We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [29]
We knew all about Jacob: we'd paid attention. We knew that he was an impostor who stole from his own brother, the hairy-armed Esau, and lied to his father, the blind Isaac, and sired children by four different women, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah, and that when one proved barren, he would simply move on to the next, and that he had a fight with an angel that left him with a limp, but that later he was blessed by God. It was a peculiar story, but none of us dared point out its oddness to Isager.
Two of Isager's twelve sons were still at the school: Johan and Josef—the latter being the only one Isager had actually named after a son of Jacob. When we told the Isager brothers that their father's Bible hero was a liar, a thief, and a fornicator, Johan burst into tears (he cried a lot anyway because Josef beat him up daily), and teardrops as greasy as candle wax dripped from his bizarrely huge eyes, while Josef, thumping his brother on the head with a clenched fist, merely retorted that their father was no fornicator: he was just a drunkard and a fool.
We never spoke about our own fathers that way. But from then on we left the Isager boys in peace.
We knew that the mild weather was over one day in the middle of September, when an east wind brought looming clouds that covered the entire island with a lid of slate gray. The same day, we noticed that Isager's steel spectacles were sitting higher than usual on the bridge of his nose and pressing tightly against its flesh. Some of us had a theory that Isager's swings of mood related to the weather, so we'd developed the habit of glancing at the sky on our way to school, looking for indications in the cloud formations. But it wasn't an exact science, and even its most ardent proponents had to concede that Isager and the clouds weren't always in concord.
On this mid-September day, however, they were. Dressing gown abandoned, Isager appeared in a black tailcoat, commonly known as the Combat Uniform—and in his right hand he brandished the thrashing rope. His boots clacked on the cobbles as he crossed the yard that divided his house from the school. Then, positioning himself by the school door, he lashed each of us across the back of the neck as we entered, catapulting us over the threshold.
There were seventy of us in his class and we had to pass through the entrance one by one, tensing our scalps for the lash as we went. The older boys among us were used to violence and could take a beating, but no one could quell the fear in his heart as he waited for it. Pain that you anticipate is always worse than the kind that comes out of the blue. Before they even came close to Isager, the youngest boys' lips started quivering. A blow to the back of the head was their school baptism.
But worse awaited us in class.
***
We always started by singing "Gone Is the Dark, Dark Night," with Isager leading, in his braying voice. He doubled up as parish clerk, but he had to pay the assistant teacher, Mr. Nothkier, to lead the hymns in church on Sundays because half the congregation had vowed that if Isager led, they'd march out as soon as he opened his mouth—and this was too much for his vanity. But we schoolboys had no such choice, and indeed, we learned to appreciate his voice and to wish that the lengthy, turgid hymn would go on forever, because as long as he was singing, he couldn't clobber us.
He'd pace restlessly up and down while in full flow; although he knew the hymn by heart, he held the open hymnbook right up to his nose, while his predator's eyes roamed the room over the top of the page. As he reached the last few lines, "God grant us happiness and guidance, may He send us the Light of His Grace," you'd usually catch the sound of someone crying. The hymn always served to drown our sobs—but only until it ended. It was the blow across the back of the head that brought on the tears. And it was fear that kept them welling.
Albert Madsen