We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [312]
The war had made equals of them, and Knud Erik could only hope that Herman would never find out what he himself had done. He could imagine his reaction. "I wouldn't have thought you had it in you," he'd say, bursting with malicious joy at knowing that Knud Erik too had succumbed to the worst in himself.
Herman was made for war. He was the type of man who felt naturally at home in it. He had that ability that Anton had said was essential to survival: he could forget. The big, brutal muscle man had been reduced to a helpless, barely human lump of meat, and yet he didn't give up. He didn't brood on the past but adapted to the present. Once he'd had four limbs. That was one kind of life. Now he had one. That was another kind of life, but it was still a life. He was like the worm you can cut in half without injury. A pioneer, in fact. In war, everyone had to become like him or go under.
"He took part in the battle for Guadalcanal in the Pacific, sir."
The mess boy was still standing there.
"Is that what he told you?"
"Yes, sir. His ship was sunk and he was in the water for an hour, fighting a shark. He says you have to punch them on the nose or in the eye. Those are their weakest points. But the shark kept coming back. Their skin's like sandpaper, it scrapes you."
"So he knocked out the shark in round three and got away with a scrape?" He couldn't control the sarcasm in his voice.
"No, sir," the mess boy said. The naïveté in the boy's voice made him feel ashamed. "The shark was shot by someone on the ship who came to his rescue. It took a chunk out of his legs and some of his lower arm."
"Has he shown you the scars, perhaps?"
"No, sir. He says they were on the parts that were amputated."
"So it wasn't the shark that took his arm and his legs?"
"No, sir. That wasn't until later. That was frostbite."
The core of the crew came from Marstal. There was Knud Erik himself, Anton, Vilhjelm, and Helge. Then there was Wally, who was half Siamese, and Absalon, who, though he'd grown up in Stubbekøbing, must have roots in the West Indies from the days when a few of its islands belonged to Denmark. They made up the Danes on board the Nimbus. The rest of the crew were from all over the place. There were two Norwegians, a Spaniard, and an Italian; the gunners were all British, as was the mess boy; there were two Indians, a Chinese, three Americans, and a Canadian. They were a floating Babel, at war with a god intent on ruining the Tower.
What united them?
The captain did. He was its fragile core. Though worn down by his own inner strife, he embodied the law of the ship and issued the commands they had to follow if they wanted to reach the next port alive.
Did they ever wonder why they sailed? Was it duty, conviction, or something deeper that kept propelling them into the danger zone?
At the start of the war, he'd believed that behind their willingness to risk their lives fighting was the same moral attitude that kept them united and determined to rescue fellow crewmen in a storm. He'd stopped believing that. But his old belief hadn't been supplanted by a new one.
At times he agreed with Anton: they were united by their silence. If they began articulating their thoughts, they'd feed one another's insanity and everything would fall apart. This was merely a ceasefire, and he knew it couldn't last.
"What's he been telling you now?"
Knud Erik never entered the mess, so whenever Duncan appeared on the bridge with coffee, he questioned him, with the excuse that as captain, he needed to know what was happening on board.
"He told us about the time they were torpedoed and climbed into the lifeboats. The water was as clear as gin. He could see the two red and white bands on the torpedoes before they hit. The cook had taken an ax with him