We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [27]
She can hold her own memorial service in front of that bureau, the only grave she can visit. But at least she has the document and with it, certainty: a conclusion, but also a beginning. Life isn't like a book. There's never a final page.
But it wasn't like that for Karoline. No official message reached her. Laurids was gone, but how or where he'd disappeared no one could tell her. Hope can be like a plant that sprouts and grows and keeps people alive. But it can also be a wound that refuses to heal.
It's said that if the dead aren't buried in consecrated ground, they'll haunt us, and Laurids soon began to haunt Karoline. He became the ghost in her heart, and he never left her in peace, because he did not know the difference between day and night, and finally neither did she. There was her yearning during the day, when she should have been busy with domestic matters. There were the practical concerns at night, when she should have been sleeping or crying herself empty from loss. Without rest or relief, she grew gaunt and gray, as if she were made from the same substance as the ghost in her heart.
Only her hands never lost their strength. She'd draw water from the well, light the fire in the kitchen every morning, wash and mend clothes, weave, bake bread, bring up four children, and box their ears hard enough to remind them of the missing Laurids.
THE THRASHING ROPE
THE SUMMER HAD just ended, but the sun's warmth was still in our blood, and we longed for the water. After school we'd run down to the harbor and jump right in, headfirst, or walk out to the long strip of beach known as the Tail. Once we'd swum, we'd lie on the warm sand to dry off and talk about Mr. Isager, our teacher. The new pupils thought he wasn't all bad. Having your ears pulled or getting a slap on the side of the head was no big deal; it was no different from home.
But some of the older ones warned, "Just you wait. He's in a good mood right now."
"He said something nice about my dad," said Albert Madsen.
"But what did your dad say about him?" Niels Peter asked.
"He said that Isager was a devil with the thrashing rope."
His mother had then declared that they were not to call the schoolteacher a devil and his father had retorted, "Well, that's easy for you to say. You girls never had Isager."
Remembering his father brought tears to Albert's eyes. He blinked and looked down. His nose thickened and he wiped it with an angry movement of his wrist. We saw his tears, but none of us teased him. Many of us Marstal boys had lost a dad at sea. Our fathers were often away. But then sometimes, out of the blue, they'd be gone forever. Often away and gone forever: the two phrases marked the difference between having a living father and a dead one. It wasn't a big difference, but it was big enough to make us cry when no one was looking.
One of us slapped Albert on his shoulder and jumped up.
"Race you!"
And we tore across the sand and threw ourselves into the water.
Every summer we went to the beach, with its border of dried seaweed that crackled and pricked under our bare feet, its carpet of crushed mussel shells, its luminous green seabed, and its swaying submerged forests of bladder wrack and eelgrass.
When we turned thirteen we went to sea. Some of us never returned. But every summer new boys came out to the Tail.
One day in August we lay on our stomachs in the warm sand, licking our salty skin, still tanned from the summer, and talked about Jens Holgersen Ulfstrand, who during the reign of King Hans had defeated the Lübecks in a naval battle; about Søren Norby, Peder Skram, and Herluf Trolle, who had all fought on the sea we'd just emerged from; about Peder Jensen Bredal, who was killed at Als by a musket bullet to the chest; about King Christian IV, who boarded his own ship, the Spes, and chased the Hamburgers away