We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [41]
"Why did you let him hit you?"
Niels Peter put the question without looking up, almost as if he were talking to himself. Hans Jørgen hesitated. Then he shrugged, as though defeated in advance.
"It doesn't matter now," he said.
Albert looked up, squinting into the falling snow.
"I don't understand."
Hans Jørgen paused. "Well, we didn't get him," he said. "And now he's come back and he's worse than ever. It's all"—again he flung out his arms—"hopeless."
"But he was bleeding," Albert protested. He hadn't seen it, but he'd heard detailed, almost painterly descriptions of Isager's dripping blood.
"Yes," Niels Peter said. "He did bleed."
"And so what?"
Hans Jørgen turned around and started heading back to the town. The snowflakes came thicker now. We followed. For the first time, we disagreed with Hans Jørgen. He'd always been our leader. But now we had to answer for ourselves.
We'd killed the dog, but we'd failed to kill the master. He'd thrashed our fathers and he'd go on thrashing us. We did the math on our fingers. We stayed in school for six years. Albert had five and a half years to go. Hans Jørgen had six months, the rest of us something in between. If Isager claimed six years of our lives, how many more would it take us to forget what he'd done? It sounded like a problem from Cramer's Arithmetic, but whether you solved it through addition, subtraction, or multiplication, none of us knew.
We had seen Isager bleed one winter's night, and the sight of his blood on the snow had filled us with hope. We'd seen fire lick through Niels Peter's sweater in the schoolroom stove, and we weren't through with contemplating what those flames meant.
At which point we began to see the potential of fire.
HANS JØRGEN TOOK confirmation with Pastor Zachariassen and went to sea. Eight months later he returned with the winter ice, having saved up his wages and bought himself a tall hat of the kind the older sailors wore.
Now was the moment for taking his revenge on Isager, we told him, because he was an adult, and no one could hurt him. But Hans Jørgen said he got thrashed just as much on board ship, so nothing had changed, and now that Isager was no longer his teacher, he'd lost the urge to smash him to pieces. In fact he'd bumped into him in the street, and Isager asked him about life at sea and they'd chatted as though Hans Jørgen had never forced him to his knees by twisting his arm, or lain on the floor being flayed: one adult to another.
"Do it for us, then," Albert pleaded. "You're big and strong. You're stronger than last year. You can take him on."
"I've already forgotten him," Hans Jørgen said. "He's of no interest."
"You're full of it because you've just been paid."
"You're not listening."
Hans Jørgen squatted down so his face was level with Albert's.
"They thrash you on board ship too. It never ends. It goes on and on. You might as well get used to it now."
"It's not fair!" Niels Peter fumed.
"No"—the others joined in—"it's not fair!"
"What's the point of teaching us to do sums, or to read and write," asked Hans Jørgen, "when all we need to know is how to take a beating, if we want to get ahead? And when it comes to that, there's no better teacher than Isager."
We looked at him uncertainly. Was he mocking us?
"Did the great Tordenskjold complain when a wave snapped off the foremast? No. What did he say to his men?"
"We're winning, boys," Niels Peter mumbled, and looked at his feet.
"There you are. We're winning, boys! Just remember that and stop whining."
"He's gone really strange," Albert said afterward.
We nodded. We felt more alone than ever. Hans Jørgen was no longer one of us. He'd become a grownup and he knew more about the world. But we didn't like what he told us. We decided not to believe him.
However, from that day on, it seemed that we were readier to put up with things. When Isager went on a thrashing round, there was less rebelliousness