We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [297]
Absalon looked away.
He and Wally kept their distance from Knud Erik on the road to the railway station, which ran between rows of bombed-out houses, where lean men and women were sifting through the bricks. There was no hostility in it. He was the captain, and they were just trying to uphold what remained of his dignity.
He'd once told Wally that he wasn't his buddy—but this was what he was trying to become now. He felt the poison of self-loathing spread. He hoped that it would kill him.
He fell asleep on the train to London, and Wally woke him when it stopped at the platform. Dazed, he looked around the compartment. Moving between New York and England always felt like time traveling: the Americans existed in a permanent prewar state, with well-nourished bodies and faces that exuded health, while the English, with their skin drained of color, looked like blurred, yellowing photographs of half-remembered people in an old album kept in a dusty attic, vegetating in a shadowland of ever-decreasing rations.
They'd just left the station building when the air-raid alarm sounded. It was night, and a dense darkness lay between the houses. They stopped short, not knowing what to do. Spotting some people running, they took off in the same direction. Somewhere a faint red light glowed, marking the entrance to an air-raid shelter. The irony wasn't lost on him. At sea, a red light meant yet another life on his conscience. Here it meant salvation. For a moment he had the urge to simply stand there and wait for the bombs to rain down on him. Seeing his hesitation, Absalon grabbed him by the arm.
"This way, Captain."
He let his legs take charge and followed the others.
There was no light in the air-raid shelter. They sat tightly packed together, surrounded by pitch-black darkness. He could hear whispers, a cough, a child crying. He'd lost track of Wally and Absalon, and it was a relief to be among strangers. There was a powerful smell of unwashed bodies and musty clothes. An anti-aircraft battery right above the bunker started firing, making the air tremble. Then the bombs started falling. Chalk and dirt dropped from the ceiling: it felt as though death had grown hands and was tentatively feeling their faces before it grabbed them. He heard gasping and whispering. Someone began sobbing uncontrollably and someone else murmured words of comfort, then broke into a panicked "Shut up for Christ's sake!"
"Leave her alone," another voice interrupted.
"Please, can we go home?" a child's voice begged.
A little girl screamed for her mother, and the voice of an old woman responded with the Lord's Prayer. A bomb exploded nearby, and the whole floor shook. For a moment Knud Erik expected the shelter to collapse on top of them. Everyone fell silent, as if death itself had hushed them.
Then he felt a hand on his. It was a woman's: small and delicate, but with a work-hardened palm. He stroked it reassuringly. He felt her head rest on his shoulder, and he held the unknown woman to him in the darkness. Another bomb fell, and the concrete walls of the shelter groaned from the pressure. Someone started screaming. More screams followed, and soon the darkness vibrated with panicked shrieking as the confined people surrendered to mass hysteria, while the bombs drummed outside in accompaniment.
The woman put her hands around his neck and started kissing his mouth greedily, then fumbled at his groin. He slid his hand inside her coat and felt the contour of her breast. Her burning hot sex welcomed him. The screaming surrounded them like a wall as they took each other in blind, brutal lust, with the bombs dictating the rhythm of their thrusts. Yet there was selfless tenderness in the soft, anonymous body that united with his own. She offered him the warmth of life itself, and he offered it back until their moans of pleasure mingled with the cacophony of terrified voices.
And for a moment he escaped the little red lights.
Some hours later the anti-aircraft battery above the air-raid shelter stopped rattling, and the sirens