We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [221]
Did we ever think that we'd just been down to the place where so many of our fathers had ended up? We swore that we'd die with our boots on. But then, that's what you do when you drown.
We drew members from every street in town, including the half that had always been South's turf. But the test also meant saying good-bye to some of the old members of North. The most important thing was passing the test; it overrode where you were from. South had a hard core that refused to surrender, but this suited us just fine: we needed someone to fight. We gave them a hard time, and mostly, they got thrashed. Sometimes we'd fight on rafts in the harbor or have sea battles in stolen boats. But most of the time we met in a field in Vestergade where the adults never came. We didn't want to be disturbed while we inflicted cuts and bruises, black eyes, and battered skulls on one another.
Until the terrible thing happened to Kristian Stærk, the leader of South, Henry Levinsen was the only one of us to receive a permanent injury. He'd been wearing a copper flowerpot holder as a helmet, and Kristian Stærk gave it a whack with a stake from a fish trap, ramming it right down over his ears and breaking his nose on the way. Groth, the plumber in Vestergade, had to cut the pot free, and Henry's nose was crooked from that day on.
The adults called us pickaninnies. This meant "children" in a language that wasn't English, German, or French, but one they used in a faraway place. And that's just how the word made us feel: as foreign as natives and savages from an undiscovered island.
If we'd ever bothered to count the members of our gang who were fatherless, we'd have realized just how many of us had at some point started blubbering in the street or the playground, suddenly remembering the father we'd lost when a ship went down. Whether in peacetime or in war, it was always the same: death by drowning, and no's funeral afterward.
But we didn't bother ourselves with thoughts like that, even though there was undoubtedly a reason why some of us punched harder than others when we got into fights, and didn't care how much it hurt when we got punched back. We clobbered one another the way a blacksmith clobbers red-hot iron. We did it to forge ourselves into some kind of shape.
Anton claimed that the murdered man appeared below his gable window every night and called out to him in a hollow voice that he wanted his head back. We didn't believe it though. How can you shout from the garden when your head's up in the attic?
Hadn't we noticed that his lower jaw was missing? Anton asked us. That was where the voice came from. He showed us the footprints in the potato bed at the end of the garden.
We reckoned he'd made them himself.
Anton sighed and said that being disbelieved by those nearest to him, even though he possessed great and burdensome knowledge, was a cross he'd have to bear. Not only did he know the identity of the murdered man; he knew the murderer too. He gave us a look that sent shivers down our spines. We didn't believe everything he said, but he had the power to unsettle us all the same.
We didn't know it at the time, but a night would come when there really was a man in the garden calling out for Anton. It wouldn't be the dead man wanting his head back though.
It would be the murderer. And Kristian Stærk would have sent him.
IT ALL STARTED when Anton found he had less spending money than usual and had to cut down on his daily quota of Woodbines. Smoking them gave him a manly voice that made him sound much older. He said that the lack of money stemmed from a problem with Shooter, as