We, the Drowned

by Carsten Jensen

  A wave of unease went through us as the news spread, and those who didn't know who Herman was had it explained to them in terms that were far from flattering. Herman hadn't shown his face in Marstal for twenty years, but the mere mention of his name was still enough to fill those of us who'd heard the story of the Kristina with disgust. He sat strangely lost among the dead. His arm and leg stumps made him look like a stranded walrus waving its flippers, but his vulnerability didn't lessen our contempt.

  "Help me up," he said.

  We did nothing; we just kept staring at him. None of us wanted to go near him, so he just sat there in the puddle of his wet clothes, and his big body started shaking from cold.

  A man in Kongensgade was running toward us, waving his arms and shouting, but we couldn't make out what he was saying: he was too far off.

  At the same moment the church bells started to peal in a wild and breathless rhythm we'd never heard before, as if someone was improvising a melody fit for an occasion unique to the history of the town—neither funeral nor wedding service, sunrise nor sunset.

  In a way that we couldn't explain, we knew that something momentous had happened, something much bigger than the burning steamers out on the water or Herman's sudden reappearance.

  Finally the running man came within earshot.

  "The Germans have surrendered! The Germans have surrendered!"

  We looked at Herman and Knud Erik and Helge and Vilhjelm and the other men whose names we didn't yet know, and we looked at the woman and the child, and we understood that they were just the first. The sea was about to return our dead.

  We lifted them up and bore them high through the streets. We even hauled Herman out of his pool of water and found a cart to pull him around on. Cheering, we marched through Kongensgade, along Kirkestræde, down Møllegade, along Havnegade, up Buegade, through Tværgade, and down Prinsensgade, where Klara Friis, as always, sat in her bay window, her pale face staring out to sea.

  We went back along Havnegade and as we marched, more people joined us. An accordion appeared, and then a trumpet, a double bass, a tuba, a harmonica, a drum, and a violin. We mixed "King Christian" with "Whiskey, Johnny" and "What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?" There was whiskey and beer, there was rum and more beer, there was Riga Balsam and Dutch gin; it had all been saved up for this moment, the moment we'd always known would come. Lights were lit in the windows, and blackout curtains were burned in the street, crackling as they blazed.

  We ended up on Dampskibsbroen, where the dead lay waiting for us in their rows. And we drank and danced and stumbled about among the corpses, and that was as it should be. The dead had been piling up throughout our entire lives: the drowned and the missing, all those who'd remained unburied across the centuries, lost even to the cemetery, those who'd ruined our lives with longing. Now they rose up and took our hands. We danced and danced in a huge churning circle and in the midst of it all sat Herman, no longer shivering from the cold but flushed with intoxication, brandishing an already half-empty whiskey bottle. He sang in a voice that was hoarse with toil and drunkenness and evil, with impatience and greed and battered lust for life:

  Shave him and bash him,

  Duck him and splash him,

  Torture him and smash him,

  And don't let him go!

  There was a black man, a Chinese man, an Eskimo woman, and a child we didn't know; there was Kristian Stærk and Henry Levinsen with the crooked nose; there was Doctor Kroman, there was Helmer, and there was Marie, who'd finally learned how to clench her fist but didn't yet know that she'd been widowed this very day—Vilhjelm would tell her later. There were Vilhjelm's parents, deaf but smiling; there were the Boye widows, Johanne, Ellen, and Emma, and tonight they didn't hesitate to join hands with us and dance; there was their distant relative, Captain Daniel Boye; and there was Klara Friis, running down Havnegade, breaking through the circle until she found Knud Erik and he nodded at her, and the little boy whose name we didn't know went up to her and said a word we guess Knud Erik must have taught him: "Granny." And the child took her hand and pulled her into the dance, and our dance was like a tree that grew and grew, adding rings for every year.

  There was Teodor Bager, still clutching his chest; there was Henning Friis, once the most handsome man on the Hydra, with the blond forelock Knud Erik had inherited; there was the indefatigable Anna Egidia Rasmussen, and there were her seven dead children, and they too joined the dance alongside the one living daughter; there was the cassocked Pastor Abildgaard, who before he died had finally found himself a rural parish that suited him better than Marstal, looking at us through his steel-rimmed glasses and taking a hesitant step forward. Albert followed, with hoarfrost in his beard and the head of James Cook under his arm, and then came Lorentz; he was panting and struggling, but nothing was going to stop him from joining the dance; there was Hans Jørgen, who went down with the Incomparable, and Niels Peter. Even Isager took his place with us, and so did his fat wife, with the resurrected Karo in her arms, and their sons, Johan and Josef, with the Negro hand; behind them came Farmer Sofus and Little Clausen and Ejnar and Kresten, the poor creature with the constantly weeping hole in his cheek. Laurids Madsen towered above us in his heavy sea boots; others appeared behind him; and finally there was Anton, whose charred face broke open in a smile that revealed his tobacco-stained teeth. Then came whole crews: the men of the Astæa and the Hydra, the Peace, the H. B. Linnemann, the Uranus, the Swallow, the Smart, the Star, the Crown, the Laura, the Forward, the Saturn, the Ami, the Denmark, the Eliezer, the Felix, the Gertrud, the Industry, the Harriet, the Memory: all the drowned. And there, in the outer circle, with their faces half hidden by fog, danced everyone who'd been away at sea for these five years of war.

  So many of them had died. We didn't know how many.

  We'd count them tomorrow. And in the years to come we'd mourn them as we'd always done.

  But tonight we danced with the drowned. And they were us.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We, the Drowned is fiction. The novel is inspired by and largely adheres to the history of the town of Marstal in the years 1848 to 1945. I have made use of the town's traditional family names, but I have shuffled the deck so that any resemblances to people living or dead are purely coincidental.

  The historical parts of the novel are based on my research in the archives of the Maritime Museum in Marstal and on its many publications. I also found valuable material in the newspapers Ærø Folkeblad and Ærø Tidende as well as the quarterly publication Ærøboen.

  I have found inspiration and gained essential knowledge from—among others—the following writers and publications: Henning Henningsen (Crossing the Equator, Sømanden og kvinden, Sømandens våde grav, Sømandens tøj), Ole Lange (Den hvide elefant, Jorden er ikke større), H. C. Røder (Dansk skibsfarts renæssance, vols. 1, 2, and 4), Joseph Conrad (The Shadow-Line), H. Tusch Jensen (Skandinaver i Congo), Adam Hochschild (Kong Leopolds arv), Søndagstanker—kristelige Betragtninger på Søn—og Helligdage af ærøske Præster, Sømandspostillen, Knud Ivar Schmidt (Fra mastetop til havneknejpe), Harriet Sergeant (Shanghai), E. Kroman (Marstals søfart indtil 1925, Dagligliv i Marstal og på Ærø omkring år 1900), Hans Christian Svindings ("Dagbog vedrørende Eckernførdetogtet og Fangenskabet i Rendsborg og Glückstadt," Danske Magazin, series 8, vol. 3), Marstalsøfolkenes visebog, J. R. Hübertz (Beskrivelse af Ærø 1834), C. T. Høy (Træk af Marstals Historie), Victor Hansen (Vore Søhelte: Historiske Fortællinger), "Salmebog til Kirke—og Husandagt 1888," Anne Salmond (The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: Captain Cook in the South Seas), Homer (The Odyssey), Nordahl Grieg (Skibet går videre), W. Somerset Maugham (The Trembling of a Leaf), Herman Melville (White Jacket), Robert Louis Stevenson (Tales of the South Seas, A Footnote to History), Mark Twain (Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands), Victor Hugo (Les travailleurs de la mer), F. Holm Petersen (Langfarere fra Marstal), Knud Gudnitz (En Newfoundlandfarers erindringer), Rauer Bergstram (Kølvand), Per Hansson (Hver tiende man måt
te dø), Martin Bantz (Mellem bomber og torpedoer), Andrew Williams (Slaget om Atlanten), Richard Woodman (Arctic Convoys), Claes-Göran Wetterholm (Dødens Hav: Østersøen 1945), Edward E. Leslie (Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls), Anders Monrad Møller, Henrik Detlefsen, Hans Chr. Johansen (Dansk søfarts historie, vol. 5, Sejl og Damp), Mikkel Kühl (Marstallerne solgte væk), "Marstals handelsflåde 1914–1918" in Maritim Kontakt 26, Karsten Hermansen (Søens købmænd), Karsten Hermansen, Erik Kroman a.o. (Marstals søfart 1925–2000), H. Meesenburg, Erik Kroman ("Marstal—et globalt lokalsamfund," in Bygd, vol. 17, no. 4), Tove Kjærboe (Krampebånd og Klevesnak), Finn Askgaard (ed., Fregatten Jylland), "Samling af søforklaringer over forliste danske Skibe i Årene 1914–1918," Christian Tortsen (Søfolk og skibe 1939–1945), Ole Mortensøn (Sejlskibssøfolk fra Det Sydfynske Øhav), and Poul Erik Harritz (Rundt om Selma fra Birkholm).

  APPRECIATION

  I wish to thank the people of Marstal who turned up at my evening readings at the Navigation College and at the public library in Skolegade, as well as the following individuals, each of whom in their own way provided invaluable assistance: Lis Andersen, Iben Ørum, Henning Therkildsen, Jens and Hanne Lindholm, Henry Lovdall Kromann, Knud Erik Madsen, Connie and Martin Bro Mikkelsen, Lars Klitgaard-Lund, Nathalia Mortensen, Annelise and Poul Erik Hansen, Astrid Raahauge, Pulle Teglbjerg, Leif Stærke Kristensen and Berit Kristensen, Regitze and Ole Pihl, Hjørdis and Kaj Hald, Erik and Lillian Albertsen, Hans Krull, Karla Krull, Erna Larsen, Adam and Anne Grydehøj, Søren Buhl and Marjun Heinesen, Gunnar Rasmussen, Pastor Emeritus Finn Poulsen, Lars Kroman, Lone Søndergaard, Frans Albertsen, and Kristian Bager. A special thank-you goes to Erik Kroman, director of the Maritime Museum in Marstal, for making the museum archives available to me. And to Karsten Hermansen, who shared his home-baked currant buns as well as his inexhaustible knowledge.

  I owe Christopher Morgenstierne my thanks for helping me with maritime terminology and expressions. Any errors in sailing techniques and wind force lie entirely with the author.

  Huge thanks to my dearest Laura. It has taken me half your life to write this book, and you have voiced your strong views about it with unswerving enthusiasm the whole way through.

  And to my beloved Liz I owe a debt of gratitude it would take more than a lifetime to repay. You have supported me with your unique blend of professionalism and love, and it is thanks to you that I finally made it safely to port.