Far Afield (19 page)

The familiar cultural exhaustion was sneaking over Jonathan. In deference to Anna, the dinner conversation was in Faroese. And discussing Paris and painting in Faroese was more tiring than discussing sheep driving—perhaps because he’d never had occasion to talk about sheep in English.
Flirtation in Faroese was apparently beyond him, though he had to admit that it was hard to know where to locate the blame for flirtation’s failure tonight. Jonathan knew he wasn’t going to marry Daniela, but he would have been willing to go on flirting with her—to flatter her, himself, their hosts. She wasn’t having any.

Jonathan rearranged himself mentally. If no flirtation, then information. And alertness! A cup of coffee—but that was in the same universe as salad, some unreachable universe where food made sense and girls enjoyed a little attention at dinner. In this universe, puffins, the never-ending daytime of evening, the burden of anthropology to be done.

“What’s Wooley like? The other anthropologist,” he asked Daniela.

“I spent only one evening with him,” she said.

But she seemed to have no trouble figuring Jonathan out in half an evening; he was beginning to feel frankly spurned. “Did you enjoy him?” he asked, somewhat nastily.

“His Faroese is not very good,” she said, “not like yours.”

Jonathan was not to be wooed. “What university is he from?”

“I don’t remember him saying anything about that. Marius might know.”

“You should go visit him, Jonathan,” said Eyvindur. “Aren’t you lonely for a countryman?”

“Not yet,” he answered. He couldn’t imagine ever being lonely enough to visit his rival.

“Now, Marius could fix your homesickness,” Eyvindur said.

“I’m not homesick.”

“He has a radio program of your music,” Eyvindur continued, paying no attention. “He has hundreds of American records. He plays them on Thursday afternoons.”

“Wednesday afternoons,” said Daniela. She ran her fingers through her hair and looked at Jonathan.

She
was
flirting. He smiled. She looked away. On impulse, he let his leg fall against hers under the table. She didn’t flinch, but he, startled by the sensation, drew his leg away immediately. What was ailing him? He couldn’t tell if his skittishness was a sympathetic imitation of hers or something of his own. Either way, it was making the evening confusing.

Eyvindur was smoking and watching the two of them. Anna had begun to clear the table. Jonathan stood up to help her; movement would dispel his discomfort, he hoped. But Anna protested.

“Sit, you are a guest.”

“I like to help,” said Jonathan.

“In America, do the guests wash the dishes?” Eyvindur asked.

“Sometimes. If you are friends with the host.”

“A democracy. We are not a democracy.” He was in his smoking pose, leaning back in his chair, head tilted up, nostrils pluming smoke as if he were a dragon in a saga.

“Oh?” said Jonathan. He knew that they were, a sort of parliamentary democracy. But Eyvindur was probably about to make a sweeping generalization, and this was his buildup to it.

“We are not free,” said Eyvindur.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Anna, clearing Eyvindur’s plate. She turned to Jonathan. “We are free. In the Faroes, everybody can do as he pleases.”

“We are not free,” Eyvindur repeated.

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“What I mean is real freedom, Jonathan. We have a free press, yes, we have votes, yes, we can live where we like and say what we like. But what kind of a life can you have here in this country? Tell me that.” He leaned forward, his cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth. “Hah! You can be a fisherman, or you can be a farmer, or you can be an institutionalized outlaw like me—that’s what I
am. You have a wife who washes the dishes: very nice. You have your little home all paid for: very nice. You have your disability pension if you get hurt while you are out fishing. And let’s say you don’t want to work, you are a crazy person who wants to roam around talking to yourself—fine! Just go to the pension office and say, I am a crazy person who doesn’t want to work, and they give you money. I get money because when I was young I had tuberculosis and I couldn’t work. That’s how I could become a painter. Everybody knows I’m not sick now, but I still get money. This is because everybody must be inside the system. No exceptions.” He leaned farther over the table and put his cigarette out on Daniela’s plate, which Anna hadn’t yet removed. “We’re always taken care of.”

“And this means you aren’t free?” Jonathan asked.

“Sometimes he gets into this mood,” said Anna. She picked up Daniela’s plate.

“It’s not a mood. It’s the truth. We are in prison.”

“In America people starve because nobody takes care of them,” Jonathan said. He was sure Eyvindur wouldn’t believe this. He had never met a European willing to give up his idea of rich America.

“Yes! Yes! You have social unrest. We are sheep. Nobody is restless here.”

“Do you agree?” Jonathan asked Daniela. He considered putting his hand on her arm, then decided not to.

“It’s true that we are not restless. If you are restless, you must leave the country.”

“As you did,” said Jonathan.

“And I,” said Eyvindur. “I left this stupid country where everybody puts their noses in your business, looking over your shoulder to see what you are painting, coming over to see what you are having for dinner, because they have nothing else to do.”

“But you came back, both of you.”

“It’s my home,” said Daniela.

Jonathan waited for Eyvindur’s reason. Eyvindur stood up.

“A man does not choose his homeland, Jonathan,” he said. “Come, we will drink whiskey in the living room and become maudlin.” He looked at Jonathan. “I know you think I am already maudlin. You are wondering what I will be like after I drink whiskey.”

Jonathan laughed; that was exactly what he had been thinking. He felt a rush of affection for Eyvindur—for understanding him, for understanding himself, for possessing the one thing Americans, with all their freedom, lacked: realism. What Jonathan meant by realism was a fatalism leavened by pleasure in the oddities of this life, which could be amusing on its inexorable downward course. Brushing up against this consciousness had been the charm of his previous trips to Europe, and he was charmed anew to find it here, though he supposed it might be a mainland specialty, imported from Italy by Eyvindur alone. Another cultural trail to follow: Did Faroese happiness lie in this cheerful hopelessness? Was the American conviction that Things Would Improve the source of his—and his country’s—miseries?

Daniela and Jonathan followed Eyvindur into the living room, where he pulled the whiskey bottle out from behind some books on a shelf. Not much was left in it. “Two glasses, Anna,” he called. “You share one,” he said to them. Anna brought the glasses in hands still soapy from washing dishes. When she’d gone back into the kitchen, Eyvindur sat down next to Daniela on the sofa and put his arm across the top of the pillow, so that her head would be under his protection were she to lean back.

Jonathan was on the other side of Daniela. He had to lean over her to see Eyvindur. He didn’t like this arrangement, which made him feel that he was in a waiting room and also that he and Eyvindur were competing for Daniela’s attention.

Eyvindur poured the whiskey and passed a glass to Jonathan. “I suppose you think I treat Anna in a very chauvinistical manner,” he said. He had switched to English.

“Um.” Jonathan took a sip and handed the glass to Daniela.

“I get amusement at playing like a Viking with her. She understands. We have a very good marriage.”

“Oh,” said Jonathan. He didn’t want to hear about it. He wanted more whiskey. He put his hand out for the glass. Daniela was staring out the window. He nudged her knee with his. She moved a little farther away from him. “Whiskey,” he said.

“Oh,” said Daniela. She took a sip before handing it over.

“Marriage is the most important thing in the world,” said Eyvindur. Jonathan noticed that Eyvindur had already drunk most of his whiskey. “It is much more important than painting. My babies! My beautiful babies. What painting would ever be as beautiful to me as my babies? They are my inspiration, they are my teachers. Truly, Jonathan”—he leaned across Daniela’s lap—“I have learned to see the world again as new, like a baby myself, from them.” He subsided back into his spot and finished off his whiskey.

Jonathan disapproved of this concept of the child as teacher, which was common in Cambridge, where all the parents he knew were graduate students who claimed their toddlers had taught them more about psychology, biology, or physics than they had ever learned from books. Any child whose parents pontificated about this had Jonathan for an ally immediately, and he thought now sadly of Marta and little Anna asleep in their beds, burdened by their careers as instructors in seeing. Why didn’t people leave children alone? But would he do any better? Wouldn’t he see his children as informants from the child world, whom he could pump for data about sensations and emotions lost to him?

“They’re just kids, Eyvindur,” he said.

“ ‘Kids,’ I love this word for babies. The American language is marvelous.” Eyvindur patted Daniela’s thigh enthusiastically. She shifted back toward Jonathan.

Jonathan now felt sympathy for everybody washing over him in a whiskey-induced tide: poor Daniela, trapped between two oafs, poor babies the world over, poor Eyvindur, whose marriage probably wasn’t as happy as he claimed, poor Anna, who seemed to have finished her washing and shuffled off to bed without saying good night, leaving the “grown-ups” to their drinking and their English, which she couldn’t understand. He was lucky. He was free: nobody’s child, nobody’s father, nobody’s husband. He looked at Daniela; he wasn’t going to be her husband. Maybe he could be her lover, though.

But did she like him? He found it difficult even to guess what she might be thinking at this moment, holding the whiskey glass in her bitten fingers, drawn into herself so as to be smaller than usual and not brush against the men on either side of her. Jonathan looked at the size of her wrist and compared it to his own and worried: such a thin, frail shaft of bone, how could she manage in the world?

He scolded himself for “chauvinistical” thinking; she clearly could manage well. Nothing about her suggested the helplessness that waited under the surface of many American girls’ competence. Quite the opposite: Jonathan was sure that a tough heart beat beneath that frilly blouse. With light-headed, late-night, X-ray vision, he saw through the silk and through the breast so admired by Eyvindur to her organ clenched like a fist. That was the barrier to flirtation, not culture or language or his lack of appeal.

This was sad information. Her wounds—for surely someone guarded was someone wounded—made Daniela familiar and less appealing to Jonathan. She was not after all very different from him. Her methods of expressing her unhappiness were exotic, but the unhappiness was not. Tolstoy
was wrong: it was unhappiness that was the same the world over, recognizable and tediously comprehensible. Happiness—that phantom—varied, and its every manifestation was a mystery, a lure, and a dare: Catch me!

It was time to go, back to the hotel where he would sleep alone. Jonathan wished he were home in Skopun, where the foreignness was some kind of comfort. He put his hand on Daniela’s shoulder.

“Shall I walk you home?” he asked.

Eyvindur’s head, which had been drooping, bobbed up. “You’re leaving?”

“It’s late,” said Daniela. “I have to work tomorrow.”

“We have not discussed Harvard,” said Eyvindur. “I don’t care about it anyhow. Go.”

Was he insulted? Jonathan looked at Daniela; she was smiling at Eyvindur. “You’re tired too,” she said. She sounded like a wife. To Jonathan she said, “He gets up very early, to paint.”

“That’s what you should do,” Eyvindur mumbled. He lurched to his feet. “Good night, thank you.”

“Thank
you
,” Jonathan said, standing up as well. “Thank you for a wonderful dinner—”

“Better than last time, eh?” Eyvindur interrupted. “So. Back to Skopun tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll come for dinner another night?” He sounded forlorn.

“Of course,” said Jonathan. He suddenly had the feeling that it might be a long time before he saw Eyvindur again. His year stretched in front of him. He put out his hand. And Eyvindur did what Jonathan had wanted to do, pulled him into a hug. He smelled of tobacco and turpentine and man—warm, slightly sweaty, adult.

“You,” said Eyvindur, “take care. Take care.”

* * *

Daniela lived halfway down the hill from Eyvindur. “Alone?” asked Jonathan, as they stumbled among the cobbles.

“With Marius. Girls don’t live alone in the Faroes. It’s not Paris.”

“That’s for sure,” said Jonathan. “Why did you come back?”

“I told you.” She sounded irritated.

“People do leave their homes.”

“Not Faroe people.” Daniela turned away from him. “The Greeks had a story about a man who lost all his strength when his feet weren’t on the earth.”

“Antaeus. He was a giant.”

“Because the earth was his mother,” Daniela went on. She turned back. “We are like that. Perhaps we are very simple people.”

They had reached her house. “But all your education—” Jonathan stopped himself; it really wasn’t his business.

“Maybe that’s not so important,” Daniela said. She didn’t sound sure.

Jonathan did the only thing he could: kissed her goodbye. Goodbye to Tórshavn, goodbye to Paris, goodbye to their never-to-be-shared future. It was a lovely kiss, a sad and intelligent kiss, and they both gave themselves over to it. They separated as gently as they had come together, as if aware of each other’s fragility. Jonathan put his hand on her cheek for a final farewell. “Good night,” he said.

“Yes,” said Daniela, and opened the door.

Continuing down the hill, Jonathan came to the spot where weeks before he had sat and surveyed Tórshavn and wished for beer. He stopped. Tórshavn looked the same, or worse, now that he’d learned to see the country as beautiful. He sat again, to consider whether he was also the same.