We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [136]
"Pastor Abildgaard, in one of your sermons you spoke about feeling how the world withdraws and your strength disappears precisely when you need it the most."
Abildgaard looked up with a smile of surprise.
"You were there, Captain Madsen? I'm delighted that you can remember my sermons. Yes, that was an excellent choice of words."
Albert had been going to say something more, but now he fell silent, and Abildgaard relapsed into despondency.
"What am I going to do with that hand?" he wailed. Again he looked out of the window, as though the garden could provide him with an answer to his question.
THE MONEY KEPT rolling into Marstal. The freight market had never been so favorable, nor had seamen's wages. Ship prices too continued their incomprehensible rise. Every other house in one street might be grieving, yet the merriment of those families that remained untouched couldn't be entirely suppressed. Women in their Sunday best mingled with widows in black. Shop fronts were decorated as if Christmas had already come. And no hearses drove to the cemetery, with girls strewing flowers before them: the dead sailors politely kept away. They didn't disturb us, and the elderberry hung low and blossomed over the streets that summer.
Every spring, before the fleet left the harbor, all of Marstal would smell of tar. Sailors armed with sticky brushes would coat the stone foundations of their houses as if they were ships whose bottoms needed caulking in preparation for the summer's sailing. On the house gables were numbers in cast iron, painted black, announcing the year each house had been built: 1793, 1800, 1825. When we hammered away at the tarred plinths, the black peeled off in layers like the rings of a tree trunk. But the numbers never fit. The layers of tar recorded not the years, but the absences. The plinths were tarred only when the men were home.
Now the men were disappearing, one by one, and the women would have to take on this masculine job, along with many others. Soon we'd see them in springtime, tarring away, with brushes as black as their fresh widow's weeds.
Excited students from the Navigation College cycled through the town and pretended to mow down children playing in the streets, who squealed at them in mock terror. The young men were going back to their boardinghouses to eat their hot lunches. Albert froze at the sight of them. He'd seen them too. The U-boats were waiting for them.
They thought the future would bring them money and adventures. They had the fever of youth in their veins and feared nothing. Albert was the one who carried fear on their behalf.
He had odd thoughts about the war and its causes. He visited the church regularly these days. They were just laying the copper lining of the new spire, and the nave echoed all day with the sound of hammering, so Albert visited in the evening, when the day's work was done. He was looking for tranquility. Behind the thick walls, in this cool, white room where dusk arrived early—almost a different version of the rhythm of day and night—he felt he had time to think.
And what he contemplated was death. Some people complained when death came too early and claimed a child, a young mother, or a sailor with a family to provide for. He'd never understood that. Of course, it was a tragedy for those left behind and for the person who'd been robbed of the greater part of life. But it wasn't unfair. Death was beyond such notions. It seemed to him that the bereaved often forgot their grief at a death in favor of railing fruitlessly against life's injustices. After all, no one would dream of saying that the wind was unfair to the