We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [163]
"Did I nearly drown?" the boy asked, trying to look important.
"Yes, you can boast about that. But not to your mother. Once underwater, twice underwater, but never three times. Remember that."
"What happens the third time?" the boy asked.
"The third time's the shortest journey," the old man said. "The journey that leads to death. It only takes two minutes. Always take the longer journey when you become a sailor. Never the shorter. Remember that."
The boy looked at him and nodded gravely. He hadn't understood any of this speech, but he sensed that something important had been said.
Albert pulled the boy's clothes off him and hung them to dry on the front thwart. "Come on," he said. "Let's do some more rowing. It'll warm you up."
"IT CAN'T GO ON," we said about the war. "It has to end."
We didn't know anything and we didn't understand politics.
"The good times will be over soon," the old skippers said, as they sat in the summer sun on their benches by the harbor. Their lined faces, tanned to leather, gave nothing away. With their eyes hidden beneath the shiny brims of their caps, it was impossible to tell whether this was gallows humor or whether they really meant what they said.
Albert too sensed that the war would be over soon. The right-hand column was now nearly as long as the left-hand one. September came. The boy started school, but they continued to meet in the afternoons, as they always had. Seven more ships were lost. The last to go down was the steamer Memory. Then it ended. Albert delivered his last messages to the bereaved. The war lasted a few more months, but as far as Marstal was concerned, it was done with.
Albert sat down next to the skippers in the harbor who were soaking up the September sun, giving their old bones a last warm-up before the winter. The group shifted uneasily. They weren't used to his company.
"Yes, the good times are indeed over," he said, and he didn't hide the sarcasm in his voice. They shifted again.
"Four hundred and forty-seven Danish sailors were lost," he said. He knew his figures. "Fifty-three of them came from Marstal. That means roughly one in every nine men who drowned came from this town."
He paused to let them digest this fact. Then he continued with the figures.
"The number of Marstal inhabitants is only a thousandth of Denmark's total population. And what's the bottom line of our sum, gentlemen? Does our total amount to good times?"
He got up from the bench, touched his cap with his finger, and left.
They looked after him as he swung his stick and walked up toward Havnegade. Yes, he knew his math, did Albert.
"Fifty-three hands lost," Albert thought, as he continued along Havnegade. "Perhaps I'm being unfair. A town quickly forgets. A mother, a brother, a wife, or a daughter won't. But a town will. A town looks ahead."
Mr. Henckel still visited Marstal. Tall and broad, with his light coattails flapping behind him, he'd stride down Kirkestræde on his way to the Hotel Ærø, where he kept a room permanently at his disposal. His arrival was celebrated with grand champagne galas for investors and's other interested parties, of which there were always plenty. Herman, meanwhile, had sold both the Two Sisters and his house in Skippergade. This had left him homeless, and so he'd moved into Hotel Ærø, where he soon ran up an enormous bill. With his entire fortune sunk in Mr. Henckel's engineering projects, he was unable to settle it right away. But that didn't matter, said Orla Egeskov, the proprietor; he was happy to extend credit to him and Mr. Henckel. Orla Egeskov was an investor himself. He knew that every penny would come back tenfold; each bottle of champagne would be paid for out of future profits. And champagne was all Herman drank.
Henckel had built lodgings for the workers at the shipyard at the end of Reberbanen, where the village idiot, Anders Nørre, had once had his hut. Compared to the miniature proportions of most of the town's houses, it was an impressive structure, with