We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [122]
The following night he saw the schooner H. B. Linnemann send out a distress signal. As in the previous dream, he saw the crew scrambling around on the deck, trying to launch the lifeboat. Again he heard shots and was unable to tell where they were coming from. He instantly recognized the ship's captain, L. C. Hansen, standing on the half-deck, right under a flapping Danish flag. Captain Hansen sank down as he pressed his hand to his thighs, where a large, dark patch was spreading. A moment later he was hit in the head and wiped from the ranks of the living. Afterward three of the crew were shot in quick succession.
Finally it dawned on Albert what it all meant: the brutality, the mercilessness, the inexplicable killings of peaceful seamen, and the sinking of ships.
He was foreseeing a war.
He thought about Commander Cartensen: he was about to get the war he wanted. And what would Albert get? He sensed darkly that in these dreams he was witnessing more than just the deaths of people he knew. He was witnessing the end of an entire world.
He couldn't explain this feeling in any more detail, only that it gripped him like a deep sorrow and sucked the light out of the panoramic view from his gable window. What use would the breakwater be in a few years' time? Yes, the sailor was at war with the sea, but soon there would be another, crueler war that no amount of seamanship could win.
Albert had neither the imagination nor the political insight to envisage who might start this conflict, nor did his dreams tell him. But he thought about the battleships he'd seen on the sea, and the torpedo boats in the harbor, and the submarines, which he'd read about but never seen. To what object on earth can you compare a sailing ship? None. A ship has her own wondrous architecture. But what about the new floating war machines? The submarine seemed to be made in the image of a shark, while the torpedo boats looked like armored amphibians. It was as if the entire modern war industry had taken as its templates the prehistoric monsters that had lived on earth millions of years ago.
He'd heard enough about the Englishman Darwin's theories on the origin of species to know that life evolved; it did not regress. But surely regression was precisely what mankind was aiming for with these war machines: a return to the brutal and simple life forms of bygone eras.
Was this what his dreams were showing him, a future in which humanity returned to its amphibian stage and became its own worst enemy?
The dreams continued. He saw schooners go up in flames. He saw them blown to pieces by sudden explosions at the bow, vanishing into the sea in minutes. He saw men drifting in sinking lifeboats. He saw the terror in the seamen's faces and heard their cries for help as they were sucked down into the deep. Finally, all he could see was the sea itself and its relentless waves. For a long time he felt as though he were floating on that iron-gray water, all alone beneath a clouded sky. He thought that the world must have looked like this soon after its's creation, before life began.
He started keeping lists of the ships he saw go down in his dreams. He also wrote down the names of the dead, when he recognized a face. He wrote all this in the left-hand column in his office account ledger, leaving the right-hand column blank, reserved for the day when his dreams started coming true. He reflected that these must be the strangest accounts ever kept and that he must be the oddest bookkeeper, because he was treating an imaginary world as if, like the real one, it must answer for its accuracy.
Albert was a strongly built man, with a short beard and a head of hair that age had not thinned. For many years