We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [115]
IN 1913 ALBERT decided to construct a monument to his personal doctrine in the form of a memorial stone to be erected close to the new Dampskibsbroen. He'd already picked out the stone and knew its provenance. It was about four meters long, three meters wide, and two meters tall. It lay in the Baltic Sea out by the Tail, and in an offshore storm you could sometimes see it from land. In the summer boys would swim out to it and stand on it, their small blond heads just reaching above the surface of the glittering water.
The light would play on the waves and flicker across its massive flank and sometimes Albert would sit in his boat, resting his oars, and simply contemplate it. It lay so solidly down there in the pale green, shifting waters. But even this boulder had come here on a voyage, millions of years ago, moving down from the north with the ice. Now it must be moved again, this time to a permanent location, to remind Marstal of the construction of the breakwater and man's power over nature.
He even came up with the inscription it would bear: STRENGTH IN FELLOWSHIP.
Then one sunny day in June, as he sat leaning over the rail, gazing into the lapping water, a severe bout of dizziness overcame him, and he got the sudden feeling that the world was losing its cohesion and that everything he believed in was doomed. He felt the shadow of a menace that went beyond the fury of the wind and the pounding of the waves: a foreboding of looming disasters from which even the unyielding boulders of the breakwater couldn't protect Marstal. The sensation was so vague and dreamlike that he thought he must have briefly nodded off in the afternoon sunshine. Then, fixing his eyes on the boulder in the water, he made out his own shadow on its scarred flank, and his sense of reality returned.
It was then he got the idea. It came over him with a kind of urgent haste, in a flurry of inspiration. It was time to take stock, he decided: to make a big, strong, permanent mark to counterbalance his own sudden premonition of doom. The stone.
Only a few days after this epiphany, Albert called a meeting in the rooms of the Marine Insurance Company in Havnegade to present his idea to a circle of invited guests. His proposal for the memorial met with general support, and a committee was set up to carry out the preliminary work. The stone was to be put in place that very year, before autumn set in.
A week later Albert joined the chairmen of the harbor commission the Marine Insurance Company to inspect it. A strong breeze was blowing from the west, baring its top as the waves broke against it.
On a mid-July morning, two crane barges were towed out to the boulder. On board were Albert Madsen, the chairman of the harbor commission, the harbormaster, a fisherman, and a rigger from one of the shipyards in town. A circle of the town's ladies brought sandwiches and refreshments to the white sandy beach, and these were ferried out to the sweating men on the two rocking decks. By two o'clock the stone had been lifted and secured between the barges. When the returning convoy passed Dampskibsbroen and sailed into the harbor with the stone tethered between them, the flag went up and the large crowd waiting on the wharf cheered.
We were celebrating ourselves: ourselves and our flourishing town.
Two days later the boulder was hoisted ashore. Albert had telephoned Svendborg and asked them to send a flatbed trailer to transport it, and this arrived on the ferry the following day. A huge crowd turned up and everyone volunteered to pull. Shipyard owner and rigger, able seaman and shipowner, merchant and clerk: even the manager of the savings bank turned himself into a human mule and got hold of the rope, while schoolchildren ran around making a racket until they too found a place in the line. Even old, long-retired skippers interrupted their chatting