We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [26]
As none of the rest of us had experienced battle, we didn't know what to make of Laurids's attitude, and so we left him alone.
Karoline thought that her husband should find himself a job on land, so that both she and the children would get to see more of him. She worried about the change that had come over him and preferred to keep him close by.
Little Clausen and Ejnar were each called up several times during the war, but they always came home in one piece, and we soon grew tired of erecting celebration arches and applauding their return, and started treating them like any other sailors who made it back.
Laurids too was recalled, but by then he had already quit Marstal. He hadn't taken a land job, as Karoline had wanted, but had instead traveled to Hamburg along the Elbe, the same river he'd stared at every day during his imprisonment in Glückstadt. In Hamburg he was hired as third mate on a Dutch ship bearing immigrants bound for Australia; the other crew consisted of three Dutchmen and twenty-four Javanese. There were 160 passengers on board and it was Laurids's task to hand out provisions and keep the accounts. After a six-month voyage, the ship arrived at Hobart Town in Van Diemen's Land, where Laurids signed off. And that was the last we heard of him.
KAROLINE SAW no reason to worry during the first two years of Laurids's absence. He'd been away from home before, for two or three years at a stretch, and letters sent from the other side of the globe don't always reach their destination. Our women, who have no choice but to stay behind in Marstal, live in a state of permanent uncertainty. Even a letter is no proof that the sender is alive; it can be on its way for months, and the sea steals men without warning. But we're all so used to enduring periods of anxious waiting that we never share our unease with one another. Which is why there was no visible change in Karoline for the first three years, until the day when her neighbor in Korsgade, Dorothea Hermansen, asked her, "Isn't it about time Laurids came home?"
"Yes," Karoline answered. And she said no more. She knew Dorothea had been working up to putting the question for a long time, and that she wouldn't have done it without first consulting the other women in Korsgade. It was in fact a statement, rather than a question: Laurids wasn't coming back.
That night, once she'd put the children to bed, Karoline cried. She'd wept before, but always tried to suppress it. Now she allowed the tears to flow freely.
The next morning the local women crowded into her parlor to ask if she needed help.
Laurids's demise was now official.
They sat around her dining table, each with a cup of coffee. At first their voices were pragmatic and matter-of-fact as they assessed Karoline's circumstances: when it came to help, she had little in the way of family, having already lost five brothers at sea, and with Laurids's father gone too. Then their voices softened and they started praising Laurids's qualities as a husband and provider.
Karoline started crying again. He came alive for her in these moments, resurrected through the words of others.
The oldest woman, Hansigne Ahrentzen, embraced her, and let her dampen her gray dress with her tears. They stayed until she was all cried out.
Thus ended the first meeting, which introduced Karoline to her new status as a widow.
A message was sent to the Dutch shipping company, but they reported no lost ships, nor did Laurids's name appear on any of their crew lists.
The merciful comfort of a grave to which you can take your children and tell them about their father in front of the headstone that bears his name, the possibility of distracting yourself by clearing weeds or perhaps disappearing into a whispered conversation with the man who lies underground—a sailor's widow is denied all that. Instead, she'll receive an official document declaring that the ship her husband was working on, or perhaps skippered and owned, has been "lost with all hands," gone down on this