We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [283]
He waited for the next one.
The noise was deafening. Two oil tanks on the north side of the Thames had caught fire, and a frustrated roar sounded from the sea of flames, like the great mythic wolf of Ragnarök straining on its chain at the end of time, howling to be unleashed on the whole world. The black smoke was a clenched fist headed for the distant stars, extinguished one by one in the roil of darkness and toxic fumes. Beneath its black lid everything was ablaze, as though the sun itself had been shot down and was flaring for the last time in the midst of the ruined oil tanks.
The whole of Southend was on fire. The windows in the tenement blocks glowed in the blaze; flames leapt from the roofs like strange vegetation growing at explosive speed, determined to consume the very soil it grew in, and the docks shuddered in convulsions of destruction. Fire flashes spurted from the anti-aircraft batteries on the roofs that were still intact. The ships on the river were firing too. Knud Erik could hear the sputter of the old Lewis machine gun that had been mounted on board the Dannevang some months earlier: the British navy had trained four of the crew in the use of weapons. He was one of them. The machine gun, which dated from the First World War, they'd soon discovered to be useless when it came to defending the ship, but it had another more important function. It beat whiskey, and if anyone still remembered to pray these days, it beat praying too. Clutching and firing it gave you a blissful feeling of calm—though its services came at a price. Its overheated metal stock burned your palms, and its explosive coughing deafened you. But for a moment, the waiting stopped.
You were responding. You were taking action.
In a strange way the machine-gun position was the best place to be during an attack, even though you were clearly visible on deck, which made you the perfect target for a hail of enemy bullets and bombs. But at least out there, your helplessness didn't drive you insane.
When the air-raid warning sounded, the crew would instantly re-lease the mooring and head for the buoys in the middle of the Thames. It was procedure for all ships to leave the wharf during air raids because it took weeks to clear the wreckage of a bombed ship and in the meantime it blocked the wharf to other vessels. So, resigned, they'd head for open water, where they couldn't just jump onto land if the ship took a hit. "We're off to the cemetery," they'd joke.
So it was good to have your hands on a Lewis.
Several of the ships around them were on fire now. One capsized slowly and began to sink. The crew in the lifeboats rowed haphazardly: the whole harbor was ablaze, and a crane had fallen halfway into the basin. High up above them one parachute after another unfurled and floated down toward the river, swaying calmly. As they drew nearer, Knud Erik was able to see that what was suspended from them wasn't human. The parachutes hit the water and their vast fabric canopies crumpled languorously before settling on the river. They looked like flowers scattered across a grave.
An hour later the air-raid alarm sounded the all clear. Fires were still blazing on the wharves, and the oil tanks were belching black fumes into the night sky. An acrid smell of oil, soot, and brick dust hung over the river, along with a faint trace of sulfur whose origin he couldn't identify. His eyes stung from exhaustion.
Knud Erik had been through the same scenario in Liverpool, Birkenhead, Cardiff, Swansea, and Bristol. Sometimes it seemed that they were sailing in an ocean of flames, and the sky was filled not with cumulus, stratus, and cirrus clouds, but a whole weather system made up of Junkers 87s and 88s, and Messerschmitt 110s. When their ship passed into the English Channel, they came within reach of the German batteries at Calais; in the North Sea U-boats awaited them. It was everywhere and it was constant. The whole world had contracted and turned as black as a cannon mouth. They didn't call it fear: it manifested itself as sleeplessness.