We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [129]
"In the years before the war, you'd often take a walk to Dampskibsbroen to see the ferry leave, wouldn't you?"
"Yes," Abildgaard said. "Dare I say it, it's the only entertainment the town has to offer. Well, apart from the ferry's arrival, obviously. Which surpasses the excitement of its departure. So, yes, of course I did."
"Did you notice anything in particular?"
The minister shook his head. "Not as far as I can remember."
"The unusually large number of farmers, weighed down by baggage?"
"Ah, I see where you're going with this."
Abildgaard smiled disarmingly, as though he knew he was about to be robbed of his earlier minor victory and was willing to be a good sport about it.
"Yes, I'm sure you do. But there's no harm in my pointing it out anyway. Those farmers were immigrating to America. There they were, the country's spiritual and cultural backbone, with ancient family farms whose soil their ancestors have cultivated for hundreds of years, saying a faithless farewell. Whereas the sailors, the rootless, restless, stateless freebooters—"
"I never said that." Abildgaard interrupted him.
"—brawlers and vandals, ruffians and half criminals, drunkards and debauchers with a girl in every port, whose Danish is so mixed up with words from every continent that not even their own mothers can understand them when they come home, with their arms and chests as tattooed as a deck of cards—hearts, diamonds, spades, clubs—"
"I must protest," the minister said. "My respect for the breadwinners of this town is too great to speak of the seafaring profession in such terms."
"In that case you have good reason. Because you've never seen Marstal sailors lining up on Dampskibsbroen, with chests of valuables on their backs, to immigrate to America. We might be gone for years. But we always come home again. Because us sailors, we stay."
WHEN SPRING CAME the harbor emptied because a new insurance policy had been established to ensure that shipowners wouldn't suffer financially if a vessel was lost through war. After that the freight market went only one way, and that was up. We sailed like never before, not just to Norway and western Sweden and Iceland, but to Newfoundland, the West Indies, and Venezuela, even right across the war zones to England and the French ports in the Channel. Everything was back to normal, only better, although we moaned about the English, who introduced endless complicated sailing restrictions and charged exorbitant prices for piloting and towing. In this respect the Germans were far more reasonable. There was free piloting and towing assistance in German ports along the Baltic coast. So far, Marstal had yet to lose a single ship.
Then the submarine war began.
Our first loss was the schooner Salvador, which went down in flames on June 2, 1915, in the middle of a warm day. Albert made a note in the right-hand column in his account ledger. Now it would start to fill up.
No one had died. The crew returned home and behaved as if they'd achieved something important. Ha, they chuckled in the bars and streets, where curious onlookers crowded around them. It had been a picnic. All right, so they'd lost their ship, but the U-boat responsible had towed their lifeboat for a while. Their first mate, Hans Peter Kroman, had been presented with a pipe and some tobacco—Hamburg brand tobacco, very good quality, incidentally—and Captain Jens Olesen Sand had received two bottles of cognac for the voyage home. The German U-boat crew? Very nice people; a bit on the pale side, perhaps, from being down deep for so long, but otherwise very respectable sailors.
"What a shame," Sand had remarked to the U-boat captain, as they stood on the sub's deck, watching the Salvador burn up.
"That's war for you," replied the German, shrugging apologetically.
True, he was no Englishman, but a gentleman all the same. When the submarine crew finally unhitched the tow rope, they