We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [142]
Albert raised his stick by way of goodbye. He wanted to be alone with the summer evening before returning home to his bed and his tormented dreams.
As he left, he heard the engineer invite the men to come and drink champagne at Hotel Ærø. They responded with enthusiastic laughter. He didn't turn around, but continued up toward the memorial stone. He suddenly had the feeling that he'd lived too long.
He didn't believe in Henckel's promises or Herman's boasts, but Henckel and Herman belonged to the land of the living.
He belonged with the dead.
ALBERT SAT IN the church, composing himself, preparing to deliver more bad news because Pastor Abildgaard had cried again. In his days as a captain he'd often be called on to bear tidings of a sailor's death. Back then, he'd have been personally acquainted with the deceased and could speak of him knowledgeably, without resorting to empty generalities. And even though as a captain he kept his distance from his crew members, he knew enough about human nature to notice the men's quirks and tailor his words to the occasion. Albert knew that the captain's utterances mattered a great deal—even more than the minister's. The minister was closer to God, but he wasn't closer to life and death and the line that separates them. And that was what it was about. The captain's words, not the minister's, were on the invisible gravestones people erected in their memory; as for funerals, the minister was always underemployed in a town of sailors.
Marstal was a small town, so even when Albert hadn't known the dead man well, he'd know enough about him. When the war took a young man, he'd know the father, and could place him that way. If the man was older, he'd know him too. Albert might even have had him as a crew member. So Albert became a presence, a fixed point in the void that yawned open when death came. And in a way, he blocked death, standing in the doorway as a buffer that absorbed the initial shock and anguish of the bereaved, enabling them to succumb to their grief the sooner, and in grieving begin to heal.
But there was one thing he knew about the dead that he couldn't share with anyone: their final moments, as he'd witnessed them in his dreams. He'd seen them surrender to the foaming waves. He'd seen them shot to shreds by bullets. He'd seen them with frostbitten faces, slumped lifeless across the thwart of an open lifeboat after a day on a winter-chilled sea. This knowledge he kept to himself, yet even as he concealed it, his words of comfort were informed by it. He lied as only a man who knows the truth can lie. He lied away the horror and the pain, but he didn't lie away the death. He didn't speak of the Hereafter because he wasn't Pastor Abildgaard. And that was why they believed him. He was old and he'd been born in Marstal: he'd been one of the town's fixtures, with his broad shoulders and neat beard, ever since he came ashore. Even in the presence of death, he kept his captain's authority. He sat in a family's parlor, where he might never have sat before, and his presence gave death a meaning the family might not otherwise have felt. He helped the mourners guard themselves against the darkness. They didn't feel alone, for it wasn't just Albert who sat with them, but the whole town and all it represented: fellowship, kin, the past and the future. Death was already half-beaten, and's life would go on.
No one asked to hear about Jesus when Captain Madsen was there, or about where the deceased was now, or whether he was happy. The captain's message was simple: this is the way things are. He taught us a vast, all-embracing acceptance, which allowed life's realities to come at us directly. The sea takes us, but it has no message to convey when its waters close over our heads and fill our lungs. It may seem like strange consolation, but Albert's words offered us a foothold: things had always been this way, and these were conditions we all shared.
Albert knew that some couldn't get