We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [137]
He was well aware of why he felt this way. He was thinking ahead and looking back at the same time, and he didn't focus on anyone in particular. He thought about the generations, living on from fathers and mothers to sons and daughters, who in turn grew up to be fathers and mothers who had sons and daughters. Life was like one big marching army. Death ran alongside and picked off a soldier here and there, but that didn't affect the army. Its march continued, and its size didn't seem to diminish. On the contrary, it grew on into eternity, so that no one was alone in death. Someone else would always follow. That was what counted. Such was the chain of life: unbreakable.
But this war had altered everything. He'd take a walk along the harbor and see how few ships were lying idle along the wharves or moored to posts in the middle of the harbor entrance. There were still shipowners who weren't prepared to risk lives, but most ships sailed. There were mines and unrestricted submarine war, and still they sailed. Six ships might go down in one month, four the next. Never before had the sea demanded such sacrifices, but owners and captains who'd have kept their ships in the harbor while a storm raged sent them into the far greater storm of war.
Where did this contempt for death, this total heedlessness, come from? Surely ten lost ships and two missing crews in two months was a lesson already dearly learned?
Along the one and a half kilometers of Marstal's harbor hundreds of ships were laid up for winter, bobbing on the water, waiting for their spring departures. That was our town. It was a sight no one would see again. The chain had been broken.
What had happened to fellowship and to what he thought of as kinship, in whose spirit he'd erected the stone only four years earlier? He'd thought at the time that he was erecting a monument to something living. Now he understood that it was a gravestone, marking the end of the spirit that had created the town. And the cause of death was in the third column in his account ledger: profit. The high prices, the high wages, the freight that had risen tenfold, the premium on ships. Responsible owners who kept their vessels in the harbor had to watch their crews sign on elsewhere. Everybody wanted to take part in the spoils of war.
And so we sold our ships. What was the point of having them lie idle when they could be sold for three to four times their worth? The cost of building them could be recouped in a year, and so it wasn't just old, worn-out ships we disposed of, but also those freshly launched. We all spoke in pious terms about the dreadful war and vowed that this would be the last one. And dreadful it was for the millions who were killed in battle. But we, who were spared, benefited from it.
Denmark kept out of the war, taking no sides. But did we really think we'd be spared just because the Danish flag was painted on the side of our ships? A sailor needs a cool head—but this was recklessness. Marstal lay in the heart of the war zone. There were fronts on dry land, but the sea had its fronts too, and half the town's sailors were at them every day.
What drove us? Was the prospect of profit the heartbeat of this war? Was it bare greed that Albert now saw, even in people he'd thought he knew well? Had he simply grown old? Had something definitive changed? Or had it always been this way, without his realizing it?
Albert suddenly felt ridiculous. He'd worried about losing his mind because of dreams that contained information so terrible, he dared not convey it to others. So what if he'd told us what he knew? Would we not have laughed at him and dismissed his words, even though we didn't doubt the truth of what he was telling us?
Die? Well, maybe.
Him and him, a first mate, an able seaman, a skipper. We might have pointed