We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [120]
When he awoke the next morning, he felt at peace with himself at last.
Albert Madsen was sixty-nine years old and he'd achieved what he wanted. Although he hadn't had children, which was a regret, the town he belonged to continued to prosper. The shipyards were busy as never before, and the town's leading shipyard would soon switch to building modern vessels, investing in the construction of steel ships instead of wooden ones. Last spring His Majesty the King had paid a visit to the town, which had been decked in bunting in his honor, and the navy's six torpedo ships had been there too. There were plans for a new post office and a copper spire on the church to replace the turreted section of the roof.
The memorial stone at the harbor commemorating the breakwater showed that the townsfolk remembered their history and acknowledged their debt to their ancestors. STRENGTH IN FELLOWSHIP ran the words carved in Johannes Simonsen's neat lettering. Now Albert Madsen's creed had become the town's too.
He knew that the reason for his sense of well-being that morning wasn't just the successful conclusion of his grand project, with the unveiling of the memorial stone and the party that followed. It was something much bigger: the harmony he felt between himself and the continuously prospering world he was part of. He opened the gable window and there in the soft sunlight of an early September morning, beyond the latticework of mast tops, it all lay: the breakwater and the archipelago. The cries of seagulls drifted up, mingling with the clang of hammers and the rasp of saws from the town's shipyards. He knew that these same sounds were heard in every port on every continent, and with a kind of triumph he felt himself to be a part of a much wider world.
Later he would think of this day as "the end," though he never articulated exactly what had been concluded. Not his life, certainly, for he went on to live for several more years. But they were years spent half in reality and half in a world of dreams, and the two were linked by a bridge of terror, for in his dreams he acquired knowledge he couldn't bear alone and yet could share with no one. He ended up living in a town peopled by the dead, and he became death's silent witness.
VISIONS
WHAT DOES A ship broker write about in his log? He'll write about the ups and downs of the freight market, about cargo deals he's made, about ships that never returned home, about crews that were rescued, about insurance questions, about profit margins and the fate of his company. But these days, Albert Madsen didn't write about either business matters or his vessels at sea. Nor did he write about his feelings, and he only rarely made a note of his thoughts. It's true that he recorded certain things that were going on inside his head. But mostly these were things he didn't understand.
A stranger lived inside his head, and he wrote about that stranger.
Albert wrote about his dreams.
But not all of them.
Like most people of a practical nature, he'd once regarded dreams as things made possible only by the hibernation of the rational mind, a confused summary of accidental and half-forgotten events that might once have had a clear meaning but were now lost in a foggy half-world. Like the rest of us, Albert could make little sense of most of his dreams, and didn't try to.
Then one December night in 1877, when he was captain of the brig Princess, he'd dreamt of a voice calling out to him, warning that he was heading for danger. He'd leapt out of his berth and run up to the deck, and seen that the ship was indeed about to run aground on a large flat sandbank, where it would inevitably founder. The dream had warned him. It seemed that his head contained knowledge he'd been unaware of. A mysterious guest had moved in.
Two years later he had a similar experience, when he dreamt that the Princess went down in a hard gale. But on this occasion, even though he suspected that this dream too was a warning,