Far Afield (20 page)

But instead of thinking about himself, he began to imagine a map of the Faroes, with people marking the important points: Petur and his brothers to the south, in Skopun; Eyvindur and Daniela here in the center; Swithin to the west, on Mykines; Wooley on Fugloy, as far north as he could go. And in the east, Europe, locus of Jonathan’s yearnings, which he must now, he realized, subdue.

For he too was a landmark. He existed as a point on all these people’s maps. He could be counted on to chase sheep, he could be invited to dinner, he could be considered, and rejected, as a future husband. He had auditioned for the part of the Anthropologist, and he had gotten it. Even his simultaneous billing with Wooley didn’t, at the moment, dilute his pleasure or his surprise.

Surprise because his own competence was always a surprise to Jonathan. The pleasure was separate. He didn’t dare to take pleasure in competence, which inevitably smacked of chance—a fortuitous achievement when he wasn’t looking, so to speak. The pleasure was the odd and marvelous details of this life, which were now the details of
his
life.

Jonathan stood up. He felt big. He felt he could take on anything—whales, winter, Wooley. The ocean boomed below, slapped the shore in loud applause for Jonathan. Jonathan bowed. He agreed with the ocean; he had done something remarkable: he was, finally, here.

Blood

October, and for weeks the island had lain in an equinoctial calm. Starless, exotic summer had given way to an ordinary autumn, with dawn and dusk at ordinary times. The soft, smooth tundra had turned brittle and brown, and the sea, too, had lost its summer sheen. Dark slow swells broke on
the jetty day after day, a steady tide that pulled the world toward winter.

The fishing had picked up with cooler weather, and the dock was now awash in lines and bait pots. Stacks of fish-filled crates waited outside the filleting plant’s door. At Sigurd’s store captains heaped provisions on the counter: cigarettes, rope and tar, condensed milk, buoys, screwdrivers, batteries. Boats bound for Greenland, bound for Norway, baited for herring, baited for cod, out for blood.

Jonathan’s contribution to all this activity was note taking. It began as camouflage for his essential uselessness; he was forever standing four feet from the center of some piece of business he didn’t understand and asking for an explanation. In this way he quickly filled one of his spiral-bound notebooks with sketches of fishhooks, instructions on how to coil lines in a pot, diagrams of boats’ holds, some salty curses, and a garbled version of a myth common in northern latitudes concerning a seal-woman and love.

In the evenings at home, eating his eight fillets of lemon sole or his two slabs of halibut, Jonathan reread the day’s gatherings and wondered what they meant. Sometimes his wonder was simple: writing in pencil against the top of a box or his own knee didn’t make for easy reading. Mostly, though, he wondered if all this information added up to anything. Was it on the brink of making sense? Was he engaged in making an impressionist portrait of Skopun, whose features he would recognize only when he was done and stood ten feet away from what, at close range, looked like smears and daubs? Or, the inevitable alternative, was he just wasting time?

But the inevitable seemed to have lost its inevitability. He trotted up and down the village paths, staring and scribbling; he went everywhere and wrote down everything, and by ten o’clock each night he had flopped into bed, dreamless. The occupation he’d invented for himself was a full-time one, and as he did it in public, everybody could see what
a good worker he was. The finished notebook on the kitchen windowsill assuaged his remaining doubts. He grew more and more willing to put the question of meaning on hold. He was gathering data—reams of data—and doing it well. Conclusions and assertions would have to wait for Cambridge, where they were hard currency. Hard currency here was how much cod the
Skarvanes
brought in and whether Jens Símun would get a sheepdog.

Within a week or two his cover story had become reality; he had a job, just like everybody else. Jonathan liked having a job. His mission was simple: record. A student’s mission was tricky: be wise, be willing to learn; be inventive, remember the facts; be smart, don’t be a smart-ass. After seven years on that tightrope, he was daily delighted to click his mechanical-pencil lead out another notch and be ready for work. No extensive mental preparation was needed for curiosity. The more he indulged his curiosity, in fact, the stronger it grew, until Jonathan suspected that his aloofness was only protective coloring. He appeared to have a boundless interest in other people’s affairs. Licensed—mandated—to stick his nose into everybody’s business, he was happier than he’d been in years.

The villagers too were happy to see him doing his job. A man must have work, and Jonathan out of work, stirring his septic tank and reading his murder mysteries, was a sorry sight. Petur and Jens Símun had decided to offer him a place in the boat if he didn’t collect himself; they were relieved to see the notebook in his hands day after day, because it wasn’t a very large boat. But now things were as they should be, and Jonathan was going about his proper work, which was playing Boswell to everybody’s Johnson. Although nobody had ever thought village life worth chronicling before Jonathan turned up proposing to do it, everyone now agreed that the immortalization of Skopun and its inhabitants in Jonathan’s book was fitting and good.

For Jonathan had told them he was writing a book. A
thesis was a sort of book, he reasoned, and his attempt to describe a thesis, and scholarship generally, to Heðin had been a bust. It would be published as a book, he hoped, and so he said it was a book. The Faroese approved of books and read many during the winter; Sigurd the shopkeeper poring over
Gulliver’s Travels
was typical. Petur had read
Hamlet
, Jens Símun had cast his bicolored eyes on Ibsen (though he confessed he’d never finished a play, just “looked to see what happened”), all the village children knew Andersen and Grimm. “There’s nothing else to do in the winter,” Heðin said. “Just read and listen to ship-to-shore radio.”

Heðin and Jonathan had become friends. Every third or fourth evening little Jens Símun was sent by his mother to ask Jonathan, “Aren’t you coming to eat?” Olí had returned to Vestmanna; it was natural, Jonathan supposed, that Heðin would want to fill his young uncle’s absence with Jonathan’s presence. Soon he realized he had shortshrifted himself with this analysis. Heðin liked him. Heðin came to visit him, unannounced, on evenings when Jonathan hadn’t come for dinner. Jonathan would walk downstairs from the bathroom after dinner and find Heðin making tea or eating an end of bread or leafing through the notebook left on the table. Sometimes he brought a bottle of near-beer, and they sat on the front steps sharing it, watching the stars emerge from the darkness that comforted Jonathan, who had yet to live through a winter without light.

Snaggle-tooth, lanky, green-eyed Heðin had lost no time in turning their private conversations toward his favorite topic, sex. He seemed to have had a great deal of experience for one so young and, to Jonathan’s eyes, unprepossessing. He asked Jonathan the English words for acts Jonathan had only contemplated performing; claimed to have fucked a ewe; and added sex to his earlier list of wintertime activities: “There’s nothing else to do,” he repeated,
“so we all get busy in the bed.” By matchlight and cigarette glow, Jonathan studied Heðin’s face, trying to locate his appeal. Perhaps he had what Jonathan had overheard a woman in a Cambridge café describe as “animal magnetism.” His huge hands, swollen from work at sea, were capable of spanning a woman’s waist easily, firmly, to hold her in place while he had his way with her. But according to Heðin, they didn’t need to be held down.

Jonathan wasn’t exactly envious. Plenty of women had nuzzled up to him or sent nuzzlesome glances his way. The difference was that he didn’t take advantage of it. Partly because he considered it “taking advantage of,” partly because of his distaste for entanglement, mostly, he now decided, because he was a Puritan. He didn’t think of love-making as a sport. Heðin did, and so did a number of Faroese girls.

All this was bound to make him think of Daniela and, eventually, talk about her, though with trepidation: perhaps Heðin had banged her too? He had not; he didn’t even know her. But he knew of her family. He put his nose in the air and sniffed, pan-cultural shorthand for snobbiness.

“Oh, no, she’s very friendly,” Jonathan said, not wishing to remember that she hadn’t been.

“Yah, to an American writing a book.” Heðin sniffed again. “What was it like with her?”

“We didn’t.…”

“Then you must telephone and invite her to come for a visit, so you can have a good fucking. I will find out her telephone for you.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Jonathan. It appealed to him immensely.

“Why? You are writing your book, you are cousin to my family, you are my friend, all you need is a woman.”

Jonathan had to admit to himself that this was true. “She has a job,” he said. “It would be hard for her to visit.”

“Pah!”

So much for the vaunted equality of the sexes in Scandinavia, babbled about in the Danish guidebook—and at Cambridge dinner parties. But Skopun generally seemed to have one foot in the Bronze Age; Jonathan had thought of calling his book
Viking Village
.

“When the nights get long, you’ll call her,” said Heðin.

But the nights and the days were still balanced in harmonious intervals of stars and scudding clouds dappling the faraway sky. Jonathan going about his work was sometimes troubled by an image of Daniela, sometimes had an arrow-sharp memory of that kiss, but most of the time he pretended she was Christmas or his birthday: inevitable, possibly fun, and fixed in the future. For he had reached that condition of contentment in which he was aware of being happy, and he wanted nothing to disturb it.

Into this calm, mid-month, something odd intruded.

Though the weather had been generally fair, a little spatter of storms had buffeted Skopun for a weekend and given Jonathan a cold. For a few days he took notes between snorts, but the wet phase passed quickly, leaving stalactites of snot that pricked when he breathed and that could be removed only in private by delicate, persistent excavation. He was at this one evening, flipping through his notes and picking away, when he felt a rush of liquid course down the back of his throat, nearly choking him. He spat: blood. Not a thin, mucusy stream but a dark red glob. Frightened, he blew his nose, gently: more blood, fresh, wet, as if his nose were an open vein. He dashed upstairs to the bathroom to look at himself in the mirror. He was pale, and a steady flow was leaking from his nostril, inching its way toward his lip. His blood tasted sweet and alien. It was coming at him from two points, trailing down inside and out, so he sampled it both hot and cold.

The first rule with blood was to put your feet up, according to Gerda; Jonathan remembered lying on the living room rug with his legs on the sofa after he’d skinned
both knees falling off his bike. With toilet paper pressed to his nose, he lay down on the bathroom floor and put his feet on the toilet seat. His floor, he saw, could do with a sweeping: Band-Aid wrappers, strands of hair, a dead spider and a living one were all within an inch of his head. He looked out the window instead, looking at the stars blurred by the pane until he thought it safe to stand up.

The hemorrhage seemed to have stopped. He peered up his nose in the mirror and saw caked, black blood, but he couldn’t taste it anymore. Back at the kitchen table, he finished going over his notes and left his nose alone. By ten-thirty, when he was in bed with
Dombey and Son
(ordered by mail from Blackwell’s; received only seven weeks later), he’d brushed the episode off.

But in the morning his pillow was soaked, stained brown and crimson, as if he’d been murdered during the night.

Now Jonathan’s days and nights were haunted by blood. The pillowcase was an atlas of his sufferings; continents and islands formed nightly and were obscured by new ones rising the next night from the tide of his body’s salt water. He told nobody, though his anxiety mounted daily. And he feared a public outpouring almost as much as he feared the blood itself. Exposure, aside from the mess and embarrassment it would cause, would mean a doctor, and a doctor would mean a diagnosis, and Jonathan already knew the diagnosis.

Clearly, he was dying. He had nose cancer; a tumor was pressing on his sinus, or some sort of rot was eating his insides and spitting them out as blood. At the very least, his nose was altered, and his days henceforth would begin with scrubbing his pillowcase and include many deft, furtive checks for blood with his fingers and his tongue—secret movements he’d already perfected.

Thus, Jonathan at his worst. And it went further. He lost no time turning his happiness into the cause of his
affliction. He was never meant for this busybody life he’d so enjoyed, therefore nose death was sent to cut it short. Whether he called it divine retribution or psychosomatic illness or his rotten luck—and he called it all of these—nosebleeds had scotched his newfound pleasure in living.

He saw the humor in this black speculation, but that didn’t stop him from spinning it out each time he stood at the sink running cold water on his bloody linen. After eight days of this and of walking gingerly on the slick mud roads, with cones of toilet paper wadded into both nostrils, he decided he’d better confide in someone.

Little Jens Símun appeared around seven o’clock with his usual refrain: “Aren’t you coming to eat?” Jonathan nodded and went upstairs to unpack his nose. Let his body speak for him. And between the halibut and the tea his nose began to bleed. He knew the sweet taste now and had learned to swallow whole gulps of blood, but soon he felt the warm, thick wriggle coming out his left nostril for all to see. He put his hand up to his face and then, shamed but urgent, held his red fingers out toward Petur.