We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [192]
We pictured him standing in the dock, broad and mighty in his wide-brimmed hat, his coattails flapping as though he'd brought the fresh breeze of enterprise into the courtroom with him. His bloodshot eyes were bright with energy, and the way he flung out his arms and confessed to all his mistakes, you'd think he was inviting the judge, the journalists, the defense, and the prosecutor to a champagne party.
It turned out he wasn't an engineer at all. Like everything else about him, the title was a concoction. Now he was off to prison. He took the announcement of his three-year sentence like a man, refusing to let it break him. He'd stormed through life bursting with grand plans for himself and for others; if he had to make a detour to a locked cell, it was only a temporary interruption. He'd come back out again eventually, and then he'd show us.
We no longer frequented Hotel Ærø. Our starched shirts stayed at home, once again reserved only for weddings, confirmations, and funerals. Back in Weber's Café, we reacquainted ourselves with flat beer. We didn't gloat when we heard about the prison sentence. We couldn't even get properly angry with Henckel. Yes, he'd cheated us, but fraud takes two: we should have exercised better judgment. We certainly didn't regard him as evil. His enthusiasm and his spirit of enterprise were genuine. His problem was simply that he'd had too many ideas and he'd lost track of them until they became hopelessly entangled. But the man was willing to take a risk. We respected that. It was what we did all the time. We acknowledged something of ourselves in Henckel: not his fraudulence, but his get-up-and-go.
We toasted him the way we'd have toasted a ship that was lost with all hands.
Herman did the rounds of the shipping offices, looking for work. We'd expected him to run away from it all, just as he'd done when Hans Jepsen put him in his place and refused to sign him on as an ordinary seaman on the Two Sisters. He'd come back as a big shot: he'd talked big and had a wallet to match, but then he'd lost it all and ended up where he'd begun. He'd been sold a pig in a poke. But then again, he wasn't alone. Quite a few of us had bought one. In that respect we were all in the same boat.
We never expected Herman to be humbled by his fall. It wasn't in his nature, which was stubborn-minded and arrogant. We just imagined that he'd flee the humiliation and reappear only when he had money in his pocket and was ready to start bragging again. Instead, he stayed in the town that had witnessed his downfall and signed on to the Albatross. We couldn't help but think that he must have finally learned his lesson and accepted that life had no plans to treat him differently than anybody else and that a certain amount of humility was therefore in order. Apart from that he was just the same Herman, as aggressive and unpredictable as ever. But he knew his way around a deck, so he had no problem finding a job.
He returned from his first voyage a war hero, though the war had ended long before. He'd fought in the defense of Denmark in a pub in Nyborg, together with two other men from Marstal, Ingolf Thomsen and Lennart Krull, fellow crewmen on the Albatross.
He sat in Weber's Café, holding forth about his deeds, while Ingolf and Lennart nodded in affirmation. From time to time they'd interject. But under Herman's stern eye, it never amounted to more than "Yes," "No," or "Exactly."
So they'd been in this pub in Nyborg with the rest of the crew, and they'd started talking to this car mechanic. Ravn was his name: greasy little fellow with a potato nose covered in blackheads, engine oil on his hands. When he learned they were sailors from Marstal, he pulled out his wallet and showed them a photo of a schooner in flames. It was the Hydra, which had vanished without a trace in the Atlantic in September 1917. So had the six hands aboard, including two from Marstal: the captain and the ordinary seaman Henning Friis, who left behind a widow, Klara,