We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  Cheng Sumei unbound her long hair and let it cascade over her shoulders, and he buried himself completely in its dense darkness. This was the unvarying prelude to their lovemaking. He closed his eyes and surrendered to her hands, which gently caressed his cheekbones. Then her lips landed on his.

  The next morning she didn't wake up. She just lay there with her black hair spread out across the white, embroidered silk pillow. She'd died as though she'd merely turned her face away to look in a different direction. She'd never aged and was never struck down by illness. And yet her life had ended.

  Cheng Sumei had passed away. That was exactly how he thought of it: she'd risen from the bed in the middle of the night and passed away, away from him. He looked at her dead body on the sheet as though it were a kimono she'd stepped out of. Every night for a long time afterward, he expected to hear the familiar swishing of silk as she undressed in front of him. He closed his eyes, though darkness already reigned in the room, and waited for the touch of her hands gliding across his face.

  He worked hard during the day. But not even his daily activities provided distraction or escape. They'd worked together too closely for that. He'd accompany her to her office, and in the evenings they'd bring telegrams and newspapers home with them. Then they'd discuss freight rates and political events around the globe. He learned from her. And she learned from him. He had firsthand knowledge of the sea, and if there were problems with a crew, or if she was dissatisfied with a captain's decisions, she would consult him. If a new market was opening up, they'd make the decision jointly after extensive discussion. They discovered common ground in the brokerage business, and that was fundamentally the strongest bond between them.

  He could still recall the moment he'd fallen in love with her. Luis Presser had invited him for the first time to dinner at the villa where he'd later spend so many nights. At the table, he'd been mesmerized by her. He'd had to concentrate on not staring and force himself to pay attention to the conversation, which was in English. After a while even he realized that it was embarrassing—odd almost—that he hadn't yet addressed her, or looked in her direction, except furtively. If he felt anything, it was awe. There was something transparent about her beauty that in his eyes made her enigmatic, almost supernatural. He hadn't expected that she would deign to do something as profane as open her mouth to speak, and so when she addressed him, he was as startled as the devotee of some pagan god would have been, had the lips of the statue he was kneeling to suddenly parted to give him a jovial greeting.

  "Monsieur Madsen, would you like me to tell you about the moment I fell in love with the West?" she asked.

  She pronounced his name with a strong French accent, but otherwise her English was perfect. She sparkled, full of curiosity and playful teasing, as though she'd sensed his bashfulness and now wished to demystify herself. He hadn't noticed them before. He'd only seen her long, dense eyelashes when she looked down, not the eyes behind them.

  "It was the first time I saw a fire being put out," she went on. "You see, in China we believe fires are started by evil spirits. So when a house catches fire, we try to scare the spirits away." She paused, as if to emphasize the words that followed. "With noise. Drums and cymbals. I've seen many houses burn to the ground to the beating of drums. We have a five-thousand-year-old culture, and in all those five thousand years it's never once occurred to us to put a fire out with water.

  "The English set up a fire brigade in Shanghai. A house opposite me caught fire. It started in the evening, and the English gentlemen, who were all volunteers, arrived straight from a dinner party, wearing top hats, tailcoats, and starched white shirt collars, which quickly became filthy from the soot. They pointed large hoses at the flames. When the fire hissed and died away and most of the house was still standing—that was the moment I fell in love with the West. Do you understand what I'm saying, Monsieur Madsen? My philosophy is basically very simple. You put out fire with water. That's why I live here and not in China."

  She laughed. He laughed back and nodded.

  "Well, my philosophy tends to be that water's for sailing on. But I don't suppose that deep down we're so different."

  It was at that moment that his awe turned into love. Here was a woman whose attitude to life resembled his. Her cheerful directness liberated him. Her beauty suddenly became accessible. When Cheng Sumei took over her husband's business after his death and carried it on successfully, it came as no surprise to Albert. He'd already spotted that she had it in her.

  He wasn't just one man with her. He was several. Any sailor, by necessity, must be one man at home, another on the deck, and a third in a foreign port. But his inner selves are separated in time and space, always by vast distances: just like a ship, he has waterproof bulkheads inside, to prevent sinking. But with Cheng Sumei, Albert found he could be several men at once. He was first and foremost the man he considered his real self, the sailor and captain, and he often thought that the two of them, Cheng Sumei and Albert Madsen, were like two captains on the same vessel—an unlikely couple who nonetheless respected each other's authority and never risked the safety of their ship.

  But he was also the man he remembered from the brothel visits of his youth. That self wasn't always rough. In the brothels of Bahia or Buenos Aires, a young seaman was a dumbstruck guest in marble palaces with fountains and palms, silk sheets, and mirrored ceilings and walls. And the girl, yes, she was a compliant spirit put on this earth to grant him his wishes in a brief, faithless moment, but though she was compliant she was also superior. How speechless, how blushing, how shy and ignorant, and at the same time how infinitely grateful he'd felt in her skillful hands, which knew things about his body that he'd never even suspected: that battered body, with its permanently aching muscles, sore from the rigging, covered with saltwater blisters and unhealed cuts, always on guard, always ready to fight back in the bitter necessity of self-assertion.

  He'd never felt like anyone's master in those brothels. He didn't visit them to enjoy a master's dubious privileges: he'd felt like a guest and behaved with polite restraint. In them, his permanently clenched fists briefly opened up. But he learned nothing. He wasn't a better lover when he left. He remained the same clumsy, awkward man, made brutal by sheer uncertainty when it came to women.

  With Cheng Sumei, it was like the brothel visits of his youth. In the bedroom she was a compliant and yet superior spirit. In their encounters he became his younger self. He didn't know whether or not he was a good lover. Desire had never been a demanding inhabitant of his body: it had never had the power to rearrange his life. It was not lovemaking he missed as he lay awake. It was a human being.

  He finished drying himself and ran a hand through his short, trimmed hair, which had begun to dry despite the humidity of the bathroom. He found a pair of scissors and started trimming his beard. He studied his face in the mirror and wondered what it was he'd awakened in Klara Friis. His age and position offered security. He presumed that was what she was looking for. And he'd seen gratitude in her eyes when he listened to her story about the flood on Birkholm.

  What did he want from her? Was it just about gratified vanity? Though she wasn't exactly pretty, the traces of grief had vanished from her face, which when they first met had seemed both swollen and sunken. She dressed with more care nowadays: she'd lost the shapelessness of her pregnancy and he could see that she had a lovely figure. But it wasn't her looks that attracted him. Nor was it her personality. He didn't actually know her at all. Her words were few and reticent, stilted by the difference in social rank they were both only too well aware of. It was something impersonal that had stirred this feeling in him, which he still hesitated to acknowledge as desire. No, it wasn't her. It wasn't even the woman in her. It was her youth, a fundamental force of nature that had reawakened in her along with the summer, a last reflection of what she'd once been before childbirth and poverty started to grind her down, and grief struck. It was his own doing, in a way. His attentiveness, which to begin wit
h had been nothing but kindness, had rekindled her youthfulness.

  The boy had come first. Then the three of them had sat down together and suddenly they'd resembled a family, the family he had never had, the family she'd lost. But they could not be that family unless he and Klara behaved like a man and a woman.

  He was old. Again, he reminded himself of that. Old men had their regular orbits like planets that circle a sun. But the sun they circled was cooling down. He halted his reflections at this point. He ought to stay in his rightful orbit, around the fading sun. He was in the ice age of his life, and any open ground not yet covered by snow could only produce lichen.

  But his hands spoke a different language when he tied the laces on his white canvas shoes and settled a straw hat on his head. As he passed through the dining room, he stopped and took a white daisy from the bouquet his housekeeper had placed in the middle of the table. In front of the mirror in the hall he ran his hand through his hair once more, and put the daisy in the buttonhole of his summer jacket. Then he opened the front door and walked down the steps to Prinsegade, filled with the blind triumph that people sometimes experience when they've conquered their own better judgment.

  WHEN ALBERT WAS asked to step inside the house, Knud Erik was there. Klara Friis had put up her long hair; he noticed that she'd washed it. He rarely paid attention to the seasonal displays of changing fashions in the shop window of I. C. Jensen in Kirkestræde, but he could tell from the cut of her dress, which reached halfway down her calves, that it wasn't new. She must have produced it for this occasion: a garment set aside from the first years of her marriage, perhaps, or even an earlier time, when she was full of youth and expectation.

  The table was set for three, which both disappointed and reassured him. Knud Erik's presence ruled out any blunders occurring, and yet Klara Friis blushed when she opened the door to him. She stepped aside, just as she'd done this morning, and bowed her head slightly. Her neck, exposed below her chignon, looked so delicate that he had to suppress an urge to cross the line between protectiveness and possessive desire, and put his hand on it.

  Little Edith was nowhere to be seen, and he asked after her. Klara told him that she'd already eaten and had been put to bed.

  She invited them to sit down at the table. Knud Erik, whose sun-bleached hair had been combed through wet, was the last to pull up his chair. He sat down with an unnatural stiffness and stared into the distance. A big bowl of freshly boiled shrimp stood in the middle of the table. Albert had brought the wine in a basket, wrapped in a damask napkin. He took it out and opened it with a little pop. He'd had trouble deciding whether to pack wineglasses too. He knew that she wouldn't have any, but feared that if he brought his own, she might interpret it as a criticism, an underscoring of the poverty of both her home and her life. In the end, it was his sense of tradition that won the argument. He didn't fancy drinking good wine from an ordinary glass, so he took his best crystal. Old men and their habits indeed. He'd even brought a corkscrew.

  He poured the wine into the glasses, glancing at Knud Erik, who was watching him attentively. "I nearly forgot you," he said, and pulled out a bottle of cordial and placed it in front of him.

  The boy laughed. "Just like a picnic," he said. He looked at the condensation on the wine bottle and touched it carefully. "It's cold," he said, and his voice was filled with wonder.

  Albert Madsen and Klara Friis clinked glasses. She clutched hers as if afraid of dropping it. He glanced at her over the rim of his own. She blushed, unfamiliar with the rituals surrounding the consumption of wine. Her glance flickered confusedly away from the table, then she threw her head back and swigged from the glass, as though its pale contents were medicine, best downed quickly. She grimaced, then reddened again.

  "Please, may I taste it?" Knud Erik said.

  "It's not for children." His mother gave him a severe look. Albert could see that her rebuke was an attempt to hide her confusion at this meal, which was unlike anything she'd ever taken part in.

  "I'm not a child," the boy retorted. "I earn my own money."

  "Then you're allowed a taste." Albert winked at Knud Erik's mother and passed his glass to the boy, who took it carefully with both hands before raising it tentatively to his lips, as though already regretting his nerve.

  "Just one small sip," his mother ordered him.

  Knud Erik grimaced.

  "Ugh," he exclaimed. "It tastes sour."

  Albert laughed. "I think your mother agrees."

  "Yes," she admitted. "I don't think wine is for me."

  "It's always like that to start with. Later you'll learn to appreciate it."

  "Not me," Knud Erik declared. "I'll never learn to appreciate it."

  Albert wished that time could stop right then. He had a family. He was sitting at dinner with a boy who could be his grandchild and a woman who could be his daughter, and he wanted nothing more. He'd put the loneliness of the war years behind him. He almost felt he had a home that consisted of more than just himself and his memories.

  He thought of his afternoon in the bath and his preening in front of the mirror. He'd dressed up, putting on a summer jacket and fixing a flower in his buttonhole. Perhaps there was a spark left in him. But if so, it was the last spark: the one that flares suddenly in the embers of a fire that has burned itself out overnight. Finding no nourishment in ashes, it soon fades. For a moment he'd given in to vanity, but it wasn't a woman he needed. It was this: two people he could be something to and who, by mere virtue of their presence, could be something to him.

  He twirled the stem of the wineglass and chuckled to himself.

  "What are you laughing at?"

  "Oh, I'm not sure I even know, I just feel so comfortable here. Put it down to contentment."

  "That's good to hear." She got up. "Time for dessert."

  She brought in a bowl of rhubarb compote and a jug of cream. Knud Erik followed her, bearing three smaller bowls, which he placed in front of them.

  "You're good at helping your mother, I see."

  "Yes, he's a good boy."

  She sat down and served them.

  "When you've finished you may go outside to play."

  Knud Erik wolfed down his compote, sending the cream splashing over the tablecloth. She frowned at him but didn't speak. Then he disappeared out the door. She looked after him and laughed.

  "Someone's got places to go."

  "It's summer," Albert said.

  The low-ceilinged room was semi-dark, but outside, the street was bright as day. He pushed back his chair. "Thank you, that was lovely. I suppose I'd better be off home now."

  She bowed her head as though he'd rejected her. "Please stay a little longer," she begged, and looked at him. "See, I haven't even finished my wine. You did promise you'd teach me to enjoy it. So you can't abandon me now." Her voice was coquettish, as if she was permitting herself greater freedom now that her son was absent.

  "I'll stay a little longer, then. May I suggest that we go outside into the garden and enjoy the summer evening?"

  He could see that she was taken aback by this proposal. Her garden was small, a kitchen garden—more decorative than a bare yard but not a place she'd invite guests or spend a spare hour.

  "Allow me," he said, picking up two of the high-backed, dark-varnished dining room chairs. He carried them through the kitchen and set them next to each other in the garden while Klara disappeared into the bedroom to check on Edith, who had slept soundly through the entire meal. When she returned they clinked glasses once more, and this time when he tried to catch her eye across the rim, she responded. The soft evening light transformed her pale skin, giving it an enigmatic, intense glow. She smiled at him. He smiled back. For a moment they were both embarrassed.

  He looked across the small garden. At the back he saw black currant and gooseberry bushes. There were also potatoes and rhubarb. A small gravel path led to a flower bed bordered with conch shells bleached by salt water and sun; you'd find the same shells b
ordering most gardens in Marstal. Growing next to the house was a small rose bed. There was no terrace; he'd had to balance the chairs on the flagstones that had been laid here and there on the soil. There were no weeds between the stones, and he could see that the garden was neatly tended.

  From the street came the sound of children's cries, while in the neighboring gardens women were chatting quietly. An outsider wouldn't have noticed the absence of male voices, but Albert did. Summer was the women's season. At the first sign of spring, the ships began preparing to leave the shelter of the breakwater. Some would return at Christmas, but many, bound on longer voyages, would be gone for years. In the absence of the menfolk, it was the women who ran the town. Now he sat in the midst of this female life, surrounded by summer light and the scent of elderberries, and experienced a part of Marstal in a way he hadn't done in years.

  He leaned forward and picked up a conch. He put it against his ear and listened to the rush coming from the spiral within.

  "Listen," he said, and handed it to her. "They've invented the radio now. But when I was a child, we had these for radios."

  Instead of putting it to her ear, Klara replaced the shell in the border, with an expression that suggested he'd disturbed a secret harmony in her garden by picking it up.

  The conch had a melody for everyone who listened to it. For the young, the conch sang of longing for distant shores; for the old it sang of absence and sorrow. It had a song for the young and another one for the old, one for the men and one for the women, and the women's song was always the same, as monotonous as the beating of the waves against the beach: loss, loss. The conch offered them no enchantment. When they put their ear to it, all they heard was the echo of their mourning.

  They sat in the garden for half an hour. The sun went down behind a rooftop, and a grainy twilight filtered between the gooseberry and black currant bushes as the sky turned an even deeper violet.