We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [106]
We don't know.
In any case, adolescent sensitivities were not uppermost in our minds at this point: a ship had arrived at the port with only the cabin boy on board. Where was the captain? Had he gone ashore in Rudkøbing, and had Herman run off with the ship?
"What's happened to Captain Jepsen?" we asked him.
Herman was still nursing his sore cheek. "He fell overboard."
He sounded absent-minded, as though he needed time to recall who Captain Jepsen was.
"He fell overboard? No one falls overboard between Marstal and Rudkøbing in a light wind."
"Maybe I didn't put it the right way," Herman said. It was then that we first sensed a terrible arrogance in him. "What I meant was, he jumped."
"Jepsen? Jumped overboard?"
All we could do was stupidly repeat Herman's words like a bunch of parrots. It was that impossible for us to grasp what he'd said.
"Yes," he said. "He was always whining about missing Ma. In the end I suppose he couldn't take it anymore."
You could hear his arrogance grow with every word, and we felt like asking him whether he too hadn't "whined" about Erna, and whether her death hadn't been a blow for him, as well as his stepfather. Then, finally, the truth dawned on us. Herman had lost his mother long ago, on the day she'd married Jepsen. By the time she died for real, he felt nothing but contempt for his stepfather's despair. Maybe he even had a morbid feeling that things had fallen into place. Had his stepfather's grief and anguish given him satisfaction? Did he feel avenged when Jepsen jumped overboard? Or—and here we hesitated, we never voiced it, but we thought it privately (and when enough Marstallers privately think the same thing, it's as good as spoken aloud)—when Jepsen was "given a hand"?
"Where did he jump?" we asked—though we sensed that the way we phrased the question would take us farther from the truth.
"I dunno," the boy replied brazenly.
"You don't know? But you've got to. Was it in Mørkedybet? Outside of Strynø? Think. It's important."
"Why?" He shot us a defiant look. "Water's water. And when you're drowned, you stay drowned. Makes no difference where."
We got nowhere with him.
Sooner or later Jepsen's body would drift ashore on one of the archipelago's many little islands, on Strynø, Tasinge, or the coast of Langeland, perhaps as far in as Lindelse Nor. And there it would lie, sloshing about in the seaweed, half eaten by fish and crabs. But it wouldn't be your regular washed-up body. Or so a lot of us reckoned. Because the forehead would be caved in by a marlinspike. Or a swinging boom. Or one of the many other weapons a would-be murderer might find on board ship.
But Jepsen was never found. Perhaps he sank to the bottom, with a stone around his neck to keep him down. Or perhaps, a long-distance traveler to the very end, he drifted with the current and went south, deeper into the Baltic. Either way, he never came back to testify.
And that's why we never voiced our thoughts, though some of us would hint at them in a whisper: "There's something not quite right about that Herman, isn't there? And Jepsen—could he really have jumped?"
A space grew around Herman. He was only a fifteen-year-old boy, but he was something else too, something different and alien. We slapped him on the shoulder and praised him, eventually, for having steered the Two Sisters safely back to Marstal. We had to, because he'd done something spectacular, something no other boy his age could have done. Another kid would have panicked or simply given up. Yes, Herman had the makings of a good sailor. But the toughness that we