Excerpts from
We, the drowned
By Carsten Jensen
Lauritz Madsen had been to Heaven and back.
He was not like others who ended up buried in a grave or who went off to sea and never came home. He’d never been as high up as a crow’s nest, hardly even as high as a yardarm. Yet he had stood at Heaven’s gate and seen St. Peter, although it was only his backside that the gatekeeper of Heaven had shown him.
Lauritz Madsen should have been dead, but death didn’t want him. He returned with a secret that he never revealed to anyone.
Before Lauritz Madsen became famous for his visit to Heaven, he was notorious for something else. He was an arrogant man who had single-handedly started a war. He lost his father, Rasmus, to the sea when he was six, and he joined the crew of the Anna af Marstal when he was fourteen. After only three months the Anna went down in the Baltic. The crew was rescued by an American brig, and ever since then Lauritz had dreamed of America.
He took his mate’s exam in Flensburg when he was eighteen, and that same year he was in his second shipwreck off the coast of Norway near Mandal. There he stood one cold October night on a skerry inundated by waves, waiting to be saved. For five years he sailed the oceans of the world. He had been south around Cape Horn and heard the penguins shrieking in the pitch-black night. He had seen Valparaiso, the west coast of North America, and Sydney, where the trees lose their bark in winter instead of their leaves and kangaroos hop around everywhere. He had kissed a girl named Sally Brown and could tell stories about Foretop Street, La Boca, the Barbary Coast, and Tiger Bay. He had crossed the Equator, said hello to King Neptune, and felt the bump that occurs when a ship crosses the Line. On that occasion he drank salt water, fish oil, and vinegar. He had been baptized in tar, lampblack, and glue, been shaved with the broken blade of a rusty knife, and had his cuts tended with salt and lime. He had kissed the pockmarked Amphitrite on her ocher-painted cheek and dipped his nose into her bottle of smelling salts, filled with nail clippings.
Lauritz Madsen had traveled far and wide.
Many people had done the same. But he was the only one to return with the obsessive idea that everything in Marstal was trivial, and to prove it he constantly spoke in a language which he called American. He had sailed for a year aboard the warship Neversink and taught himself this foreign language.
“Givin nem belong mi Lauritz Madsen,” he said.
Translated by Annemette Lundtofte
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