We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [292]
"I'm not Chinese," he said, in a patient tone of voice. "My mother's from Siam. And my father's surname is Jørgensen."
"You have a Danish passport, I hope?" Helge needled him. The young man's reply had unsettled him, and he wanted to recover his authority.
"Don't worry about that, as long as your discharge book is in order," Knud Erik said, to smooth it over.
A harsh glint appeared in Valdemar Jørgensen's dark eyes. "I was born in Siam," he said. "I have a Siamese passport and a Danish passport. The Danish one I cheated to get. I'm a member of the Seamen's Union of the Pacific. Is that good enough for you guys?" He gave them a combative look.
Knud Erik laughed. "The job's yours, if you want it."
"I want to know if we're going to America."
"Ask the British. If I were you, I'd prepare myself for the North Atlantic."
"I want to give you a piece of advice. Just the one. Don't marry an American girl."
"And what's wrong with American girls?"
"They're up for anything. Real hot chicks. But then they want to get married. I've been on ships where the guys were boasting of their conquests: wedding rings, wedding photos, true love, happily ever after—the whole shebang. And then two of them discover they've married the same girl. Know why? Those broads get ten thousand dollars in widow's pensions if a sailor's lost in Allied service. Pain in the ass. Get my drift?"
"Sure do." Knud Erik was finding it hard to keep a straight face. But the guy didn't appear to notice.
"You should, because you're not married, are you? You old guys are easy pickings for them. Take care, buddy!"
The kid really didn't miss a thing. He'd noticed Knud Erik wasn't wearing a wedding ring. Knud Erik leaned forward. "Listen to me," he said. "I'm not your buddy. I'm the captain of the Nimbus, and if you want to go to sea on my ship, you'll have to change your tone. Is that clear?"
"Aye, aye, Captain," he said. He was halfway across the room when he turned and addressed Helge. "Listen. If you've got a problem with Valdemar, then just call me Wally."
THEY SAILED IN convoy, first from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and back, and then to New York via Gibraltar. They sailed in ballast westward and returned with timber, steel, and iron ore. They had mounted four 20-millimeter machine cannons, one fore and one aft. The remaining two, placed on the bridge wings, pointed menacingly out to sea. These weren't manned by the crew but by four British gunners who sailed with them.
The Nimbus wasn't built for the North Atlantic. In fact it was hard to identify what she was built for. Anton did his best in the engine room, but he could never get her above nine knots. When they sailed in convoy and the U-boat alert sounded, they had orders to zigzag to avoid the torpedoes. The forty ships in the convoy left Liverpool in a straight line, then regrouped into a square, four by four. It was hard to maintain position, as the Nimbus wasn't sufficiently maneuverable; they inevitably fell astern.
Captain Boye had once told Knud Erik that in any situation that threatened the ship's destruction, the captain must forget rules, regulations, and ship's insurance, and follow a single unwritten law: treat people the way you'd like them to treat you.
Boye's words summarized Knud Erik's experience as a sailor. Later he heard that Boye drowned after giving his life jacket to a stoker who'd panicked and left his own behind. More than once he'd seen a captain risk his ship to come to the aid of another vessel. And he'd seen sailors in the navy do the same for one another.
Sailors were neither better nor worse than other people. It was the situation they found themselves in that encouraged loyalty. In the finite world of the ship, mutual dependency overrode individual survival instinct. Every man knew he'd never make it alone.
Back then he believed, naively, that the war had turned the whole world into a ship's deck and that the enemy they were united against resembled the sea in its brutal, uncontrolled power. He didn't know that