We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [295]
The flood of my nightmare is upon us, and I was the one who provoked it.
I wanted to banish the sea from men's hearts, but I achieved the opposite. You looked for work elsewhere because there were hardly any ships registered in Marstal. You sailed farther away. The time you were home with us became even shorter than it used to be. Now you are all gone indefinitely. Some of you, many, I fear, forever. The only proof we have that you are still alive is the letters we receive. There are long intervals between them. When letters fail to arrive, we are left guessing why.
Dear Knud Erik, I once said that you were dead to me, and this is the most dreadful thing a mother can do to herself. I know so little about you, only what I hear from other people, and they fall silent in my presence. I feel they regard me as something unnatural. I do not know if they have forgiven me for what I have done to this town. Maybe they do not even realize that I was behind what has happened. But no one has forgiven me for disowning you, and I have grown even lonelier than I was to begin with.
You will not get to read this letter. I will not send it. When the war is over and you have returned, I will give it to you.
I ask for nothing more than that you read it then.
Your mother
KNUD ERIK DIDN'T go ashore in New York. The land scared him more than the sea did. He suspected that once his feet touched the pier, he'd never be able to walk up the gangway again. And that would be a failure of duty. He'd no longer be part of the war—but men who stayed in it were failing in their duty too. The red lights had taught him that. So the choice the war offered him was a choice between two failures. Alone on the bridge, he honored his duty to the Allies, to the war, to the victory to come, to the convoy, and to the cargo. But he didn't honor his duty to the men who screamed for his help. It felt as if every single one of them was calling out his name.
When Vilhjelm went to the Upper East Side to visit Isaksen and Kristina, Knud Erik was briefly tempted to go with him. The last time he'd seen them had been at Klara's confirmation, and he'd been invited to dinner afterward. Then he shook his head. He preferred the solitude in the cabin. He huddled inside it as though it were an air-raid shelter.
There were men who, when they feared they were losing their nerve, started counting women, as though recalling their conquests in foreign ports made them feel stronger: women on one side of the scale, death on the other. It gave them a sense of balance.
Knud Erik could have gone ashore and tipped his own balance. He was thirty-one and unmarried. It wasn't too late, but—as he often told himself—neither was it too early. He was restless, and he'd known many women. It wasn't immature lust that prevented him from making a final choice. His indecisiveness was caused by something he could neither pin down nor articulate. At times he still thought of Miss Sophie, the crazy girl who'd turned his head at the age of fifteen. Surely she couldn't be what was stopping him? He'd barely known her. And her behavior, which he'd found enigmatic and compelling at the time, had been nothing but youthful pretentiousness. And yet it was as if she'd laid a curse on him. By suddenly vanishing into thin air—a disappearance that might have been anything from an amorous adventure to death by foul play—she'd tied him to her. It wasn't her he was seeking in the harbor bars or in Marstal's down-to-earth girls. But he was missing something, and every time he reached out for it, it vanished.
He'd managed one engagement in Marstal, to Karin Weber, who'd later broken it off. "You're always so distant," she'd said, and she wasn't referring to the normal absences of a sailor. He was well aware of that.
Something inside him longed desperately for a family. He needed to have a human being to miss. He needed a counterbalance to the terrible things the war had done to him, and he couldn't find