We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [46]
That was how we showed our love: with silence.
Their eyes were always red. In the morning, when they woke us up, it was from stove smoke. And in the evening, when they said good night to us, still dressed, it was from exhaustion. And sometimes it was from crying over someone who would never come home again. Ask us about the color of a mother's eyes, and we'd reply, "They're not brown. They aren't green. They're neither blue nor gray. They're red." That's what we'd say.
And now they've come down alongside the wharf to say goodbye. But between us, there's silence. Their eyes pierce us.
"Come back," their stare pleads. "Don't leave us."
But we won't be coming back. We want out. We want to get away. Our mother sticks a knife in our heart when we say goodbye on the wharf. And we stick a knife in hers when we go. And that's how we're connected: through the hurt we inflict on one another.
Some elements of our new life we'd already learned at home. We knew how to splice a rope's end and strike knots. We could climb the rigging, and the height of a mast didn't scare us. We knew our way around a ship. But we'd stood on the deck only in the harbor, in winter. We had yet to learn how big the ocean is, and how tiny a ship can feel.
We started out as cooks.
"Here," the skipper said, shoving a tarnished copper pot at us.
This pot was the entire equipment of our galley, and in those days the galley was nothing but a clay stove in the fo'c'sle, with a flue made of four boards nailed together, poking up through a hole in the deck. When it rained, the water swept inside, and in stormy weather, when the waves washed over the deck, seawater would cascade down and put out the fire; there were times when we were up to our knees in water. The slightest wind caused the ship to pitch, and then we had to hold the pot in place to stop it from sliding across the floor; we pulled down the cuffs of our sleeves to protect our fingers from the hot handles and watched the sago soup with smoke-stung eyes. Nothing we did was ever good enough. Someone had to be the whipping boy on a ship, and if there wasn't a dog on board, then it was us.
We were roused at four in the morning and had to be ready with coffee at any point during the day. There'd be time for only a quick nap between any two cups, and then a kick would wake us: "Damn it to hell, you sleeping again, boy?"
We never had a single hour ashore to visit the towns where we loaded and unloaded. After a year at sea we'd been to Trondheim, Stavanger, Kalmar, Varberg, Königsberg, Wismar, Lübeck, Antwerp, Grimsby, and Hull. We saw rocky coastlines, fields and woods, towers and church spires—but we came no closer to them than to castles in the air. The only land we ever felt under our feet was near the wharf, and the only buildings we entered were warehouses. The wide world we'd come to know consisted of the ship's deck, the smoky cabin, and the permanently damp berths.
Every night when we were in port, we had to wait until after midnight for the skipper, just to pull his boots off.
"Are you there, boy?" he'd say in a thick voice as he sat down on the berth, blotchy and panting, with his legs outstretched.
It was not until then that we could turn in—only to be roused a few hours later.
We met every winter, when the ships came home to wait for spring and waters free of ice.
"Do you remember what Hans Jørgen said?" Niels Peter asked. "That the most important thing Isager taught us was to take a beating?"
"He should have taught us how to keep awake," Josef said.
He was Isager's son, but he'd gone to sea anyway, while Johan had stayed home to take care of his mother—who since the fire had taken to wandering the fields dressed in rags and calling out for Karo. He was hoping to become a schoolteacher like his father.
We nodded in agreement. This was roughly the sum of our experiences during our first