We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [316]
Most of the men at the rail were cheering him on as if he was a runner approaching the finish line. They'd hung a ladder over the side. Absalon was waiting on the bottom step, holding on with one hand and stretching out the other. The raging sea had soaked him through. Someone threw a line; Knud Erik grabbed hold of it and let himself be pulled over to the ladder. Then Absalon grasped his hand and pulled him up. His other hand supported the woman by her arm; she still seemed unaware of what was happening. She'd stopped screaming and a gentle smile had spread across her lips. As he yanked her out of the water, her naked abdomen revealed the guts spilling out of her. It was death that had made her gaze so distant and quelled her screams.
He tried to throw her over his shoulder, but a soft object blocked him. He looked down a second time. There was something coming out of her, but it wasn't her intestines. It was an umbilical cord. And in her arms she was cradling a baby. A small, creased, puce-colored human bundle, born underwater.
Her childbirth must have started even before the Hopemount was torpedoed. In the icy water, with only a few minutes' grace before she froze, the mother had fought not only for her own life but also for the baby's.
Gripping the woman beneath the thighs, Knud Erik lifted her up to Absalon, and from the rail countless hands reached out for them.
Just then he heard the dull undersea roar of depth charges, followed by the sound of heavily falling water. He closed his eyes and knew that the woman in his arms was now the sole survivor of the Hopemount.
Dear Knud Erik,
Last night they bombed Hamburg, and the whole sky was lit up by the glow of the flames. They say that the fire reached several kilometers into the air and that the asphalt in the streets melted. It thundered all night as loudly as if the bombs were falling on Ærø. The cliffs at Voderup started collapsing. The last time that happened was in 1849, when the Christian the Eighth blew up in Eckernförde Fjord, and Hamburg is so much farther away.
An American pilot was found drowned in his parachute out at the Tail. The Germans ordered him buried at six o'clock in the morning. I think this was to avoid a scene, but we all turned up at the cemetery with a rake and a watering can and told them it was a Marstal custom to tidy family graves early in the morning. I don't think the Germans fell for it.
Apart from that the Germans here on the island are calm and sensible.
Everything in Marstal is peaceful. As always, death comes from the sea.
The fishermen are afraid of catching corpses in their nets, so no one is eating the eels this summer, though they are much fatter than usual.
Many people are keeping pigs in their back gardens even though there is a ban. Marstal must have looked like this a hundred years ago, when there were still pens in the center of the town. However, it burns to the south, and we hear the bombers day and night.
Few sailors attend the Navigation College, but those who do get a lot of attention from the many women in this town who have not seen their husbands for more than two years. I don't judge them. There is a shortage of everything, including love. Personally I broke the habit of needing love, but not everyone is like me, and the older I get, the more understanding I grow. I missed out on so much. Some of it is my own fault, some of it not. I had a great mission. I wanted to make it possible for women to love. Today I think I failed. I did achieve a few things, but not for me. On the contrary: I pushed you away, and Edith, who now lives in Aarhus, I see only rarely.
I used to think that when a woman met a man, she would lose not only her virtue but also her dreams. When she has a son, she is rewarded for losing her virtue, but she loses her dreams all over again.
There was so much I wanted for you. You wanted something else. I was disappointed and I withdrew my love. I have never learned to love without conditions. I did not think that life had given me anything, so I decided to take what I wanted for myself,