had drowned because he'd given his life jacket to a stoker who had left his own behind in the engine room. He handed his life jacket to Wally and ordered him to help Herman put it on. If they sank, he'd have given up his life for a man he despised, but he had no choice. The war had taught him one thing: the Allies might be fighting for justice, but life itself was unjust. He was the captain and he was responsible for his crew. Duty was the only thing he had left. He must cleave to it or else surrender to pure meaninglessness.
"Aren't you going to put on your life jacket?" Sophie asked. She hadn't noticed him glancing at Herman.
He brushed her question aside with a smile. "The captain's always the last to leave the ship. And the last to put on his life jacket."
"A true Odysseus you are," she said, returning his smile. "And a lucky one too, having Penelope on board."
"We aren't like Odysseus," he said. "We're more like his men."
"What do you mean?"
"Have you read the story?"
She shrugged. "Not properly."
"It's depressing reading, actually. Odysseus is the captain, right? He has fantastic adventures. But he doesn't bring back a single one of his crew alive. That's the part we sailors play in this war. We're Odysseus' crew."
"Well, you'd better get moving, Captain Odysseus," she said, looking at him. "Because this particular crew member happens to be pregnant."
THEY SAILED AT half speed and switched off the boat's lights at night. The closer they came to their destination, the more they feared they'd never reach it. Until now they'd existed only in the present, as all who put their trust in the vagaries of luck are obliged to. Now that they dared to believe in the future, they were terrified of losing their lives. The old daily dread from the time of the convoys returned. Again, the sky above and the sea beneath seemed packed with hidden's menaces.
The sea was like dark blue silk, and the bright spring night was cloudless. There was a warmth in the air that heralded summer, and had it not been for the tugboat's pervasive smell of coal and tarred hemp rope, they'd have caught the scent of apple blossom coming from the shore. But the water was cold. Winter clung to its depths, and all they could think about was that chill: it felt as if they were still sailing the Arctic, still on the lookout for the foam stripes that signaled torpedoes and the red distress lights that had once bankrupted their souls and could do so again. Again, they listened for the sound of oars or cries for help. Again, they enacted an eternal dress rehearsal of death by exposure. Spring welcomed them, but the memory of the five-year winter they'd endured still held them in its grip.
In the bay they'd left behind that morning, eight thousand Allied prisoners of war were incinerated when their transport ships were bombed. Earlier, another ten thousand refugees had drowned in the same sea the Odysseus was now crossing. But her crew knew nothing of this either. They'd seen ships go down before, but they'd never seen a refugee ship sinking with ten thousand passengers trapped on board, or heard the collective scream as the water gushed in from all sides and sent the ship down to the bottom, or the wail that followed the final plea for help, when those still living realized that rescue is just a word. No, they'd never heard that vast cry, and yet it entered them that night.
They spent the night on deck; they dared not go below. They wrapped themselves in blankets they'd found on board and sat awake, watching the sea with restless eyes, and listening.
Bluetooth didn't sleep either. He lay silently, watching the fading stars. As dawn broke, he was the first to hear the deep whoosh of wings. "The stork" was all he said.
They looked up. There it was, flying low above them, still heading northwest. Far away they could see Kjeldsnor Lighthouse in the early morning light. They were approaching the southern point of Langeland.
Ærø appeared in the late afternoon after they'd sailed along the Langeland coast for most of the day. Trying to save coal, Anton kept the tug at half speed: they were running out. They saw Ristinge Hill rise to the north. Open water followed. Farther out to the west lay Drejet and the hills at Vejsnæs. In the midst of it all rose the red roofs of Marstal, with the copper church spire, now green with verdigris, towering high above. There were still a few masts in the harbor, looking like the remains of a stockade that had been overrun by some unknown force. From here they couldn't see the Tail and the breakwater that embraced the town like a useless arm.
Some distance outside the
harbor, they saw black masses of smoke pouring into the calm air. Coming closer, they saw flames. Two steamers in Klørdybet were ablaze. The war had beaten them to it. Knud Erik had been so sure that it would all end the moment he set eyes on the Marstal skyline. Fatigue overwhelmed him, and he felt close to giving up. If he was an exhausted swimmer trying to reach the shore, this was the moment he'd simply let the water take him.
They were just level with the steamers when they heard the howl of a dive-bomber. They looked up: a Hawker Typhoon was coming straight for them. One of its wings gave a flash, and a rocket sped toward them, trailing white smoke.
There was a bang, and the whole boat shook.
IT WASN'T A good time to be a child. Corpses floated onto the beach and the little islands around the town on a daily basis, and it was the children who found them. They'd always fetch an adult, but by then the damage had been done. They'd seen the decomposing faces of the drowned, and afterward they were full of questions that we found hard to answer.
Early in the morning of May 4, a ferry docked at the harbor. It came from Germany and it was packed with refugees. Only a few on board were men: soldiers with blood-soaked bandages around their arms and legs. The rest were women and children. The children said nothing, but simply stared pale-faced into the distance with their scrawny necks sticking out from winter coats that seemed far too big for them, as though nature had gone into reverse and they'd grown too small for their clothes. They hadn't eaten a proper meal in a long time. But it was their eyes that made the deepest impression on us. They seemed to see nothing at all. We reckoned it was because they'd seen too much. Children's heads are quickly overloaded by ugly things. The eyes simply go on strike.
We offered them bread and tea. They looked like they could do with something warm. We behaved decently toward them, though we wouldn't exactly claim they were welcome.
At eleven o'clock that morning two German steamers ran aground, attempting to navigate the south channel. British bombers had flown over the island several times during the past few days, and we'd often see them flying over the sea. Two of them appeared now. They fired their rockets and both steamers caught fire. They had machine cannons mounted both fore and aft and they returned fire. The British planes kept coming back, and one of the steamers took several direct hits and was soon engulfed in flames.
We didn't dare approach the ships to rescue the survivors until the shooting was over. The water was filled with people, many of them burned or wounded by shrapnel. They screamed and wailed when we hauled them on board, but we couldn't just let them lie there in the cold water. It was a dreadful sight. Their hair had been singed off. They were black from soot, and you could see bloodied flesh where the skin had been burned away. Many were naked. We'd brought blankets, but wrapping them around the poor shivering creatures would be of no help: the wool would just stick to the exposed flesh. Helping them ashore on the wharf, we handled them as gently as possible. There were many dead too. We left them in the water. Survivors had priority.
The wounded were taken to the hospital in Ærøskøbing, and the others billeted in the house we called the Lodge, in Vestergade. Then we started recovering the bodies. There were quite a few—twenty in all. We brought them to the wharf by Dampskibsbroen, right by the entrance to the harbor, where we laid them out in a row and covered them with blankets. One of the bodies was missing its head, but somehow that one was the least horrific: no face, and no mouth gaping in a rigid scream that it would take to the grave.
Several hundred people had gathered in the harbor to watch the steamers burn. One of them was almost extinguished, but she was still giving off plenty of smoke, while the other one burned amidships. Some drunken German soldiers were on board, manhandling a group of half-naked women on the foredeck. Fear of death combined with booze had made them lose all inhibition.
Late in the afternoon the British resumed bombing the two steamers. The crowd was swelling. We'd all come to watch the sad scene unfolding on our waters. Many of us had lost husbands, brothers, and sons in this war, and it would have been easy for us to think that these Germans had got what was coming to them. We didn't, though. How many times had we, our fathers, or our grandfathers been on a ship that was sinking or on fire? We knew what it was like. A sinking ship was a sinking ship. It didn't matter whose.
Suddenly a tugboat appeared in the south channel. We'd been so preoccupied by the burning steamers that we didn't even notice it at first. Marstal harbor's south channel is tricky to navigate if you're not familiar with the waters, but the captain seemed to be managing well until one of the British bombers flew low over the boat and fired its rockets. The explosion that followed could be heard all the way to the shore. The boat took a direct hit and went up in flames.
***
Gunnar Jakobsen, who'd been out there with his dinghy, would always say afterward that he'd never seen a more jumbled-up crew. One fellow was a Negro, another was a Chinaman, and another one was in a wheelchair: the others shoved him overboard before they jumped themselves. He had no legs and only one arm, but his life jacket kept him afloat. A woman with a child popped up in the water too. Half the world seemed to be floating around down there. Gunnar's surprise doubled when he pulled them all on board, and not only did both the Negro and Chinaman speak Danish, but the rest spoke like Marstallers. "Aren't you Gunnar Jakobsen?" one of them said.
Gunnar Jakobsen narrowed his eyes—not because he couldn't see the man properly, but because he needed time to think.
"Goddammit," he exclaimed. "You're Knud Erik Friis!" Then he recognized Helge and Vilhjelm. The man with no legs and one arm said nothing, nor did any of the others introduce him.
"Anton," Knud Erik Friis said suddenly, looking around desperately. "Where's Anton?"
"You mean Anton Hay? The Terror of Marstal?" Gunnar Jakobsen asked.
They looked around. "He's not here," Vilhjelm said.
He wasn't visible in the water either. The Odysseus was about to keel, and the flames soared high. No one could be on that ship and still be alive. They circled about the water for a while, calling out for Anton.
The bombers kept attacking the steamers as if they'd been ordered to use up their entire supply of bombs and rockets before the war ended. Just when the men in Gunnar Jakobsen's dinghy were about to give up and head for the harbor, the Odysseus took another direct hit. This time she must have been struck below the waterline, because she keeled instantly and began to sink. Gunnar Jakobsen switched off his motor, as if he felt he owed the tugboat a minute's silence as it died. A moment later the ship was gone. In the place where she'd been, they could see something floating on the water. Gunnar Jakobsen started the engine and headed for the spot. At first they couldn't make out what it was, but then they recognized the horribly charred remains of what had once been a human being. They saw its back and its head. Anton was naked and his hair had been burned off. His life jacket was gone, or if it was still on him, there was no telling it from the flesh of his back, which was as black and porous as charcoal.
Sophie covered Bluetooth's eyes with her hand. Knud Erik reached into the water to get the charred body into the dinghy. He didn't think about what he was doing; he simply couldn't leave it there. But when he hauled up the corpse the whole arm came off. Startled, he let go, and when the body hit the water again, what had once been Anton's flesh fell off his bones, which began sinking at once.
The engine was throbbing violently.
Gunnar Jakobsen wanted to get back ashore as quickly as possible. None of the survivors from the Odysseus objected. They sat in total silence, with the same blank expression he'd seen in the German children, which he hoped he'd never see on the faces of his own kids. He didn't know much more about the war than what he'd read in the newspapers. He'd heard the pounding in the south when the British dropped their bombs, and he'd seen flames on the horizon when Hamburg and Kiel were razed. Now he was learning more in a single day than he had over the past five years, and he'd have the same expe
rience in the months that followed every time he met someone who had spent the war outside Denmark's borders. Something was wrong with them, and he just couldn't explain what it was. It wasn't anything they said, because they said nothing; it was almost as if they were all brooding over a huge secret that they kept to themselves only because it wouldn't help to tell anyone. They were part of a dreadful community that no one else could penetrate and that they couldn't escape.
The boy was crying. He'd seen nothing, but he sensed that something had happened.
"Will we never see Anton again?" he asked.
"No," said the woman, whom Gunnar Jakobsen thought must be the child's mother. "Anton's dead. He's not coming back."
It was a brutal thing to say, Gunnar Jakobsen thought, and he'd probably never have been so frank with his own children. Yet something inside him acknowledged the honesty of the woman's reply. To the children of war, you told the truth.
High above them a stork flew past. It came close to one of the burning steamers and seemed to vanish briefly in the clouds of smoke before emerging on the other side, unharmed. It continued across the town, and when it reached the other end of Markgade, it folded its wings and prepared to land in the nest on the roof of Goldstein's house.
Gunnar Jakobsen put in at Dampskibsbroen. This was where most of us were standing, and though he'd been shaken by the sight of Anton's body, he nevertheless felt that he was returning with a great story that deserved a big audience. He was bringing home the first people to return to Marstal from the war after an absence of more than five years.
Gunnar Jakobsen hadn't noticed that the dead were still lying on the wharf when the big legless man was helped out and settled among their covered bodies. We stared at him with curiosity and suddenly Kristian Stærk said loudly, "That's Herman."