We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  "I don't think you understand how serious this is, Captain Friis. I gave you an order. You don't have a choice."

  "You're welcome to shoot me," he said calmly and nodded at the holster. "And make that freak an honorary citizen of the Soviet Union afterward. I really don't care. But he's not coming on board my ship."

  "Watch your words, Captain."

  She spun on her heel and got into the car, which turned around and drove back to the hospital.

  He returned to the Nimbus and issued orders to sail immediately. The first mate gave him a startled look. "We can't do that, Captain. We need to light up the boiler first. And our papers aren't ready. They'll come after us and make us turn around."

  "For Christ's sake!" He started pacing up and down the bridge, awaiting the inevitable. Sure enough, in just half an hour a truck pulled up on the wharf in front of the Nimbus. On the back of it sat the man in the high-backed wheelchair, with a sea bag on his lap. The official stepped out of the cab. The crew crowded around the rail to stare at the man, who raised his one arm and waved to them.

  "Hello, boys!"

  The official ordered two men to lift the man off the bed of the truck and carry him up the gangway. Once he was settled on the deck, she saluted Knud Erik with irony.

  "Over to you, Captain."

  "He's going over the side as soon as we leave the harbor."

  "That's entirely up to you."

  She turned around and got back into the cab of the truck. The engine revved and the truck drove off.

  The man in the wheelchair waited. Knud Erik crossed the deck and placed himself next to him, then turned to face the crew, who were standing in a semicircle, eyeing the new arrival curiously.

  "I'd like to introduce our guest," Knud Erik said. "His name is Herman Frandsen."

  Vilhjelm and Anton looked shocked. In the eighteen years since they'd last seen him, Herman had changed into something so ravaged and burned-out that they hadn't recognized him until his name was uttered.

  "He's known to several of us on board. But not for good reasons. He's a murderer and a rapist, and if any of you accidentally push him overboard, you'll be rewarded with a bottle of whiskey."

  Herman stared into the distance, seemingly unaffected by the speech with which Knud Erik had honored him.

  "In the meantime we'd better find you some work to do," Knud Erik said. "You've rested long enough. Get up."

  "I can't."

  With his remaining arm Herman calmly flipped the blanket aside. His trousers were empty from the knees down. It was more than an arm he'd lost. Both his legs had been amputated.

  HERMAN WASN'T THROWN overboard when they left Molotovsk, and nobody tried to win the whiskey bottle on offer to whoever sent him to the resting place he deserved at the bottom of the sea.

  "I've still got the most important thing," Herman said to the crowd that had gathered around him in the mess. "My right hand. A sailor's best friend in those long off-duty hours. And I can still raise a glass," he said. "What more can a man ask for?" His jerking-off hand, he called it. "Shake," he said, offering a big paw. "I've washed it." He wriggled the tattoo on his arm. "The old lion still roars."

  They lined up to greet him.

  Herman spent most of his days in the mess. He helped out at mealtimes, setting the table and clearing it afterward. He could just about manage that with one arm. It was degrading work, but that didn't seem to bother Herman. There was always someone ready to go for a stroll with him on deck when the weather permitted. Someone, Knud Erik didn't know who, had rigged up a pulley so they could lift him onto the bridge. One day he found him sitting on a high chair in front of the wheel, which he controlled with his one strong fist.

  He'd given strict orders that Herman was not to be given alcohol, knowing full well that at the heart of it lay a secret desire to make Herman's life unbearable. Yet again and again, he came across him obviously under the influence. There was a secret cache of vodka somewhere on board, and the crew were supplying him with it. They treated him as if he was a mascot rather than a murderer.

  There were three people on board who wouldn't have been alive if Herman had had his way: Vilhjelm, Anton, and Knud Erik himself. Miss Kristina's life would have taken a different and happier path without him. Ivar would still be among the living. And so would Holger Jepsen. God only knew how many people around the world Herman had killed since then because they'd been in his way for one reason or another.

  And yet here he was, calm, relaxed, jovial, and sociable, making himself popular with the crew, who seemed unaware that he was a monster who'd only been rendered harmless through amputation. The younger men, especially, seemed fascinated by him. When the mess boy brought coffee to the bridge, he described Herman as "an amazing guy who's had lots of adventures."

  "He's got some incredible stories," Duncan said. He was seventeen and from Newcastle.

  "Did he tell you the one about smashing his stepfather's skull till his brains spilled out? When he wasn't even as old as you are now?"

  He glanced furtively at the boy to see if it had had any effect. It hadn't. Stubbornly, the boy looked straight ahead. He had his own view of Herman and there was no way the captain was going to change that.

  Knud Erik knew perfectly well why. Before the war, everyone would have avoided Herman if they'd known the truth about him. They'd all have shunned his company, and whoever had the guts to would have treated him with open contempt. But the war had destroyed their moral defenses. They'd seen too much and perhaps done too much as well. Why should a mess boy take his captain's strictures seriously when only a few months ago he'd seen him shoot a pilot who was kneeling on the wing of a wrecked plane, pleading for his life? Where was the difference between Herman and Knud Erik?

  The war had made equals of them, and Knud Erik could only hope that Herman would never find out what he himself had done. He could imagine his reaction. "I wouldn't have thought you had it in you," he'd say, bursting with malicious joy at knowing that Knud Erik too had succumbed to the worst in himself.

  Herman was made for war. He was the type of man who felt naturally at home in it. He had that ability that Anton had said was essential to survival: he could forget. The big, brutal muscle man had been reduced to a helpless, barely human lump of meat, and yet he didn't give up. He didn't brood on the past but adapted to the present. Once he'd had four limbs. That was one kind of life. Now he had one. That was another kind of life, but it was still a life. He was like the worm you can cut in half without injury. A pioneer, in fact. In war, everyone had to become like him or go under.

  "He took part in the battle for Guadalcanal in the Pacific, sir."

  The mess boy was still standing there.

  "Is that what he told you?"

  "Yes, sir. His ship was sunk and he was in the water for an hour, fighting a shark. He says you have to punch them on the nose or in the eye. Those are their weakest points. But the shark kept coming back. Their skin's like sandpaper, it scrapes you."

  "So he knocked out the shark in round three and got away with a scrape?" He couldn't control the sarcasm in his voice.

  "No, sir," the mess boy said. The naïveté in the boy's voice made him feel ashamed. "The shark was shot by someone on the ship who came to his rescue. It took a chunk out of his legs and some of his lower arm."

  "Has he shown you the scars, perhaps?"

  "No, sir. He says they were on the parts that were amputated."

  "So it wasn't the shark that took his arm and his legs?"

  "No, sir. That wasn't until later. That was frostbite."

  The core of the crew came from Marstal. There was Knud Erik himself, Anton, Vilhjelm, and Helge. Then there was Wally, who was half Siamese, and Absalon, who, though he'd grown up in Stubbekøbing, must have roots in the West Indies from the days when a few of its islands belonged to Denmark. They made up the Danes on board the Nimbus. The rest of the crew were from all over the place. There were two Norwegians, a Spaniard, and an Italian; the gun
ners were all British, as was the mess boy; there were two Indians, a Chinese, three Americans, and a Canadian. They were a floating Babel, at war with a god intent on ruining the Tower.

  What united them?

  The captain did. He was its fragile core. Though worn down by his own inner strife, he embodied the law of the ship and issued the commands they had to follow if they wanted to reach the next port alive.

  Did they ever wonder why they sailed? Was it duty, conviction, or something deeper that kept propelling them into the danger zone?

  At the start of the war, he'd believed that behind their willingness to risk their lives fighting was the same moral attitude that kept them united and determined to rescue fellow crewmen in a storm. He'd stopped believing that. But his old belief hadn't been supplanted by a new one.

  At times he agreed with Anton: they were united by their silence. If they began articulating their thoughts, they'd feed one another's insanity and everything would fall apart. This was merely a ceasefire, and he knew it couldn't last.

  "What's he been telling you now?"

  Knud Erik never entered the mess, so whenever Duncan appeared on the bridge with coffee, he questioned him, with the excuse that as captain, he needed to know what was happening on board.

  "He told us about the time they were torpedoed and climbed into the lifeboats. The water was as clear as gin. He could see the two red and white bands on the torpedoes before they hit. The cook had taken an ax with him and started chopping at the rail. 'What the hell do you think you're doing, chef?' the captain asked. 'I'm making a notch for every day we're on the lifeboat.' 'If you keep hacking away like that, there won't be many more.'"

  Duncan stopped and looked at Knud Erik. He was clearly expecting the reaction that Herman had got in the mess for this tale: a roar of laughter.

  Knud Erik didn't laugh. He took a sip of his hot coffee. "What else did he say?"

  "Well, a few days after that they spotted a cork bobbing up and down. They couldn't see any land. But it cheered them up because the cork meant it couldn't be far off. Then a few hours later another cork floated by. Still no sign of land, and they started thinking it was strange, all these corks floating about in the middle of the sea. And that's when they discovered that some of the crew had a stash of whiskey in the bow and they were emptying one bottle after another on the sly. That's when Herman got his frostbite."

  "And how did that happen?"

  "Well, you see, sir. They started fighting about the whiskey. And he was pushed into the water. Herman said that it took them a hell of a long time to pull him back on board."

  Herman turned every tragedy in this war, including his own, into a joke. Through the stories he told them, he came as close to conveying the unspeakable as you could get without saying the words out loud. That was why they listened to him.

  When he heard that their nickname for him was Old Funny, Knud Erik realized that it was no longer silence that united the crew.

  It was Herman.

  The latest tale to come from the mess was that Herman could drink scientifically. During surgery, the doctors had removed some of Old Funny's surplus guts, which meant he had plenty of extra space inside. There was skill involved, he explained—like packing a hull with the maximum cargo. You had to have a method based on scientific fact, and he'd found it. To be perfectly frank, they couldn't see that his drinking was so special. He just knocked it back in the same way they did—the only difference being that he could keep at it longer. But this, he argued, was surely proof that he was drinking scientifically. He never needed to stop. As far as that went, they had to agree with him. They'd retire one by one to their cabins, and he'd stay on in the mess, downing more.

  The only time Old Funny had met his match was when a young Salvation Army officer had come on board in Bristol to convert the crew to the Lord Jesus Christ. Old Funny had proposed a bet. If the evangelist could drink him under the table, he'd become a believer. But if Old Funny was the winner, the youngster would have to leave the Salvation Army for good.

  "It was more than just a question of who could drink the most," Old Funny said. "It was a battle between faith and science. He had his Jesus, and I had my method. But he won, the bastard. I went under the table at four o'clock in the morning. To this day I still don't know how he did it."

  "So you're a believer now?"

  "I'm a man of my word," Old Funny said. "I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and I renounce the devil and all his works. The good Lord looks after me. It's thanks to Him I've still got my jerking-off hand."

  He put down his glass and made the sign of the cross, while his stump waggled as if wanting to join in the fun too.

  "But you're still drinking," Wally protested.

  "Only when I take communion, and I'm a frequent churchgoer. Besides, I think I owe it to old Jesus. You see"—he looked around, and they could tell that the story hadn't yet reached its climax—"when he'd drunk me under the table, and he realized he'd won, he got up, threw his coat on the floor, and shouted, 'I'm through with the Salvation Army!' No one got what the hell he was talking about until he explained it. 'I realized it as soon as I emptied my first glass,' he said. 'I like drinking. I didn't win because the Lord was on my side. I won because I couldn't get enough!'"

  They howled with laughter around the mess table. Old Funny enjoyed this applause for a while as he studied the transparent liquid in his glass. Then he raised the vodka to his lips and drained the glass in one gulp.

  "Here's to Jesus," he belched.

  FREIGHT SHIPS FROM Archangel and Murmansk joined them along the route back to Iceland, making them a pack of eight in total. A destroyer and two refitted trawlers, both equipped with depth charges, escorted them. It wasn't much protection, but apart from the ballast, they were sailing empty, and the British Admiralty probably assumed that the Germans would think it a waste of ammunition to attack ships with no war matériel on board. They'd soon discover that the Germans took a different view.

  It was now October and the ice rim had shifted farther south. They sailed as close to it as they dared, but for the German bombers based in northern Norway, it was still no distance. The autumn gales provided some unexpected help. The weather was severe most of the time, and in heavy winds the aircraft never left the ground. But a storm in the Barents Sea made no difference to the U-boats.

  Wally was on the lookout at the bow, and he managed to sound three false torpedo alarms in the course of a single hour. "It's the stripes of foam on the waves," he explained apologetically.

  "He's anxious," said Anton, who'd appeared on the bridge from the engine room to moan about all the times he'd been ordered to reverse or stop for no reason.

  Knud Erik thought it over. "I'd better find someone else," he said.

  "Being up there all on my own with no one to talk to drives me round the bend," Wally said, with a look of gratitude.

  Knud Erik went down to the mess. As usual Herman was sitting by the table, holding court. Only Duncan and Helge, who were busy getting dinner ready, were there. Helge had grown used to Herman and called him Old Funny along with the rest of the crew. Sometimes they'd talk about Marstal.

  Knud Erik hadn't spoken to Herman since he'd come on board. Now he went up to him and announced, without a greeting, "It's about time you made yourself useful." He ordered him dressed in an Icelandic sweater, duffel coat, and oilskins, and his head wrapped in a cap and woolen scarves. A mitten was put on his hand. His lower body was covered by blankets and a tarpaulin. Then he had him tied to the wheelchair.

  Herman was undisturbed. "I feel like a baby being taken for a stroll" was all he said. Not once had he asked the captain what he was supposed to do.

  "May you freeze to death," said Knud Erik.

  Two of the crew carried Herman up onto the stem, where they secured his wheelchair so the heavy rolling of the ship wouldn't send him flying. The Nimbus didn't plunge deep enough for the bow to be submerged, but an icy spray washed over it. Knud Erik stood on
the bridge and looked down on the bundled-up figure, who seemed to occupy the whole bow. The circle was complete. Once, Herman had sent Ivar out on the bowsprit. Now Herman was similarly exposed.

  Knud Erik saw him bend his arm and raise something to his lips. Someone had managed to slip him a bottle of vodka. Oh yes, Old Funny was one of theirs, all right.

  Two hours later Herman raised his hand: a torpedo was heading toward them.

  Knud Erik ordered the ship to reverse, and Anton responded instantly down in the engine room. Knud Erik had time to note the strangeness of their putting unconditional faith in a man who'd once threatened their lives. Then he spotted the stripe of foam just ahead of the bow. Herman's warning had come at the last minute.

  The torpedo sped onward, now aiming for another of the convoy ships, the tanker Hopemount. Another foam stripe appeared, parallel to the first. The torpedoes hit the Hopemount amidships just ten seconds apart. The ship broke in two, and the halves drifted in opposite directions in the raging sea; the front half began sinking immediately. The water around the stricken ship was filled with men, with and without life jackets, fighting to stay afloat in the freezing water.

  The Nimbus was still reversing at full speed. They were now the last ship in the convoy. A trawler approached; Knud Erik hoped she was there to pick up survivors. If she dropped a depth charge, it would mean certain death for the men in the water.

  On the deck of the Hopemount's rear end, still afloat, a half-naked figure appeared. The sailor had managed to fasten his life jacket around his heavy belly, but his legs were naked. He climbed up on the rail and let himself fall into the water. Knud Erik saw him surface and make brisk strokes to escape the suction from the half-upright stern, which was rapidly taking in water and would soon plunge to the bottom of the sea. The distress light on the life jacket glowed red against the gray waves.