We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  Captain Eagleton was a young man with bushy whiskers and shifty eyes. As soon as he ordered Albert down to the sleeping quarters to bring back the men's half-empty whiskey bottles and throw them overboard, Albert knew he'd never gain the crew's respect. Eagleton should have thrown out the whiskey himself, and in front of the whole crew, rather than behind their backs while they slept it off: it was obvious. Albert eyed the bottles as they bobbed up and down on the waves. He'd already noticed the big solid armchair bolted to the deck, like the throne of an absent king. Albert knew enough about seamen to recognize Eagleton as the type who'd stay clear of the deck and isolate himself from the crew, so it wouldn't be his. It might belong to the first mate, he speculated, but for now there was no way of telling, as the man had yet to make an appearance.

  Meanwhile a terrible racket had started in the fo'c'sle and the captain ordered Albert to investigate. From out of the darkness came angry shouting.

  "You've nicked my whiskey, you bloody dog," yelled an English voice.

  A reply came in Italian, followed by another in a language that could have been Greek. In between were sentences that contained a few words Albert recognized, but he couldn't work out their meaning. These men had lived in international crews for so many years that they now all spoke a tongue straight out of Babel.

  One thing was clear: the fight was over the missing whiskey. Albert heard the sound of a blow and then of a body crashing into a bulkhead. Glancing down the hatch, he saw a knife flash in someone's hand; it was followed by groaning and the kind of labored breathing you hear when men are raising the anchor. But it was something else they were hauling up. It was dark and terrifying and it came from the depths within.

  Though Albert was still safe on the deck, he took a few steps back. There was nothing he could do down in that dark hole, and the brawl would eventually exhaust itself. He'd seen fights like that before, and they rarely ended in a killing. The men would emerge from the fo'c'sle the next day, bruised and cut and severely hung over, and begin work, mute and reluctant, with bloodshot eyes. Today they were animals. But tomorrow they'd be sailors again.

  It wasn't the savagery down in the fo'c'sle that worried him. It was the captain's lack of authority.

  "Out of the way!"

  Someone grabbed Albert's shoulder and shoved him violently aside; he turned to see a monster of a man towering over him. His face was dominated by a bulbous red nose and disfigured by scars that crisscrossed it as if his head were a pumpkin someone had slashed at. Half-drowned in this mass of battered flesh sat his eyes, their pupils like black stones on the bottom of a deep lake. Underneath a filthy, torn shirt, his vast muscular body too was riven with scars, as though someone had gone for the giant's heart with a sharp knife but given up—it would be like trying to stab a steam train.

  Albert instantly understood who was standing in front of him. This was the man to whom the throne belonged, the true ruler of the ship.

  The first mate had made his appearance.

  The giant didn't use the ladder but jumped straight down into the fo'c'sle, his huge body tumbling directly into the midst of the brawling men. There came another crash and some roaring from below, and the tumult intensified, with intermingled howls and groans of pain, the e thudding of punches, and a strange whimpering that seemed quite unrelated to fighting. It went on for a while before starting to subside, until only one voice—that of the first mate—could be heard.

  "Have you had enough? Have you had enough then?"

  More of that whimpering sound. Then the thud of a few more blows—or were they kicks? Then silence.

  The first mate emerged from the fo'c'sle, panting. He'd acquired the makings of a few more scars down there in the darkness. There was a deep cut to his forehead, and blood ran from his neck, but he wiped his face absent-mindedly, as if the blood that welled in one dense eyebrow was no more inconvenient to him than sweat.

  Albert hadn't shifted from the spot where the giant had first thrust him, but now he was swept aside once more, as the bleeding first mate shoved past him again to scrutinize the rest of the crew, as if contemplating how to continue the punishment he'd begun below deck.

  "The name's O'Connor."

  At this, the men on deck nodded as if responding to an order.

  O'Connor went to his throne, sat down heavily, and belched. The blood that he'd smeared across his forehead gave him the look of a heathen idol that demands nothing but human sacrifices. Albert wondered if O'Connor would call for soap and water to clean his injuries, but he just sat there while the blood congealed, as though his scars were tattoos and he'd just added fresh details to the gruesome work of art that was his face and body.

  Then he gave a sudden whistle, and a long-haired black monster of a dog that no one had seen before padded over with the skulking gait of a wolf and hunkered down at his feet. Pulling a heavy-caliber revolver out of the pocket of his nankeens, O'Connor started spinning the barrel pensively.

  That night Albert ventured down to the fo'c'sle, but he soon came back up again. By the glimmer of his tallow dip he'd seen men lying on the floor in oddly contorted positions, while a few sat on benches, cradling their heads in their hands. He couldn't tell whether they were sleeping. But there was blood on the bulkhead, and vomit covered the floor. He'd prefer to sleep on deck.

  The next morning the men emerged, bearing the traces of yesterday's brawl. Some were limping while others moved about slowly and deliberately, as if their bodies ached beneath their clothes. Their faces were bloated, with livid swellings around the eyes. One man had a broken nose—though its shape suggested it wasn't his first. These were tough men, used to beatings and the aftereffects of prolonged drinking—men who could take practically any treatment without complaining. But they wore an expression you rarely see in a sailor. They looked cowed. They didn't so much as glance at one another and never lifted their eyes to O'Connor when he roared his orders. Instead they stared at their hands or let their eyes drift toward the rigging.

  There was a proper cook on board the Emma C. Leithfield— and we understood Albert well when he pointed out the difference between a proper one and the kind we'd been on the Marstal cutters, when we'd all started out as galley boys, barely mastering any cooking skills beyond steadying the water pot in a storm to ensure the supply of hot coffee and satisfying the appetites of men more interested in filling their bellies than in the pleasures of the palate.

  But Giovanni, said Albert, was nothing like that. He was an Italian and he made sure that every day, both fore and aft, there was freshly baked bread, a hot lunch and dinner, and plenty of pies and pastries. We ate better than at the best boardinghouse: not even Frau Palle in Kastanien Allée in Hamburg could compete with Giovanni.

  All told, the Emma C. Leithfield was an odd ship. Despite the men's linguistic differences, they understood one another well enough to agree that of all the vessels of the American merchant navy, the Emma had the worst first mate and the best cook. The galley was heaven, and the deck was hell.

  ***

  Giovanni was the last man to board, but he didn't arrive alone: with him came two suckling pigs, ten hens, and a small calf, for which he built a pen on the foredeck. O'Connor's dog grew restless and left his place at his master's feet to roam, with its huge jaw hanging open and a hungry look in its eyes. Spotting the dog, Giovanni stepped right up to the beast, which bared its teeth and growled menacingly: it seemed to think the whole ship was its territory. But Giovanni stared straight into its eyes and slowly raised his hands—not to strike it, but to explain. Hypnotized, the dog lay down on its belly and whined pitifully, before starting to shuffle backward. The sight of the ferocious monster, its belly to the floor, backing off from the small, agile man, was so funny that the sailors watching the incident started e laughing.

  O'Connor saw it too. But he didn't laugh.

  O'Connor never ate with the other officers. Instead, he sat on his throne on deck and had his food brought to him there. The weather never b
othered him; his body seemed immune to everything. He never changed clothes, but always wore the same tattered shirt, barely covered by a waistcoat with no buttons and ripped buttonholes. By day, only a blizzard or a hailstorm could budge him out of the chair, while at night, they said he slept in another chair, bolted to the floor of a cabin that stank like a wild animal's lair. He was always on guard. Word had it that he kept his muscles tensed even while he was asleep.

  When Giovanni brought him his food the next day, instead of placing the plate on his own lap, O'Connor lay it on the deck and signaled to the dog, which immediately came and wolfed down the whole beautifully presented meal. All the while O'Connor kept his eyes fixed on Giovanni, and Giovanni met his stare. He was no more afraid of O'Connor than he was of the dog. He could control the animal with one simple gesture. But O'Connor was beyond his control—and he'd acquired a mortal enemy.

  And that's how he first came among us.

  The next day Giovanni brought O'Connor his food in a dog bowl and placed it on the deck at the first mate's feet.

  "Enjoy your food," he said, and turned to leave.

  "Where's my dinner?"

  O'Connor's voice was low and menacing.

  "There." Giovanni pointed to the bowl. "If I were you, I'd hurry up before the dog gets to it."

  In that moment, he sealed his fate.

  Giovanni was far more than a mere cook. When a ship is at anchor in New York, it's not just tailors, shoemakers, butchers, ship's chandlers, and fruit sellers who come on board—all those practical men no ship can do without before she sets sail. No, along with them comes a motley crew of fences, offering false gold rings and pocket watches that stop at the slightest knock; tattoo artists with filthy needles whose every tattoo becomes a weeping infection; beggars and magicians; jugglers, fakirs, and fortunetellers; procurers, pimps, and thieves. Giovanni, standing on the deck with a red bandana around his ink-black hair, juggling four eggs at a time without dropping a single one, seemed more at home with this crowd than with the crew of the Emma C. Leithfield.

  No one had the faintest idea how he'd ended up at sea, but he'd begun as a circus performer. He'd been a knife thrower as well as a juggler, and sometimes when we were off duty we'd linger in the doorway and watch him practice. He could juggle three or four sharpened knives until they whirled about in a deadly spinning wheel. He never dropped one, he never missed a catch, and he never cut himself.

  "Giovanni's setting the table," someone would shout on deck, and the crew would rush to the mess to grab a front-row view as he set the table without moving a single inch from where he stood. Knives, forks, and tin plates would fly through the air—and land exactly in the right spot, right next to each other. It set his audience dizzy with excitement. He never broke anything—but no one could understand how.

  "How do you do it, Giovanni?"

  He smiled and shook his head. There were no secrets. "It's all in the wrists," he said, flexing them.

  The men winked at one another. They were proud of their cook. With the whiskey thrown overboard and the ship at sea, it was Giovanni who got them straightening their backs and going about their work feeling like a crew.

  It was a fortnight since they'd left New York. The Emma C. Leithfield had just passed the equator, heading for Buenos Aires, and the men were admiring Giovanni as usual when O'Connor suddenly appeared. The cook was busy setting the table, and the plates were sailing accurately through the air en route to their destinations, when O'Connor stuck out his giant fist and intercepted one, sending it crashing to the floor. Tin plates don't break, but the effect of O'Connor's sabotage was greater than if it had smashed into a thousand pieces.

  Giovanni's reaction was instant. When he performed, he was at once focused and dreamy. But now, his expression switched to something new: wariness. When O'Connor's fist came at him, he dodged it with the same lightning agility with which he threw cutlery and plates, and O'Connor's fist, which would have turned his narrow, delicate-featured face into a bloody mess, slammed into the bulkhead, with an ugly crunch. When he regained his balance, his knuckles e were bloody.

  Giovanni stood his ground, his face showing not hostility, fear, anger, or panic, but the concentration of an acrobat high in the circus tent, preparing for a tricky jump, with no safety net. And when O'Connor lashed out again, he ducked with the same accuracy as before.

  O'Connor stumbled forward as if he'd lost his balance. But those playing close attention sensed something was up. His eyes, narrowed to slits in his swollen, scarred face, bore a calm chill, which indicated the stumble was premeditated.

  Giovanni leapt to one side and out of the path of the toppling giant. But instead of thrusting his hands out to break his fall, O'Connor flung out an arm and grabbed the little Italian, pulling him down to the deck. Guessing that O'Connor would straddle Giovanni and beat him up, the men began crowding in to pull him away. But the two fallen men just lay next to each other for a moment, motionless—until Giovanni uttered a sudden cry of pain and clasped his wrist. His hand was dangling from it in an odd way. It was all limp. O'Connor had snapped it with a single quick twist of his strong hand.

  Calmly the first mate got up. Standing next to his victim, he fixed the men hard with his eyes. Then, without even looking down, he raised his foot and stomped his boot down on Giovanni's injured hand. They heard the sound of his fingers break.

  When O'Connor walked away from the mess, the men stepped aside for him. But if they'd had one of Giovanni's sharp kitchen knives, they'd have buried it in his back, deep enough to prick his rotten heart and extinguish the hellfire that burned inside.

  They flocked around Giovanni and helped him to his feet. He was still clutching his ruined hand, and the tears rolled down his cheeks. It wasn't the pain that made him weep, but the loss of his ability. They looked at his broken fingers, which stuck out at unnatural angles. They'd seen enough accidents on board to know that he'd never use that hand again. Minutes earlier, he'd been an artist. Now he was barely a man.

  The men took him to Captain Eagleton, who had the hand bandaged. Much good that would do. Even a doctor couldn't have saved it. And when they protested about what had happened to Giovanni, Captain Eagleton looked the other way, as if it had nothing to do with him.

  "O'Connor," he said, "has his reasons."

  And that was all he'd say on the matter.

  Giovanni had turned the men into a united crew. But O'Connor wanted the opposite of solidarity: he wanted each one of them to face him alone. Not because he lacked the strength to beat up more than one of them at a time, but because he knew they feared him most when they had no one to share their fear with.

  The captain had lied when he said that O'Connor always had his reasons. And the lie was a huge one. Nothing O'Connor did had a reason. He hit and punched and broke men's bones for the pleasure of it, rather than as punishment for anything they'd done. He toyed with them as a god toys with his worshipers, leaving them to reason their own suffering. It was this unpredictability that turned him into a monster. Whatever his dark motivation was, expressed in his hatred of everything that stirred on board, it lay deep within him. The men ducked, or tried to make themselves small and invisible, in order to escape his motiveless malice—but that wasn't always enough. His eye worked like a falcon's, searching for mice in the wheat.

  They had nowhere to hide. What place of safety is there for those who live under the thumb of an all-powerful ruler? What choice but to do everything correctly and second-guess his slightest whim?

  "What did Giovanni do wrong, apart from being the best cook who ever sailed, the best juggler who ever wasted his talent on a drunken and thick-headed crew? Apart from making each of us a better man than the Lord ever planned? What did he do to deserve a broken hand? What offense was he being punished for?" Albert asked.

  ***

  A boy by the name of Isaiah had to take charge of the galley. He was from America and fourteen years old, with black skin that was so shiny and smooth, it l
ooked permanently wet. When he lit the fire in the morning, his dark cheeks reflected the oven's glowing embers. He did his best. But gone were the fresh-baked bread, pies, and cakes.

  Giovanni had been sitting in the fo'c'sle for some days, staring at his bandages in the half-light. Despite all that had happened, he'd not been broken. Soon he reappeared on deck, entered the galley, and started bossing Isaiah around. Then his left hand woke up. It was, after all, the hand of a performer, and was just as deft as his right. He might be only half a man, but he was still more capable than most e whole ones. Soon the plates were sailing across the table again. But there was a new air of defiance about him. He knew he was playing a dangerous game. His eyes shone. The crew guarded him, ready to defend him, though they were more terrified than he was.

  But the falcon always spots his chance.

  It was when Giovanni was briefly alone with Isaiah that O'Connor attacked him next. They came running at the sound of his screams—but it was too late. O'Connor had got hold of his left hand. Giovanni grabbed a knife with his right, but the pathetic bundle of broken fingers had lost all its strength and precision and he could barely lift it. He knew he was fighting for his life, and all he could manage was a scratch across O'Connor's chest.

  How desperate Giovanni must have been to use the knife like that. When the men in the fo'c'sle had encouraged him to take his revenge and promised to cover for him—and yes, even take the blame themselves—he'd replied, "I'm a knife thrower, not a murderer."

  The plates sailing across the table again, the reawakening of our taste buds: those had been Giovanni's revenge. Only now he'd gone for the knife. Isaiah said later that he'd seen tears in the artist's eyes as he clutched the weapon in his damaged hand—as if in that moment, forced to share the coarse language of his enemy, his honor was lost.