We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [334]
We ended up on Dampskibsbroen, where the dead lay waiting for us in their rows. And we drank and danced and stumbled about among the corpses, and that was as it should be. The dead had been piling up throughout our entire lives: the drowned and the missing, all those who'd remained unburied across the centuries, lost even to the cemetery, those who'd ruined our lives with longing. Now they rose up and took our hands. We danced and danced in a huge churning circle and in the midst of it all sat Herman, no longer shivering from the cold but flushed with intoxication, brandishing an already half-empty whiskey bottle. He sang in a voice that was hoarse with toil and drunkenness and evil, with impatience and greed and battered lust for life:
Shave him and bash him,
Duck him and splash him,
Torture him and smash him,
And don't let him go!
There was a black man, a Chinese man, an Eskimo woman, and a child we didn't know; there was Kristian Stærk and Henry Levinsen with the crooked nose; there was Doctor Kroman, there was Helmer, and there was Marie, who'd finally learned how to clench her fist but didn't yet know that she'd been widowed this very day—Vilhjelm would tell her later. There were Vilhjelm's parents, deaf but smiling; there were the Boye widows, Johanne, Ellen, and Emma, and tonight they didn't hesitate to join hands with us and dance; there was their distant relative, Captain Daniel Boye; and there was Klara Friis, running down Havnegade, breaking through the circle until she found Knud Erik and he nodded at her, and the little boy whose name we didn't know went up to her and said a word we guess Knud Erik must have taught him: "Granny." And the child took her hand and pulled her into the dance, and our dance was like a tree that grew and grew, adding rings for every year.
There was Teodor Bager, still clutching his chest; there was Henning Friis, once the most handsome man on the Hydra, with the blond forelock Knud Erik had inherited; there was the indefatigable Anna Egidia Rasmussen, and there were her seven dead children, and they too joined the dance alongside the one living daughter; there was the cassocked Pastor Abildgaard, who before he died had finally found himself a rural parish that suited him better than Marstal, looking at us through his steel-rimmed glasses and taking a hesitant step forward. Albert followed, with hoarfrost in his beard and the head of James Cook under his arm, and then came Lorentz; he was panting and struggling, but nothing was going to stop him from joining the dance; there was Hans Jørgen, who went down with the Incomparable, and Niels Peter. Even Isager took his place with us, and so did his fat wife, with the resurrected Karo in her arms, and their sons, Johan and Josef, with the Negro hand; behind them came Farmer Sofus and Little Clausen and Ejnar and Kresten, the poor creature with the constantly weeping hole in his cheek. Laurids Madsen towered above us in his heavy sea boots; others appeared behind him; and finally there was Anton, whose charred face broke open in a smile that revealed his tobacco-stained teeth. Then came whole crews: the men of the Astæa and the Hydra, the Peace, the H. B. Linnemann, the Uranus, the Swallow, the Smart, the Star, the Crown, the Laura, the Forward, the Saturn, the Ami, the Denmark, the Eliezer, the Felix, the Gertrud, the Industry, the Harriet, the Memory: all the drowned. And there, in the outer circle, with their faces half hidden by fog, danced everyone who'd been away at sea for these five years of war.
So many of them had