We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [117]
The stone had reached its destination.
Albert had held several public meetings at Hotel Ærø about the memorial stone, or the Fellowship Stone, as he'd privately named it. It would be financed in the way that anything major and important in Marstal was always financed: through the collection of small contributions. Through fellowship. When he stood on the podium, warming to his theme, he happily forgot that there was something important he'd never explained. What was the occasion for erecting the memorial stone? The seventy-fifth anniversary of the construction of the breakwater had been 1900, the year the century changed, but no one had organized anything back then. Its centenary was twelve years away. He couldn't count on being alive then; he'd be eighty-one years old, and he wasn't one of those arrogant men who assume they'll live forever. But why now? Why in the year 1913?
Fortunately, no one ever put that question to him. "Of course," everyone had said, the first time he suggested it. Of course the town should have a memorial stone—and what better event to commemorate than the construction of the breakwater? So he was never called on to explain that one day in June, he'd grown dizzy on the water south of the Tail and had premonitions whose meaning was unclear to him. He could hardly stand on a podium and talk about that. Indeed, he couldn't even have confided to a friend that this was his reason for having 230 men drag a fourteen-ton boulder around on a flatbed.
Why now, why in the year 1913?
Before it is too late, before we forget who we are, and why we do what we do.
Too late? What do you mean?
No. He could barely answer these questions himself. All he knew was that he'd been overwhelmed by a sense of doom, and to counter it, he'd thrown himself into organizing the raising of the boulder.
Again and again, from the podium in the ballroom at Hotel Ærø, Albert recounted the history of Marstal's breakwater. He explained how the harbor had once been at the mercy of winds from the north and the east, and yes, from the south too, where the sea often broke through the point that we call the Tail. How even ships in winter dock could get tossed ashore. And how, when we all faced ruin, because our harbor was so vulnerable, one man had stepped forward. You could consider him the actual founder of our town as we know it today, Albert would say, even though he didn't build on land, but in the water. He was the creator of our fellowship, the force we're now erecting a stone to commemorate. Skipper Rasmus Jepsen was his name. He encouraged our town's residents to commit themselves in writing to the construction of a breakwater. Three hundred and fifty-nine people signed that document. Some provided their labor, some the stones to build it with, and some money. But everyone gave something—all except one, who declined for the shameful reason that you should put your own needs first and not gamble on posterity.
"I will refrain from mentioning his name, for the sake of his living relatives," Albert said from the podium.
At which point everyone turned and stared at Skipper Hans Peter Levinsen, who was to become one of the keenest and most generous of the contributors to the memorial stone because it finally gave him the chance to erase his family's eighty-eight-year-old shame.
Continuing his speech, Albert recalled how, on January 28, 1825, which happened to be the birthday of King Frederik VI, one hundred men had gathered on the ice under the banner of fellowship to lay the first boulder of the massive building project. Even nature had been on their side, because if that year and the next few hadn't been ice winters, they'd never have been able to lay down the boulders. But they'd succeeded, and now here was Marstal's breakwater, an eternal symbol of what men can achieve through fellowship and hard work.
"When you look at the breakwater," he addressed the gathering, "you see a line of boulders. But never forget the real building materials. Strong arms and unbreakable will."
He concluded by reminding them that