We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [246]
That night a southeasterly storm rose, and they started drifting toward the rocky shore. During the day Knud Erik had observed the tall, dark cliffs through the downpour. Now they moved closer, invisibly, in the impenetrable darkness of the night, and only the distant thunder of the surf warned of their proximity. Everyone below was roused and ordered to put on their oilskins so they could get up on deck immediately if needed.
The searching beam of the Cape Bonavista lighthouse swung across the turbulence, briefly ghosting the sails before sweeping across the shifting veil of densely falling rain. They were close to the coast and the ship was reefed until they were left with only the fore staysail. With all her power lost, the Kristina was reduced to pitching in the storm-lashed waves as she fought the gale.
The flicker from the lighthouse came and went like a star that has come too close to the sea, swallowed by waves one minute and struggling free the next. Clouds appeared through the darkness, big-bellied sharks chasing across the sky. Dawn broke and supplanted the beam of the lighthouse. But the storm continued to rage.
The skipper looked at the barometer. "This is going to last awhile," he said darkly, and put a hand to his chest as if fearing his heart couldn't hold out that long.
Knud Erik never would have believed it, but mortal danger can bore a man stiff. The storm continued, day in and day out, ceaselessly battering the hull of the Kristina, howling in the rigging, tearing at the wheel, and putting them under constant strain. But paradoxically, the state of alarm anesthetized their nerves, leaving them with a sense of infinite emptiness.
The deck was constantly flooded by the onslaught of the waves, giving the impression that only the stern and the bow remained afloat, like two severed pieces of wreckage that stayed inexplicably equidistant amid the chaos of breaking waves and raging foam.
The low-riding clouds chasing one another across the sky; the ranks of waves rolling endlessly toward the shore; the black, menacing barrier of a coast that represented death rather than salvation if they came too near: all this emptied his head of thought.
The storm endured, but so did the Kristina. Even his fear of drowning took a back seat, ceding to the tedious grind and the constant pain from the saltwater blisters, which spread furiously up his arms and around his neck. The only reason the open wounds didn't become infected was that they were permanently wet.
They pitched up and down like that for thirty days. Sometimes the black coastline sank into the horizon until it was nothing but a pencil line between sky and sea; at other times it would rise up and tower over them, an anvil against which the sea could hammer their frail hull.
It didn't make any difference whether the coast was near or far: to him, the black cliffs represented neither destruction nor salvation. They weren't even land. They were just another aspect of the monotony, as real or unreal as the rain-laden clouds above their heads. Day and night came and went.
When he was off duty during the day he'd stagger, dazed, to the bow of the ship, clinging to the ropes the crew had suspended from the rigging for support as they crossed the flooded deck. He'd be waist-high in water already when a wave hit directly amidships and tugged at his legs, spume rampaging all around. He felt like a tightrope walker who has lost his footing and is hanging by his arms on a line suspended between two points in the sky. As if he wasn't aboard a ship at all, but swinging himself across the empty sea.
He'd tumble down the ladder into the dark, foul-smelling fo'c'sle, with its flooded floor and its stove, which remained unlit for fear of carbon monoxide poisoning. He'd climb into his berth fully clothed, because what was the point of undressing,