Far Afield (17 page)

“Where did you find out about them?”

“Bothers you, eh?” Swithin looked into Jonathan’s eyes for a second. “Up here for the doctorate?” He smiled.

Jonathan did not enjoy feeling exposed. And he didn’t know if Swithin was prodding him or merely commenting on the obvious.

“I know how it is,” he continued, when Jonathan said nothing. “I got out of it myself. You would never have heard of that institute in America. It’s sheer luck I found out about it. I’ve a Norwegian friend in London who was at Oxford with me, a folklorist, who had been up here years ago, when they were just starting to collect ballads. He told me to look up Mohr and send his regards and all that.”

“I’m at Harvard,” Jonathan blurted. Then he blushed. But it was too much: the institute, the other anthropologist, Oxford. To regain his composure, Jonathan turned the conversation back toward Swithin. “You were in graduate school?”

“I was working toward the doctorate, yes, in history. Terrible life. I canned it, moved down to London, got a job with a bird society. Banding, population estimates, that sort of thing. Peaceful. And I like the travel.”

“How did you learn it, though? I mean, if you were studying history.”

“In the blood.” Swithin smiled again. “My father’s a devoted birder. I grew up counting wrens and rooks. Really, though, it’s easy. I took classes in the evening.”

Jonathan had calmed down somewhat, and he wouldn’t have minded a few questions about himself. But Swithin was occupied by eating cakes. “People took me for an ornithologist when I first arrived,” Jonathan said, offering an opening.

“Did they now.” Swithin chugged down a cup of tea. “How long have you been here?”

“Oh, a month or two,” Jonathan said. It had been five weeks almost to the day. He waited for more questions.

Swithin stood up. “Good to meet you,” he said. He
had powdered sugar on his cheek. Jonathan had an impulse to invite him to come along to Eyvindur’s. They might appeal to each other, and his presence would provide a distraction should the future wife prove dull or unacceptable.

“Will you be here tomorrow night?” Jonathan asked.

“No. I’m going to Mykines tomorrow. Main booby nesting grounds. I’ll see you at breakfast, though.” He bobbed his big head up and down. “Au revoir,” he said. Scooping up his book, spoon still in place, he left the dining room.

Before dinner Jonathan had been merely sad; now he was in trouble. Room service would have protected him from the terrible news that he was not the only anthropologist on the Faroe Islands. What was he to do? Back in his bed, he located Fugloy on the frontispiece map in the picture book: far away, far up north, with only two tiny dots of villages. Bush—or as close to bush as you could come in the tundra. Skopun, with its choice of grocery stores and its bustling harbor, was New York City compared to Hattarvík or Kirkja. Things were grim. This Jim Wooley had probably already written his thesis, if he’d spent a whole winter here. He was bound to be a live wire from the University of Chicago, tough, self-sufficient, inured to the rigors of fieldwork from undergraduate stints in jungles with his mentors.

Jonathan shut his eyes. He would have to enlist Frank Swithin’s aid. He was going up there anyhow. He could give Jonathan a report on Wooley’s activities and research. Whatever it was Wooley was doing, Jonathan would do something else—no hardship, as he hadn’t started yet. If Wooley was doing kinship on boat crews, Jonathan would do
huldufólk
beliefs; if Wooley was doing folklore, Jonathan would do political party alignment within families.

But whatever he did, it would be diluted by Wooley—negated by Wooley, in fact—as Wooley had the jump on
Jonathan and surely would finish first. Jonathan’s secret dreams of being asked to publish his thesis, of the scholarly world brought to attention by his seminal analysis of this little-known, well-nigh forgotten corner of Western Europe, now looked like hopeless fantasies rather than slightly exaggerated visions of his future. He groaned.

Swithin would help. Swithin had seemed sympathetic to academic troubles of this sort. But perhaps he would prefer Wooley and would side with him? After all, Wooley’s island was a better bird-watching spot. And Wooley would be his host. Jonathan determined to invite Swithin to Skopun first; there was nothing wrong with the birds out at the Troll’s Head. Calmed by this resolve, he turned his attention to the next night’s dinner.

Jonathan quickly realized that he had better stop thinking. The girl would be ugly and stupid; the girl would be delicious and find him lunky and dull; the girl would not come (this seemed the best alternative he could imagine).

He went into the bathroom to check the condition of his sneakers, which he’d left to dry on the edge of the sink. They were soft, moist, and expansive, as if they had been transformed into a pair of large mushrooms. He sniffed one; it smelled of warm rubber and shit. His Keds, from the five-and-dime on Mount Desert: their death increased his sadness. He had his new Nikes, but the Keds were one of his few representatives of home. It seemed wrong to leave them in a wastebasket in Tórshavn. He put them on the radiator next to the bed. Maybe a good baking would revive them.

In the morning Jonathan drank three cups of thin mean coffee and made revisions to his invitation to Swithin: Please come and stay with me this week, I think you’ll like my birds (too eager); did you say you were looking for puffin colonies, because we’ve got a big one (Swithin had said nothing of this); you must stop off in Skopun on your way back from Mykines (this suggestion defied geography); I
need your help—why not? Why not just tell the truth? He ate bread and cheese and kept his eyes fixed on the door to the dining room. By ten-fifteen his nerves and the coffee had put him into a sweaty, shivery, buzzy state. He went to the front desk to find out Swithin’s room number.

“The English?” asked the clerk. “He has left.”

“When?”

“Very early. He had coffee in his room.”

Jonathan didn’t move.

“He went to Mykines,” said the clerk.

“I know,” said Jonathan. Coffee in his room. He decided to go for a walk.

The storm had blown off during the night, leaving high, thin clouds that either presaged the arrival of the next storm or signified enduring calm weather; natives could read the clouds’ language, Jonathan could not. But even an illiterate such as he could enjoy the sun, the brisk winds that twirled through the streets, the air freshened and distilled by rain. Many others were out walking too: elderly people dressed in black leaving church arm in arm; young men recuperating from exasperatingly sober nights-before; packs of little boys darting up and down hills, chasing cats from their spots in the sun. And couples in love—a Nordic version of love.

This love did not hold hands, did not kiss on the street, did not coo into an ear or let a hand stray to a buttock. This love was evident only in a fine thread of tension between two people, a quivering, taut connection that enforced a distance at the same time that it ensured a link. Couples in love always emitted some sort of glow; Jonathan had often enough been set to grumbling internally from seeing it. But Faroese couples seemed to inhabit their own pulsing electrical field, sparking out warnings to everyone—including the beloved—to stay away.

Watching two teenagers at the pier who were so besotted that they couldn’t look at each other and stood poised
side by side, listening—or so it appeared to him—to the crackle and hiss of their high-voltage emotions, Jonathan wondered if such a dangerous and powerful connection would be waiting for him at Eyvindur’s. He admired the usually phlegmatic Faroese for their all-out engagement in the business of love. Let the French neck on the boulevards, let the Italians pinch every passing bun, let the English talk their heads off over drinks while fantasies rolled past their eyes: the Faroese had passion with dignity. What captivated him most was the sense of their privacy, their unwillingness to display anything. Some might call their unwillingness an inability and think them repressed; Jonathan thought them only serious. And weren’t they right? Wasn’t love too serious to toy with or show off?

He hoped so but he didn’t know. Love in Cambridge was offhanded. It lacked both Continental form and Faroese substance. From his parents’ marriage he had learned that it was possible to connect and stay connected, but examples of
how
to do this were unavailable. His fifteen classmates made the rounds through one another’s beds sequentially, unceremoniously. Jonathan himself had gone a quarter of the circuit. He couldn’t claim any credit for finding this distasteful; he had found it too much trouble. Even the minimal wooing needed to bed a level-headed girl graduate student was more effort than Jonathan was willing to put out. Eight of his classmates were women; after he’d made love to three of them, he quit. They were all the same. Like him, they were entirely fixed upon their futures, their qualifying papers, “their” tribes. Their minds were not on him—any more than his mind was on them. And mindless conjunction was hollow, Jonathan had realized. He had also realized he wanted no other sort of connection.

So Jonathan had put love off until the future. Sex became dimmer as it slipped further into the past. He had an adept if predictable partner at home, and the life of a graduate student, with its competitiveness, jockeying for
position, and deadlines for achievement, was an anti-erotic one.

But the world, even the gray, undemonstrative Faroese world, was full of sex and love and confusion. Some of these might be heading his way, might be at this moment walking around Tórshavn wondering how dinner would go and how she would like the American. Jonathan smelled a whiff of hope and chided himself: expect nothing, never be disappointed. Anticipation was alluring, though. She might be beautiful. She might be, in fact, his future wife. Jonathan projected himself five years into the future, telling his colleagues the story of meeting his wife one evening at dinner in the field. But this assumed a transplantable girl. She liked rock and roll; didn’t that suggest a fondness for America and possibly a yearning to go there? On the other hand, maybe he was transplantable. A sod-roofed cottage in the old section of Tórshavn, work at the Folklore Institute, the annual visit to the States, which each year would seem more foreign. Walking the cold cement pier into the wind, Jonathan doubted he could become Faroese. More than the food, the language, or the customs, the very land was alien. Could he ever stand at the end of this jetty looking out to the dark swatch of island across the fjord, watching the clouds drift down onto the crests of the cliffs and the light banding the ocean purple, blue, black, purple, and say, in the words of little Petur’s song, Here is the land that suits me? No sun speckled through the trellis of deciduous growth, no thick, tar-heavy summer air, no January drive on roads cushioned and battened by snow, no pulse of city, dangerous, melodic, that symphony of cars and radios and population that is the real American music. Here silence, shot through with bird cries, and the visual equivalent of silence, these naked scarps of earth, monotonous, magnificent, and empty.

Thoughts of home stirred in Jonathan an urge to make trouble—an urge he had rarely indulged in America, where
there was a wider scope for it: a few teenage trips to the beach in the small hours with beer and a companion willing to neck with him until the sun came up and the mosquitoes woke; a marijuana-fuzzy month in his sophomore year. He now wanted intrigue, deception even, secret trips, late nights, coffee at one in the afternoon in a bathrobe: dissolution of some sort. Or its opposite: dangerous action. Perhaps he could join whatever group was protesting the early warning station. Or go home and pour blood on government documents.

He would not, he knew. These longings were only today’s installment of Tórshavn malaise. Discontent was endemic here, as dysentery to Bombay. And he had additional sources of misery in the discovery of Wooley, King of the Faroes, and the imminent encounter with the unknown, the girl. Momentary encounter—for, looking at his watch, Jonathan saw he would be late if he didn’t hurry. Lacking all-American clothes, he had resolved to shower at least before putting on Faroese ones.

He went back to the hotel in the liquid yellow afternoon light of 6
P.M
., washed, dressed himself in navy blue, chucked his Keds into the trash with a brief farewell, grabbed the geranium, and trotted uphill in his Nikes to Eyvindur’s house.

Daniela of Icelandair, with whom Jonathan had written the fruitless telexes searching for his suitcase, was not an improbable choice for his future wife. She spoke excellent English, he remembered, and had struck him as intelligent. She had not, however, struck him as particularly attractive, but he prepared himself to change his mind on this point. She was more appealing out of her uniform, a stiff, dark-blue woolen suit with a military aura. She was dressed now in genuine Levi’s (in honor of his presence?), a “professional” silk shirt with a bow at the neck, and black pumps
whose soles had curved upward from hundreds of soakings by Tórshavn’s rain. This garb didn’t catch Jonathan’s fancy, but it did reveal her figure—curvy, though on a small scale. Jonathan noticed she didn’t reach even to his shoulder. In previous encounters, they’d been sitting at her desk in the office.

Anna emerged from the kitchen to watch the momentous meeting. Always awkward with gifts, Jonathan thrust the geranium at her and mumbled, “This is for you.” She barely looked at it; she and Eyvindur were hopping with excitement. As Jonathan and Daniela shook hands—her hand was dry and warm, almost fevered—Anna clasped the geranium with one hand and her husband’s arm with the other, the two of them nodding and exemplifying, Jonathan thought with irritation, the ideal of the happily married couple that was supposed to spur him to action.

To her credit, Daniela seemed uneasy with the fuss the Poulsens were making. She sat down on the sofa as soon as she’d let go of Jonathan’s hand. Then she kicked off her curly shoes and tucked her feet up under a pillow, as if to announce that she was now off duty. The ball seemed to be in Jonathan’s court.