Far Afield (33 page)

So he sat against the wall, head cocked slightly, on the lookout for timepieces, lapsing now and then into a sort of sleep during which he dreamed passionately of his pillow and his eiderdown. He was in a stupor when he was roused by Petur patting his hand, saying his name softly over and over.

They were all standing in front of him, Sigurd and Jens Símun, Heðin, Jón Hendrik, all looking gray and gaunt and in need of a shave. Jonathan touched his own cheek: a slow-moving timepiece, but it told him that at least twenty-four hours had passed.

“Hoopla,” said Petur, as if talking to a child. “Off we go. Let’s go.”

Jonathan stood on tired, spongy feet. “Where now?”

“Time to divide the whales,” said Petur.

They straggled through the dim wet streets, sliding on muddy stones down to the harbor. The sun was just coming up as they arrived, a red smear at the juncture of sea and sky.

“Storms are coming,” muttered Heðin.

“Good thing we have all this
grind
,” said Petur briskly. He alone had survived the night intact; his brothers were
slipping and stumbling, Jón Hendrik looked near death, Heðin kept stopping in his tracks and closing his eyes. “We won’t be out fishing for a while,” Petur went on.

“Papa, don’t talk so loud,” said Heðin, shutting his eyes.

Jón Hendrik wove his way over to Jonathan. “So, so, so,” he said. “Now you are a Faroese man.” Jonathan looked at him blankly. “Now you are a Faroese man,” said Jón Hendrik again. He teetered and lost his footing in the sand, then fell against Jonathan. He was all bones, rattly, sharp, gnarled bones, and Jonathan gripping him around the shoulders felt he was holding a bird of prey, light yet intense with the desire to sink his talons into something.

“Why do you say that?” Jonathan asked, putting him back into a standing position.

Jón Hendrik just said it again, like a bird with only one call.

“He wants to know why, Great-Grandpa,” said Heðin. Then he covered his eyes with both hands and said, “Oh, God.” He sat down on the sand.

Petur came into view, lugging a sack of whale meat. “Go get your meat,” he told them.

Heðin stood up again. “Come on,” he said to Jonathan. “We’ll get Grandpa’s meat too.” He put his hand on Jonathan’s back for support. “I feel terrible,” he confided.

Jonathan felt terrible too, and the sight of dozens of butchered whales didn’t help. Nor was he especially eager for a sack of whale meat; one steak would be enough for his taste. But because Petur had speared the first whale, and because the
grind
was a large one, and because Jonathan was considered an honorary member of the Dahl family, he got a sack so full he had to drag it behind him on the sand. Heðin was dragging two. Jonathan was glad to see Sigurd standing beside the car on the road above the harbor; at least they wouldn’t have to haul a hundred pounds of whale through the whole village.

It all went into the trunk, and Jón Hendrik was coaxed into the back seat with Heðin. Jonathan was about to get into the front when Petur said, “No, no, you come back on the boat with us.”

“I don’t want to go back on the boat.” Jonathan was too tired to mince words.

“It’ll be good for you,” said Petur.

Jonathan looked wistfully into the car, where Heðin and Jón Hendrik were already settled in, napping. Then he watched Sigurd try to start the car with the skeleton key that opened his shop and figured he might be better off with Petur.

Jens Símun was bailing out the boat with an empty red-cabbage can, rather small for the job. But he had another one, which he thrust into Jonathan’s hands. They bailed while Petur checked over the oars, looking for damage from yesterday’s battle. “Okay,” he said after about ten minutes. They cast off into the fjord.

The ocean was calm and their progress easy. Peter and Jens Símun, intent on their work, rowed without speaking. Jonathan sat shivering in the stern; he slid his hands up in his sleeves and huddled into his slicker.

Silence: even the oars slicing the water and the water breaking on land were silent. The boat slipped along the sea between the gray cliffs of Húsavík, leaving far behind the beach where kittiwakes and gulls reeled above the carcasses. Dead ahead, the sun loomed at the mouth of the fjord, clear of the water now but still blurred by sea fog. On they went, a dot in all that gray vastness, the hooked prow of the boat cutting straight through the chill swirls of mist and murk.

Jonathan’s head was heavy, and despite the cold he felt himself drifting into sleep. He had the rare sensation of falling—as if “falling asleep” were a simple description of an action. He was tumbling down a long dark shaft, sometimes floating, sometimes plummeting, and the deeper
he fell, the lighter grew his hold on consciousness. And then, in a peculiar reversal, he seemed to be rising, or, rather, rising and falling simultaneously. His body dropped down deeper—he could actually see it sinking—and his mind, reawakened, shot up to the top of the shaft, where a circle of light beckoned. With a rush he popped out into the sky.

Below him the boat lay in the water with three forms in it, two rowing, one still. That still one was himself, but he had no feeling for it. Whatever his essential self was, it was in the sky and rising higher with gusts of speed that made him dizzy but thrilled him. He soared into darkness, above the range of the sun. The whole fjord ran silver under his eyes, flanked and banked by rock that pressed the water out to sea. He could see the tug of the tide below the waves, the shoals where cod lay sleeping. He rose another notch, up to the clouds, through whose veils islands glimmered brown and gray, long Streymoy, tiny Mykines, and his home, Sandoy.

Jonathan knew he had seen this before. The effort he made to remember when dislodged him from his vantage point, and with sickening suddenness he was back in the boat, jerking awake on the wooden seat.

“Fell asleep, didn’t you,” said Petur. “That’s good.”

He had seen it from the airplane, when he’d first arrived: the patchwork of land and sea, the dot of a boat on a fjord. But then the scene had been static and impenetrable, like a painting, and like a painting, too, provoking sorrow, almost nostalgia, for a world he could not enter. Now it was not a painting, it was real and he was in it—deep in it: wet with its water, cold with its wind, stained with its blood.

The Cat King

January produced snow, a rarity in this maritime climate. The kids went out on flattened cardboard boxes, screaming past Jonathan’s house down to the harbor, where they smashed into barrels and lay laughing on the concrete. Jonathan made a short but elegant snowman in his front yard,
which was visited and commented on by all the villagers as if it were a wonder of nature. Lacking a carrot, he’d used a potato for the nose; he was particularly happy with the eyes, which were fish eyes still in fish faces, embedded in the snowman so artfully that they seemed to be returning the stares of the admirers.

The entire fall was gone after three days, melted down by the usual torrent of winter rain. And most of February was the epitome of drear: gale-force winds kept the mail boat away for several days at a time, and the calms between the storms were tentative, overcast, mere brewing periods for more bad weather. As Petur had predicted, everybody was eating a lot of whale meat. Only the biggest boats were out—and they were far out, gone for weeks. When the
Skarvanes
returned late in the month, Jonathan went over to the Dahls’ to gorge on halibut and cod. But soon they were back to
grind
, digging around in their buckets of salt for yet another slab of overrich steak. If Jonathan had been less finicky, he could have varied this with half-rotted cod, braces of which hung from Maria’s clothesline. Instead he reminisced about a sausage—it almost qualified as a hot dog—he’d eaten in Tórshavn when he first arrived in the Faroes, and made omelets twice a week.

From the sausage to Daniela was not a big leap. Jonathan decided to take a trip to Tórshavn. Easy enough to decide in his snug kitchen, with
Tom Jones
lying open on the table in front of him (he was reading his way through the large classics, ordering from Blackwell’s only fiction of over four hundred pages); the season was against him. Reconnoitering on the dock one dark morning near the end of the month, he got many pessimistic assessments of when the next boat trip would take place, ranging from “tomorrow” to “March.” He called Eyvindur.

“Bah,” said Eyvindur, disgusted. “They use the weather as an excuse to stay on their godforsaken little island. Come immediately.”

“Well, I can’t, if the boat doesn’t go.”

Eyvindur snorted at the irrefutability of this. “Come in a fishing boat, then. We’ll send the helicopter.”

“I’ll do what I can. I just wanted to let you know I’m hoping to get over there.”

“We’ll have a special treat when you come. Fresh whale steak.”

Jonathan sighed. “How about puffins? I like them so much.”

“There are no puffins now. Puffins are in summer.”

“Frozen puffins?”

“Jonathan, you get here, then we’ll discuss dinner. Dinner is not important; social intercourse is important.” With this piece of arch-Eyvindur wisdom, he hung up.

He called back just as Jonathan was going out Sigurd’s door. “We’ll have frozen puffins for you,” he yelled, and hung up again.

Jón Hendrik was manning the phone that day, and unlike Sigurd he had no interest in people’s calls. He contented himself with saying “Eyvindur, hah,” as Jonathan left.

When he got home, Jonathan noticed an odd smell. He’d got a whiff of it the day before, but it had gone away. Now it was back: sweet, thick, sneaky. He poked in his whale bucket, but that smelled only of salt water. Some ancient potatoes in the refrigerator might be the culprits; although they smelled clean when he sniffed them, he threw them out. No leak in the kerosene line, nothing objectionable about a small pile of socks in the bedroom closet. He would ignore it, he figured.

By morning it was unignorable, or perhaps it was because his plans for a trip were still frustrated—for whatever reason, Jonathan focused on the smell. It had an undertone that made him gag, and it seemed to be getting stronger. He called Petur in for a diagnosis.

“Mice,” said Petur, standing in the middle of the bedroom,
where the smell was worst. “Could be dead ones. You need a cat.”

“I don’t want a cat. In fact, I want to go to Tórshavn tomorrow.”

“In this weather?” Petur shook his head. “Jens Símun has cats. He’ll lend you one.”

Jonathan didn’t like cats. “What good will the cat do?”

“Find the mice.” Petur looked at him strangely.

“I know, but then what?”

“Eat ’em.”

“Even the dead ones?” Jonathan was now sure that dead mice—flocks of them—were causing the smell.

Petur shrugged his shoulders. “Go get a cat,” he advised.

Jens Símun’s extra cat was a svelte little creature, speckled brown and gray. Sigrid offered to carry it over to his house.

“What should I feed it?” Jonathan asked her as they paraded through town.

“Don’t feed it anything,” she said, “or it won’t look for the mice.”

The cat yowled when Sigrid left it in Jonathan’s kitchen. “Shh,” said Jonathan. The cat stared at him with yellow eyes. Jonathan had to look away. This was one of the reasons he didn’t like cats; they enjoyed staring people down. “I’m not playing that game,” he told it, and took up his book. But he felt uneasy with the cat in the room.

He stood up. “C’mon,” he said, “let’s go upstairs.” He had little hope that the cat would follow, and it didn’t. He waited in the hall for a minute, then poured a bowl of milk and, waving it under the cat’s nose, tried to lure the animal up the stairs. The cat ignored the milk. Jonathan left the bowl near the bedroom door and went back to his book. When next he looked, the cat was asleep on the bench by the stove.

Heðin came over after dinner. Jonathan was glad to
see him. Dinner with the cat had been a trial. It was whale night, and the cat had wanted some whale for itself and had rubbed incessantly on Jonathan’s leg while he cooked. Then it had stared at him all through dinner from its perch by the stove, tracking the movements of his fork from plate to mouth with its yellow eyes.

“Hey, what a nice little cat,” said Heðin.

“What’s nice about it? I’m borrowing it from Jens Símun and it’s a terrible cat. It’s supposed to find mice but all it does is watch me.”

Heðin picked up the cat and tickled it under the chin. “You have to make friends with a cat, Jonathan.”

“I don’t like cats,” Jonathan whispered. The cat heard and stared at him.

“What’s its name?” Heðin asked.

“I don’t know.”

Heðin dumped the cat into Jonathan’s arms. “Tickle it,” he said, “and give it a name.”

“It’s just borrowed,” Jonathan protested. The cat settled into his arms and started to purr. Unthinking, Jonathan stroked it. “I’m not going to bother with a name.” He put the cat on the floor. It hopped back into his lap.

“See, now he likes you,” Heðin said. “See how easy it is?”

“How about getting to Tórshavn? How easy is that?”

“Did you call her?” Heðin grinned.

Jonathan shook his head. “I will, though. I’ll call her as soon as I know I can get over there. But everyone keeps telling me I can’t.”

“Well, you
could
get there.” Heðin seemed doubtful. “I don’t think you’d want to get there.” He leaned over the table. “It’s that boat, you know. It’s so horrible in bad weather.”

“I’ve been on it,” said Jonathan.

“That was in summer.” Heðin leaned back. “In
winter …” He didn’t bother finishing, just rolled his eyes. “But maybe you don’t get seasick?”

“I do. At least, I did.”

“If you
had
to go …” Heðin trailed off again.

“Wouldn’t you go, if Kristina were in Tórshavn?”

“Nah,” said Heðin. “I’d make her wait.” Then he winked. “Lucky I don’t have to worry about that.”

“Are you really going to get married?”

“Of course.” Heðin nodded. “Of course we are. So will you. We’ll have a double wedding.”