Far Afield (34 page)

“Not if I don’t get over to Tórshavn,” said Jonathan grimly.

The cat slept at his feet. The day dawned dark, windy, and more redolent of the smell. Jonathan shut all the doors to the kitchen, shutting out the smell, and made a lot of progress in
Tom Jones
. He had an omelet for dinner. The cat wanted omelet just as much as it had wanted whale.

“No,” Jonathan said to the cat, as it yowled at the frying pan. But when it jumped into his lap and began licking forlornly at the edge of the plate, Jonathan felt too sorry for it to protest. They finished the omelet together. Then the cat curled up in Jonathan’s lap.

The next morning he hardened his heart, shut the cat into the bedroom, probable home of the mice, and went down to the harbor. Jens Símun was standing on the dock looking mournful.

“Terrible weather,” he said. Jonathan agreed. “How’s Tróndur doing?”

“Tróndur?”

“The cat.”

Knowing the cat was named for the hero of a saga changed Jonathan’s feelings about him. Perhaps at this moment Tróndur was tearing into mice. “I left him near the mice,” Jonathan said.

“He’ll get them. He’s a good cat.” Jens Símun relapsed into gloom. “What a terrible winter,” he said.

“Do you think I can get over to Tórshavn this week?”

“Maybe next week.” Jens Símun brightened a little and added, “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Really?” Jonathan was eager.

Jens Símun looked up at the impenetrable sky. “No, I reckon not.”

Jonathan went home to check on Tróndur’s progress. He was asleep on the bed. The smell had overtaken the entire atmosphere of the room.

“That does it,” Jonathan said out loud. He set off again, to complain to Sigurd.

“I have mice,” he began. Sigurd pulled a mousetrap from under the counter. “No,” said Jonathan. Frustration seized him. “No, listen. I’ve got this cat of Jens Símun’s, Tróndur, and it doesn’t do a damned thing, and the mice are rotting in my bedroom somewhere, I can smell them—”

“So, so, so,” Sigurd cut in. He put the mousetrap away. “That’s a problem, I reckon.” Jonathan was momentarily soothed. “That’s a good cat, though.”

“Sigurd,” Jonathan banged his hands on the counter. “Please. The cat isn’t working. I have to do something else. I want to go to Tórshavn.”

“You won’t find a better cat in Tórshavn. That’s a good cat.”

“I’m not looking for a better cat,” Jonathan said slowly. “I want to go to Tórshavn for a visit.”

Sigurd smiled. “To see your fiancée?”

Jonathan ignored this. “Can you help me?”

Sigurd looked out the window. “You might have to take up the floor,” he said dreamily. “Sometimes they get under the floor.” He looked back at Jonathan. “The cat can’t get under there, you see.”

“Can we do that today?”

“You could do it right now,” Sigurd said.

“Couldn’t you help me?” Jonathan was reduced to pleading.

“Jens Símun. He’s good at that.”

Jonathan bought a raisin cake for Jens Símun and went back to the dock.

“A good day for raisin cake,” said Jens Símun, eyeing the box Jonathan held.

Jonathan’s frustration abruptly funneled into hatred of the smallness of Skopun, where everybody could tell that you’d bought raisin cake from Sigurd by the shape of the box you carried. Anonymity, privacy, solitude—forget it! But did that mean they rushed to help out with the vermin they knew were in the house, or the cesspool they knew was clogged? No. Jonathan tried calming himself down by seeing this reluctance to help as their version of privacy: Do nothing unless asked. Well, here he was asking—and asking Jens Símun again.

“Would you like to come over for a
temun
with me?” he said. “I’ve got a problem.”

Without a word Jens Símun turned from his sad contemplation of the weather and walked home with Jonathan.

“Puuh,” he said when they were inside. “What a stink!”

Hearing his master’s voice, Tróndur dashed down the stairs and into the kitchen, where he yowled loudly, complaining, Jonathan supposed, about his bad treatment over the past two days. Jens Símun paid no attention. “Got a hammer?” he asked.

Jonathan found a hammer and a screwdriver under the sink.

“Bring them both,” said Jens Símun. They went upstairs, Tróndur accompanying them. Jens Símun lay down on the bedroom floor and wriggled along it, nose to the boards. “Aha,” he said after a while. He sat up and attacked the floor with the claws of the hammer, which had no effect.
Then he began hammering the screwdriver in between the planks. Jonathan sat on the bed and watched. Tróndur hid in a corner.

Soon Jens Símun had destroyed a foot or so of flooring. “Come here,” he ordered. Together, he and Jonathan pulled up several boards, revealing a dark, dust-ball ridden landscape. “Got a broom?” Jens Símun demanded. Jonathan produced a broom from the closet.

After ten minutes’ poking, Jens Símun fished out a tiny gray lump about the size of a man’s thumb, which he held aloft by its thread-thin tail. Tróndur came out of hiding to stare up at it. The sweet smell of rot was overpowering.

“A little thing, a lot of trouble,” said Jens Símun.

“You think there’s only that one?”

“We’ll leave the floor like this for a couple days, in case we need to get in again, but I reckon that’s it.” Jens Símun opened the window and threw the mouse into the yard.

As Jonathan put a cup of tea and a slice of cake in front of him, Jens Símun said, “Poison.”

“What? The cake?”

“That mouse was poisoned. That’s why it smelled so bad.”

“I didn’t put poison out.” Jonathan took a piece of cake for himself.

“Somebody did. It came to your house to die. That’s why Tróndur didn’t go after it. He could smell the poison.”

Jonathan was unwilling to credit Tróndur with so much logic, but he nodded anyhow, happy to agree with almost anything Jens Símun said.

“That’s a good cat,” said Jens Símun.

And Jonathan, grateful, said, “Yes, very good.”

Jens Símun was gone, leaving a trail of crumbs and Tróndur—“In case there are more mice.” Tróndur ate the crumbs but showed no interest in the world beneath the
floor. Jonathan wondered if he should spend the night at the Dahls’; his bedroom stank more than ever, even with the window open. When Heðin came over after dinner (whale night again; rubbing and complaints again), Jonathan took him upstairs.

“Do you think I ought to sleep in here?”

Heðin was more interested in Jonathan’s things than in his predicament. He poked around on the bedside table, looking at the books and the alarm clock, opened the door to the closet and the top drawer of the bureau, examined Jonathan’s hairbrush. “A wooden hairbrush,” he said. “I’ve never seen that. We have plastic.”

“Well? What do you think?”

“It’s a nice bedroom.” Heðin nodded at the furniture. “And you have two beds.” He grinned and sat down on the one Jonathan used. “Good for guests.” He winked.

“What about the poison, and the smell?”

“That’ll go away.” Heðin stretched out on Jonathan’s bed. “You want to trade for the night? I’ll stay here, you can sleep at my house? I could go get Kristina.”

“You don’t think it’s dangerous?”

Heðin shut his eyes. “I would like to have a nice big bedroom like this.” He sat up. “I’ll build one. Next spring. I’ll be building a house next spring.”

“Oh.” For politeness, Jonathan asked, “Where?”

Heðin went over to the window and pointed at a muddy stretch that lay between the house opposite and a small drying shed. “That’s our land.”

“It won’t be a big house,” Jonathan said.

“That’s our shed, too. We can get rid of that. You’ll help us.”

“Mmm.” Jonathan grunted. “Want some cake?”

Heðin stayed late, drawing possible floor plans in Jonathan’s notebook and eating up the cake. Watching Heðin debate whether two extra bedrooms for children were enough made Jonathan feel like a teenager; he was just
hoping to get a date—and with a girl whose interest in him was uncertain.

“Two will do,” Heðin concluded as midnight approached. “We can have four babies, then.”

Jonathan yawned. “What will you name them?”

“Petur, Jens Símun, Sigurd, and Heðin. Or Kristina, if it’s a girl.”

“Suppose they’re all girls?”

“They won’t be. We have many sons in my family.”

Huddled under his eiderdown trying not to breathe in too much of the foul air in his bedroom, Jonathan was haunted by this sentence of Heðin’s. In its cockiness, reverence for lineage, and quasi-magical reliance on the past as a predictor, it exemplified Faroese pretensions to a primitive life. Maybe “pretensions” was too strong, although, like the crushing intimacy of Skopun, this quality had begun to bother Jonathan. Behavior that two months ago he would have seen as expressions of culture he now saw as poses—the favored pose, naturally, being the Viking. Long, meditative examinations of the pattern of waves, head held high, chest braced against the wind: just a dramatic way of passing a few hours on a rainy afternoon. If he chanced to observe them at this, so much the better for Jens Símun, or Petur, or whoever was playing out the charade with himself. They were all entertaining themselves by pretending to be their ancestors. Jonathan suspected they had romanticized their origins even more than he had.

This line of thought was depressing. Rolling around in his bed, Jonathan wished for it not to be true, to be rather a product of his grumpiness that would evaporate if he could get a breather in Tórshavn. He imagined the concrete arms of Skopun’s harbor open to him on his return, the familiarity of the muddy street, the pleasure of seeing Jón Hendrik on his box in the store—all the subtle and comforting delights of coming home that make the everyday rewarding. In the
middle of trying to project himself into this future, he fell asleep.

The clouds blew away while he slept, and though the wind was still fierce, the bustle on the dock the next morning was evidence that a change was in the offing. Gregor the fishmonger perched hopefully on a crate, awaiting something to sell; Jens Símun sat in his boat scraping at the paint; Heðin and his cronies were smoking and baiting a pot of lines.

Jonathan’s clouds too had blown off, and he felt vigorous and well organized. He nailed the broken floor boards back into place, put Tróndur into an old pillowcase, and went over to Jens Símun’s to give him back. Tróndur didn’t like traveling in the pillowcase. He bit and scratched and tore his way through it so that when they arrived, Jonathan was holding in his arms a cat cloaked in tattered strips of muslin. He seemed delighted to be home and jumped out of Jonathan’s grasp, running around the kitchen sniffing every inch of floor and dragging his white train behind him.

Sigrid laughed. “What a funny cat,” she said. “I guess he didn’t get the mice—but he would have, you know.”

“Oh, yes,” said Jonathan. And though he didn’t believe Tróndur would ever have done anything, he was surprised to find that he regretted giving him back. He was a weird sort of company. “Thanks anyhow,” he said to Sigrid. “Thank Jens Símun again for me.”

“Sit, have a
temun
.”

Jonathan debated this. A homemade cake on the table looked inviting, but he was determined to get organized for his trip. “I can’t today,” he said.

“Oh, yes, you’re going to Tórshavn.” Sigrid nodded. “Well, you will go tomorrow, I reckon.”

“I reckon so.” Jonathan decided that “I reckon so” was preferable to “I hope so”: it was positive thinking, and it signaled his departure from the kitchen.

“So, so, so,” said Sigrid.

* * *

Jonathan washed some socks and pawed around in his bureau, dissatisfied with all his clothes, even the new ones he’d bought in the fall in Tórshavn, which had taken a beating and now looked as shabby as the rest. All his trousers were stained with fish offal and mud, his underwear was gray, his socks were full of holes, his gloves were splitting on the thumbs. Examination of himself in the mirror was no more rewarding: too much hair and skin as pale as a boiled potato.

He devoted the rest of the afternoon to self-improvement: a bath, a close shave, nail-cutting; basting of the gloves; disposal of the most tattered underpants; removal of the mud encrusted on his clogs. Flushed from the bath and his efforts, he was much more pleased the next time he looked in the mirror. A haircut would really do the trick, though, and Jonathan decided to pay a visit to the Dahls. Maybe he could get an after-dinner trim from Maria.

It was Petur, however, who was the family barber. He draped Jonathan in an old dish towel and centered him under the kitchen light; little Jens Símun and Heðin rode shotgun at the table. “Watch out, Papa! You’re cutting too much on that side,” from Jens Símun; then from Heðin, “Not enough! Make it shorter!” Petur’s nervous trick of snapping the scissors in the air while planning his next move made Jonathan edgy.

As he sat trying not to wriggle, Jonathan wished he’d been less impetuous about sprucing himself up. Any Tórshavn barber would have more confidence than Petur, who kept darting in at Jonathan’s head and then reconsidering, backing off, and taking a slice of oxygen instead. After a particularly long pause in the action, Jonathan asked, “Is anything wrong?”

“I seem to have made it a little lopsided,” Petur confessed.

“Even it out, then.”

“It’s more—well, I’d say it’s more, ah, uneven all around, if you see what I mean.”

Jonathan went up to the bathroom to see what he meant.

Petur had managed to get a zigzag effect all around his head. It was so amazing that Jonathan started to laugh.

“You like it?” Petur had followed him and was lurking in the hall.

Jonathan looked at him and then looked in the mirror again.

“You don’t like it.” Petur sighed.

They went back to the kitchen. Jonathan held a small mirror of Maria’s and directed Petur. As more and more of his hair fell to the floor, Jonathan’s spirits sank; he was not going to be looking good for his trip.

In the end, though, it wasn’t too bad, at least Jonathan kept telling himself it wasn’t too bad. It was too short, especially around the ears, but the zigzags were gone. He put the mirror face down on the table; he knew how it looked.