Far Afield (6 page)

A shadow fell across Jonathan’s plate, and a pale long hand took hold of the empty chair beside him. The substance of the shadow, as long and pale as the hand, was a man who looked familiar, though Jonathan had never seen
him before. When he spoke, Jonathan realized why: he was American.

“Y’Amerrucan, right?” he asked. “They told me.” He nodded his satisfaction and sat down. “Bart,” he said, extending the other hand. This one had a ring. It was the sort of ring offered by senior committees to the graduating classes of large midwestern high schools—chunky, carved, set with a stone that looked like glass and was probably a low-grade sapphire. Jonathan put his fork on the table and joined hands with Bart.

“Whew.” Bart sighed and said “whew” again. “Helluva place.” Jonathan could only agree. “How’s that lunch?”

“Not too good, but it’s all there is.”

“Don’t care for fish myself. Seems like this is the wrong place to be.” He laughed a whispery laugh, which slowly moved into a cough that kept him occupied for a full minute. Jonathan inched his chair away; he did not want to get sick.

“So,” Bart said, when his cough had run its course. He looked at Jonathan. This was a question of some sort, but Jonathan couldn’t formulate an answer. Stumped, he said “So” as well.

“Yup,” said Bart.

This was an impasse. “What brings you here?” Jonathan asked. At the same moment, Bart said, “Where y’all from?” So they were at another impasse. Before they could get stuck again, Jonathan blurted, “Boston. How about you?”

“San Diego, by way of San Antonio. ‘Course I flew over from Washington. But I’m based on the Coast.” His shoulders shook; an as yet silent battle with the cough. “Whew.” He had won, this time. “Boston? Never been there. Went to New York once. Craziest place I ever saw.”

“It’s not like that,” Jonathan said, “it’s smaller.”

“Yup. So I hear.”

Bart had close-cropped hair and a black suit and big,
shiny shoes, one of which nicked Jonathan’s calf as Bart settled in and crossed his legs. Adding up “Washington,” the suit, “stationed on the Coast,” and Bart’s overall closed demeanor, Jonathan decided he was from the CIA.

“You from the Company?” he asked, confident he’d used the term that would guarantee an honest answer.

But Bart was either very dumb or very quick. “What company?” He looked around the room. “Guess I’ll get some of that lunch there.” He searched more determinedly.

“They’ll bring it,” Jonathan told him. “They know you’re here.”

“Got here last night, you know, on the plane.”

“Quite a trip.”

“I’ve seen worse.” Bart nodded. “Seen worse.” He nodded again.

“Yes?” Jonathan was sorry he’d interrupted, because things had come to another halt. “You were saying?”

“Couldn’t find a goddamned bar. Couldn’t find one. You know this place, don’t ya? Point out the high spots to me.”

“I’d be glad to take you around. But there aren’t any bars.”

“Whaddya mean? They got Prohibition here?”

“Sort of, yes. You can’t buy liquor. You can only get it from the government if you pay your taxes.”

“I paid ’em.”

“Me too,” said Jonathan sadly. “But not to the Faroese. So no booze.”

“Well, I’ll be. What do they do?”

“Pay, I guess.”

Bart’s lunch arrived and he fell to it. Like an old-timer, he put HP Sauce on his potatoes and enjoyed it. “Not so bad,” he said halfway through, then, after a few more bites, lost interest and sat silent, staring, his shoulders twitching again. Jonathan was waiting for the arrival of the tea, which was brought out approximately seven minutes after the fork
and knife had come to rest on the plate. He guessed Bart’s presence had gotten the waiter off schedule. Bart began to cough in earnest.

“Got a flu?” Jonathan asked.

“Sure,” said Bart, hopeless. “Had it for years.” He grinned. He pulled a pack of Luckies from his shirt and lit one between spasms. “I’m down to three a day. One after breakfast, one after lunch, one after dinner. Can’t quit, though. I even tried hypnotism, but I couldn’t get under.”

“Three’s good,” Jonathan said.

“So. They tell me you’re an ornithologist.”

“No. Well—” Jonathan debated leaving it alone. “Well, I’m actually studying the people. The culture, you know?”

“Like what? Prohibition?” Bart laughed a juicy laugh and heaved some more.

“Old stuff. Old songs they sing, native costume, that sort of thing.”

“How long you figure on being here?”

“A year.” It sounded like forever, and Jonathan sighed.

“You with the Army?”

“Army? No. Why would the Army be interested in that?”

“Beats me. I’m with the Air Force myself. I don’t know what goes on in the Army. They’ve got the money.”

“What are you doing here?” Jonathan asked idly.

“Checking the system.”

“What system?”

“The one up there.” Bart moved his head to the left. “Early warning.”

“Warning of what?”

“Attack. Missiles. Catch the Russian missiles before they get to us.”

“Jesus,” Jonathan said. This put Eyvindur’s paranoia in a new perspective. “You mean, it fires them back or something? Intercepts them? What does it do?”

“Classified,” said Bart, stubbing his cigarette out on the plate. “It protects us. That’s what it does.” He looked at Jonathan. “They’re all over the north. That’s because that’s the path the Russians set their missiles on, over the north. They got all their missiles up in Siberia aimed at us. Don’t you know that? They got missiles aimed at every city with a population over half a million. ’Course, so do we.”

A web of potential missile paths spread over Europe like a grid, some red (for the Russians), some blue (for the Americans), took shape in Jonathan’s mind. It was a new geography; perhaps it was the only geography that counted. He shivered. “That’s insane,” he said.

Polite Bart pretended not to hear. He patted his belly, full of fresh, bad Faroese cod. “You gonna take me around this burg?” he asked.

“What do you want to see?”

“You’re the expert. Show me what’s important. All the native stuff.” Bart chuckled.

This was just what Jonathan wanted—needed, in fact, to put his mood straight: expertness. No outright failure or foolishness can compare to the pervasive sense of incompetence engendered by being a foreigner—and a foreigner condemned to remain so into what seems the infinite future. In the strange algebra of human suffering, the condition of a sufferer is always improved by contact with one who suffers more. Bart, the ultimate foreigner, was, according to this formula, the worse off of the two.

But as they rambled through crooked and muddy Tórshavn, from the Parliament building to the street of sod-roofed houses to the bustling jetty, the happiness that had welled up in Jonathan at the prospect of relief from his chronic ineptitude ebbed away. Something was wrong. Bart didn’t care. Jonathan was reluctant to fault him for not caring in the particular: Tórshavn had little to offer in the way of the marvelous and exotic. In a grand sense, however, Bart was unimpressed and uninterested.

He said, “Ummmmm,” he said, “That so?,” he said, “What do you know about that.” He nodded or occasionally shook his head as Jonathan explained that there were no trees, that the economy had shifted from sheep farming to fishing a century before, that the islands were self-governing, that those wooden shacks were for hanging and curing meat. But he wasn’t really there.

It started making Jonathan uneasy. Not because Bart didn’t give two hoots about the economy, but because the totality of the place, its quasi-medieval, quasi-Appalachian atmosphere, didn’t seem to register. After all, it was certainly strange, though it might not be wonderful. He was sure Bart had seen nothing like it before. In a scramble for recognition—of himself, of his efforts, of his passions—Jonathan said, “It’s a far cry from San Diego, isn’t it?”

They were back on the dock. It was the inevitable high point of any tour, the Scandinavian equivalent of a common. Everybody in town gravitated toward it, most because they had business there, but some, like the children, because of the commotion and vitality that were a contrast to the slow drip of rain on quiet streets. Jonathan looked out to sea and awaited Bart’s reply, which he expected to be a low-key, down-home acknowledgment of the subtle fascinations of the north.

Instead, Bart yawned. “When you’ve been around as much as I have,” he said, sourly, “it all looks the same. Fact is, it all
is
the same. Question is, Whose side are they on? That’s all I want to know. Yes or no. For or against.”

“Denmark is part of NATO,” Jonathan said. It was a feeble response, he knew.

“I don’t trust them. All those countries so close to Russia, they’re all a little communist, you know? Free medicine. And pornography! You been to Copenhagen? Now that’s something to see.”

Jonathan had not been there. He looked at the winches
and the waves and the clouds colliding with the mountains and thought they were something to see.

Bart’s cough came up along with a sharp gust of wind that made Jonathan shiver. He stood patiently while Bart shook and paled and flushed. A line of gulls on a roof was rearranging itself to make room for a new gull, who tucked itself in cosily, wing to wing with its neighbors. Some feathers dislodged in the process floated down to the cement pier. Then all the birds took off hooting in the wake of a small boat, bobbing in its diesel spume till it reached the end of the breakwater. At that point the flock lost interest and returned to the shed, settling again, dropping feathers again. All this time Bart coughed.

“Hey, Bart,” Jonathan said, “I think you’re sick.”

Bart wasn’t having any sympathy. “Let’s get a drink,” he said, turning back toward town.

So Jonathan had to remind him that they couldn’t.

Bart pulled a cigarette from his pack and put it in his mouth. He chewed on it awhile before putting it back where it came from. “The base.”

“Pardon?”

“Come up to the base with me. I’ll bet there’s a drink up there.”

“No,” said Jonathan. “I bet there isn’t.”

“Let’s go see. Come on. You showed me round town, I’ll show you round the base.”

“Isn’t it classified?” Jonathan didn’t want to go but didn’t know why.

“They’ll never know. Bunch of Danish teenagers. I’ll just tell them you’re my assistant. Be more convincing if you got a haircut.” He glanced at Jonathan’s neck, where hair and collar connected.

“I’m not getting a haircut.” A bad mood was threatening.

“Doesn’t matter. Let’s go. It’ll be something to see.
And I’ll bet you—I’ll bet you five dollars we can get a drink up there.”

Jonathan winced at “something to see.” Clearly, all he had provided didn’t qualify as that. He was tempted to refuse on principle, but imagining his room and his sulk and his afternoon slowly sliding down to dinnertime made him accept.

At the hotel Jonathan asked how they might find a taxi. Why, the desk clerk wanted to know, did they need a taxi? Irritated, Jonathan insisted that they did and that it was up to him, the desk clerk, to tell them how to get it. It depended on where they were going, he replied. Different taxis went to different places. Jonathan mumbled that they were going west; he had noticed early on that the Faroese did not use
here, there, right, left, up, down
, or any normal designations of direction: everything was according to a compass, as in, Pass me that salt on your east, please. He had spent an afternoon in his dim room twisting his map of the islands round and round and memorizing relative compass points between every important village.

“West,” said the desk clerk. He smiled. “To the Place?”

Jonathan had to admit they were going to the Place. This was precisely what he had hoped to avoid. He didn’t want to compromise his role as ornithologist/anthropologist. Damn Bart. Bart was chewing contentedly on another cigarette, musing perhaps on the drink he was shortly to get.

Símun would take them. Símun went west because his sister Maria lived in Vestmanna. Símun was in the Hotel Hafnia now having a
temun
. Jonathan shuddered at the thought of the
temun
—an inky cup of tea and a remarkably sweet doughy cookie available between two and five daily in the dining rooms of both hotels. He’d had it once on a rainier-than-usual afternoon.

“Manga tak.”
He toyed with the idea of explaining to
the desk clerk that he was going along as Bart’s interpreter. But his Faroese wasn’t up to it, and he knew that, even if it were, the desk clerk would nod politely and then spread the news that the American was a spy, just as they had thought. “Come on, Bart. We’ve got to go to the other hotel to get the taxi driver.”

Jonathan and Bart had a silent ride in a creaking Rambler, at least twenty years old, through misty valleys and over naked hills where sheep licked lichen off rocks. Símun was silent too, respecting the secrecy of spies. After about ten miles they began climbing; Jonathan’s ears popped and closed, and the mist on the ground mingled with thicker clouds from above, making a two-tone gray ether through which landscape, in smaller and smaller portions, was fitfully visible. No houses, no cars. Once a clutch of geese rose from a lake to darken the sky further. They were a premonition of the bout of hail awaiting them around the next hairpin curve. Three minutes inside a mad celestial pinball machine, then higher, into brief clarity that revealed high black cliffs beside the road, over which Jonathan could not bear to look. Even through the closed windows he heard the ocean roaring a hundred feet below.

Símun drove with reckless unconcern. His passengers knocked against each other as he blasted through the fog, honking his way around curves to warn the nonexistent oncoming traffic of his determination not to stop. Bart gripped the armrest; Jonathan ground his teeth. They avoided each other’s eyes and apologized each time their legs or arms smashed together. Jonathan felt himself adequately punished for sloth and idle curiosity. If he had taken the nine o’clock boat.… Another prayer, to be returned in good health to Tórshavn, asked to be articulated, but he suppressed it; things, he told himself, were not that bad.