We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [17]
The next meal was distributed as though it were a military exercise, with a major and a sergeant bellowing commands at us. They had brought the bosuns from the Gefion and Christian, who divided us into the same groups of eight as on the warships, so we could be fed in an orderly way. We were each given a spoon and a metal bowl and made to line up by the altar. And it was, in its way, a form of communion, because it took every last scrap of imagination to transubstantiate what was in our metal bowls into something edible, and we consumed the sorry-looking mess of gruel and prunes only out of sheer necessity. Afterward we lay down on the straw to sleep. The exhaustion that had overwhelmed us the day after the defeat still held sway.
Late in the afternoon the church door opened again, and a group of officers entered, along with some well-dressed men, doubtless prominent citizens of Rendsburg, and the Prussian soldier who had eyed our fellow townsman so suspiciously on the second leg of the march. While the guests waited by the door, the Prussian began walking around in the church as if looking for someone. Finally spotting Laurids, he ordered him up from the straw and led him over to the party of officers and gentlemen. When they began talking, it became obvious they were questioning Laurids. Then, after a while, they did the same thing that the departing Holstein officers had done on the way to Rendsburg: they handed Laurids bank notes before politely taking their leave. A few of the well-dressed folk even tipped their hats.
Laurids, the heavenly traveler, had become a celebrity.
The story was now circulating around the whole church. It turned out that Ejnar wasn't the only one who'd seen Laurids shoot up into the sky when the Christian the Eighth exploded, only to miraculously reappear on the burning deck once the column of fire had subsided. They'd all believed it to be a kind of mirage, an apparition brought on by the nervous strain of mortal danger during battle, and had mentioned it to no one—but now they came forward to bear witness to the rest of us, and soon a large crowd had gathered in front of Laurids.
We wanted to know why his clothes and hair weren't scorched.
"My boots are," he said, sticking out a leg for inspection.
"And your feet?" We wanted to know.
"They stink," said Laurids.
Ejnar couldn't take his eyes off Laurids. He looked at him the way you'd look at a total stranger—which was precisely what Laurids had become to him. He started treating him with a bashful subservience and couldn't seem to act normally around him. Little Clausen, meanwhile, accepted what had happened. Or rather, now that Laurids was standing in front of him as large as life, he accepted that others believed in his ascension. Personally he had been a skeptic right from the start, so when he became an official believer, it was mostly for the sake of comradeship, like joining in the laughter of a shared joke. In his eyes, Laurids was a born prankster. First he'd made the whole island believe that the German was coming. And now he'd made the German believe that he'd been to Heaven and back. Little Clausen felt a jaw-dropping respect for this achievement. That Laurids was one hell of a guy!
While Laurids held forth on the subject, the church filled with women who'd been given permission to come daily with their baskets to hawk coffee, cakes, sour bread, eggs, butter, cheese, herring, and paper. The men from the Gefion had money to spend: before throwing the ship's coffer overboard to prevent the enemy getting hold of it, the officers had opened it and given each crew member a couple of coins, and most of us had managed to save our sea bags.
We Marstallers considered ourselves privileged: we'd all been on board the Gefion, except for Laurids, who'd recovered nothing from the Christian the Eighth except the clothes on his back and, of course, his reputation