THE END OF THE WORLD

IT WAS THE END of the world.

He was on an alien planet or somewhere in the future. Whatever it was, it was heading for destruction. Convinced he was about to die, Knud Erik closed his eyes. Then suddenly he realized where he was.

He was in the middle of a dream. But it wasn't his own.

He was seven years old, sitting on the thwart of Albert Madsen's boat as they rowed through Marstal's harbor. The old man's voice came back to him, talking about a phantom ship painted gray all over, huge tubular buildings on fire, a night sky lit by a blinding phosphorescent white light, and air that quivered from the pressure of exploding bombs and collapsing houses.

Yes, that's where he was: in a dream that had visited the old man more than twenty years before. He opened his eyes and saw what Albert had seen, and for the first time he understood that the old man's dreams had been prophetic. What he'd presented to a child as tales of adventure had actually been his own visions of horror.

"That's the best story you've ever told me," Knud Erik had said back then. And now here he was, right in the middle of it. He'd never heard the ending. But it was on its way, and he sensed it would involve his own death.

Just then, a Stuka dived toward the ship and dropped a bomb. As he watched the missile falling, time stood still: he realized it would plummet right through the gray-painted funnel and detonate in the engine room, with devastating consequences. Preparing himself for death, he tensed his muscles.

Now!

The bomb disappeared with a splash into the water a few meters from the side of the ship. He'd mistaken its trajectory. His muscles were still locked rigid. He waited for the column of water and the sudden keeling of the ship, for the water pressure to burst her steel plates and come flooding in. But nothing happened. The bomb was a dud.

He waited for the next one.

The noise was deafening. Two oil tanks on the north side of the Thames had caught fire, and a frustrated roar sounded from the sea of flames, like the great mythic wolf of Ragnarök straining on its chain at the end of time, howling to be unleashed on the whole world. The black smoke was a clenched fist headed for the distant stars, extinguished one by one in the roil of darkness and toxic fumes. Beneath its black lid everything was ablaze, as though the sun itself had been shot down and was flaring for the last time in the midst of the ruined oil tanks.

The whole of Southend was on fire. The windows in the tenement blocks glowed in the blaze; flames leapt from the roofs like strange vegetation growing at explosive speed, determined to consume the very soil it grew in, and the docks shuddered in convulsions of destruction. Fire flashes spurted from the anti-aircraft batteries on the roofs that were still intact. The ships on the river were firing too. Knud Erik could hear the sputter of the old Lewis machine gun that had been mounted on board the Dannevang some months earlier: the British navy had trained four of the crew in the use of weapons. He was one of them. The machine gun, which dated from the First World War, they'd soon discovered to be useless when it came to defending the ship, but it had another more important function. It beat whiskey, and if anyone still remembered to pray these days, it beat praying too. Clutching and firing it gave you a blissful feeling of calm—though its services came at a price. Its overheated metal stock burned your palms, and its explosive coughing deafened you. But for a moment, the waiting stopped.

You were responding. You were taking action.

In a strange way the machine-gun position was the best place to be during an attack, even though you were clearly visible on deck, which made you the perfect target for a hail of enemy bullets and bombs. But at least out there, your helplessness didn't drive you insane.

When the air-raid warning sounded, the crew would instantly re-lease the mooring and head for the buoys in the middle of the Thames. It was procedure for all ships to leave the wharf during air raids because it took weeks to clear the wreckage of a bombed ship and in the meantime it blocked the wharf to other vessels. So, resigned, they'd head for open water, where they couldn't just jump onto land if the ship took a hit. "We're off to the cemetery," they'd joke.

So it was good to have your hands on a Lewis.

Several of the ships around them were on fire now. One capsized slowly and began to sink. The crew in the lifeboats rowed haphazardly: the whole harbor was ablaze, and a crane had fallen halfway into the basin. High up above them one parachute after another unfurled and floated down toward the river, swaying calmly. As they drew nearer, Knud Erik was able to see that what was suspended from them wasn't human. The parachutes hit the water and their vast fabric canopies crumpled languorously before settling on the river. They looked like flowers scattered across a grave.

An hour later the air-raid alarm sounded the all clear. Fires were still blazing on the wharves, and the oil tanks were belching black fumes into the night sky. An acrid smell of oil, soot, and brick dust hung over the river, along with a faint trace of sulfur whose origin he couldn't identify. His eyes stung from exhaustion.

Knud Erik had been through the same scenario in Liverpool, Birkenhead, Cardiff, Swansea, and Bristol. Sometimes it seemed that they were sailing in an ocean of flames, and the sky was filled not with cumulus, stratus, and cirrus clouds, but a whole weather system made up of Junkers 87s and 88s, and Messerschmitt 110s. When their ship passed into the English Channel, they came within reach of the German batteries at Calais; in the North Sea U-boats awaited them. It was everywhere and it was constant. The whole world had contracted and turned as black as a cannon mouth. They didn't call it fear: it manifested itself as sleeplessness. At sea, they always worked double watches, and when they were attacked, nobody slept. While in port, the whole crew frequently had to move the ship to another mooring point, so their sleep was constantly interrupted. Did they sleep at all? Well, they closed their eyes and they were gone in a moment, free of memories, until death yelled "Boo!" again and they tumbled out of their berths, wide-eyed, as though dreaming of exit. But there was no escape, no hatch in the sky, no trapdoor in the deck, no horizon to escape behind. They lived surrounded by three elements—not sea, sky, and earth, but what they concealed—U-boats, bombers, and artillery. They were on a planet that was about to explode.

Albert Madsen had been right. He'd seen the end of the world. But the old man hadn't told Knud Erik he'd be trapped in the middle of it.

Tonight he'd manage two hours' sleep before rousing the crew. They were going farther up the Thames with the tide, and for him, it was a matter of honor to be ready before any of the other ships. He prayed for a dreamless sleep.

He didn't know that the next day he'd get to learn a new word. He'd expanded his vocabulary over the past few months, with technical expressions that bore witness to mankind's endless ingenuity. This ingenuity was so convoluted and contradictory that he found it impossible to follow, but he knew its mission well enough. A newer and even fancier way had been found to destroy him.

Yes, he got the sleep he'd asked for. Darkness descended and contained him—that rare, longed-for darkness in which, for a moment, he could renew his strength. This time it held him for so long that when it finally released him, he stumbled out of his berth with those wide, dazed eyes that are the normal reaction to an attack. He'd neglected his duty. He'd overslept.

He rushed out of his cabin. Many of the other ships already had smoke emerging from their funnels. Then, within the space of a second, more than just smoke was pouring out. A massive explosion that recalled last night's bombardment rolled across the river without warning. Another followed. Nearby, the bow of the Svava rose into the air, then snapped off. The ship started sinking immediately while smoke and flames devoured their way toward the wheelhouse. He saw several men jump into the river, one with his back in flames. Then the bow of the Skagerrak exploded. Two Norwegian steamers blew up next, and then a Dutch one.

His first thought was to get away. But what were they fleeing from? Where was the enemy? The sky was clear and it couldn't possibly be a U-boat.

A dinghy approached from one of the British escort ships. At its front a man with a megaphone hailed him with the day's new word: "Vibration mines!"

Knud Erik needed no further explanation. The mines were triggered when a ship's screw started turning. The objects he'd seen last night, falling gently through the air suspended from parachutes, were vibration mines.

A couple more ships exploded. Those that remained lay still, their boilers cold. Around them, flaming ships were reduced to sinking wrecks in seconds. A grim regatta of burned bodies floated between the wrecks.

Later, they were ordered to drift upriver with the tide, without using the engine. The only sound they heard was the lapping of waves against the side of the ship. It was as quiet as if they'd returned to the age of sail.

THEY WERE ON their way to England in a convoy from Bergen on the west coast of Norway when the radio announced Germany's occupation of Denmark. Their captain, Daniel Boye, immediately called a ship's counsel and presented the choice: to continue to an English port or reverse course and return to Denmark or Norway.

In a way, they felt the decision had already made itself. They were sailing in a convoy under the protection of British warships. Didn't that mean that they too were at war with Germany, like the ships escorting them?

The answer was clear. Thanks to a war that wasn't their own, freight rates were high. So were wages, which now came with a 300 percent war supplement. With overtime and various allowances, this meant a quadrupling, sometimes a quintupling, of a man's income. The reason they'd sailed was money. Now they were being asked to join this war and to be at its front line. Danish neutrality was no protection: seventy-nine Danish sailors had been killed last Easter and more than three hundred had lost their lives since the outbreak of war, despite having sailed on ships with the Danish flag painted on the side. The torpedoes on the U-boats couldn't tell the difference. A ship on her way to an enemy port was a ship on her way to an enemy port, regardless of the stripe of those on deck.

All of the seventeen crewmen on board the Dannevang agreed to continue on to England, out of sheer defiance more than anything else. They'd made the decision to go to sea. And now no one was going to frighten them off deck.

They sensed it was this same defiance that would pull them through and keep them alive, rather than patriotism, or love of the motherland, or ideology, or indeed any understanding of what the war was about. Doubtless these motives played some part, whether large or small, in each crewman's decision, but they weren't being asked to offer their opinion on the war. They were being asked to make a choice that would have unforeseen but crucial consequences for the rest of their lives. In what way they couldn't know, but their sailor's instinct told them it was a matter of life and death. They felt all of the sailor's stubbornness when faced by an overpowering force—a hurricane or a Messerschmitt 110—and they said yes, not to the war that raged this year, but to one that had raged for eons; not to England, but to the road to England: to the sea, and to a challenge that made them feel like men.

They arrived at Methil, in Scotland, on April 10 and were immediately ordered to sail to Tyne Dock in Newcastle, where their ship would be assigned to the British Admiralty. There was no ceremony to mark the transfer. An officer from the British navy stuck a note to the aft mast: a brief text stating that the ship had been requisitioned by the British in the name of King George VI. The Dannebrog was lowered, and the Red Duster, a scarlet cloth with a Union Jack in one corner, was raised in its place.

They'd never taken very good care of their Danish flag. It was frayed around the edges, and its white cross was blackened by soot from the funnel. But it was theirs. Among strangers, it was half of their identity. Now they'd lost the right to display it. Their country had surrendered to the Germans without a fight, and so their flag was taken away. From now on, they counted only if they no longer considered themselves Danes. They'd be fighting the war stark naked: their stripping had just begun.

The second engineer asked what wages they'd get under the British flag.

"Three pounds, eighteen shillings a week and one pound, ten shillings for victuals," the officer replied.

The second engineer did a quick mental calculation. He glanced around at the rest of the crew and shrugged. They could do the math too. The pay was a quarter of what they'd been getting. That said, they wouldn't be providing for their families anymore: they'd been severed from them indefinitely.

"Don't worry, you'll be home for Christmas," the officer said. He'd observed their faces closely.

They forgot to ask which Christmas.

***

They were ordered to paint the Dannevang gray, as gray as a winter's day on the North Sea. Not even the varnished oak doors and window frames around the wheelhouse escaped. This was their ship. That winter they'd scraped off the rust and painted every square centimeter of her: the black hull, red below the waterline, the white superstructure, the red and white stripe that ran like a ribbon around the funnel. They'd lovingly traced the white letters on the bow, and they'd kept the Dannevang so clean you could walk about on her in shore clothes even after loading coal. They'd maintained the steamer in the old sailing ship style, as they called it, with a scrubbed deck and washed-down bulkheads. It was miserable and hard work, but it gave them pride. Now the Dannevang they'd cherished had slipped through their fingers, almost as if she'd sunk into the wintry sea from which she'd borrowed her new color.

The Dannevang had once been registered in Marstal. The steamer had been owned by Klara Friis and had been laid up for years before being sold to a shipowner in Nakskov. The captain and the first and second mates were from Marstal, the seafaring town that no longer had its own ships, but whose men had become the aristocracy of the Danish merchant fleet. Marstallers were everywhere, and most commonly on the bridge as first mates or captains: the only ones who sailed as seamen were those still too young to be anything else. Daniel Boye, a distant relative of Farmer Sofus, had been captain of the Dannevang when she still belonged to the family and sailed under her old name, the Energy.

He'd been among Frederik Isaksen's supporters and he'd stood near the wharf when Isaksen caught the ferry to Svendborg after his defeat.

"You won't remember Isaksen," he'd said to Knud Erik, "but he remembers your mother." Knud Erik had shuddered slightly. His mother was a sore point. He'd neither seen nor spoken to her in a decade. However, he knew Isaksen well. Isaksen had retained his affection for the people of Marstal and never closed his door to a Marstaller if a voyage brought him to New York. He'd even married a Marstal girl: Miss Kristina.

Always the gentleman, he'd been waiting for her on the pier in New York when she arrived. Klara Friis had written to him, "I know that you do not owe me anything. But I do believe that you are a man with a strong sense of responsibility."

Isaksen certainly was. He'd not only taken Kristina Bager under his wing but ended up marrying her. Knud Erik had visited them from time to time. Isaksen was a wonderful father to Ivar's child, but he and Kristina never had children of their own, and Knud Erik couldn't work out whether they were happy together: he had his doubts about Isaksen's relationship with women. He was fond of the vivacious Kristina and he had good reason to be, but as far as Knud Erik could see, he wasn't fond of her in quite the way a man should be of a woman. Although Knud Erik and Kristina Isaksen confided in each other, on this matter he never inquired.

"My little knight," she'd call him. She used a sisterly tone, though he'd outstripped her in size a long time ago.

Knud Erik had been in New York when Kristina's daughter was confirmed. It had been a strange experience to sit in a Protestant church in the Upper East Side, watching the fourteen-year-old Klara, a girl named after the mother he hadn't seen since the day she'd declared he might as well be dead. Her kindness to Kristina Bager was a side of his mother he'd never seen himself.

Whenever anyone tried to talk to him about why his mother had renounced him, Knud Erik always turned away in silence.

Captain Boye had received two telegrams on the morning of April 9. One was from the ship's owner, Severinsen in Nakskov, ordering the Dannevang to return to Denmark. The other was from Isaksen.

Boye read it aloud and looked at his first mate. "Isaksen suggests we go to a British port," he said. "It's actually none of his business, as he doesn't own the ship. But I happen to agree with him."

"Isaksen's a man of honor," Knud Erik said.

The majority of Danish shipowners had done what Severinsen had done. Møller, who appeared to be well informed, had stayed up with his son the night before the Germans invaded Denmark, telegraphing his ships with orders to seek a neutral port. The crew of the Jessica Mærsk had mutinied, tying up the first mate and locking him in the chart room: the ship had been bound for Ireland, which was staying out of the war. The crew had forced the captain to sail to Cardiff instead. Rumor had it that the Jessica Mærsk too had received a telegram from Isaksen. From his New York office he'd been just as busy as his former boss. As Boye remarked, Isaksen had stuck his nose into something that was none of his business. But this was how a man of honor sometimes behaved.

On the other hand, it was hard to feel honorable on board the Dannevang. You'd behaved honorably, all right, but you'd been stripped of dignity for your pains.

They might be in a pub in Liverpool, Cardiff, or Newcastle, downing as much Guinness as they could manage between two air-raid alarms. And always there'd be someone who noticed their accent and asked them, "Where are you from, sailor?" That was the killer moment.

They learned quickly. The one thing you never did in that situation was tell the truth. If you said you were from Denmark, the information was received with cold silence or open contempt. You'd be called a "half-German."

In the Sally Brown, a pub by Brewer's Wharf, a girl with a low-cut blouse and remarkably red lips had approached Knud Erik, and he'd bought her a drink. They'd raised their glasses and she'd looked deep into his eyes across the rim of her glass. He knew the routine and how the evening would end. That was all right with him. He needed it.

Then she'd asked. Back then he hadn't heard the question often enough to know the effect the word Denmark would have.

"Why aren't you in Berlin with your best mate Adolf?"

He was furious. Hell, because he was here, in a pub where half the windows were broken, in a bombed-out city, risking his life for measly wages, cut off from his family and friends! He could have been lying under his eiderdown back in Denmark. Instead, by way of payment for his willingness to face an abrupt end to his miserable life, he daily confronted every kind of explosive devilry ever invented. She wiggled her bottom as she walked off in her tight skirt, determined he should know what he was missing out on, for having the wrong nationality.

When news came of Denmark's fall, Danish shipowners and the government had encouraged Danish sailors to seek neutral ports right away. But the crew of the Dannevang had done the opposite, risking homes, families, safety, everything. It didn't help. There was no free Guinness from the barman, no sympathy pussy from women with low-cut blouses and red lips.

Instead, they were reduced to watching the good fortune of others from a distance. Down there, at the other end of the bar, for instance: the underage boy with blue eyes and a lock of blond hair falling across his forehead. For him there was no end to the backslapping, the flirtatious looks, the free beer, the invitations to an all-expenses-paid night in a room where a mattress with broken springs would squeak the night away. The kid didn't even speak English, apart from the crucial words "I'm from Norway."

They were fighting the Germans in Norway; the king and the government were in exile in London; thirty thousand Norwegians sailed in the service of the Allies, and they sailed under their own flag. The Norwegian merchant fleet had been assigned to the state, and the king was now its official owner.

Scandinavians were popular wherever they went. But to English ears, Scandinavian meant Norwegian. Denmark had dropped off the map, and if a sailor mentioned that was where he came from, it sounded as if he was offering a shameful reminder of the past. On April 9, 1940, the crew of the Dannevang had become stateless. They were in the line of fire, but they were buck-naked.

They downed their Guinness in silence.

The end came the following January, one day at around four o'clock in the morning. The Dannevang was on her way from Blyth to Rochester, with coal. Afterward they were unable to decide whether it had been a vibration mine, an acoustics mine, a magnetic mine, or just an old-fashioned horn mine—but her bow was ripped apart. The ship started to take in water immediately, but she didn't sink right away. They'd been blacked out during their voyage, and when they climbed into the lifeboats, Captain Boye ordered the lights turned on. They rested on their oars as they bid farewell to their ship, and a bottle of rum was passed around. They'd rarely drunk on board. On New Year's Eve, Boye had held long discussions with his officers before he decided to give each man a glass of cherry brandy. When the bottle of rum came back to him, it hadn't even been emptied. Seventeen men! He gave them a look of approval.

The Dannevang keeled over. The sound of explosions came from the engine room as the water reached the hot boilers, and lumps of coal flew out of the shattered skylight. The stern rose up in the water, and the screw gave a brief screech as it spun around for the last time. Then it stopped, and all over the ship the lights went out.

Knud Erik closed his eyes. Albert had dreamt this moment. He'd seen a sinking steamer and he'd described everything. Just as it was happening now.

When he opened them again, the sea had closed over the Dannevang.

The men sat in the lifeboat and watched, their wool-lined Elsinore caps in their hands. No one spoke. Knud Erik felt the captain ought to say a prayer. Or recite the funeral text from the Book of Sermons. How the hell were you supposed to send off a ship?

The steward was puffing on a cigarette; its tip glowed red in the night.

"A cigarette would be welcome right now."

It was Boye who broke the silence. He looked at the steward. "Hammerslev, did you remember the cigarette cartons?" The steward nudged the mess boy, who looked miserable. "The cigarettes, Niels."

The mess boy dived under the stern thwart and triumphantly pulled out a carton. They got a pack each. They'd been forced to leave their sea chests and sea bags on board—there wasn't room for them in the lifeboat. Now all they owned were the clothes they were wearing, their discharge books, and their passports, which proved that they belonged to a nation that no longer existed because the war had swallowed it up. And a pack of cigarettes.

It was all right. They would manage. They were alive, and soon their lungs would be filled with smoke.

"The matches," Boye said. "Where are the damn matches?" He looked sternly at the mess boy. "I'm throwing you overboard if you've forgotten them."

The mess boy flung out his hands in desperation. "It all happened so fast," he said. So the steward passed his lit cigarette around, and soon seventeen tiny red dots glowed in the winter darkness. Dawn was still a few hours away.

"Niels," the captain said to the mess boy. "It's your job to make sure that at least one cigarette is always lit, even if you have to smoke in your sleep. Is that clear?"

The mess boy nodded gravely and puffed away as if his life depended on the orange spark in front of his nose.

Knud Erik looked around. It had been a good crew. He'd been first mate on the Dannevang for three years. On board were seven men from Marstal and one from Ommel. The rest were from Lolland and Falster. Now they'd be scattered all over the place.

A couple of years later he would return to this moment and do the math. Of the seventeen survivors of the Dannevang, eight were dead: the captain, the second mate, the steward, an able seaman, two ordinary seamen, a junior ordinary seaman, and the chief engineer. Five were Marstallers. Captain Boye was run down by an American convoy ship. The junior ordinary seaman was on board a munitions ship when she was torpedoed. There'd been only three survivors out of a crew of forty-nine, and he wasn't one of them.

But right now they were all together, waiting for dawn. They were close to the English coast and they knew they'd be spotted soon. Death was the last thing on their minds. Their only concern was keeping the red glow of the cigarettes going until they were picked up.

THE CREW OF the Dannevang remained unemployed for a few weeks in Newcastle, where they spent most of the time at the newly opened Danish Seamen's Club, honing their pool skills. It wasn't exactly that they missed the air raids, mines, and U-boats: any nostalgia for bombs could be easily satisfied by taking a stroll around the docks. It wasn't as bad as London, but almost. No, the fact was they'd made a choice, and it seemed ludicrous to spend a world war playing pool. Besides, the food ashore was disgusting. Powdered eggs, Spam, and gray bread smeared with a reeking, oily substance known as Bovril. Meat inevitably meant corned beef. The British diet wasn't dictated by stinginess but by the war, and it showed on the British. Their patched-up, prewar clothes were a fair measure of how much weight they'd lost. The food on the Dannevang had been better: from time to time they'd had real eggs or a piece of fresh beef. "The Brits eat the way we did on the old Newfoundland schooners," Knud Erik commented.

He hadn't sailed the Newfoundland route since the fatal voyage on the Kristina, and the Claudia had been his last sailing ship. Once he'd passed his navigation exam, he'd decided to crew on a motor ship. He'd applied to the Birma and the Selandia, vessels belonging to the Far East Asia Corporation, but they'd both turned him down. Knowing nothing of the connection between his mother and the owner of the company, old Markussen, he'd never understood why. So he'd taken jobs on steamers.

Helge Fabricius, the second engineer of the lost Dannevang, laughed at what Knud Erik said about the food. He was in his mid-twenties and not old enough to have sailed the Newfoundland route. Knud Erik was thirty, less than ten years older, but they'd been born on either side of the great divide between the age of sail and the age of steam. They weren't even separated by a generation and yet they were children of two different worlds.

Behind the pool table hung a blackboard with VACANCIES written on it in chalk. Under this was scrawled NIMBUS OF SVENDBORG. Nothing else. What were they looking for, a first mate, a steward, a chief engineer? Knud Erik and Helge went to see the Danish consul, Frederik Nielsen, to find out. To their surprise, he offered them the whole vessel: its crew had jumped ship. The Nimbus was theirs if they wanted her. Knud Erik would be promoted to captain.

This was the other side of the war. It imposed restrictions, but it also offered opportunities. They went to inspect the ship. On the bow you could make out the letters that had once spelled Nimbus and more marks on her stern that had probably said Svendborg. But you had to apply your imagination.

As they walked up and down the wharf, inspecting the vessel, Helge Fabricius started counting. Knud Erik didn't need to ask him what he was up to. "There's no way that crew jumped ship," he said. "They're all dead."

"One hundred and fourteen...," Helge intoned.

"The only cheese they ever got on that ship must have been Swiss."

"I'd like to see them make a cup of coffee," Helge said, abandoning his numerical litany.

They both laughed and walked up the gangway. They'd seen ships with half the bulwark ripped away, with the superstructure blown off, with craters in their sides, that had nevertheless managed to stay afloat. But they'd never seen anything like this. The Nimbus had received not one direct hit, but a thousand. The steamer was riddled with bullet holes. She was intact yet utterly destroyed. Waves and waves of Messerschmitts must have strafed her. Not one of the Germans' aircraft bombs or torpedoes had struck her; if they had, the Nimbus would be at the bottom of the sea. But their machine guns certainly hadn't missed. There was something awe-inspiring about the sight of the ship's perforated superstructure: it exuded a defiance that seemed almost human.

They entered the galley, where a blue enamel coffeepot still sat on the stove. As if to give the lie to Helge's joke, it was still in one piece.

"I'll be damned," said Helge.

They found some English coffee substitute, made from acorns, in a cupboard, and sat down at the table while they waited for the water to boil.

"We'll take this ship," Knud Erik said. Helge poured the boiling water and shot him a questioning look. "She's a lucky one."

"You mean her coffeepot was lucky. It's the only thing on board that doesn't have holes in all the wrong places."

Knud Erik shook his head. "No, the whole ship's lucky. Have you ever seen so many direct hits? But the Nimbus is still here. She's still afloat. And she'll share her luck with us."

They were both well aware that this was pure superstition. On the battlefield—and the sea was a battlefield—no rules govern who will be spared and who will fall. Whatever decides a soldier's or a sailor's fate is unfathomable and random, so they might as well call it luck and trust it as such. On the Dannevang they'd had a Lewis. On the Nimbus, they'd have the more effective Lady Luck.

They returned to Consul Nielsen and told him that they'd take over the ship. He looked relieved.

"These are our terms," Knud Erik said. "We won't be needing all that ventilation on the Atlantic, so we want the holes mended. We want some decent tackle on board so we can defend ourselves. And we'll be in charge of the hiring. We want to decide whom we sail with."

The Nimbus was taken to the shipyard to be repaired, and Knud Erik and Helge returned to the Danish Seamen's Club to find her a crew. On the chalkboard under VACANCIES they wrote a list of the crewmen they needed. Then they settled themselves in a corner near the pool table and waited.

Within a few days they'd hired a first mate, a mess boy, a donkey-man, and a couple of able seamen. They were still looking for a second mate, a steward, a chief engineer, and a few more able and ordinary seamen. It would be a crew of twenty-two.

Knud Erik hadn't expected to become a captain this early in his career. He didn't doubt his abilities, but he wasn't sure he had the necessary authority. Could he judge a man well enough to make the most of his strengths and help him forget his weaknesses? And what about twenty-two men all at once?

On the fourth day Vilhjelm stepped through the door and asked to sign on as second mate. It was two years since he and Knud Erik had last seen each other, and that had been in Marstal. Vilhjelm had a family now: a son and a daughter with a woman of his own age, who was the daughter of a fisherman from Brøndstræde. His stammer had never come back, and whenever he was in Marstal he went to church every Sunday. He kept the Book of Sermons from the Ane Marie at home. He didn't need it with him on board. He still knew it by heart.

"How's your father?" Knud Erik asked.

Vilhjelm's father had stopped his hard job as a sand digger a long time ago. Now he fished instead, though he was actually too old for that as well. But he persisted doggedly, trapped in his own deaf world.

"He was fishing over at Ristinge when the Germans came. He couldn't hear the sound from the aircraft, of course. He looked up because shadows were crossing the water, one after the other, too fast for clouds. Apart from that, he didn't give it a second thought. He was more interested in how many shrimp he'd caught. That's the war, as far as he's concerned."

The next man to turn up was also from Marstal: Anton. He was appointed chief engineer on the spot, and he wanted to know everything about the engine.

When he heard that the Nimbus had only eight hundred horsepower, he said, "I have my doubts," and fiddled with his black horn-rimmed glasses. "Don't think there's much top steam in that old tub." He wanted to know what type of coal they'd be using. "I'd like it to be Welsh coal," he said. "Coal from Newcastle gives off too much soot."

"You'll get all the coal you want," said Knud Erik.

It was a joke, of course: he didn't know the first thing about coal, and he had no idea what they'd be able to get hold of.

Anton sulked over this for a while, and Knud Erik suspected he'd get up and leave. They'd been friends once and they still were, though they were often on opposite sides of the globe. But Anton wasn't sentimental; he was a professional and wanted a decent vessel on which to exercise his talent for mechanical work. So his answer took Knud Erik completely by surprise. "Well, what the hell," he said. "We Marstallers should stick together. I'll take the job. I'll get this old tub to shift."

The third man to approach the corner table that day had applied for the job of able seaman. Under his open shirt he wore a white T-shirt that emphasized his gleaming black skin. They assumed he must be an American.

"Fritz says hello," he said in Danish.

Knud Erik's jaw dropped. Fritz! He didn't even notice that the man had addressed him in his own language. "I thought Fritz was in Dakar?"

"He is," said the man. "Or at least he was the last time I saw him." He stuck out his hand. "I'd better introduce myself. Absalon Andersen from Stubbekøbing. Yes, I've heard it all before. I'm a Negro. Black Sambo and all that. But I grew up in Stubbekøbing and if you promise not to ask me where I learned Danish, then I promise not to ask you where you did."

He smiled at them as if pleased that introductions were now out of the way and they could get down to business. "I was in Dakar with Fritz," he went on. He pulled out a chair and made himself comfortable. Knud Erik offered him a cigarette. "Well, that bit of the story you're familiar with, I suppose?"

Knud Erik nodded. Dakar, in French West Africa, was every sailor's nightmare. There was nothing wrong with the town itself. But when France fell to Germany, the governor of Dakar proclaimed, initially, that he was on the side of the Allies. A few days later he changed his mind, and the many ships that had come to the port to enter Allied service were interned instead, dooming the sailors who had been willing to sacrifice themselves in battle to months of idleness on their own sun-baked decks. Vital engine parts were confiscated to prevent them from escaping. And when the British bombarded the port, they'd suddenly found themselves on the wrong side. It was one hell of a situation. One Norwegian ship managed to escape: the crew claimed that the ship's engines would rust unless they were run from time to time, so the idiot French handed over the missing engine parts and the crew gave them back replicas, then made their getaway in the middle of the night. The other ships—six Danish ones among them—were still rotting there. The war was calling out for them and they couldn't go. They must be feeling absolutely and utterly useless.

"But you're not Norwegian," Knud Erik said. "So how did you get out?"

"I'm something even better than Norwegian," Absalon Andersen said with a self-assured grin. "I'm black. I just walked out of Dakar. No one tried to stop me. I looked like all the other Negroes. After various detours I ended up in Casablanca. By the way, Captain Grønne says hello too. You boys from Marstal, you're just about everywhere."

"How did you manage to get here?"

"I have beer to thank for that."

"Beer," Helge said. "You're telling me you paddled from Casablanca to Gibraltar in a beer crate?"

"That's not the whole story," Absalon said. "But almost. Many try to escape, but only a few succeed. The French don't miss a trick. A few of us found this rotten old dinghy upriver. The French knew about it, but they never suspected a thing. It would have been sheer madness to try to go to sea in a tub like that. The problem was water for the crossing. We couldn't just stroll through town with a whole water cask. The French would have seen what we were up to right away. So Grønne gave us a couple of crates of beer. The French just grinned when they saw us carting them along. They thought we were off on a picnic. We rigged a mast and some sails and set off late at night. We had to bail out the whole voyage. That tub took in water like a herring crate. We reached Gibraltar after four days. The dinghy sank right under our feet as we sailed into the harbor."

"So you made it at the very last minute." Knud Erik said. He was impressed.

"Damn right we did," Absalon said, nodding gravely. "Damn right it was at the last minute. We'd just run out of beer."

When the next man appeared, Knud Erik gave him a curious look, and raised a hand before he could open his mouth.

"Let me guess your name. It's Svend, Knud, or Valdemar."

"Valdemar," the man said, without batting an eye.

"How can a Chinese end up being called Valdemar?" Helge asked, looking him up and down. He was young and slender, with the high cheekbones and narrow eyes of the East. A mocking smile played on his well-formed lips. He was handsome, in a surprisingly gentle, almost feminine way.

"I'm not Chinese," he said, in a patient tone of voice. "My mother's from Siam. And my father's surname is Jørgensen."

"You have a Danish passport, I hope?" Helge needled him. The young man's reply had unsettled him, and he wanted to recover his authority.

"Don't worry about that, as long as your discharge book is in order," Knud Erik said, to smooth it over.

A harsh glint appeared in Valdemar Jørgensen's dark eyes. "I was born in Siam," he said. "I have a Siamese passport and a Danish passport. The Danish one I cheated to get. I'm a member of the Seamen's Union of the Pacific. Is that good enough for you guys?" He gave them a combative look.

Knud Erik laughed. "The job's yours, if you want it."

"I want to know if we're going to America."

"Ask the British. If I were you, I'd prepare myself for the North Atlantic."

"I want to give you a piece of advice. Just the one. Don't marry an American girl."

"And what's wrong with American girls?"

"They're up for anything. Real hot chicks. But then they want to get married. I've been on ships where the guys were boasting of their conquests: wedding rings, wedding photos, true love, happily ever after—the whole shebang. And then two of them discover they've married the same girl. Know why? Those broads get ten thousand dollars in widow's pensions if a sailor's lost in Allied service. Pain in the ass. Get my drift?"

"Sure do." Knud Erik was finding it hard to keep a straight face. But the guy didn't appear to notice.

"You should, because you're not married, are you? You old guys are easy pickings for them. Take care, buddy!"

The kid really didn't miss a thing. He'd noticed Knud Erik wasn't wearing a wedding ring. Knud Erik leaned forward. "Listen to me," he said. "I'm not your buddy. I'm the captain of the Nimbus, and if you want to go to sea on my ship, you'll have to change your tone. Is that clear?"

"Aye, aye, Captain," he said. He was halfway across the room when he turned and addressed Helge. "Listen. If you've got a problem with Valdemar, then just call me Wally."

THEY SAILED IN convoy, first from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and back, and then to New York via Gibraltar. They sailed in ballast westward and returned with timber, steel, and iron ore. They had mounted four 20-millimeter machine cannons, one fore and one aft. The remaining two, placed on the bridge wings, pointed menacingly out to sea. These weren't manned by the crew but by four British gunners who sailed with them.

The Nimbus wasn't built for the North Atlantic. In fact it was hard to identify what she was built for. Anton did his best in the engine room, but he could never get her above nine knots. When they sailed in convoy and the U-boat alert sounded, they had orders to zigzag to avoid the torpedoes. The forty ships in the convoy left Liverpool in a straight line, then regrouped into a square, four by four. It was hard to maintain position, as the Nimbus wasn't sufficiently maneuverable; they inevitably fell astern.

Captain Boye had once told Knud Erik that in any situation that threatened the ship's destruction, the captain must forget rules, regulations, and ship's insurance, and follow a single unwritten law: treat people the way you'd like them to treat you.

Boye's words summarized Knud Erik's experience as a sailor. Later he heard that Boye drowned after giving his life jacket to a stoker who'd panicked and left his own behind. More than once he'd seen a captain risk his ship to come to the aid of another vessel. And he'd seen sailors in the navy do the same for one another.

Sailors were neither better nor worse than other people. It was the situation they found themselves in that encouraged loyalty. In the finite world of the ship, mutual dependency overrode individual survival instinct. Every man knew he'd never make it alone.

Back then he believed, naively, that the war had turned the whole world into a ship's deck and that the enemy they were united against resembled the sea in its brutal, uncontrolled power. He didn't know that war had different rules, or that those rules would break his loyalty and the strong sense of fellowship that the years at sea had rooted in his soul. He sailed ballast one way across the North Atlantic and timber and steel the other way, under armed escort, and he risked his life, and he did it because he'd learned on deck that no human being can turn his back on the fate of another. Yet the day would come when his commitment to the war would reduce him to a lesser human being, and he wouldn't realize it until it was too late. A time would come when he'd feel his existence was dictated by little red lights rather than the torpedoes that sought to end it. And the effect of the lights would be far worse.

There were rules for sailing in a convoy. A meeting was held ashore before departure, and each time the order from the convoy's commodore was the same: maintain speed and course. Every ship had her position, which she must stick to at all costs. And another order would come to balloon in their consciousness like a tumor: never go to the aid of a stricken ship; do not stop to pick up survivors. A ship that was stationary even for a moment would become a target for U-boats and bombers, and risk losing cargo essential to the war effort. They sailed to deliver that cargo, not to rescue drowning sailors.

This rule sprang from bitter necessity. Although Knud Erik recognized this, he still felt it was an assault on his whole identity. It wouldn't be a torpedo that destroyed him, he suspected, but an order that forced him to ignore drowning men crying out for help.

Escort vessels sailing at the rear of the convoy were tasked with picking up survivors, but they were often prevented from doing so by the wrath of the bombers or forced to divert their course to avoid torpedoes. Then the shipwrecked men would drift behind and disappear on the vast sea. The last trace of them would be the red distress lights on their life jackets.

They were the lucky ones. As their body temperature dropped, they'd drift into sleep, and then death. Or they'd give up, undo their life jackets, and let themselves slip into the darkness that was awaiting them. The red lights glowed on for a while longer. Then they too went out one by one.

When a ship was torpedoed, the destroyers would speed over to the attacking submarine and drop their depth charges. Any survivors in the water would implode from the enormous pressure, strong enough to rip away the U-boat's armored steel plates, or be propelled into the air on a powerful geyser of water, with their lungs forced out through their mouths: tattered human remains of which not even a scream was left.

He'd seen it happen on the voyage back to Halifax.

They had orders not to deviate from course because the danger of colliding with the other ships in the convoy was greatest when they sailed at top steam while attempting to flee the U-boats. He'd stood on the bridge, his hands on the wheel, and sailed right into a whole poppy field of red distress lights in front of the Nimbus's bow. He'd heard the frantic pummeling against the ship when the life-jacketed survivors drifted alongside and desperately tried to push off, so as not to be caught by the screw propeller. The ship's wake foamed red with blood from the severed body parts being churned around, while he stood on the bridge wing, looking back.

Don't look back was the rule for moments like this. Having done it once, he never did it again. But something inside him still watched what a moment ago had been men, and it kept watching until it turned to stone. No one, no one willingly did this to another human being. And yet he'd done it. Treat other people the way you'd like them to treat you. If he couldn't believe in that, what was he left with?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

He counted the little red lights from his captain's cabin. Their glow stripped him bare. He'd lost his last point of reference. He'd got his cargo to its destination. Yet he was doing the wrong thing. He'd done damage to others and in doing so, did damage to himself. He felt that close to the men in the water, screaming out for help.

When the convoy was attacked, he appeared on the bridge with a face that was frozen and hard. He didn't think about the U-boats. Nor did he think that the ships taking a direct hit might just as easily be the Nimbus. He simply braced himself for the little red lights. If they came, he'd push the helmsman aside without a word and take the wheel himself. He had the bridge cleared. He wanted to be alone, not only when he tried to avoid the bobbing distress lights ahead, but also when he plowed straight into them because there was nothing else he could do. He was the captain. He set the course. It was his responsibility.

He shielded his crew from it, determined that their hands, at least, would stay clean. If they wanted to, they could point him out as the guilty one.

He didn't know what they thought. He never discussed it with them.

When it was over, he'd go to his cabin, open a bottle of whiskey, and drink himself unconscious. It was his substitute for penance; he knew no real penance was possible. He'd done something irreparable. There on the bridge he'd forfeited the right to his own happiness. Any thoughts about the purpose of his life faded away. He watched himself from the outside, but he could no longer make anything out. His soul had turned to dust, pulverized on the grindstone of war.

He isolated himself. He never went to the mess. Nor did he fraternize with the first or second mates. He didn't even speak to his boyhood friends from Marstal anymore. He took his meals alone and opened his mouth only to give orders.

No one tried to coax him out of his solitude. No one addressed him with jocular remarks or asked him a question that didn't relate directly to daily duties on board. And yet they helped him. They helped him maintain his solitude, as if they knew that the price he was paying was on their behalf too.

An outsider might have thought that the crew was behaving coldly—ungratefully, even—by keeping their distance. But the contrary was true. They knew that the smallest sign of sympathy—a pat on the shoulder, a kind word, a glance—would have made him break down. Instead, they kept him going. They shielded him so he could get on with the job of shielding them. They needed a captain and they gave him the chance to be that man.

Dear Knud Erik,

I am writing to tell you about a dream I had last night.

I was standing on the beach, staring across the sea, as I used to do when I was a child. I felt the same mixture of fear of the sea and longing to sail on it that I used to feel back then. Then suddenly the sea started to withdraw. The pebbles on the beach rattled as they were sucked out by the pull. The water lay flat as though a huge wind was passing across it. This went on for a long time, and finally there was nothing left but bare seabed all the way to the horizon.

If you knew how I have longed for a moment like that! You know how much I hate the sea. It has taken so much from us. But I felt no triumph, though I saw my most ardent wish come true at long last.

Instead, I was filled with a premonition of something terrible.

I heard a roaring. Far out, a wall of white foaming water had risen and it was approaching at speed. I made no attempt to escape, even though I knew that I would be swept away in a moment.

There was nowhere to escape to.

What have I done? What have I done?

This question screamed itself inside me when I woke up.

You might think this sounds insane, but I feel a terrible guilt when I wander the streets. I see boys and girls, I see people out shopping, I see the women—and there are many women—I see the old people. But I see so few men, and I feel that I am the one who chased them away when I deliberately ruined the seafaring business here.

Marstal is not in the habit of counting those who are missing. But I am. Somewhere between five and six hundred men are no longer among us—sons, fathers, brothers. You are on the other side of the wall that the war has built around Denmark. You sail in the service of the Allies, and the outcome of the war will determine whether you can ever return home. But even victory is no guarantee that you will survive.

The flood of my nightmare is upon us, and I was the one who provoked it.

I wanted to banish the sea from men's hearts, but I achieved the opposite. You looked for work elsewhere because there were hardly any ships registered in Marstal. You sailed farther away. The time you were home with us became even shorter than it used to be. Now you are all gone indefinitely. Some of you, many, I fear, forever. The only proof we have that you are still alive is the letters we receive. There are long intervals between them. When letters fail to arrive, we are left guessing why.

Dear Knud Erik, I once said that you were dead to me, and this is the most dreadful thing a mother can do to herself. I know so little about you, only what I hear from other people, and they fall silent in my presence. I feel they regard me as something unnatural. I do not know if they have forgiven me for what I have done to this town. Maybe they do not even realize that I was behind what has happened. But no one has forgiven me for disowning you, and I have grown even lonelier than I was to begin with.

You will not get to read this letter. I will not send it. When the war is over and you have returned, I will give it to you.

I ask for nothing more than that you read it then.

Your mother

KNUD ERIK DIDN'T go ashore in New York. The land scared him more than the sea did. He suspected that once his feet touched the pier, he'd never be able to walk up the gangway again. And that would be a failure of duty. He'd no longer be part of the war—but men who stayed in it were failing in their duty too. The red lights had taught him that. So the choice the war offered him was a choice between two failures. Alone on the bridge, he honored his duty to the Allies, to the war, to the victory to come, to the convoy, and to the cargo. But he didn't honor his duty to the men who screamed for his help. It felt as if every single one of them was calling out his name.

When Vilhjelm went to the Upper East Side to visit Isaksen and Kristina, Knud Erik was briefly tempted to go with him. The last time he'd seen them had been at Klara's confirmation, and he'd been invited to dinner afterward. Then he shook his head. He preferred the solitude in the cabin. He huddled inside it as though it were an air-raid shelter.

There were men who, when they feared they were losing their nerve, started counting women, as though recalling their conquests in foreign ports made them feel stronger: women on one side of the scale, death on the other. It gave them a sense of balance.

Knud Erik could have gone ashore and tipped his own balance. He was thirty-one and unmarried. It wasn't too late, but—as he often told himself—neither was it too early. He was restless, and he'd known many women. It wasn't immature lust that prevented him from making a final choice. His indecisiveness was caused by something he could neither pin down nor articulate. At times he still thought of Miss Sophie, the crazy girl who'd turned his head at the age of fifteen. Surely she couldn't be what was stopping him? He'd barely known her. And her behavior, which he'd found enigmatic and compelling at the time, had been nothing but youthful pretentiousness. And yet it was as if she'd laid a curse on him. By suddenly vanishing into thin air—a disappearance that might have been anything from an amorous adventure to death by foul play—she'd tied him to her. It wasn't her he was seeking in the harbor bars or in Marstal's down-to-earth girls. But he was missing something, and every time he reached out for it, it vanished.

He'd managed one engagement in Marstal, to Karin Weber, who'd later broken it off. "You're always so distant," she'd said, and she wasn't referring to the normal absences of a sailor. He was well aware of that.

Something inside him longed desperately for a family. He needed to have a human being to miss. He needed a counterbalance to the terrible things the war had done to him, and he couldn't find that in port bars. He was a ship with no moorings.

He sat in his captain's cabin like a monk in his cell, but there was nothing edifying about his solitude. He counted the red lights. He counted his soul into tiny pieces. His dreams about the life he could have had crumbled like a child's sandcastle.

IN LIVERPOOL he deserted. He was running away from his sense of duty. The same whiskey that had helped him maintain a balance could also make him lose it. And in Liverpool he lost it.

Even shaving every day had become an ordeal. How do you shave without looking in the mirror? Shaving was the last struggle before the final rot set in. He knew this was an unwritten law for prisoners of war in the German internment camps. And that was how he felt: like a prisoner of war. He'd fallen into enemy hands. Only the enemy was inside him.

On the last voyage they'd sailed with ammunition in the hold. A hit would have meant total annihilation: no men in the water with their pleading little red lights. Not even the captain's cap would have survived if the Nimbus had disappeared in a gigantic spurt of flame. He'd caught himself fantasizing about the relief that death would bring. But no torpedoes struck them. Nor did any bombs drop through the deck and hit the cargo.

Yes, the Nimbus was a lucky ship. She kept a steady course through the drowning men and he cursed it all.

The ship's radio could pick up the frequency of the Royal Air Force, and when they approached the English coast after crossing the Atlantic, they'd gather on the bridge to listen to the conversations between the flight command and the RAF pilots. They heard the words "Good luck and good hunting," which signaled the start of a radio transmission of a life-or-death battle. They cheered and shouted in support of their team. They cursed the enemy whom they could not hear but sometimes saw, because the fights took place in the sky right over their heads. They clenched their fists; the veins bulged in their foreheads. They rooted for the pilots, who shouted their warnings or triumphs out into the ether. And then sometimes suddenly slumped in their seat, shot to pieces. These men sacrificed themselves for the ships, and yet the sailors all wished they could swap their eternal waiting position on the deck for the pilot's exposed cockpit. There wasn't one of them who didn't long to deliver death, instead of waiting for it. They got so worked up during these transmissions that if someone had handed them revolvers, they'd have been hard-pressed not to gun one another down like dogs.

Knud Erik was the only one who didn't fantasize about firing a gun. He'd have preferred to be the target of one. They were welcome to pull the trigger on him. He'd be happy to oblige.

He stopped Wally as he made his way down the gangway, suitcase in hand. He'd heard Wally boasting about its contents, which he'd acquired in New York: nylon stockings, salmon-pink satin brassieres, and lace panties.

Knud Erik made an effort not to sway. "Take me with you," he said in a thick voice. "I want to see what your underwear buys you." It was a plea, but he made it sound like a command. Not that it was the kind of command a captain would give to a crew member if he wanted to maintain respect. Show me the way to the gutter, let us be companions in degradation!

He'd left his cell to commit weaponless suicide.

Anton and Vilhjelm weren't there. If they had been, they'd have stopped him. Wally didn't have the maturity or the experience for that. He saw the boy's eyes flicker, but he knew he wouldn't dare raise an objection.

"Aye, aye, Captain" was all he said.

Absalon came up next to him. "But Captain...," he said.

Knud Erik could hear it was the start of a protest. After all, leaving the ship was tantamount to deserting it. The Liverpool docks were bombarded incessantly. They had to keep remooring. A captain couldn't just walk off in circumstances like that. It would be an unforgivable dereliction of duty. Never mind; he'd just have to add that one to the list. He made a deprecating gesture. "Vilhjelm will look after her."

Absalon looked away.

He and Wally kept their distance from Knud Erik on the road to the railway station, which ran between rows of bombed-out houses, where lean men and women were sifting through the bricks. There was no hostility in it. He was the captain, and they were just trying to uphold what remained of his dignity.

He'd once told Wally that he wasn't his buddy—but this was what he was trying to become now. He felt the poison of self-loathing spread. He hoped that it would kill him.

He fell asleep on the train to London, and Wally woke him when it stopped at the platform. Dazed, he looked around the compartment. Moving between New York and England always felt like time traveling: the Americans existed in a permanent prewar state, with well-nourished bodies and faces that exuded health, while the English, with their skin drained of color, looked like blurred, yellowing photographs of half-remembered people in an old album kept in a dusty attic, vegetating in a shadowland of ever-decreasing rations.

They'd just left the station building when the air-raid alarm sounded. It was night, and a dense darkness lay between the houses. They stopped short, not knowing what to do. Spotting some people running, they took off in the same direction. Somewhere a faint red light glowed, marking the entrance to an air-raid shelter. The irony wasn't lost on him. At sea, a red light meant yet another life on his conscience. Here it meant salvation. For a moment he had the urge to simply stand there and wait for the bombs to rain down on him. Seeing his hesitation, Absalon grabbed him by the arm.

"This way, Captain."

He let his legs take charge and followed the others.

There was no light in the air-raid shelter. They sat tightly packed together, surrounded by pitch-black darkness. He could hear whispers, a cough, a child crying. He'd lost track of Wally and Absalon, and it was a relief to be among strangers. There was a powerful smell of unwashed bodies and musty clothes. An anti-aircraft battery right above the bunker started firing, making the air tremble. Then the bombs started falling. Chalk and dirt dropped from the ceiling: it felt as though death had grown hands and was tentatively feeling their faces before it grabbed them. He heard gasping and whispering. Someone began sobbing uncontrollably and someone else murmured words of comfort, then broke into a panicked "Shut up for Christ's sake!"

"Leave her alone," another voice interrupted.

"Please, can we go home?" a child's voice begged.

A little girl screamed for her mother, and the voice of an old woman responded with the Lord's Prayer. A bomb exploded nearby, and the whole floor shook. For a moment Knud Erik expected the shelter to collapse on top of them. Everyone fell silent, as if death itself had hushed them.

Then he felt a hand on his. It was a woman's: small and delicate, but with a work-hardened palm. He stroked it reassuringly. He felt her head rest on his shoulder, and he held the unknown woman to him in the darkness. Another bomb fell, and the concrete walls of the shelter groaned from the pressure. Someone started screaming. More screams followed, and soon the darkness vibrated with panicked shrieking as the confined people surrendered to mass hysteria, while the bombs drummed outside in accompaniment.

The woman put her hands around his neck and started kissing his mouth greedily, then fumbled at his groin. He slid his hand inside her coat and felt the contour of her breast. Her burning hot sex welcomed him. The screaming surrounded them like a wall as they took each other in blind, brutal lust, with the bombs dictating the rhythm of their thrusts. Yet there was selfless tenderness in the soft, anonymous body that united with his own. She offered him the warmth of life itself, and he offered it back until their moans of pleasure mingled with the cacophony of terrified voices.

And for a moment he escaped the little red lights.

Some hours later the anti-aircraft battery above the air-raid shelter stopped rattling, and the sirens sounded the all clear. The door opened onto a dark street. It had to be the middle of the night.

He lost her in the crowd heading for the exit. Or perhaps he'd let her go deliberately. And perhaps she'd let him go too? Fires burned outside. He scanned the faces in the flickering light. Her? Or her? The young girl with the scarf around her head and her eyes fixed on the ground? Or the middle-aged woman with the hard face, trying to fix her smeared lipstick in the glow of burning houses? He didn't want to know. Both he and the unknown woman had found what they were looking for. Faces and names were irrelevant.

He stayed in London for three days.

He did it in back yards, in pub toilets, in hotel beds; he did it to the thunder of bombs and he did it without any accompaniment other than his own panting and that of his arbitrary partner; he did it until he reached a place where silence and darkness met and took him. He drank with men and he had sex with women who felt just the same way he did. When the bombs dropped, nobody knew who would shortly be joining the rapidly growing numbers of the dead, or whose workplace had been reduced to rubble or whose family was buried under a collapsed house. They all lived so steeped in fear that the losses they had yet to suffer had already consumed them. Every single second was a rebirth, every kiss a stay of execution, every shuddering breath in the arms of a stranger a declaration of love to life. Every drunken stupor—the permanent stupor he'd sought and found—was a gift, because just like a bullet to the brain, it eradicated all he was—his face, his name, his past—and unleashed all the hunger in his body. For three days he was his own ruthless appetite for life and nothing more.

On their last night they gathered up the remaining contents of their suitcases: underwear, nylon stockings, coffee, cigarettes, and dollars. Dollars especially. They behaved like Yanks and paid for a night in a hotel suite that took up an entire floor. They brought in the girls themselves and tipped the waiters generously. The porter kept an eye on their bar account to warn them when their money was running out. They ate, drank, danced, and whored through yet another night of bombing. Wally was in charge of the gramophone. They danced to Lena Horne and knocked back beer, whiskey, gin, and cognac.

The air-raid alarm went off at eleven o'clock. The waiters hammered on the door and called out to them to go to the basement.

"I suggest we stay here," Knud Erik said. He'd dropped the commando tone. He wasn't the captain now, but a mate among mates.

"Aye, aye, Captain." Wally saluted him and poured himself another cognac.

They switched off the light and opened the curtains. Outside, searchlights were strafing the night sky. The first bombs fell, far away to begin with, then closer. It sounded like a drummer testing his kit before his great solo. The building shook, and they dived under the beds. They knew that a mattress was no protection. But the intimacy of another body was. Their instincts took over: sex made them invincible.

The bombs came closer and closer. Outside a purple light flickered sporadically and a fiery glow dappled the ceiling. Every time common sense wormed its way into their muddled brains with the message that they should leave this minute and head for the safety of the basement, they grabbed their women tighter and thrust deeper, lust and fear driving them to ecstatic heights. Then they collapsed together, limp and exhausted, flung out their arms, and dozed briefly but blissfully, as if they'd already made it safely through the night.

But they hadn't. The bombs wouldn't let go of them. The fear returned, with its constant companion, ally, and friend: desire. From the darkness beneath a bed, someone would suggest, "Change? Who wants to swap?" And then a scramble would start, and they'd shuffle across the floor on their stomachs to a fresh, uncharted love nest, where new arms, a new greedy mouth, and new moist openings awaited, while the German bombers beat their kettledrums on the roofs of London.

At last all went quiet. They crawled out from under the beds, closed the curtains, and lay down next to one another on the untouched beds.

They'd won.

KNUD ERIK WAS there when the Mary Luckenbach was blown up.

The Nimbus was sailing in a convoy north of the Arctic Circle, on its way to Russia, with supplies for the Red Army. The weather was fine and visibility good. They were half a nautical mile behind the Mary Luckenbach.

The men on the bridge of the Nimbus watched in total silence. They'd seen tankers take a direct hit before; they'd seen two-hundred-meter flames. But they'd never seen anything like this. Neither had Knud Erik. It wasn't terror that silenced him. It was relief.

The German Junkers flew in so low over the water that it seemed to skim the waves. Just three hundred meters from the Luckenbach, it dropped its torpedoes, then roared across the ship's deck and got caught in the machine-cannon fire. Small flames darted from one of its engines.

Then the torpedoes reached their target.

One moment the Mary Luckenbach was there. The next, nothing but a stillness as terrifying as the explosion itself. There was no sign of fire, no wreckage floating on the sea: just a black cloud of smoke that rose with majestic slowness, as if it had the power to lift up thousands of tons of steel and carry them off.

The smoke rose unbroken to the clouds, several kilometers up, where it slowly spread out until it covered half the sky. Black soot fell silently as snow over the sea, as if the explosion had come from a volcano, rather than the war they were in the middle of.

There would be no little red lights: that was Knud Erik's only thought. Fifty people had just been wiped out, right in front of his eyes. A minute ago, through his binoculars, he'd seen gunners crouched behind the machine cannons and a black mess boy calmly crossing the deck with a tray. Now they were gone and all he felt was relief: he'd been spared. Not his miserable life, which he no longer valued, but his wrecked conscience.

They attacked in waves of thirty to forty aircraft, flying only six or seven meters above the water, swarming blackly over the gray sea. The sirens mounted on their wings let off a terrifying howl designed to drive the enemy mad and short-circuit his ability to react. Their twenty-millimeter machine cannons pounded the ships, and white and red tracer bullets sprayed the deck as the planes dropped their torpedoes one by one. The inexperienced gunners on the decks panicked and aimed wildly, their bullets hitting lifeboats and the wheelhouses of surrounding ships.

It made them shudder with reluctance, but they were forced to admire the German pilots' courage. With suicidal determination, they flew into a wall of fire intensified by the four-inch cannons aimed at them from the escorting destroyers.

The Wacosta and the Empire Stevenson were hit next, then the Macbeth and the Oregonian.

It was all over in five minutes. A Heinkel made an emergency landing on the water at the center of the convoy. The aircraft stayed afloat, and the crew crawled out onto one of the wings and held up their hands in surrender. They were no longer enemies. Without their machines they were just defenseless human beings. They kept looking around as if they wanted to catch the eye of every single one of the sailors crowding the rails of the surrounding ships. Then they meekly lowered their heads, awaiting sentence.

A shot rang out. One of the men clasped his shoulder and turned halfway around before sinking to his knees. A second shot finished him off. He slumped forward into the water, but his lower body stayed on the wing. The three remaining crew started running around him in a panic, looking for cover. One of them tried to crawl back into the cockpit. He was shot in the back. He fell and rolled into the water. The two survivors threw themselves to their knees and clasped their hands beseechingly.

They'd realized what was happening. They hadn't been transformed: they hadn't become human beings. They were still the enemy, and the proof hung over their heads in the shape of the black cloud that had been the Mary Luckenbach. The Oregonian was lying close by, capsized and sinking slowly after being hit by three torpedoes on her starboard side. Half her crew had, mercifully, drowned. The rest had been rescued by the St. Kenan, where they lay on the deck, vomiting oil, their limbs so frostbitten they'd probably have to be amputated.

Knud Erik remembered the nights on the Nimbus when they'd tuned in to the RAF frequency. Every one of them had longed to come face to face with a German he could empty his revolver into. At last the enemy was standing before them, not in the form of a war machine, but as a living, vulnerable human being they could hurt and take revenge on. Finally they had a chance to redress the massive imbalance of their lives. In those days, he'd desperately wanted to be on the receiving end of an enemy bullet. Now he felt the same blood lust as the others. It was urgent and strong. The imbalance in him was greater than in any of his crew.

He saw the two men kneeling on the wing of the aircraft that had been shot down, and the sailors in their hundreds, teeming along the rails of the surrounding ships, some with rifles in their hands, and the gunners in their positions behind the machine cannons. They fired lightheartedly, as if at the shooting gallery of a summer fairground. They probably felt that they were men again, because men aren't cut out to take a pounding and not fight back. They were fighting back.

The bullets whipped at the water around the aircraft. One of the two remaining airmen shot backward from the wing, as if a mighty hand had come to sweep him off and in doing so, prove just how pointless his life was, how futile his prayers to preserve it. The shot must have come from one of the heavy-caliber machine cannons. He landed in the water and vanished instantly.

The survivor slumped. He unclasped his hands and settled them on his thighs, leaning forward and baring his neck as if awaiting the mercy shot.

The rattle of bullets stopped: the men lowered their rifles, and the moment became a solemn one, as if they were all holding their breath before completing the execution. Slowly it began to dawn on them what they'd just done. Even before the enemy had been annihilated, their thirst for blood was quenched.

Knud Erik pushed the Nimbus's gunner aside. He was an untrained shot. At first the machine cannon spat its bullets straight into the sea, drawing a long stripe of foam across the water, before starting to strike the aircraft wing. Then they hit their target.

Now he'd killed another human being, and everything inside him collapsed. He fell on the machine cannon, sobbing, oblivious to the hot metal burning the skin of his palms.

THEY'D SAILED NORTH around Bear Island, on the seventy-fourth parallel, when a new order came from the British Admiralty: spread out. From the briefing Knud Erik had received in Hvalfjörður on Iceland, where the convoy had set out, and from his experience of every other convoy he'd been with, he knew the order was a death sentence. Many rules applied to convoy sailing, but one overrode them all: Stick together. You'll only get through if you're united. On your own, you're lost, and an easy prey for the U-boats, with no protection and no one to pick you up if you're sunk.

How often had his crew heard that message over the megaphone from a passing destroyer, when, despite Anton's efforts in the engine room, the Nimbus lagged behind: "Stragglers will be sunk." This wasn't so much a warning as a sentence, a farewell unaccompanied by the usual encouraging assurance: we'll meet again.

They knew one thing for certain: the cargo had to arrive. The tanks, vehicles, and ammunition in their hull would continue via some complex route and end up on a distant front, where the fighting between the Germans and the Russians would determine the outcome of the war—and ultimately their own fate. They knew it because that's what they'd been told, but they'd never been sure about the actual mechanics of it. The only part they were familiar with was the sea, the Junkerses and the Heinkels attacking them, the wake of the torpedoes, the ships exploding and sinking, and the men fighting for their lives in the icy water.

Their contribution to the war effort was important. They needed to keep faith in that. But the moment they received the order to give up their place in the convoy and fight their way to Molotovsk on their own, they realized such faith had been pointless and supplanted it with speculation about the reason for the fatal order. And as always, in a shaky situation involving immense pressure, their guesses hardened to suspicion, and they recalled the rumor that had dogged every single convoy they'd ever sailed with to Russia, a rumor that clung with the persistence of smoke to a funnel, the wake to a propeller, and a torpedo to your precious cargo: they were bait.

In one of the Norwegian fjords a forty-five-thousand-ton German battleship, the Tirpitz, lay in ambush. She was the biggest battleship in the world, a threat to everything that moved in the North Atlantic and a symbol of the Nazi dream of world domination. Probably the battleship's greatest value lay in simply being that symbol: certainly she rarely ventured out of her hiding place in the fjord, with its protective mountainsides. Instead she lay chained there like the great wolf of myth, threatening a Ragnarök that never came. But now that Ragnarök was imminent: the wolf at the end of the world was going to snap its chain at last and grab the bait.

Hard experience convinced them of this, the same experience that had lined their faces and tortured their bodies with frostbite. When the thirty-six ships of the convoy abandoned sailing in formation and tried limping on their own to Murmansk, to Molotovsk, or to Archangel on the White Sea, the Germans wouldn't require the overwhelming firepower of the Tirpitz's fifteen-inch guns to sink them: the U-boats could manage it with ease. Now that the British destroyers and the corvettes that had escorted them had been called off to go chasing after the Tirpitz, the convoy's thirty-six ships were left defenseless. No, they were doomed. Their own protectors had tricked them into an ambush.

They realized their insignificance with bitterness. They were expendable.

But what about their cargo? In Hvalfjörður they'd been told that in total they were carrying 297 aircraft, 594 tanks, 4,246 military vehicles, and 150,000 tons of ammunition and explosives to Russia. Were the British navy's officers prepared to sacrifice all that, simply to boast that they'd sent the Tirpitz to the bottom of the ocean?

They didn't get it. The only thing they understood about this whole business was that they couldn't trust anyone but themselves if they wanted to stay alive. If they didn't survive, they'd die without a soldier's sense of duty fulfilled or the comfort of knowing that their sacrifice made sense. If they were sunk, they'd disappear not just without honor, but without any acknowledgment that they'd so much as existed.

The defiance that flooded them wasn't directed solely at the enemy, but at friend and foe alike. As if they'd lost all notion of the difference.

The order came as a relief to Knud Erik. It meant that he could stop worrying about the drowning men. From now on, it was all about him and his crew. He could finally allow himself to surrender to the cynicism that comes when a crisis of conscience has exhausted itself. His sole priority was survival. They'd be alone in the middle of the ocean, and that was where he wanted to be. Alone, with no little red lights.

He changed course and headed north for Hope Island, sailing as close as he dared to the rim of the ice. Dense freezing fog covered the entire area. He ordered the crew to paint the whole ship white. They lay still for a couple of days, with the boilers switched off so the funnel smoke wouldn't give them away. The pack ice grated against the sides of the ship, and her steel plates protested in an ominous bass growl that from time to time shrilled to a treble scream. The message from the hull was clear: with a little more pressure from the pack ice, the Nimbus's luck might just run out.

Knud Erik thought back to the time the Kristina had been trapped in ice. The heavy timber of the sailing ship had been pliable; it didn't need to prove its strength the way steel did, but instead let the ice push the vessel about until the weight that threatened to crush her ended up supporting her.

He ignored the Nimbus's screaming hull. Better ice than U-boats. He dreamt about letting the Nimbus freeze and stay frozen until the whole world began to thaw and the weapons fell silent. He'd fought the sea his whole life. Now he embraced the dangerous ice as a friend.

He switched on the radio and invited the crew to gather around it as they'd done when they listened to the RAF frequencies. They heard nothing but distress signals: one SOS after another, and each cry for help a funeral service. There were only minutes between a ship's being attacked and its sinking. No one came to its rescue. Their crews went down alone in the icy cold sea. The Carlton, the Daniel Morgan, the Honomu, the Washington, the Paulus Potter. They counted twenty ships. There was nowhere to hide, not even here in the freezing fog at the end of the world.

They got going again and the Nimbus followed the ice edge north of the seventy-fifth parallel until she reached Novaja Zemlja, then headed south toward the White Sea. The ship encountered four lifeboats containing survivors from the Washington and the Paulus Potter. Both ships had been sunk by a formation of Junker 88s. The planes had flown over them as they climbed into their lifeboats, and the airmen had waved to them cheerfully while a cameraman filmed them for the German weekly newsreels. They hadn't waved back.

Captain Richter from the Washington came on board to consult a chart. After a while bent over it, he asked if they could spare a compass. His crew were still crouching in the lifeboats.

"Why d'you want a compass?" Knud Erik asked. "We'll take you."

Richter shook his head. "We'd prefer to sail on alone."

"In an open boat? The nearest coast is four hundred nautical miles away."

"We'd prefer to get there in one piece," Richter said, eyeing him calmly.

Wondering if the captain was suffering from shell shock, Knud Erik addressed him in the kind of tone he might use to persuade a wayward child.

"We can't offer you berths, but of course we'll find you a warm place to sleep. We've enough provisions, and in this weather we can manage nine knots. We'll be there in a couple of days."

"You do realize what's happened to the rest of the convoy?" Richter said, in the same calm tone. Knud Erik nodded. "A lifeboat's the safest place to be. The Germans won't waste their bullets on men in a boat. They're only interested in ships. They'll get you too. I'm grateful for the offer, but we'd prefer to go it alone."

He climbed down the ladder with the compass. In the boat, his men were slapping themselves to keep warm. If the wind rose, they'd get splashed and become encased in an armor of ice. But still they preferred their lifeboats.

The men pulled at the oars while Knud Erik ordered the ship full speed ahead. He stood on the bridge and watched the boats as they disappeared.

The next day a solitary Junkers appeared on the horizon and headed straight for them. You could hear its machine guns rasping from a great distance. The gunners on the bridge answered back. The wheelhouse took several direct hits, but no one on the bridge was wounded. Then the Junkers dropped its bomb. The plane was so close, it almost collided with the mast. The bomb exploded in the water near to starboard, not near enough to tear up the side of the ship, but enough for the detonation to lift the Nimbus half out of the water and land her again with a force that snapped a steam pipe in the engine room, which made the engine cut out. They were no longer maneuverable.

The Junkers turned around and came back with a howl. The machine cannons on the Nimbus were firing at maximum capacity. The wheelhouse was pierced again, and they threw themselves to the floor. Only the gunner on the bridge wing was left standing. They waited for the explosion that would signal the ship's deathblow. She was loaded with British Valentine tanks, trucks, and TNT. If they received a direct hit, there'd be no time to climb into the lifeboats. They all knew that.

"Do it then, goddammit!" Knud Erik cursed.

Outside the gunner kept firing as if his hands had frozen fast to the trigger. Then, through the rasping of the cannon, they heard the noise of the Junkers's engine die away. Had the pilot decided to spare them after all? They remained on the floor, unable to believe that the danger had passed. Surely any minute now, the plane's engine would roar over them again, and they'd be finished.

Total silence. The machine cannon on the bridge wing was quiet too.

"It's over," the gunner said.

They were still shaking as they scrambled to their feet. The Junkers was now a tiny dot on the horizon. The pilot must have been on his way home after an expedition when he spotted them. He must have had only one bomb left, and chanced it.

Once again, the Nimbus had proved herself to be a lucky ship.

Dear Knud Erik,

Grind a man into the dirt and observe him beneath your heel. Is he fighting to get up? Does he cry out against the injustice he has suffered? No, he stays there, proud of all the punishment he can take. His manhood lies in his foolish endurance.

What does such a man do when he is held underwater? Does he fight to get up?

No, his pride lies in his ability to hold his breath.

You let the waves wash over you, you saw the bulwark smashed in, you saw the masts go overboard, you saw the ship take her final plunge. You held your breath for ten years, twenty years, one hundred years. In the 1890s you had 340 ships, in 1925 you had 120, a decade later half that. Where did they go? The Uranus, the Swallow, the Smart, the Star, the Crown, the Laura, the Forward, the Saturn, the Ami, the Denmark, the Eliezer, the Ane Marie, the Felix, the Gertrud, the Industry, and the Harriet: vanished without a trace, crushed by the ice, rammed by trawlers and steamers, lost, smashed to pieces, stranded by Sandø, Bonavista, Waterville Bay, Sun's Rock.

Did you know that one in four ships that sailed the Newfoundland route never returned? What would it take to make you stop? Fewer cargoes? But freight rates kept falling: they halved in a decade. You simply lowered your wages, ate even worse food, gritted your teeth. You practiced holding your breath underwater.

You sailed where no one else dared or wanted to. You were the last.

You didn't have chronometers on board. You'd stopped being able to afford them. You could no longer work out the longitude, and when a steamer passed you, you would signal, "Where am I?"

Indeed, where were you?

In despair,
Your mother

WALLY WAS THE first to notice it. The others were on the bridge, supervising the unloading, when he turned to them and remarked enthusiastically, "Can't you see what a great place this is?"

They shrugged in their duffel coats and looked out over Molotovsk. Half-sunken, battered ships languished in the port, while along the pier stood vast piles of rubble, which were the remains of warehouses. Farther off in the low, rocky landscape loomed sooty barracks-like buildings roofed with tarpaulins. It was the height of summer, and although the sun was in the sky twenty-fours hours a day, it did little to warm the air. In the perpetual light they felt as if their eyelids had been cut off and they lived in a world where sleep had been abolished. The rocky gray landscape, the sunlight, and the knowledge that they were one hell of a way from civilized society filled them with a creeping, woolly-headed lethargy.

"Fetch the straitjacket," Anton snarled. "The boy's gone mad. He thinks he's in New York."

"This is better than New York. The chief engineer may have gone blind as a mole down in the machine room, but surely the rest of you can see what I mean."

And then they did. The workers unloading and placing tackles around the ammunition crates in their hull weren't men: they were women. Women with machine guns, patrolling the wharf where emaciated, thinly clad German prisoners of war stacked the crates onto the waiting transport trucks. And behind the wheel of each, a woman, preparing to drive the freight to the front line.

"Take a look at her behind," Helge said, pointing.

Not that you could see much: they wore felt boots and baggy boiler suits that concealed their curves. All they could do was guess at the bodies hidden under the shapeless clothing, speculating whether they were slim or thickset. Some of the women were young, though most seemed to be over thirty. It was hard to work out their ages. They had broad faces and gray, unhealthy complexions. Their hair was hidden under caps, though a few wore headscarves.

Not that any of that mattered. It had been three months since the men's last shore leave, and the sight of women in the hold or on deck was enough to stimulate the most important component of sexual desire: imagination. They started talking animatedly about their favorite parts of women's anatomy, while mentally stripping the dockers and guards in the insane hope that beneath the coarse, filthy uniforms every single one of them was a pin-up girl: a butterfly trapped in a grubby gray cocoon.

Knud Erik was wearing his captain's uniform. Normally he never put it on, but it was universally acknowledged that the Communists respected uniforms and nothing else, so when you negotiated with the Soviet authorities, it was smart diplomacy to look as official as possible if you wanted to get anything done. He noticed that one soldier kept staring at him, and he imagined it was his uniform that attracted her. He met her gaze and held it. As far as he could tell, she was slim and about the same age he was; she had ash-blond hair fixed in a tight bun at the nape of her neck. He didn't know why he looked back at her. It was a reflex he couldn't control, though he realized that it could be taken as a provocation. She didn't turn away but stared straight back, as if testing him. He couldn't interpret it any other way, though he had no idea what the point of it was.

His concentration was broken by a loud bang. A crate of ammunition had slipped out of its tackle and crashed onto the wharf, where it had sprung open. One of the German prisoners immediately began rummaging inside it, probably hoping to find something edible. Two female dockers grabbed hold of him and pulled him away. He struggled briefly, then gave up and let himself be dragged along the wharf. The unloading had stopped.

The soldier who'd been staring at Knud Erik the moment before shouted a brief command, and the dockers released the prisoner. The soldier stepped up to him, released the safety catch of the machine gun strapped across her shoulder, and fired from a short distance. She glanced briefly at the skinny figure lying prostrate before her, as if to make sure he was dead, then looked up at Knud Erik. This time he was in no doubt what she was up to. It was a challenge.

***

That evening, as he sat alone in his cabin, slowly numbing his brain with the bottle of whiskey that he never touched during the day, he had no doubt who the woman was. She was an angel of death, come to claim him. This crazy—even revolting—notion, which he didn't have the strength to resist, filled him with desire, and for the first time since the nights of bombardment in London he got an erection.

The town, which lay a couple of kilometers from the port, was nothing but a handful of wooden houses arranged around a square. The streets radiated from it like wheel spokes that led nowhere: a few hundred meters away, the wilderness began.

The town had an International Club, and that's where they headed that night. The first sight that greeted them was a badly stuffed, scrawny-looking bear standing on its hind legs, with its mouth open, baring a row of yellow teeth. The two fangs were broken, as if snapped off by someone afraid that the creature might spring to life and attack the customers.

Behind a table in a corner sat a bald man wearing a white shirt and red suspenders and guarding a money box, a crutch at his side. An accordionist sat on a chair on a makeshift stage made of roughly sawn timber. He too was unable to walk without the help of a crutch. Both men were around fifty, and each had a row of medals on his chest. They were the only other men the crew of the Nimbus ever saw in the club.

They'd got a general picture of the losses the convoy had suffered. Only twelve out of thirty-six ships had reached their destinations. Most had been bound for Murmansk or Archangel, and only the Nimbus had managed to reach Molotovsk, which meant that in this town of women, they had no rivals. They saw other men in the streets, but like the cashier and accordionist in the International Club, they were crippled or white-haired.

The few children begged the foreign sailors for cigarettes and chocolate. Their faces, which seemed wise beyond their years, would light up with an inviting smile as they approached.

"Fuck you, Jack," they said. It was British sailors who'd taught them this greeting.

"Fuck you, Jack," Wally answered, and passed out cigarettes.

The beer in the club tasted of onions, so they drank Russian vodka, which tasted like meths and most likely was. Every time they sat down on the red velvet sofas, the only furniture apart from the bare tables, they raised clouds of dust. The floor was filthy too. Anton's explanation was that once a woman had wielded a machine gun, a mop did nothing for her.

The crew from the Nimbus sat at one end of the club, and the Molotovsk women at the other. In the evening the women changed out of their work clothes and into dresses that looked like altered smocks. They put up their hair too, but their broad, heart-shaped faces were as colorless as before; they didn't own any makeup. Rumor had it that they were all spies who seduced foreign sailors in order to wangle secrets out of them, and this added to their fascination. Not that the crew of the Nimbus had any secrets.

"They're welcome to have a go," Wally said. "They can spy on me all they like." He crossed the dance floor and pulled a lipstick out of his pocket. The women looked at him with bright eyes and started giggling. He handed the lipstick to a hefty blonde in a faded blue dress, who immediately started painting the lips of the woman closest to her. The lipstick was passed around, and a bevy of red lips turned to him, united in a huge smile. He pursed his own lips at them, and another wave of giggling rolled through the room.

He walked up to the stage where the accordionist had yet to start the evening entertainment, and handed him some cigarettes: the musician stuck them behind his ear and began playing. A moan sounded from his instrument as he squeezed the air out of it in a heavy, stomping rhythm.

Wally went back to the women and bowed to one of them. She leapt up with surprising agility and led him to the center of the dance floor, where she placed her hand on his shoulder. He responded by putting his arm around her generous waist. She was older than he was and didn't hesitate to guide him through the unfamiliar steps. When the dance was over, she curtsied and returned to her seat.

"That didn't get you very far, did it?"

It was Anton. Wally turned to him.

"That was merely the preliminary discussion. I start by showing them a small selection of my wares. Then I give them time to think about it."

"You can't have much faith in yourself if you have to buy them."

Helge gave him a scornful look, and howls of protest erupted from the others.

"Quit that sanctimonious shit," Absalon said. "We all do it from time to time. You wouldn't stand a chance with that potato face of yours unless you left a few bank notes on the dresser." The others laughed.

"They're just like us," Wally said. There was an unaccustomed tenderness in his voice. "They're in need. So are we. Yes, we probably could get some Commie pussy for free. But where's the harm in spoiling them a bit? I mean, they don't look as if their life's all that much fun as it is."

Knud Erik didn't join in this conversation: he sat alone, scanning the women at the opposite end of the hall. Was his angel of death among them? He wasn't sure he'd recognize her out of uniform. He knew now that it was the unexpected sight of a machine gun in female hands that had attracted his attention. They'd stared into each other's eyes. And he felt oddly convinced that if she was here tonight, she'd try to catch his eye again. He didn't need to look for her. She'd find him.

Nevertheless, he continued studying the women's faces. Most were fleshy and worn, with a bottomless exhaustion that seemed close to resignation. It provoked tenderness in him, but it wasn't a human being he was searching for. It was the most extreme kind of self-obliteration.

They visited the club three nights in a row but not once did he feel the unease of that penetrating gaze on him, though women did look at him. He wore his captain's uniform to make it easier for her to recognize him, but the gold stripes on his sleeve and cap attracted women other than the one he sought. A young one in a green dress that matched her eyes kept staring at him, but he turned away and ignored her clear interest.

The dancing was well under way. Men and women settled down at one another's tables. The barrier between the Russian women and the foreign sailors had fallen. Wally, the experienced boy-man with the big appetite for women, was—as ever—at the center of it all. As for Knud Erik, he stayed on the red velvet sofa and avoided the dance floor.

That same evening Molotovsk was attacked from the air. The German Junkerses were aiming for the harbor. The midnight sun glowed on the horizon when the air-raid alarm sounded. The Nimbus was the only ship in the port and an obvious target. The half-drunk crew jumped from the deck onto the wharf and started running around in panic. There were no shelters in the area, and the first bombs were already falling. The anti-aircraft guns around the harbor were responding furiously. They too were operated by women.

A little distance away lay some huge cement pipes that could serve as shelters: the men ran inside them. They were big enough to stand upright in. One of the already destroyed warehouses took a direct hit. Farther away a transport truck exploded. Hard cracking noises resounded in the pipes, and they jumped. It was the heavy-caliber shells from the anti-aircraft guns; they hadn't made it to their target and were showering down from the sky like iron rain. Then they heard the shrill sound of a Junkers spinning, followed by the hollow boom of a bomb. A bomb, or a stricken aircraft colliding with the ground.

The anti-aircraft guns kept on firing. They saw an unfolded parachute float toward the ground, with the pilot dangling from the cords. The man hit the ground flat and the chute settled on top of him. He didn't reappear and nothing stirred under the thin material.

The alarm was called off shortly afterward. The Nimbus was still lying by the wharf where they'd left her. She didn't appear to have been hit, but a bomb crater on the wharf showed that it had been a close call.

A sudden impulse made Knud Erik head for the parachute. Anton came with him. He lifted the fabric and pulled it away to reveal the pilot's face. His blue eyes were wide open, and so was his mouth, as though his own death had surprised him. He lay in a dark red pool of guts. His lower body and legs were twisted at an odd angle; looking closely, they could see that he'd been torn almost in half. He couldn't have received the injury when his aircraft was hit: he'd never have been able to leave the cockpit. The women who operated the anti-aircraft guns must have used him for target practice as he drifted down. The heavy cartridges designed to bring down an aircraft had shredded his body, and dark stains soaked through the fabric of the parachute. He must have landed with the blood squirting from his exposed intestines. Something in them came to a standstill. "It's no use, Skipper," Anton said eventually.

Knud Erik looked up. Anton had never called him skipper. Yet he felt as if it were the first time in months that another human being had addressed him. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"I know what you're thinking. It's no use you trying to make any kind of sense of what you go through in this war. No use blaming yourself, either. The only thing that helps is forgetting. Forget what you've done, and forget what others have done. If you want to live, then forget."

"I can't."

"You'll have to. It's the same for all of us. Talking about it does nobody any good. It only makes it worse. One day the war will be over. Then you'll be back to who you were."

"I don't believe that."

"We have to believe it," Anton said. "Or I don't know what'll become of us." He placed his hand on Knud Erik's shoulder and shook him gently. "Come on, Skipper. Time for us to turn in."

The next day, he saw her. She was standing on the wharf in her uniform, with the machine gun hanging from the strap. Even before he looked up, he felt her gaze resting on him as if they had a secret connection, a kind of sensitivity to each other's presence that created a bond. He didn't understand its nature; her look never developed into a smile or a nod that might betray her real intentions. He held back too. Only their eyes connected. In her rigid face, unapproachable as any other soldier's, he saw no sign to suggest that this exchange was anything but a test of strength; its only possible outcome would be one of them finally falling on their knees in surrender.

A sudden thought filled him with terror: she'd execute another German prisoner working in the harbor. And she'd do it for him, as if a dead body might provide a new link in some secret connection that strengthened by the day. To his relief, nothing happened.

The unloading was proceeding slowly, and they guessed that it would be some months before they'd be able to leave. By now most of the crew had found themselves girlfriends, and all of the women appeared at the club with red lips. Several had eyes lined with kohl, and in the breaks between the dances, there was unashamed hand holding.

It was another seven days before she appeared in the club.

He was disappointed when he saw her. Had it not been for those eyes, which, as usual, stirred a tickling sensation at the nape of his neck, he wouldn't have recognized her. Her thick ash-blond hair was parted at the side and fell heavily across her forehead. She'd put on red lipstick like the others, and she stared continuously at him from the table where she sat alone. The other women seemed to keep their distance from her. He immediately stood up and went over to ask her to dance. The others, both men and women, were staring at him now. It was the first time the captain of the Nimbus had joined them on the dance floor.

She was wearing a white, freshly ironed shirt. She had lines around her mouth and was probably in her midthirties. Life had left its mark on her, but she wasn't unattractive.

It wasn't her appearance that disappointed him. But now that she'd taken off her uniform and laid down her machine gun, she was just a woman like the others. She was no longer his angel of death. He'd been mistaken about that. She'd simply looked at him the way any woman looks at a man and there'd been nothing else to it. He'd been so affected by all the destruction he saw, and participated in, that his normal sense had evaporated. All he sought was oblivion and he sought it with such intensity that it was indistinguishable from a desire for obliteration.

He put his arms around her and she pressed herself against him. She was a good dancer and they stayed on the dance floor for a long time. She never took her eyes off him, and he could see the longing in them. She wanted something that he felt he no longer was: a human being. She wanted his tenderness and his embrace. But he had nothing to give to anyone, only a brutal, urgent lust that sought its own relief.

How could she hope for anything, she who'd shot down a defenseless human being before his eyes and made herself a part of the horror that surrounded him? How could she feel tenderness, love, longings, or even infatuation? Did she see something in him that he couldn't see in himself? Did she think she could find salvation in him, that one night of love could give her back what she had lost forever when she killed another human being? Where did such optimism come from?

Or was she simply so callous that she could inhabit two separate worlds at once, that of killing and that of love? He couldn't. He knew it for certain, but his body reacted when she pressed herself against him, as though a part of him still possessed a hope that the rest of him had lost.

They left the club together some hours later. They hadn't spoken. Unlike the others on board, he hadn't bothered learning the Russian for those few words that pave the way: yes, no, thank you, hello, good night, goodbye, you beautiful, we make love, I never forget. She'd tried exchanging a few words with him, but each time he'd shaken his head.

It was light outside, the smoldering, dying, yet powerful light that fills the summer nights north of the Arctic Circle. She rested her head on his shoulder. All he knew about her was her name, Irina, though he'd have preferred to go without even this basic information. He wondered if Irina was the equivalent of Irene. He'd never met a girl with that name, in Russian or Danish, but he'd always thought it embodied feminine refinement and fragility. Now he was walking beside one, and she was a cold-blooded murderess.

They walked in the direction of the sooty, tarpaulin-roofed huts. He supposed that they must be barracks, but there were no guards or blockades. He'd heard a story about a sailor smuggled into such a barracks by a girl. They'd lain down on a bed in a large dark dormitory, and he'd just got his trousers off and was ready for action when the lights came on. And there he lay with a proud erection and a circle of women standing around the bed, gawking.

These barracks turned out to be empty. They stopped in front of a cubbyhole with a padlocked door. She found a key and unlocked it. Then she rolled down the blackout blind and lit a petroleum lamp. A bed and a table were all she had. On the table stood a photograph of a woman he thought must be her. She stood in a clearing among some trees, with a man in uniform; they held the hands of a girl about five years old. The sunlight dappled the ground, and the man and woman were smiling at the photographer. The soldier had taken off his cap and put his free arm around Irina's shoulder. She was wearing a white shirt just like the one she was wearing tonight.

Where were they now? The man had to be at the front or dead. God only knew where the girl was. She certainly wasn't in Molotovsk. Perhaps she'd been evacuated to a safer place, deep in this vast country?

Irina looked away when she saw his eyes linger on the photograph. Her averted face gave him the feeling that both the man and the child had died. She lay down on the bed and waited for him. He slipped in and put his arm around her. He touched her breasts with his hands. How soft and warm her skin felt. He wanted nothing but this softness and warmth. It was need, more than desire, that welled up in him—bestial but without violence. All he wanted was to touch living, breathing skin, even if its warmth came from a woman who was used to killing and did so without so much as blinking.

What had she thought when she'd looked at him after firing her machine gun? Had she sought forgiveness, understanding? Had she asked herself, and perhaps him too, if he could still look at her and see a human being?

He felt the warmth of her skin under his palm, its infinitely pliable softness, and he placed his cheek against her naked breast like a shipwrecked man who has got himself out of icy waters and presses his face against the beach and feels solid ground. He wanted to lie like this forever, never stir again, merely exist on a continent of naked, warm female skin that stretched endlessly in every direction.

Then she started to cry. She hugged him tightly, her hands ran through his hair, she repeated his name in a pleading voice, nothing but his name, over and over. She was drowning, just like him. Everything in him contracted. Two drowning people can't save each other. All they can do is drag each other down.

He struggled to free himself from her embrace. He couldn't do this. He'd been alone all along, even when he lay with his cheek against her naked breast. And he was doomed to be alone. He'd sought an angel of death and found a human being, and he couldn't cope with that.

He sat up in bed with a jerk, leapt out, and ran through the empty barracks, where his footsteps echoed as if all the soldiers who'd once filled the building and were now dead had come back.

KNUD ERIK WAS sent for just after lunch. Sent for: that was how he thought of the summonses to meetings with the local Soviet authorities. A soldier and an English-speaking official turned up, both in uniform and both female. The official was young, and confident in a way that suggested she regarded herself as a representative of something great. The Soviet state spoke through her, in an English superior to his and in phrases that took the form of commands.

She wore a faint trace of eye shadow and he couldn't work out where it had come from. He'd never seen her in the club, and he was certain she didn't mix with any of the sailors who called at Molotovsk. If there was any truth in the men's rumor that some of the women were spies, then she was an obvious candidate.

These meetings generally concerned cargo. Endless discussions were sparked by small details that didn't add up, and he always attended them in the same resigned mood. He knew that he'd be wasting yet another day on bureaucratic squabbling and be forced to listen to insulting comments about the Allies' inadequate war effort.

On one occasion, however, he'd been pleasantly surprised: they'd handed him an envelope filled with checks for the crew. It was a war supplement. The Russians were paying one hundred U.S. dollars to each man; Joseph Stalin had personally signed the checks.

"You'd have to be stupid to walk into a bank with this and get your hundred dollars," Wally said, when he was handed his check.

"Anyway, they might be fake," Helge said. "And then we'd get arrested."

"One of my friends, a guy called Stan, got one of these checks and went to a bank on the Upper East Side to get his hundred dollars from Uncle Joe. The cashier kept turning it over. 'Do you have a moment?' he said, and took him up to the fourth floor to see the manager. He started staring at it too. Like Helge, my pal thought that something was wrong. 'I'll give you two hundred dollars for it,' the bank manager says. 'What?' my friend says, gasping. He doesn't understand. 'Okay, okay,' the bank manager says. 'Three hundred dollars.'"

"I don't get it?" Helge frowned.

"It was the signature. Stalin's personal signature. It's worth way more than the check."

But this time the meeting wasn't about checks or cargo. The official told him he was going to the hospital.

"I'm not ill," he snorted. It had to be some kind of mistake.

"It's not about you," the official said sharply. "It's about a patient we want you to take back to England."

"The Nimbus isn't a hospital ship."

"The patient is as well as he'll ever be. He can take care of himself. We can't continue to look after him."

"So can he work on board?"

"That depends on what you want him to do. By the way, he's Danish. Like you." He'd never told her he was Danish. She was well informed.

"Let's go," he said brusquely.

He'd expected the hospital in Molotovsk to be located near the harbor, but it turned out to be some distance outside town, along one of those roads that seemed to lose itself in the wilderness. The hospital was a long, low building, and no signs suggested that there might be hospital activity behind its crude wooden walls. A heavy woman in dirty overalls had turned the floor into a pool of mud and water, which she stirred with a mop in a doomed bid to give the impression of cleaning. Their footsteps splashed loudly as they turned down a long, murky corridor filled with beds of patients who, judging by the sounds that escaped them, were all dying.

In a ward where you could barely have squeezed in one more bed, a figure sat slumped in a high-backed wheelchair by the window. He appeared to have nodded off, but he woke when the official greeted him, and looked up drowsily. He was wrapped in a blanket that concealed most of his body, but Knud Erik could see that his left arm was missing. His face was swollen and flushed scarlet.

According to the information Knud Erik had received, the man had been in the hospital for four months, so the stark color of his face wasn't due to excessive sunbathing. This was Russia, where the vodka doubtless flowed freely even in the hospitals.

The man's red face broke into an ingratiating smirk when he spotted Knud Erik in his captain's uniform. He was keen to sell himself, and Knud Erik could see why. He was desperate to get away from this backwater and return to civilization, no matter how bombed-out civilization was at the moment.

"I understand you're Danish," the man said in a cracked voice, as though it had been a long time since he'd spoken.

Knud Erik nodded. He held out his hand and said his name. The other man clasped his hand enthusiastically, then appeared to hesitate, as if he couldn't remember his own, or was considering giving a false one. Then he came out with it.

Knud Erik turned to the official, who was standing behind them with her normally pursed lips relaxed in a friendly smile, as if congratulating two long-lost relatives on their reunion.

"You can do what you like with this creature," said Knud Erik. "You can take him to the basement and shoot him on the spot, for all I care. Or you can send him to Siberia or wherever the hell it is you send unwanted people here in Russia. But there's one place he most definitely won't be going, and that's my ship."

He marched out of the ward without looking back, splashing his way up the corridor, where the cleaner had resumed her efforts with the apparently inexhaustible bucket.

"Captain Friis," the official called out after him. Yet again he had to admire her pronunciation. Her English accent was perfect, and when she said his surname, so was her Danish one.

He left the hospital and started walking toward Molotovsk. He'd got a fair bit of the way and could already make out the low wooden houses of the town when a car pulled up in front of him. The official stepped out onto the road. It wasn't until then that he noticed that she had a black holster attached to her belt.

"I don't think you understand how serious this is, Captain Friis. I gave you an order. You don't have a choice."

"You're welcome to shoot me," he said calmly and nodded at the holster. "And make that freak an honorary citizen of the Soviet Union afterward. I really don't care. But he's not coming on board my ship."

"Watch your words, Captain."

She spun on her heel and got into the car, which turned around and drove back to the hospital.

He returned to the Nimbus and issued orders to sail immediately. The first mate gave him a startled look. "We can't do that, Captain. We need to light up the boiler first. And our papers aren't ready. They'll come after us and make us turn around."

"For Christ's sake!" He started pacing up and down the bridge, awaiting the inevitable. Sure enough, in just half an hour a truck pulled up on the wharf in front of the Nimbus. On the back of it sat the man in the high-backed wheelchair, with a sea bag on his lap. The official stepped out of the cab. The crew crowded around the rail to stare at the man, who raised his one arm and waved to them.

"Hello, boys!"

The official ordered two men to lift the man off the bed of the truck and carry him up the gangway. Once he was settled on the deck, she saluted Knud Erik with irony.

"Over to you, Captain."

"He's going over the side as soon as we leave the harbor."

"That's entirely up to you."

She turned around and got back into the cab of the truck. The engine revved and the truck drove off.

The man in the wheelchair waited. Knud Erik crossed the deck and placed himself next to him, then turned to face the crew, who were standing in a semicircle, eyeing the new arrival curiously.

"I'd like to introduce our guest," Knud Erik said. "His name is Herman Frandsen."

Vilhjelm and Anton looked shocked. In the eighteen years since they'd last seen him, Herman had changed into something so ravaged and burned-out that they hadn't recognized him until his name was uttered.

"He's known to several of us on board. But not for good reasons. He's a murderer and a rapist, and if any of you accidentally push him overboard, you'll be rewarded with a bottle of whiskey."

Herman stared into the distance, seemingly unaffected by the speech with which Knud Erik had honored him.

"In the meantime we'd better find you some work to do," Knud Erik said. "You've rested long enough. Get up."

"I can't."

With his remaining arm Herman calmly flipped the blanket aside. His trousers were empty from the knees down. It was more than an arm he'd lost. Both his legs had been amputated.

HERMAN WASN'T THROWN overboard when they left Molotovsk, and nobody tried to win the whiskey bottle on offer to whoever sent him to the resting place he deserved at the bottom of the sea.

"I've still got the most important thing," Herman said to the crowd that had gathered around him in the mess. "My right hand. A sailor's best friend in those long off-duty hours. And I can still raise a glass," he said. "What more can a man ask for?" His jerking-off hand, he called it. "Shake," he said, offering a big paw. "I've washed it." He wriggled the tattoo on his arm. "The old lion still roars."

They lined up to greet him.

Herman spent most of his days in the mess. He helped out at mealtimes, setting the table and clearing it afterward. He could just about manage that with one arm. It was degrading work, but that didn't seem to bother Herman. There was always someone ready to go for a stroll with him on deck when the weather permitted. Someone, Knud Erik didn't know who, had rigged up a pulley so they could lift him onto the bridge. One day he found him sitting on a high chair in front of the wheel, which he controlled with his one strong fist.

He'd given strict orders that Herman was not to be given alcohol, knowing full well that at the heart of it lay a secret desire to make Herman's life unbearable. Yet again and again, he came across him obviously under the influence. There was a secret cache of vodka somewhere on board, and the crew were supplying him with it. They treated him as if he was a mascot rather than a murderer.

There were three people on board who wouldn't have been alive if Herman had had his way: Vilhjelm, Anton, and Knud Erik himself. Miss Kristina's life would have taken a different and happier path without him. Ivar would still be among the living. And so would Holger Jepsen. God only knew how many people around the world Herman had killed since then because they'd been in his way for one reason or another.

And yet here he was, calm, relaxed, jovial, and sociable, making himself popular with the crew, who seemed unaware that he was a monster who'd only been rendered harmless through amputation. The younger men, especially, seemed fascinated by him. When the mess boy brought coffee to the bridge, he described Herman as "an amazing guy who's had lots of adventures."

"He's got some incredible stories," Duncan said. He was seventeen and from Newcastle.

"Did he tell you the one about smashing his stepfather's skull till his brains spilled out? When he wasn't even as old as you are now?"

He glanced furtively at the boy to see if it had had any effect. It hadn't. Stubbornly, the boy looked straight ahead. He had his own view of Herman and there was no way the captain was going to change that.

Knud Erik knew perfectly well why. Before the war, everyone would have avoided Herman if they'd known the truth about him. They'd all have shunned his company, and whoever had the guts to would have treated him with open contempt. But the war had destroyed their moral defenses. They'd seen too much and perhaps done too much as well. Why should a mess boy take his captain's strictures seriously when only a few months ago he'd seen him shoot a pilot who was kneeling on the wing of a wrecked plane, pleading for his life? Where was the difference between Herman and Knud Erik?

The war had made equals of them, and Knud Erik could only hope that Herman would never find out what he himself had done. He could imagine his reaction. "I wouldn't have thought you had it in you," he'd say, bursting with malicious joy at knowing that Knud Erik too had succumbed to the worst in himself.

Herman was made for war. He was the type of man who felt naturally at home in it. He had that ability that Anton had said was essential to survival: he could forget. The big, brutal muscle man had been reduced to a helpless, barely human lump of meat, and yet he didn't give up. He didn't brood on the past but adapted to the present. Once he'd had four limbs. That was one kind of life. Now he had one. That was another kind of life, but it was still a life. He was like the worm you can cut in half without injury. A pioneer, in fact. In war, everyone had to become like him or go under.

"He took part in the battle for Guadalcanal in the Pacific, sir."

The mess boy was still standing there.

"Is that what he told you?"

"Yes, sir. His ship was sunk and he was in the water for an hour, fighting a shark. He says you have to punch them on the nose or in the eye. Those are their weakest points. But the shark kept coming back. Their skin's like sandpaper, it scrapes you."

"So he knocked out the shark in round three and got away with a scrape?" He couldn't control the sarcasm in his voice.

"No, sir," the mess boy said. The naïveté in the boy's voice made him feel ashamed. "The shark was shot by someone on the ship who came to his rescue. It took a chunk out of his legs and some of his lower arm."

"Has he shown you the scars, perhaps?"

"No, sir. He says they were on the parts that were amputated."

"So it wasn't the shark that took his arm and his legs?"

"No, sir. That wasn't until later. That was frostbite."

The core of the crew came from Marstal. There was Knud Erik himself, Anton, Vilhjelm, and Helge. Then there was Wally, who was half Siamese, and Absalon, who, though he'd grown up in Stubbekøbing, must have roots in the West Indies from the days when a few of its islands belonged to Denmark. They made up the Danes on board the Nimbus. The rest of the crew were from all over the place. There were two Norwegians, a Spaniard, and an Italian; the gunners were all British, as was the mess boy; there were two Indians, a Chinese, three Americans, and a Canadian. They were a floating Babel, at war with a god intent on ruining the Tower.

What united them?

The captain did. He was its fragile core. Though worn down by his own inner strife, he embodied the law of the ship and issued the commands they had to follow if they wanted to reach the next port alive.

Did they ever wonder why they sailed? Was it duty, conviction, or something deeper that kept propelling them into the danger zone?

At the start of the war, he'd believed that behind their willingness to risk their lives fighting was the same moral attitude that kept them united and determined to rescue fellow crewmen in a storm. He'd stopped believing that. But his old belief hadn't been supplanted by a new one.

At times he agreed with Anton: they were united by their silence. If they began articulating their thoughts, they'd feed one another's insanity and everything would fall apart. This was merely a ceasefire, and he knew it couldn't last.

"What's he been telling you now?"

Knud Erik never entered the mess, so whenever Duncan appeared on the bridge with coffee, he questioned him, with the excuse that as captain, he needed to know what was happening on board.

"He told us about the time they were torpedoed and climbed into the lifeboats. The water was as clear as gin. He could see the two red and white bands on the torpedoes before they hit. The cook had taken an ax with him and started chopping at the rail. 'What the hell do you think you're doing, chef?' the captain asked. 'I'm making a notch for every day we're on the lifeboat.' 'If you keep hacking away like that, there won't be many more.'"

Duncan stopped and looked at Knud Erik. He was clearly expecting the reaction that Herman had got in the mess for this tale: a roar of laughter.

Knud Erik didn't laugh. He took a sip of his hot coffee. "What else did he say?"

"Well, a few days after that they spotted a cork bobbing up and down. They couldn't see any land. But it cheered them up because the cork meant it couldn't be far off. Then a few hours later another cork floated by. Still no sign of land, and they started thinking it was strange, all these corks floating about in the middle of the sea. And that's when they discovered that some of the crew had a stash of whiskey in the bow and they were emptying one bottle after another on the sly. That's when Herman got his frostbite."

"And how did that happen?"

"Well, you see, sir. They started fighting about the whiskey. And he was pushed into the water. Herman said that it took them a hell of a long time to pull him back on board."

Herman turned every tragedy in this war, including his own, into a joke. Through the stories he told them, he came as close to conveying the unspeakable as you could get without saying the words out loud. That was why they listened to him.

When he heard that their nickname for him was Old Funny, Knud Erik realized that it was no longer silence that united the crew.

It was Herman.

The latest tale to come from the mess was that Herman could drink scientifically. During surgery, the doctors had removed some of Old Funny's surplus guts, which meant he had plenty of extra space inside. There was skill involved, he explained—like packing a hull with the maximum cargo. You had to have a method based on scientific fact, and he'd found it. To be perfectly frank, they couldn't see that his drinking was so special. He just knocked it back in the same way they did—the only difference being that he could keep at it longer. But this, he argued, was surely proof that he was drinking scientifically. He never needed to stop. As far as that went, they had to agree with him. They'd retire one by one to their cabins, and he'd stay on in the mess, downing more.

The only time Old Funny had met his match was when a young Salvation Army officer had come on board in Bristol to convert the crew to the Lord Jesus Christ. Old Funny had proposed a bet. If the evangelist could drink him under the table, he'd become a believer. But if Old Funny was the winner, the youngster would have to leave the Salvation Army for good.

"It was more than just a question of who could drink the most," Old Funny said. "It was a battle between faith and science. He had his Jesus, and I had my method. But he won, the bastard. I went under the table at four o'clock in the morning. To this day I still don't know how he did it."

"So you're a believer now?"

"I'm a man of my word," Old Funny said. "I believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and I renounce the devil and all his works. The good Lord looks after me. It's thanks to Him I've still got my jerking-off hand."

He put down his glass and made the sign of the cross, while his stump waggled as if wanting to join in the fun too.

"But you're still drinking," Wally protested.

"Only when I take communion, and I'm a frequent churchgoer. Besides, I think I owe it to old Jesus. You see"—he looked around, and they could tell that the story hadn't yet reached its climax—"when he'd drunk me under the table, and he realized he'd won, he got up, threw his coat on the floor, and shouted, 'I'm through with the Salvation Army!' No one got what the hell he was talking about until he explained it. 'I realized it as soon as I emptied my first glass,' he said. 'I like drinking. I didn't win because the Lord was on my side. I won because I couldn't get enough!'"

They howled with laughter around the mess table. Old Funny enjoyed this applause for a while as he studied the transparent liquid in his glass. Then he raised the vodka to his lips and drained the glass in one gulp.

"Here's to Jesus," he belched.

FREIGHT SHIPS FROM Archangel and Murmansk joined them along the route back to Iceland, making them a pack of eight in total. A destroyer and two refitted trawlers, both equipped with depth charges, escorted them. It wasn't much protection, but apart from the ballast, they were sailing empty, and the British Admiralty probably assumed that the Germans would think it a waste of ammunition to attack ships with no war matériel on board. They'd soon discover that the Germans took a different view.

It was now October and the ice rim had shifted farther south. They sailed as close to it as they dared, but for the German bombers based in northern Norway, it was still no distance. The autumn gales provided some unexpected help. The weather was severe most of the time, and in heavy winds the aircraft never left the ground. But a storm in the Barents Sea made no difference to the U-boats.

Wally was on the lookout at the bow, and he managed to sound three false torpedo alarms in the course of a single hour. "It's the stripes of foam on the waves," he explained apologetically.

"He's anxious," said Anton, who'd appeared on the bridge from the engine room to moan about all the times he'd been ordered to reverse or stop for no reason.

Knud Erik thought it over. "I'd better find someone else," he said.

"Being up there all on my own with no one to talk to drives me round the bend," Wally said, with a look of gratitude.

Knud Erik went down to the mess. As usual Herman was sitting by the table, holding court. Only Duncan and Helge, who were busy getting dinner ready, were there. Helge had grown used to Herman and called him Old Funny along with the rest of the crew. Sometimes they'd talk about Marstal.

Knud Erik hadn't spoken to Herman since he'd come on board. Now he went up to him and announced, without a greeting, "It's about time you made yourself useful." He ordered him dressed in an Icelandic sweater, duffel coat, and oilskins, and his head wrapped in a cap and woolen scarves. A mitten was put on his hand. His lower body was covered by blankets and a tarpaulin. Then he had him tied to the wheelchair.

Herman was undisturbed. "I feel like a baby being taken for a stroll" was all he said. Not once had he asked the captain what he was supposed to do.

"May you freeze to death," said Knud Erik.

Two of the crew carried Herman up onto the stem, where they secured his wheelchair so the heavy rolling of the ship wouldn't send him flying. The Nimbus didn't plunge deep enough for the bow to be submerged, but an icy spray washed over it. Knud Erik stood on the bridge and looked down on the bundled-up figure, who seemed to occupy the whole bow. The circle was complete. Once, Herman had sent Ivar out on the bowsprit. Now Herman was similarly exposed.

Knud Erik saw him bend his arm and raise something to his lips. Someone had managed to slip him a bottle of vodka. Oh yes, Old Funny was one of theirs, all right.

Two hours later Herman raised his hand: a torpedo was heading toward them.

Knud Erik ordered the ship to reverse, and Anton responded instantly down in the engine room. Knud Erik had time to note the strangeness of their putting unconditional faith in a man who'd once threatened their lives. Then he spotted the stripe of foam just ahead of the bow. Herman's warning had come at the last minute.

The torpedo sped onward, now aiming for another of the convoy ships, the tanker Hopemount. Another foam stripe appeared, parallel to the first. The torpedoes hit the Hopemount amidships just ten seconds apart. The ship broke in two, and the halves drifted in opposite directions in the raging sea; the front half began sinking immediately. The water around the stricken ship was filled with men, with and without life jackets, fighting to stay afloat in the freezing water.

The Nimbus was still reversing at full speed. They were now the last ship in the convoy. A trawler approached; Knud Erik hoped she was there to pick up survivors. If she dropped a depth charge, it would mean certain death for the men in the water.

On the deck of the Hopemount's rear end, still afloat, a half-naked figure appeared. The sailor had managed to fasten his life jacket around his heavy belly, but his legs were naked. He climbed up on the rail and let himself fall into the water. Knud Erik saw him surface and make brisk strokes to escape the suction from the half-upright stern, which was rapidly taking in water and would soon plunge to the bottom of the sea. The distress light on the life jacket glowed red against the gray waves.

He'd seen it so many times before and he already knew what it meant: yet another betrayal, yet another piece of his already wrecked humanity sinking to the ocean floor along with the Hopemount.

Then he snapped.

Shoving the helmsman aside, he ordered full speed ahead and simultaneously pulled the wheel hard to port. They quickly approached the sinking stern. Knud Erik kept his eyes fixed on the struggling man in the water.

The swimmer threw back his head toward the overcast sky as if fighting for breath. A heavy wave lifted him up and hid him from sight. When he resurfaced, he seemed to be screaming, though the racket from the engines prevented Knud Erik from hearing anything. Then the water around him turned red.

For a moment Knud Erik thought the trawler had released its depth charge, and he expected to see the drowning sailor shoot out of the sea with his chest exploding, but nothing happened. Had he been attacked by a shark? It was unlikely. Perhaps he'd been injured before he jumped into the water?

By now a couple of minutes had passed, and the sailor was very close. But his time was nearly up. No one survived that long in the icy water.

Knud Erik ordered full stop and ran out of the bridge. He climbed the rail and stood on it for a moment, swaying as though hesitating.

Then he jumped.

Later, when he tried to explain it to himself, he'd say, I did it to restore the balance in my life. But when he jumped, he didn't have a single thought in his head. He jumped the way you rub your eye with your finger when something irritates it. A red distress light was on, and it was bothering the hell out of him.

He'd broken the most basic rule of convoy sailing: a ship must never stop to pick up survivors. The rule wasn't there just to prevent them from becoming an easier target for the U-boats, but also to stop the ships behind from colliding with them. In plenty of cases a single deviation from course had set off a chain of collisions, often with fatal consequences for the ships involved.

But the Nimbus was at the rear of the convoy, so no one would run into them from behind. When Knud Erik leapt into the sea from the bridge wing, it was only the lives of his own crew he was risking. Like every other act committed during a war, it confirmed one rule only to break another. It was simultaneously right and hideously wrong.

The icy water hit him like a kick to the head. He instantly felt the cold soak through his clothes. He got his head out of the water, gasped, and looked around wildly, already half panicking. He couldn't see the drowning sailor. Then a wave lifted him up and he spotted him. He swam toward him with furious strokes that made his blood pump faster. The drowning man's mouth was still open, and now he heard his scream, full of pain and ecstasy. Then, as the distress light threw its red glow across his face, Knud Erik saw that the sailor wasn't a man at all, but a woman with short black hair and narrow, Oriental-looking eyes, of which only the whites were visible. If it hadn't been for her scream, he'd have assumed she was dead.

Then he reached her. Her eyes returned to normal, but her gaze was oddly elsewhere, as if she was concentrating on something happening inside her. He thought she must be in shock. He started dragging her back to the ship. He had to hurry now. The cold spreading through his body was beginning to paralyze him. He'd have to give up soon, and he had no life jacket to keep him buoyant.

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, but life was not prepared to bargain with me. Perhaps the greatest thing you can achieve is to love without demanding anything in return. I don't know. I don't think I can make the distinction. So much of what is called love seems to me merely bitter constraint and self-sacrifice.

I think about you every day.

Your mother

EVERY COMMUNITY HAS its own myths, including the community of ships that sailed the convoy routes to Russia. Their myths were improbable, verging on the completely unnatural. They made you listen and gawk at the same time. And yet unlike most popular legends, they were true. Take the one about Moses Huntington.

Moses Huntington was black, from Alabama: as well as a sailor, he was a tap dancer. He had a deep, melodious voice, and he tapped his feet to his music. But it wasn't these talents that gave him his mythic status and made men who met him ask for his autograph.

It was the Mary Luckenbach.

Moses was the mess boy Knud Erik had seen through his binoculars, carrying a pot of coffee across the deck of the Mary Luckenbach in the last moment of her existence. A second later the torpedo had hit, and instead of a ship there was a column of black smoke rising several kilometers into the sky, where it began to spread and rain black soot.

The Mary Luckenbach was gone. But Moses Huntington was still there.

He reappeared half a nautical mile down the convoy, where the British destroyer HMS Onslaught picked him up. No one could explain his survival, least of all Moses himself. It defied nature. Yet it had happened, and here he was to prove it, alive and tap dancing. And all the men who heard his story straightened their backs and renewed their faith that there'd be life beyond the war.

Then there was Captain Stein and his Chinese crew, on board the Empire Starlight. The Starlight was the most-bombed ship in history. From the April 4, 1942, up to and including June 16, 1942, the ship was attacked almost daily by German bombers: Messerschmitts, Focke-Wulfs, Junkers 88s, you name it, sometimes up to seven times a day. The Empire Starlight took one direct hit after another. She was anchored off the coast of Murmansk, and the crew could have gone ashore if they had wanted to. But they didn't. The Empire Starlight was their ship and there was no way they'd abandon her. Every time she was attacked, they'd fix whatever could be fixed. They took in survivors from other ships. They shot down four enemy bombers. "Come and have a go" was their attitude. They were nothing but a bunch of Chinamen with a Yankee skipper, but they never gave in.

During the ship's final days they camped on land because by then the Empire Starlight was so wrecked, it was impossible to stay on board. But they kept rowing out to carry on repairing her, so that she grew to be their ship, literally, more and more as each day passed.

They wouldn't give in.

Like the story of Moses Huntington, it sounded impossible. It defied nature. But it had happened. Which meant it could happen. And those who heard the story gritted their teeth and held their heads high.

And then there was Harald Bluetooth, the boy born in a sea filled with U-boats, torpedoes, depth charges, and drowned sailors—a sea where lives usually ended rather than began.

Everyone believed he was dead when he arrived on deck, and they gathered around him and his mother in respectful silence. But he wasn't dead, and Knud Erik cut the umbilical cord and they wrapped him in woolen blankets, though they all thought that within a few days he'd be heading back into the freezing waters he'd just emerged from. But he didn't.

The Danes on the Nimbus christened him Harald Blåtand. The ship already had a Knud, a Valdemar, and an Absalon on board, so why not a Harald Blåtand, another early Danish hero? However, the Danes were a minority on board, so of course his name got Anglicized, and he ended up as Bluetooth.

It was under this name that he became a myth. Like Moses Huntington and the Empire Starlight, he should have died, but he'd gone on living, contrary to all expectations. In his case, the borrowed time was counted from his very first breath.

His mother had no objection to the name and said so once she'd re-covered, which she did very quickly. New mothers are hardy creatures. She turned out to be Danish as well, though she didn't look it. Her grandmother and her mother were from Greenland, and even the Eskimos there are a kind of Dane. Her grandmother had been a k'ivitok, an oddball who ran around the icecap on her own and refused to mix with other people. However, she'd done so eventually—and rather thoroughly too. The man she chose was a middle-aged Danish artist who never even saw the daughter he fathered. The daughter had married a Canadian called Smith.

They were sitting in a semicircle around her as she told her story. She was lying in the berth in the captain's cabin—nothing less would do. But it was Bluetooth who was the guest of honor. He was snuggled at his mother's breast, sound asleep, as if nothing more astounding had happened to him recently than a perfectly ordinary birth.

It was when she mentioned her Canadian father that Knud Erik leaned forward and studied Bluetooth's mother.

"Miss Sophie," he said, hesitantly.

"No one's called me that for a long time. Neither Missus nor Miss, though I happen to be unmarried. Not that it's relevant. I still go by my maiden name, Sophie Smith. Yes, that's me."

"Little Bay?" Knud Erik said. He wasn't checking that he was right. He just didn't know what else to say.

"Yes, Knud Erik, I recognize you. You don't need to introduce yourself. You called me a bitch when we said goodbye. You're still the same handsome boy. You've grown taller. But then you hadn't quite grown up then. And your eyes—they're not quite the same."

"When you disappeared, I thought you'd died."

"Yes, I guess I owe you an explanation. I was wild in those days. I wanted to see the world, so I ran off with a sailor. He soon got tired of me and I got tired of him. So I became a sailor myself. I was the steward on board the Hopemount." She looked around at them. "Where are the others?"

"You're the only survivor."

She looked down at Bluetooth and caressed his face with a finger. A tear rolled down her cheek.

"It was Knud Erik who...," Anton said.

She looked at Knud Erik. "I once said that you'd drown. But I was just trying to make myself interesting. Instead, you saved me from the water."

"I still have time," he said. "To drown, I mean."

Sophie didn't say who Bluetooth's father was, nor did she seem to attach much importance to it. He hadn't been one of the lost men of the Hopemount, as they'd originally believed, and they got the impression that Bluetooth was the fruit of one of the many casual encounters that wartime so lavishly offers. She assured them that she hadn't planned to give birth on the open sea in the middle of a convoy on the most dangerous route the war could offer. She'd intended to be back in England before her due date, but the Hopemount had been stuck in Murmansk for five months, and given the choice between a Russian hospital and the sea, she'd definitely preferred the latter.

She helped out in the mess with Duncan and Helge. A stoker cobbled together a cradle for Bluetooth. Herman sat in the mess, as usual, except when he was sent to the bow to keep a lookout, and when he wasn't washing down his vodka according to his scientific method, he used his jerking-off hand to gently rock the baby. Together, Old Funny and Bluetooth, the ugly idol of war and the small growing seed of defiant, promising life, formed the core of the ship.

The Nimbus sailed to Iceland and from there to Halifax, Nova Scotia. From Halifax they returned to Liverpool. They celebrated Christmas on the Atlantic.

Old Funny told his stories. For the time being, all the crew demanded of Bluetooth was his existence. And exist he did. He wet and soiled his diapers, which were improvised from dishtowels and dishcloths; he burped and gurgled, sucked and cried; he got diaper rash and then colic. But most significant were the happy times when his eyes, like telescopes, would examine the mess as though it were the universe, whose secrets he was trying to discover. Twenty sailors stared back at him as if they were at the movies. They all wanted to hold and tickle him, they all wanted him to chew at their fingers and tug on their ears. They volunteered for diaper changing and babysitting and gave advice on care and diet. Together they possessed a wealth of knowledge about babies that Sophie had to admit exceeded hers. She'd given birth to Bluetooth, but he was her first, so she was no expert, and if anyone offered good advice, she was happy to take it.

"He's a degausser," Anton said.

The degausser was the electrical cable that circled the waterline. It reversed the ship's magnetic charge, to prevent her attracting magnetic mines. That was Bluetooth's function too: not only to unite the crew but also to protect them, mostly from themselves. He helped them take some kind of root in the middle of the heaving sea.

Your roots aren't to be found in your childhood so much as in your child. It's he who provides your link to the world, and home is wherever he is. It suddenly dawned on Knud Erik that it was Bluetooth he felt connected to, not Sophie.

They'd met twice, both times by coincidence, but two coincidences don't make a pattern. The first time had been nothing but an immature infatuation, and on Sophie's side not even that, but just a frivolous game with an impressionable boy. She admitted so herself when they happened to talk about it. He'd barely got to know her. The only thing that had tied him to her was the unresolved way they'd parted, and her sudden disappearance.

Knud Erik was no longer attracted to her. But then, he wasn't attracted to any women. That was the problem. He was attracted to a moment's ecstasy in the thunder of an air raid, and nothing else. He preferred to make love in the dark and he only wanted to see a face in a flash of phosphor from a bomb detonating close by. He suspected that, deep down, Sophie was a kindred spirit and that Bluetooth had been conceived during a blitz.

Something united them, but it was no longer budding desire. It was those icy minutes they'd spent together in the water, close to death, when he'd leapt into the sea to save her. Really, it was he himself he'd been trying to save, he supposed. She'd just been the random pretext.

They spoke a lot, and that was what made the greatest change in his life. She'd moved out of the captain's cabin into Helge's; Helge now bunked with the second mate. Though she'd stopped sleeping there, the captain's cabin was no longer a solitary den. She was a few years older than Knud Erik, and both were experienced and disillusioned. She'd lived the dream of her youth to excess, but in the meantime she'd outgrown it and hadn't found a replacement. She'd seen the world too: he could reel off one port after another, and she could match his list, as one sailor to another. That was the note they struck together.

It was a stage he never got beyond, nor did he try to. He never sought out the feminine in her, and perhaps that was why she accepted him. Once she'd hidden behind the stilted, literary language of a bookish and dreamy young girl. Since then she'd acquired the manner of a hardened sailor. It was a world he knew and felt safe in and he had no need to explore what lay behind it. He had neither the energy nor the courage. Anton's advice was still valid: it was better to forget.

He didn't want to get to know another human being too well. He was afraid that what he discovered might destroy him.

He put the whiskey bottle in the cupboard and didn't take it out again. He overcame his contempt for Herman and started turning up in the mess. Bluetooth was the attraction. Though Knud Erik wasn't his father, the boy wouldn't be in this world if it hadn't been for him. He'd stood on the threshold between life and death and pulled a newborn into life. No, he didn't know whether he'd saved himself. But he'd saved Bluetooth, and that mattered more. Suddenly he felt his own lack of children as the greatest absence in his life. Bluetooth wasn't his, but his death-defying leap into two-degree water had won him a parental right.

It was pure coincidence that he'd run into Miss Sophie again. But it was no coincidence that he'd saved Bluetooth. Life had singled him out and found a use for him.

AROUND THE MESS TABLE, Anton told them about a man called Laurids Madsen, who nearly a hundred years previously had fought in a battle on Eckernförde Fjord and had been standing on the deck of a ship when it blew up. Like Moses Huntington, he'd come back down alive. He also told them about a schoolteacher called Isager whose students had tried to kill him by setting fire to his house, and about Albert Madsen, who'd searched for his missing father across the entire Pacific and returned home bearing the shrunken head of James Cook.

Knud Erik, who'd heard the same stories—indeed, he was Anton's source for most of them—interrupted. There were some things he had better knowledge of. He told them about the First World War and about Albert's visions. Then Anton cut in, saying that he wasn't telling it quite right, and Knud Erik realized that when his friend had got hold of Albert's famous boots, he'd also purloined his notebooks and read them.

Anton told the story of how he'd found Albert dead, and together he and Knud Erik told everyone about the gang named after the old captain. Vilhjelm brought up their discovery of the skull of the murdered Jepsen. Knud Erik looked over at the man the crew called Old Funny to see what effect this story had on him. He'll change the subject, he'll deny everything, he thought.

Herman looked distant for a moment, then said pensively, "Vilhjelm is talking about me," as if this was the first he'd heard about his stepfather's murder. "Yes, I killed my stepfather. He was in my way. I was young. I was impatient."

He started telling how, at the age of fifteen, he'd sailed a topgallant yard schooner back to Marstal single-handed, as though his first murder was merely the beginning of the story and the best part was yet to come.

The crew stared at him. They were gripped by the tension of his tale. Old Funny was a born storyteller. All right, so he was a dangerous killer as well. All right, so the captain had been right about him after all. But take a look at him now. He'd certainly been punished.

Knud Erik understood that Herman's pathetic state, legless and one-armed, was a ticket to a free pardon, already granted. There was no need for him to ask for his audience's pity: they gave it to him voluntarily. Old Funny had once been a man. A man capable of killing other men. But what was he now?

Anton, Knud Erik, and Vilhjelm exchanged a glance. They hadn't been expecting a confession and they wanted to investigate further. But Herman's Marstal Adventures were now in full flood and the audience wanted more. "Then what happened?" they asked, and Anton had to tell them about Kristian Stærk and the killing of Tordenskjold. "Did you really kill his seagull?" Wally asked Old Funny accusingly.

Knud Erik couldn't suppress the triumph in his voice when he told them how they'd driven Old Funny out of town simply by staring at him, and how most of the gang members didn't even know that he was a murderer but thought the whole thing was about the death of a bird.

Old Funny looked irritated, as if he regretted his departure all those years ago. Then he winked at Knud Erik and laughed. "You really got me there," he said. Then he started talking about the Copenhagen stock exchange and Henckel, and how he'd lost the inheritance he'd waited to get his hands on for so many years. His life had had its ups and downs.

Vilhjelm talked about the loss of the Ane Marie and about the Book of Sermons, which he still knew by heart. They were welcome to test him if they wanted.

"So you've been in the ice before; you know what it's like," one of the British gunners said. "You practically had a dress rehearsal for convoy sailing."

"Bloody Marstal sailors," a Canadian said. "You poke your noses into everything and you've been everywhere."

Miss Kristina and Ivar entered the story, and Knud Erik recounted their chapter in a tone that grew increasingly condemning.

Old Funny defended himself. "I confess to nothing," he said. "Ivar's death wasn't murder. Some men can take it, others can't. I was just testing him and that's all there is to it." He looked around the company, and several men nodded.

"And Miss Kristina?" Knud Erik persisted.

Yes, that had been stupid. He was happy to admit it. He flung out his jerking-off hand as if to say, all things considered, it was a trifle.

"You've ruined lives!" Knud Erik was angry now.

Well, he supposed he had, Herman admitted. He didn't add: Look at me now. But his body did, and that was enough. It was all in the past. No more evil would come from him.

Knud Erik got up and left, but the story continued. Nothing could stop it now.

Old Funny told them about the night he broke the curfew in Setúbal. Was he boasting or telling the truth? It was hard to tell. He'd certainly been one hell of a guy once. Anyone could tell that his audience thought so, just from their faces.

The story spread in every direction and contracted again until it formed a protective ring around the Nimbus.

Bluetooth lay awake in his cradle and his telescope eyes wandered from face to face. He was exploring the universe as usual, and he looked as if he understood it all.

The crew had found true fellowship around the table in the mess, however reluctantly and unwillingly at first. Old Funny had helped them become the "us" that every ship needs. Even Knud Erik conceded it.

WHEN THEY ARRIVED at Liverpool, Herman asked to see the captain. Their meeting took place on the deck where Knud Erik had introduced him to the crew and Herman had first revealed that his trouser legs were empty. He hadn't come to say goodbye and thank you. Instead, he requested permission to stay on board the Nimbus. After all, they were fellow Danes, from the same town. He believed he could be useful around the mess and as a lookout. And he'd like to remind the captain that on one occasion he'd saved the ship from a torpedo.

Knud Erik shook his head. At this, for the first and only time, Herman seemed to crack.

"Look at me," he said. "They'll shove me into some home."

"They can lock you up and throw away the key, for all I care."

"What's going to become of me?" Herman looked down. He was pathetic now, and his misery only heightened Knud Erik's rage.

"As far as I know, nothing stands in the way of hanging a man with no legs and only one arm."

The crew was standing some distance away, whispering. They could tell, from Old Funny's slumped figure, the way the negotiations were going. Absalon came up to them.

"Captain," he said, "we've drawn up a petition." He handed Knud Erik a piece of paper. Knud Erik cast his eyes over the list. Practically the entire crew was demanding to keep Old Funny on board; the only ones who hadn't signed were Anton and Vilhjelm. Sophie's signature was missing too; he assumed she didn't want to get involved. Besides, she didn't count as a crew member.

"I'll think about it."

He asked Anton and Vilhjelm to come to his cabin.

"Will you sign off if I keep him?"

They both shook their heads. "We'll stay," Anton said. "The Nimbus is a good ship, and though I hate to admit it, I think Herman has a share in that. We knew you'd say no. We just wanted to show you that we're on your side. I hate the bastard, but sometimes you have to rise above your own feelings."

Knud Erik pondered this for a while. "All right, I'll let him stay," he said. "For the sake of the ship."

The crew celebrated his decision by taking Old Funny on a trip into town. The next morning he was back in his usual place in the mess, with bloodshot eyes and an even redder complexion than usual. When he spoke, it was with biblical solemnity.

"There shall come a day when all the women in the world will lie in the gutter screaming for cock," he intoned. "But not an inch shall they be given!"

"Am I to understand," Knud Erik asked, "that nobody wanted to screw you?"

It was Knud Erik who invited Sophie to stay.

"I'm pleased that you're asking," she said. "I was going to ask if I could."

"You can carry on in the mess. I've spoken to Helge about it."

They were silent for a while. He felt relieved, but he had no idea how to express his joy at her decision. "The crew will be pleased to hear that," he said instead. "They all love Bluetooth."

"I don't know if it's irresponsible to sail with a baby during a war. But if I stayed ashore, I'd be working all day in a munitions factory and I'd never see him. He's only two months old. I wouldn't be able to stand that."

"There are bombs everywhere," he said. He realized that they were discussing Bluetooth the way a married couple would discuss their child.

"I don't know what I'd do with myself if I couldn't sail," she said. "It's my whole life. I can't live in any other way."

He knew what she meant. He'd chosen to be a sailor himself, but at some point the sea had chosen him too. It was something that could no longer be undone. He and Sophie had seemed so very different the first time they met, but since then, they'd lived parallel lives. That said, something seemed to be holding him back and he sensed the same in her too. He wasn't physically impotent. So the impotence must lie in his soul. Finding oblivion in a moment's ecstasy was all he could manage. He couldn't look into someone's eyes while making love.

"I'm like my grandmother," she said. "She was one of those crazy people who can't be with anyone. She couldn't fit in. She needed her independence too much. She had the ice and I have the sea. But it comes down to the same thing."

"You've got a child now. You have to fit in. You're all Bluetooth's got."

"He has us," she said.

He was uncertain if by "us" she was referring to him or the crew of the ship, which she was now a part of. He wanted to ask but feared the question might spoil something. It was she who broke the increasingly tense silence.

"I do know who Bluetooth's father is," she said. "He's not, as most of you probably think, some sailor I happened to meet on shore leave. I know his name, I know his address, I've met his parents and his friends. We were engaged to be married."

"So what went wrong?"

"What was wrong was that he looked like Jimmy Stewart. You know, the American actor. Six foot something, with the face of a boy."

"But Jimmy Stewart's handsome!"

"Yes. And he was so damn nice, I didn't know whether to cry or throw up. He was sweet and decent and reliable and he loved me. He had a flourishing law practice in New York. Plenty of money, plenty of everything. We'd have lived in Vermont and our children would've grown up in the country and the war would've been so far away, we wouldn't have heard it even if they dropped the biggest bomb in the world."

"And you couldn't stand that?"

"I wanted it more than anything. But I was promised to another. What was his name again, the ugly little manikin, Rumpelstiltskin? No prince can save me. I briefly believed Jimmy Stewart could. But the reality is that I prefer life with Rumpelstiltskin. Do you know what I ended up hating about him, my Jimmy Stewart boyfriend? It was his damned innocence. I ended up seeing it as dishonesty. He took me out to dinner. We raised our glasses and looked into each other's eyes. We planned our future. The war might just as well never have happened. We just sat there enjoying ourselves in our nice, quiet way, and afterward we went home and slept in our soft bed, and I knew we'd carry on doing that until the day we died. I couldn't bear it. So one evening, instead of clinking glasses, I threw my drink in his face. It wasn't his fault. He can't help it that he hasn't seen a ship blow up and a hundred men drown in front of his eyes. At bottom, I guess I'm the one with the problem. But his innocence came across as an insult." She flung out her hand. "It's not that I love all of this. I can't even explain why I'm here. I don't fit in anywhere. Unless it's here. Or, rather"—she smiled from sudden relief, as if all that talking had finally led her to the right word—"it's the k'ivitok in me."

The trust between them grew, but the distance was still there too, and it didn't decrease. She was right, he thought. It was the war. It was inside them both. Nothing could happen between them until the war was over. But when would the war end? Would they be there when it finally happened? He wanted to have a child with her. It was a blind urge in him, but how long could they wait? She was a couple of years older than he was, thirty-four or thirty-five. When was a woman too old to have a baby?

He gave up. There was Bluetooth. Bluetooth was his child—and the whole crew's.

They celebrated Christmas somewhere north of Ireland. In Halifax, Wally had gone ashore and come back with a fir tree slung over his shoulder: he'd lashed it to the bow, so it didn't start to lose its needles until they put it up in the mess. Helge had managed to obtain a bag of hazelnuts from somewhere, and the crew got four each. He'd wrapped them in pink tissue paper and handed them out as gifts. Meanwhile other presents were piling up under the Christmas tree. They were all for Bluetooth, though he was still far too young to appreciate them. Sophie unwrapped the packages on his behalf. Inside them was a world he'd not get to know until the war was over: cows and horses, pigs and sheep, an elephant and two giraffes. Most were hand-carved in wood and then carefully painted with any available paint—though the colors tended to be those of the world of war they were trapped in: black, gray, and white.

Bluetooth took the cows, the horses, and the elephant, put them in his mouth one by one, and gnawed at them tentatively.

BLUETOOTH WAS ABOUT a year old when Sophie went ashore with the crew in Liverpool one night. She left him asleep in the seamen's fo'c'sle with Wally, his special pal, who'd volunteered to babysit. Knud Erik didn't know what she was looking for. Was it something they couldn't give each other, something they could find only with strangers?

He went ashore alone. He'd put the whiskey bottle back in the cupboard and never taken it out again. But he couldn't give up his shore nights. They ran into each other in a pub in Court Street. She was wearing a dark red dress and her lips were painted. He was reminded of the first time he met her, in her father's house in Little Bay. They both looked away as if by mutual agreement and pretended they hadn't seen each other.

He went straight back to the ship and turned in immediately. Half an hour later the door to his cabin opened, and an unfamiliar scent of perfume filled the narrow room. Had he deliberately forgotten to lock his door?

"We can't go on like this," she said, and began to undress in the dark.

"I've killed a man," he said. "He was kneeling down, pleading for mercy, and I shot him."

She snuggled up to him in the berth. She cradled his head in her hands. He could barely make out her features in the dim light from the skylight. "My Knud Erik," she said, and her voice was thick with a tenderness he'd never heard before.

He freed himself from her embrace and stepped out onto the floor. "I need light," he said. He switched it on and went back to her. "The red distress lights."

He didn't know why he'd said that. Those words were taboo: they conjured forbidden memories he must keep at bay if he wanted to survive. But deep down, he understood that if he wanted to be able to love, he must speak them aloud.

"There isn't one of us who doesn't think about them," she said.

"I sailed over them."

"We," she said. "We all sailed over them."

He let his hand glide down her face and he noticed that her cheek was wet. He pulled her to him and looked into her eyes.

All was completely quiet around them. No air-raid warnings shrilled, no bombs thudded, no waves splashed across the deck, no thunder roared from exploding ammunition ships. There was only the sound of the generator working away deep in the bowels of the Nimbus.

He kept holding her tight.

"My Sophie," he said.

IN AUGUST 1943 the Danes rose up and built barricades in Copenhagen and other towns. The government ceased working with the German occupying forces and resigned. Naval officers scuttled their own ships and sent them to the bottom of Copenhagen's harbor.

The Dannebrog once again became a flag that could fly from a ship in the service of the Allies. By now, however, the crew had grown used to their Red Duster, so they kept it. Besides, there were almost as many nations on board as there were crew members, and the Danes on it were a mixed bunch. Bluetooth had been born in the Atlantic Ocean and was an honorary citizen of the sea. The Nimbus was a sailing Babel, at war with the Lord.

"We could fly one of Bluetooth's diapers from the mast," Anton suggested.

"Clean or dirty?" Wally asked. He was the Nimbus's champion diaper changer.

They all scrubbed the deck and soaped down the bulkhead. It was cleanliness, sailor-style, just as it had been on board the old Dannevang, may she rest in peace. And it was all in honor of Bluetooth.

Now they could go ashore and visit a pub as Danes, with no one calling them "half-Germans" or "Adolf's best mates" anymore. When other seamen heard they were from the Nimbus, the next question would inevitably be "And how's Bluetooth?"

He's very well, thank you. He lost his hair, but it grew back again, as black as his mother's. His first tooth probably bothered him a bit. He took his first steps a while back, and now he's got his sea legs. He must think the whole world's made of hills—up, down, up, down: in any case, he seems disappointed when the ground's solid. Sometimes he falls over. Then he wants his ma. Or one of his umpteen dads. Seventeen languages is a lot when you're learning to say Daddy. Seasick? Bluetooth? Never! No one in the entire Allied merchant navy has a better stomach for the sea.

Oh yes, indeed, the Nimbus was a lucky ship. Until one spring day in 1945.

They were bound for Southend, and for the first time in four years they were sailing through the North Sea again. There were still U-boats, but they were fewer and farther between, and reports of losses continued to fall. It was approximately ten o'clock at night when the war decided to blow them a parting kiss, just to remind them never to trust it, even when its end seemed imminent. The sea was calm. There was still a faint light to the northwest; summer wasn't far off. That's when the torpedo—the one they'd expected all the years they'd sailed in Allied service—finally tracked them down. It struck them by hatch number three, and the Nimbus began to take in water at once. The starboard and stern lifeboats were undamaged and ready in their davits. The stokers appeared in nothing but their sweaty undershirts, and any crewman who'd been off duty was also in just his underwear. Knud Erik scolded them. He'd ordered them to sleep fully dressed in case they were torpedoed, but it was an order no one took seriously anymore. There'd been a time when they'd even slept in life jackets. Now they could barely remember when they'd last heard the sound of a nose-diving Stuka. As for the U-boats—were there actually any left?

Three minutes later they were in the lifeboats and pushing off. The Nimbus had been running at top steam in calm weather when the torpedo hit her: now she continued at the same pace, with her bow sinking ever deeper, so she looked as if she were on tracks that led directly to the sea bottom. When the water rose over the deck, a bang sounded from inside the engine room, and a column of smoke and steam soared into the cloudless spring sky, where the first stars had begun to appear. The Nimbus continued on her downward course. The last they saw of her was the stern, stamped with her name and town of registration, SVENDBORG. Then she was gone, with barely a ripple disturbing the tranquil surface of the sea.

"All gone," Bluetooth said. He was sitting on his mother's lap wrapped in a blanket, with just his head sticking out. He sniffed, as though the cold night air had given him a cold. Then he started to cry.

"You go ahead and have a good cry, my boy. You've got plenty of reasons to."

It was Old Funny, parked in state in his wheelchair in the center of the lifeboat. He looked around as though he'd become Bluetooth's mouthpiece. "That was the boy's childhood home we just lost."

They sat in silence and let his words sink in. You had to admit he had a point. At two years and seven months, Bluetooth had never known any world but the Nimbus, and now it was gone. The ship had become a kind of home for them too. Only a few of them had ever believed in the Nimbus's inherent luck. What had taken over instead, gradually, was the notion that it was only their own steely determination, the care they took in maintaining the ship, and—above all—their love for Bluetooth that kept the torpedoes and the bombs away.

Suddenly they felt that determination slacken. The war had ended for them now—not because it had been won, but because without their ship they could no longer fight. There was no joy in the realization. They barely knew whether they were winners or losers. They were survivors, and now they wanted out. They were balanced on a knife-edge between disappointment and relief, and when the captain spoke, he spoke for all of them.

"I think we should go home," Knud Erik said.

Go home: that was easier said than done. The crew had more homes than there were corners of the world. "As far as I can see," he went on, "we're roughly halfway between England and Germany. Anyone who feels at home in England rows that way." He pointed westward. "And the rest—"

He was interrupted by Old Funny: "What are you saying? There were no Germans on board the last time I looked."

"We're not going to Germany. We're going home."

"To Denmark?" Sophie asked.

"To Marstal."

The crew split up again, this time according to destination. Old Funny remained in Knud Erik's lifeboat: it seemed he'd given up on vanishing from Marstal and was now ready to go home. Anton, Vilhjelm, and Helge wanted to head back too. Knud Erik looked at Sophie for a moment. Then she nodded. Wally and Absalon too were curious to see the tiny town that had been presented to them as the center of the universe. So why not?

They divided the provisions between the two lifeboats. There were three wool pullovers and three sets of oilskins in each. These were given to the freezing stokers. The boats rocked alongside each other as the crew shook hands across the rails. Bluetooth was passed around and got a hug from every man. He'd just said goodbye to his childhood home. Now he had to say goodbye to half its occupants. He didn't understand and cried for his mother as if she was the only fixed point that remained in the world.

They started rowing, and Old Funny insisted on being lifted out of his wheelchair and settled on the thwart so he could do his bit. He pulled hard at the oar with his one arm but struggled to maintain his balance on the thwart, so Absalon moved closer and supported him with his shoulder.

The other boat soon vanished from sight in the growing darkness.

Dear Knud Erik,

When I believed you had been drowned, I did something I have never liked to think about since.

I became so visible to myself, and that is never comfortable.

It happened one afternoon. I was wandering about aimlessly in the cemetery and suddenly found myself in front of a grave in the northwestern corner. It was Albert's. I had never tended his grave, though he was my benefactor.

Old Thiesen, the gravedigger, was busy painting the castiron fence around it. He had already weeded it, and it was clear that he would soon turn the neglected grave into a fitting memorial to one of the town's great shipowners.

Suddenly everything inside me—my fears, my grief and uncertainty, my eternally hidden and lonely life, my self-reproach, and the heavy burden of the almost impossible task I had set myself—all of it came out in a huge eruption of rage. It was not caused by any particular offense, but sprang from that feeling of helplessness that has dogged me all my life. I grabbed the paint bucket and flung it at the cracked gray-and-white marble column where the dates of Albert's birth and death were engraved. And I screamed the same three words over and over. I suppose I wanted them to sound like a doomsday curse. But I cannot imagine they would have stirred any feeling but profound pity in anyone who might have heard my shouting, because my madness was so obvious.

"Everything must go! Everything must go!"

I had given away my plan—but fortunately Thiesen was the only one who heard me. He understood the words, but not their meaning.

The gravedigger knew my story well. He knew that I had spent many days in the most agonizing uncertainty about your fate. He seized my hands, as if he was trying to protect me, rather than prevent me from causing further damage.

"Calm down, Mrs. Friis. Everything will be all right. I don't think you're quite yourself," he said.

He meant it reassuringly, but the terrible truth was that, in that moment, I had been precisely that: myself. I was being myself more than I ever had been before or would be again. The words came straight from my heart: everything must go. I had revealed the entire purpose of my life. Everything must go. Finally I had said it.

I collapsed, exhausted, on the grass at Thiesen's feet. "I apologize," I said, as he helped me back up. "I'm not myself."

So I encouraged him in his error. I agreed with him. I had to, if I was to go on living among people. "No, I don't think I'm quite myself," I repeated.

Everything must go. Everything has gone, and now I know that this was never what I truly wanted. I walk the streets of this town, which seems to have been hit by a curse, empty of the men who made up half of its inhabitants. And I see more and more women with an expression in their eyes that tells me that it has been so long since they last received a letter that they have finally given up hoping.

We are not in the habit of keeping accounts of the dead in this town. But I do know that far more have not returned from this war than Marstal ever lost in the last war or on the Newfoundland route. And it goes the way it always goes for those who drown. No earth for them to rest in.

I visit the cemetery every day and place flowers and wreaths on the few graves that we do have. Now I am the one who tends Albert's.

I ask you again to forgive me for having once exiled you to the dead.

Your mother

IT TOOK THEM three days to reach the German coast, an endless sandy beach with white dunes behind it. They arrived in the early dawn. The sky was overcast, and a pink rim across the landscape announced the sunrise. The weather had been calm all the way. They maneuvered through the surf, and Absalon and Wally jumped into the water to push the lifeboat ashore. Then they eased Old Funny out of the boat and into his wheelchair. He was heavy to push in the sand. Bluetooth ran alongside. He needed to move his legs after the long period of inactivity. He was clutching his stuffed toy dog, Skipper Woof, who'd also been born at sea, according to the boy. A new life awaited both of them. The up-down, up-down of the waves was a thing of the past. Now they were on boring land, and here they'd stay, for the time being at least.

"Where are the houses?" he asked. He'd never seen a beach before. The only world he knew consisted of the sea and bombed harbors. But some things hadn't changed. He looked around. There was Daddy Absalon, there was Daddy Wally (his special pal), there was Daddy Knud Erik, Daddy Anton, and Daddy Vilhjelm. There was Old Funny in his wheelchair, and there was his mother.

They found a road that led away from the beach. There was no traffic on it. Knud Erik walked with a battered leather suitcase in his hand.

"What's inside it?" Wally asked.

"Money."

"You have German marks?" Wally gave him a look of surprise.

"Something better. Cigarettes."

"You're a man with foresight," Sophie said.

"Only sometimes," he said.

***

They hardly knew where the front line was: whether they were ahead of it or behind it, or whether the Germans were still holding out or had already been overrun. The Russians were far away, but the Americans were pushing forward. They'd landed somewhere in the German Bight and would still have to cross northern Germany to get to the Baltic. It was only the last leg of their journey to Marstal that they'd be able to complete by sea.

During the first few hours, they saw no signs of war. The road ran through flat marshland sparsely dotted with farms. The main road ahead of them was still empty. Bluetooth grew tired of running about and climbed onto the lap of Old Funny, who'd miraculously conjured a bottle of rum from beneath his blanket. Wally always maintained that Herman's wheelchair had a false bottom that concealed a stash of booze.

Later that morning they reached a village. Seeing smoke emerging from the chimney of a house, Knud Erik walked up the garden path and knocked on the door. No one came to open it, but he saw a face staring at him from behind a curtain. They continued: the first bomb craters appeared in the road, filled with water and reflecting the blue spring sky. Soon they found themselves skirting craters and burned-out transport trucks. They were nearing a town, and people began to appear on the road, while unshaven soldiers in filthy uniforms trudged along indifferently. It was hard to decide whether they were on the run or had merely been sent on a mission they no longer believed in. Horse-drawn carts rumbled past, piled with towers of tightly packed furniture and mattresses, followed by dead-faced people moving with the mechanical steps of prisoners in a chain gang. Others struggled along with wheelbarrows and pushcarts. No one spoke: they kept their eyes on the ground and seemed lost in mute introspection.

"Look, a horsie!" Bluetooth cried out in his baby English, pointing a finger.

They hushed him—not for fear of standing out in the growing crowd, but from a worry that in the midst of this silent, funereal traffic, any exclamation of joy was out of place. Soon, though, they realized that they were no different from anyone else. A man in a wheelchair with a child on his lap, a woman, and a group of men trudging along: just another motley crew of refugees. The main roads of Europe were teeming with people like them, who'd lost a home and were on the lookout for another that hadn't been wrecked by war. But they had two things that most of the others didn't: they had hope, and a fixed goal. They must keep a low profile: if they showed any curiosity or raised their voices, they'd attract attention. Knud Erik had feared that Absalon's black skin might give them away as foreigners, but in the end no one paid them any heed. The Germans were too busy with their own wrecked lives and dreams, oblivious to anything but the blind onward trudge from one blasted city to the next.

They arrived at a town. Most of it had been destroyed by bombs, but they'd seen ruins before, in Liverpool, London, Bristol, and Hull. In some places the house fronts were still standing, four to five stories high, their sooty walls punctured by empty windows. In others, even the façades had crumbled, exposing the gaps between the floors. They looked into rooms, guessing at which had been bedrooms and which kitchens. They kept expecting the people they saw in the streets to return to the half-houses that had boards nailed across the doors and start a new shadow life that matched their dead faces and downcast eyes.

Bluetooth was used to ruins. He thought houses were meant to be burned out. So for him, it wasn't the somber, ravaged landscape that stood out, but the big white bird sitting high up on the spire of a shelled church.

"Look," he said. "That's Frede."

He said it in Danish. He switched freely between that and English. They'd told him about the stork on Goldstein's roof, but they never mentioned Anton's attempt to kill it. Now he thought he was seeing Frede.

"No, it's not Frede. It is a stork just like him."

Knud Erik couldn't help laughing. A passerby stared at him as if his laughter was a kind of high treason, and he'd cursed Hitler in a loud voice.

The stork took off and flapped heavily above the street. They followed it. When it reached the railway station, it landed on its damaged roof as if showing them the way.

The puddles on the stone floor inside the station suggested that it had rained recently, and there were people all over the place, lying and sitting on piles of rubble as though they were benches and chairs supplied by provident authorities. The majority had to be homeless. They didn't look as if they were going anywhere. Where would they travel to anyway? To the next bombed-out railway station?

In a corner someone was handing out coffee and bread; a notice announced that later that day soup would be served. Though they were hungry, the former crew of the Nimbus avoided the bread line, afraid of giving themselves away. Knud Erik went off alone with a pack of cigarettes and returned shortly with a loaf of bread, a sausage, and a bottle of water. Bluetooth bolted his share eagerly, but the others chewed theirs for a long time. They didn't know when their next meal would be.

They spent the night in the railway station and took a train to Bremen the next morning. In Bremen they'd change for Hamburg. They had no tickets, but Knud Erik's cigarettes solved that problem. The platform was overcrowded, so they used Old Funny as a battering ram. People moved out of his way, doubtless presuming him to be a tragic war invalid. All that was missing was an Iron Cross pinned to his chest.

A woman in an oversize winter coat was standing in the middle of the platform: she didn't seem to be headed anywhere, but just stood I there. Her pale, emaciated face, half-covered by the scarf tied under her chin, wore the most lost expression Knud Erik had ever seen. She wasn't withdrawn so much as absent: her eyes were completely blank. She was pushed and shoved from all sides by the blind throng, and the suitcase that she carried in her hand suddenly sprang open and an infant fell out. Knud Erik saw it clearly. It was the burned body of a little child, withered and practically unrecognizable, a mummy shrunk by the heat of the same fire that had clearly devoured its mother's mind too. A man, focused on the train, pushed her away, and without even noticing where he put his feet, trod right on the tiny corpse that lay in front of him. Knud Erik turned away.

"Look," Bluetooth said, "the lady dropped her Negro doll."

As they approached Hamburg, for almost thirty minutes they traveled through nothing but ruins. They thought they knew what bombs could do to a town, but they'd never seen anything to compare with this. No ghostly scorched façades rose from the piles of rubble: there was no guessing what streets might have once existed there. The devastation was so complete that you could barely believe it was caused by man. But it didn't look like a natural disaster either: that would have left something standing, however randomly. This destruction was so systematic that it looked like the work of a force that knew neither earth, water, nor air, but only fire.

For the first time in almost six years of war, they felt they'd existed only at its periphery. Like the other passengers in the overcrowded train, they averted their gaze: they couldn't bear the sight. The scale of the city's destruction was so unfathomable that they gave up trying to understand what neither their minds nor their eyes could take in. They knew that if they stayed here any longer, they'd end up like the people around them, and lose the hope that drove them on. Even Bluetooth looked away and started fiddling with a button on his coat. He didn't ask any questions, and Knud Erik wondered if it was because he was wise enough to fear the answers.

AT FOUR-THIRTY in the morning on May 3, 1945, they stole a tugboat from Neustadt Harbor.

They'd planned to go to Kiel but had to accept the transport options that presented themselves. Knud Erik's last carton of cigarettes secured them places in the covered bed of a truck that was going to Neustadt. The harbor was deserted; they walked the length of the wharf and looked for a boat that would fit their purpose. Bluetooth was sleeping, curled like a puppy on Old Funny's lap. Anton decided on a tugboat named Odysseus. When they'd quietly lowered Herman's chair down from the wharf, Bluetooth woke and demanded to be put down on the deck, where he stretched and yawned, and his telescope eyes began their eternal search for news in the universe.

"Look," he said, pointing at the sky.

They glanced up. High above them a large bird was flying northwest, with huge, slow wing beats.

"It's the stork," Bluetooth said cheerfully. "It's Frede."

"Do you know, I'm beginning to believe it is," Anton muttered. "Looks like he's heading for Marstal."

On their way out of the Bay of Lübeck they passed three passenger ships lying at anchor, the Deutschland, the Cap Arcona, and the Thielka. Though there was no sign of any crew on the bridges or decks, they were nervous that their theft would be discovered and someone would chase them, so once they were some distance away, they sailed at full speed. They'd planned to head north around the island of Fehmarn. Of course this would mean going far into the Baltic, almost as far as Gedser, before they could turn west and then south around Langeland. It was quite a detour, but they didn't dare sail any closer to the German coast.

It was early afternoon when a hollow roar rolled across the sea. Several more followed, and for a moment they felt the firmament vibrate above them. Tracks of smoke etched themselves across the bay and they guessed that Neustadt was under attack or the three anchored ships had been hit. As the day progressed they realized they might as well have followed the coast. No one would have pursued them. The Germans seemed to have lost control of the Baltic altogether; it was now patrolled by British Hawker Typhoon bombers. Again and again they heard the faint echoes of bombs exploding far across the sea.

There was heavy traffic on the water, but most of it came from the eastern part of the Bay of Lübeck, where the Russians were advancing. There were all kinds of vessels: fishing boats, freighters, smaller motor ships, yachts, smacks, and rowboats with makeshift masts and sails. Columns of smoke drifted up along the horizon. They constantly came across pieces of wreckage and once nearly sailed into a huddle of charred bodies bobbing face-down in the water. From a distance they'd looked like a raft of seaweed; the crew saw their mistake just in time to change course. The drowned—women and children as well as men—were everywhere. None of them had life jackets; clearly they too had been refugees like themselves.

Will it never end? thought Knud Erik.

The euphoria of having escaped was gone. They understood that if they were to get across the Baltic alive, their luck had to hold. They were sailing a German ship, and there was nothing to stop the next Hawker Typhoon from dropping its lethal load on them as it passed overhead. They hadn't flown a Danish flag in five years: now they wished they had one. But maybe not even that was enough. It was as if the sea had turned itself inside out and was disgorging all the thousands of people it had swallowed across the centuries. Crossing it, they felt a fellowship with them.

Knud Erik was at the helm. He ordered everyone to put on a life jacket, but there weren't enough to go around. He glanced briefly at Herman in his wheelchair. Then he shrugged. Captain Boye had drowned because he'd given his life jacket to a stoker who had left his own behind in the engine room. He handed his life jacket to Wally and ordered him to help Herman put it on. If they sank, he'd have given up his life for a man he despised, but he had no choice. The war had taught him one thing: the Allies might be fighting for justice, but life itself was unjust. He was the captain and he was responsible for his crew. Duty was the only thing he had left. He must cleave to it or else surrender to pure meaninglessness.

"Aren't you going to put on your life jacket?" Sophie asked. She hadn't noticed him glancing at Herman.

He brushed her question aside with a smile. "The captain's always the last to leave the ship. And the last to put on his life jacket."

"A true Odysseus you are," she said, returning his smile. "And a lucky one too, having Penelope on board."

"We aren't like Odysseus," he said. "We're more like his men."

"What do you mean?"

"Have you read the story?"

She shrugged. "Not properly."

"It's depressing reading, actually. Odysseus is the captain, right? He has fantastic adventures. But he doesn't bring back a single one of his crew alive. That's the part we sailors play in this war. We're Odysseus' crew."

"Well, you'd better get moving, Captain Odysseus," she said, looking at him. "Because this particular crew member happens to be pregnant."

THEY SAILED AT half speed and switched off the boat's lights at night. The closer they came to their destination, the more they feared they'd never reach it. Until now they'd existed only in the present, as all who put their trust in the vagaries of luck are obliged to. Now that they dared to believe in the future, they were terrified of losing their lives. The old daily dread from the time of the convoys returned. Again, the sky above and the sea beneath seemed packed with hidden's menaces.

The sea was like dark blue silk, and the bright spring night was cloudless. There was a warmth in the air that heralded summer, and had it not been for the tugboat's pervasive smell of coal and tarred hemp rope, they'd have caught the scent of apple blossom coming from the shore. But the water was cold. Winter clung to its depths, and all they could think about was that chill: it felt as if they were still sailing the Arctic, still on the lookout for the foam stripes that signaled torpedoes and the red distress lights that had once bankrupted their souls and could do so again. Again, they listened for the sound of oars or cries for help. Again, they enacted an eternal dress rehearsal of death by exposure. Spring welcomed them, but the memory of the five-year winter they'd endured still held them in its grip.

In the bay they'd left behind that morning, eight thousand Allied prisoners of war were incinerated when their transport ships were bombed. Earlier, another ten thousand refugees had drowned in the same sea the Odysseus was now crossing. But her crew knew nothing of this either. They'd seen ships go down before, but they'd never seen a refugee ship sinking with ten thousand passengers trapped on board, or heard the collective scream as the water gushed in from all sides and sent the ship down to the bottom, or the wail that followed the final plea for help, when those still living realized that rescue is just a word. No, they'd never heard that vast cry, and yet it entered them that night.

They spent the night on deck; they dared not go below. They wrapped themselves in blankets they'd found on board and sat awake, watching the sea with restless eyes, and listening.

Bluetooth didn't sleep either. He lay silently, watching the fading stars. As dawn broke, he was the first to hear the deep whoosh of wings. "The stork" was all he said.

They looked up. There it was, flying low above them, still heading northwest. Far away they could see Kjeldsnor Lighthouse in the early morning light. They were approaching the southern point of Langeland.

Ærø appeared in the late afternoon after they'd sailed along the Langeland coast for most of the day. Trying to save coal, Anton kept the tug at half speed: they were running out. They saw Ristinge Hill rise to the north. Open water followed. Farther out to the west lay Drejet and the hills at Vejsnæs. In the midst of it all rose the red roofs of Marstal, with the copper church spire, now green with verdigris, towering high above. There were still a few masts in the harbor, looking like the remains of a stockade that had been overrun by some unknown force. From here they couldn't see the Tail and the breakwater that embraced the town like a useless arm.

Some distance outside the harbor, they saw black masses of smoke pouring into the calm air. Coming closer, they saw flames. Two steamers in Klørdybet were ablaze. The war had beaten them to it. Knud Erik had been so sure that it would all end the moment he set eyes on the Marstal skyline. Fatigue overwhelmed him, and he felt close to giving up. If he was an exhausted swimmer trying to reach the shore, this was the moment he'd simply let the water take him.

They were just level with the steamers when they heard the howl of a dive-bomber. They looked up: a Hawker Typhoon was coming straight for them. One of its wings gave a flash, and a rocket sped toward them, trailing white smoke.

There was a bang, and the whole boat shook.

IT WASN'T A good time to be a child. Corpses floated onto the beach and the little islands around the town on a daily basis, and it was the children who found them. They'd always fetch an adult, but by then the damage had been done. They'd seen the decomposing faces of the drowned, and afterward they were full of questions that we found hard to answer.

Early in the morning of May 4, a ferry docked at the harbor. It came from Germany and it was packed with refugees. Only a few on board were men: soldiers with blood-soaked bandages around their arms and legs. The rest were women and children. The children said nothing, but simply stared pale-faced into the distance with their scrawny necks sticking out from winter coats that seemed far too big for them, as though nature had gone into reverse and they'd grown too small for their clothes. They hadn't eaten a proper meal in a long time. But it was their eyes that made the deepest impression on us. They seemed to see nothing at all. We reckoned it was because they'd seen too much. Children's heads are quickly overloaded by ugly things. The eyes simply go on strike.

We offered them bread and tea. They looked like they could do with something warm. We behaved decently toward them, though we wouldn't exactly claim they were welcome.

At eleven o'clock that morning two German steamers ran aground, attempting to navigate the south channel. British bombers had flown over the island several times during the past few days, and we'd often see them flying over the sea. Two of them appeared now. They fired their rockets and both steamers caught fire. They had machine cannons mounted both fore and aft and they returned fire. The British planes kept coming back, and one of the steamers took several direct hits and was soon engulfed in flames.

We didn't dare approach the ships to rescue the survivors until the shooting was over. The water was filled with people, many of them burned or wounded by shrapnel. They screamed and wailed when we hauled them on board, but we couldn't just let them lie there in the cold water. It was a dreadful sight. Their hair had been singed off. They were black from soot, and you could see bloodied flesh where the skin had been burned away. Many were naked. We'd brought blankets, but wrapping them around the poor shivering creatures would be of no help: the wool would just stick to the exposed flesh. Helping them ashore on the wharf, we handled them as gently as possible. There were many dead too. We left them in the water. Survivors had priority.

The wounded were taken to the hospital in Ærøskøbing, and the others billeted in the house we called the Lodge, in Vestergade. Then we started recovering the bodies. There were quite a few—twenty in all. We brought them to the wharf by Dampskibsbroen, right by the entrance to the harbor, where we laid them out in a row and covered them with blankets. One of the bodies was missing its head, but somehow that one was the least horrific: no face, and no mouth gaping in a rigid scream that it would take to the grave.

Several hundred people had gathered in the harbor to watch the steamers burn. One of them was almost extinguished, but she was still giving off plenty of smoke, while the other one burned amidships. Some drunken German soldiers were on board, manhandling a group of half-naked women on the foredeck. Fear of death combined with booze had made them lose all inhibition.

Late in the afternoon the British resumed bombing the two steamers. The crowd was swelling. We'd all come to watch the sad scene unfolding on our waters. Many of us had lost husbands, brothers, and sons in this war, and it would have been easy for us to think that these Germans had got what was coming to them. We didn't, though. How many times had we, our fathers, or our grandfathers been on a ship that was sinking or on fire? We knew what it was like. A sinking ship was a sinking ship. It didn't matter whose.

Suddenly a tugboat appeared in the south channel. We'd been so preoccupied by the burning steamers that we didn't even notice it at first. Marstal harbor's south channel is tricky to navigate if you're not familiar with the waters, but the captain seemed to be managing well until one of the British bombers flew low over the boat and fired its rockets. The explosion that followed could be heard all the way to the shore. The boat took a direct hit and went up in flames.

***

Gunnar Jakobsen, who'd been out there with his dinghy, would always say afterward that he'd never seen a more jumbled-up crew. One fellow was a Negro, another was a Chinaman, and another one was in a wheelchair: the others shoved him overboard before they jumped themselves. He had no legs and only one arm, but his life jacket kept him afloat. A woman with a child popped up in the water too. Half the world seemed to be floating around down there. Gunnar's surprise doubled when he pulled them all on board, and not only did both the Negro and Chinaman speak Danish, but the rest spoke like Marstallers. "Aren't you Gunnar Jakobsen?" one of them said.

Gunnar Jakobsen narrowed his eyes—not because he couldn't see the man properly, but because he needed time to think.

"Goddammit," he exclaimed. "You're Knud Erik Friis!" Then he recognized Helge and Vilhjelm. The man with no legs and one arm said nothing, nor did any of the others introduce him.

"Anton," Knud Erik Friis said suddenly, looking around desperately. "Where's Anton?"

"You mean Anton Hay? The Terror of Marstal?" Gunnar Jakobsen asked.

They looked around. "He's not here," Vilhjelm said.

He wasn't visible in the water either. The Odysseus was about to keel, and the flames soared high. No one could be on that ship and still be alive. They circled about the water for a while, calling out for Anton.

The bombers kept attacking the steamers as if they'd been ordered to use up their entire supply of bombs and rockets before the war ended. Just when the men in Gunnar Jakobsen's dinghy were about to give up and head for the harbor, the Odysseus took another direct hit. This time she must have been struck below the waterline, because she keeled instantly and began to sink. Gunnar Jakobsen switched off his motor, as if he felt he owed the tugboat a minute's silence as it died. A moment later the ship was gone. In the place where she'd been, they could see something floating on the water. Gunnar Jakobsen started the engine and headed for the spot. At first they couldn't make out what it was, but then they recognized the horribly charred remains of what had once been a human being. They saw its back and its head. Anton was naked and his hair had been burned off. His life jacket was gone, or if it was still on him, there was no telling it from the flesh of his back, which was as black and porous as charcoal.

Sophie covered Bluetooth's eyes with her hand. Knud Erik reached into the water to get the charred body into the dinghy. He didn't think about what he was doing; he simply couldn't leave it there. But when he hauled up the corpse the whole arm came off. Startled, he let go, and when the body hit the water again, what had once been Anton's flesh fell off his bones, which began sinking at once.

The engine was throbbing violently.

Gunnar Jakobsen wanted to get back ashore as quickly as possible. None of the survivors from the Odysseus objected. They sat in total silence, with the same blank expression he'd seen in the German children, which he hoped he'd never see on the faces of his own kids. He didn't know much more about the war than what he'd read in the newspapers. He'd heard the pounding in the south when the British dropped their bombs, and he'd seen flames on the horizon when Hamburg and Kiel were razed. Now he was learning more in a single day than he had over the past five years, and he'd have the same experience in the months that followed every time he met someone who had spent the war outside Denmark's borders. Something was wrong with them, and he just couldn't explain what it was. It wasn't anything they said, because they said nothing; it was almost as if they were all brooding over a huge secret that they kept to themselves only because it wouldn't help to tell anyone. They were part of a dreadful community that no one else could penetrate and that they couldn't escape.

The boy was crying. He'd seen nothing, but he sensed that something had happened.

"Will we never see Anton again?" he asked.

"No," said the woman, whom Gunnar Jakobsen thought must be the child's mother. "Anton's dead. He's not coming back."

It was a brutal thing to say, Gunnar Jakobsen thought, and he'd probably never have been so frank with his own children. Yet something inside him acknowledged the honesty of the woman's reply. To the children of war, you told the truth.

High above them a stork flew past. It came close to one of the burning steamers and seemed to vanish briefly in the clouds of smoke before emerging on the other side, unharmed. It continued across the town, and when it reached the other end of Markgade, it folded its wings and prepared to land in the nest on the roof of Goldstein's house.

Gunnar Jakobsen put in at Dampskibsbroen. This was where most of us were standing, and though he'd been shaken by the sight of Anton's body, he nevertheless felt that he was returning with a great story that deserved a big audience. He was bringing home the first people to return to Marstal from the war after an absence of more than five years.

Gunnar Jakobsen hadn't noticed that the dead were still lying on the wharf when the big legless man was helped out and settled among their covered bodies. We stared at him with curiosity and suddenly Kristian Stærk said loudly, "That's Herman."

A wave of unease went through us as the news spread, and those who didn't know who Herman was had it explained to them in terms that were far from flattering. Herman hadn't shown his face in Marstal for twenty years, but the mere mention of his name was still enough to fill those of us who'd heard the story of the Kristina with disgust. He sat strangely lost among the dead. His arm and leg stumps made him look like a stranded walrus waving its flippers, but his vulnerability didn't lessen our contempt.

"Help me up," he said.

We did nothing; we just kept staring at him. None of us wanted to go near him, so he just sat there in the puddle of his wet clothes, and his big body started shaking from cold.

A man in Kongensgade was running toward us, waving his arms and shouting, but we couldn't make out what he was saying: he was too far off.

At the same moment the church bells started to peal in a wild and breathless rhythm we'd never heard before, as if someone was improvising a melody fit for an occasion unique to the history of the town—neither funeral nor wedding service, sunrise nor sunset.

In a way that we couldn't explain, we knew that something momentous had happened, something much bigger than the burning steamers out on the water or Herman's sudden reappearance.

Finally the running man came within earshot.

"The Germans have surrendered! The Germans have surrendered!"

We looked at Herman and Knud Erik and Helge and Vilhjelm and the other men whose names we didn't yet know, and we looked at the woman and the child, and we understood that they were just the first. The sea was about to return our dead.

We lifted them up and bore them high through the streets. We even hauled Herman out of his pool of water and found a cart to pull him around on. Cheering, we marched through Kongensgade, along Kirkestræde, down Møllegade, along Havnegade, up Buegade, through Tværgade, and down Prinsensgade, where Klara Friis, as always, sat in her bay window, her pale face staring out to sea.

We went back along Havnegade and as we marched, more people joined us. An accordion appeared, and then a trumpet, a double bass, a tuba, a harmonica, a drum, and a violin. We mixed "King Christian" with "Whiskey, Johnny" and "What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?" There was whiskey and beer, there was rum and more beer, there was Riga Balsam and Dutch gin; it had all been saved up for this moment, the moment we'd always known would come. Lights were lit in the windows, and blackout curtains were burned in the street, crackling as they blazed.

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 died. We didn't know how many.

We'd count them tomorrow. And in the years to come we'd mourn them as we'd always done.

But tonight we danced with the drowned. And they were us.