We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [127]
Albert continued his list until the end of the year. Sometimes a ship's name matched a name from his dreams, and each time that happened, it had the same terrible impact on him. He'd been there and he'd seen it happen. If the left-hand column on the list of his nightly visions was longer than the right-hand one, it was only bes cause the war was still new. There were those who speculated about a quick breakthrough on all fronts and an imminent end to the conflict—talk he dismissed with a shake of his head. For obvious reasons, he couldn't tell us the cause of his certainty.
"There's still much death to come," he said.
This unexpected pessimism from a man who had put such faith in the future was seen as the weakness of old age. Albert Madsen had lost his nerve.
In the end, he kept his opinions to himself.
A few months after the war broke out we held a collection in aid of the suffering population of Belgium. It was a sign of how remote the war still was that we had compassion to spare for the woes of others. Albert was persuaded to join a committee responsible for preparing a special public exhibition of items related to the town and its seafaring history; the entrance fees would go wholly to the Belgians.
The exhibition was a success, attracting a great many visitors. On display were old costumes from Ærø, intricate lace and embroidery work, brass candle-scissors, and some beautifully carved cupboards and bureaus. We admired these things, but they didn't stir any nostalgia in us; on the contrary, they proved that the present was better than the past, and the future better still. Our continuing progress was especially evident in the section that documented the development of the shipping trade.
"Look," we said to one another, pointing to the model of a Marstal cutter. "Only twenty-four registered tons. And next to it, a three-masted schooner built at Sofus Boye's shipyard, with a carrying capacity of five hundred tons. And it's already twenty-five years old."
Albert was mainly interested in the collection of curiosities that the town's seamen had brought back from all parts of the world. The conches, the stuffed hummingbird, and the set of teeth from a sawfish took him back to the days of his youth. But when he came to the telegrapher Olfert Blach's Chinese hoard of rugs, embroideries, and a complete and very precious Mandarin costume, he stopped to reflect.
"Yes," he said to Pastor Abildgaard. "A sailor knows from experience that there's no such thing as tradition. Or rather, that there are many kinds of tradition, not just his own. This is how we do it here, says the farmer on his ancestral land. Well, that's not how they do it there, says the sailor. He's the one who's seen more. The farmer provides his own yardstick. But the sailor knows that won't do for him. Right now the whole world is at war; it's not even two weeks since Russia, England, and France declared war on Turkey because Turkey became an ally of Germany. Many millions of people are fighting one another, but does the world get any bigger because of it, or any smaller? The ships lie still. The sailors can't go to sea and come back with tales of new things. All we can do now is sit here on our little island and grow as stupid as the farmers."
"You shouldn't say that. You're being unfair to them."
The minister wasn't from the island. He had an outsider's curiosity about anything local that he considered to be an amusing oddity, and he'd been responsible for that part of the exhibition. Albert knew that the pastor was even writing an account of the town's local history because every now and then Abildgaard would ask for advice. A friendly, if not warm, relationship had developed between them. But Albert had often thought that the minister would have been better suited to a rural parish than a shipping town like Marstal. Given his shackled life, the farmer, after all, fit