Far Afield (7 page)

Indeed, they had arrived. A couple of flat-roofed low buildings nestled between a radio tower and a granite outcropping. Bart jumped out and fairly ran in the nearest
door. Jonathan discussed the return journey; Símun would pick them up in two hours, after visiting his sister for another
temun
. The Rambler took off into the clouds.

Jonathan looked at the radio tower, whose top was misted over, and decided it was not the system. He had an urge to see the system. Behind one of the barracks—he assumed they were barracks—a single-lane road shot silver up the mountain; he buttoned his jacket and set out. Bart would doubtless find him, or find himself a drink and contentment.

It was perfect walking weather: fifty degrees, a light moist wind from the sea that parted the mist occasionally, enough dew or rainfall to lend the rocks some luster. In between rocks was what Jonathan knew to be tundra. It was not how he’d imagined it: springy, gray, patchy. Instead it was luscious and green, firm like a good lawn, and sprinkled with small white flowers, which, when Jonathan bent to examine them, seemed to be minute, perfect orchids. He put one in his jacket pocket for later positive identification and felt himself momentarily a genuine scholar.

Then an unpleasant thing happened. At first it was merely annoying. A very large brown bird (Jonathan took it to be a gull from the shape of its head) started to circle above him and scream and flap its huge wings. Jonathan ignored it and kept walking, but it circled closer and closer, shrieking and sometimes actually brushing his hair with a wingtip. Irritated and somewhat disturbed, he flapped his hands at it. At this the bird became incensed. It rose up high and then came bombing straight down at Jonathan, landing for a few horrifying seconds on his shoulders. Its cold webbed feet gripped his bones and its sharp, ammoniated bird smell filled his nostrils, making him gag. Then it took off, still screaming. Glancing back, Jonathan saw that it was heading his way again. He began to run. The bird had calculated its landing point on a slower target and missed him this time, just catching his cheek with the edge
of its wing. Jonathan ran for about a minute. Then he ventured another look back. The bird was circling far behind him, hovering and crying over some sacred bird spot that looked, to Jonathan, the same as everything around it. His heart was racing. He sat down on the tundra—soft, cool, and comfortable—to calm himself.

But stopping was a bad idea. Fear, held at bay by motion, got loose and made him sweat and shiver. Alone on a mountaintop, with an angry bird on his tail and an armed nuclear device somewhere in front of him, Jonathan panicked. What kind of a fool was he to have set out alone in this country? Where was Bart? Why was that bird after him? He took some deep breaths. The air was salty and charged.

Then he heard the hum. Vibrating in consonance with one of the tones of the ocean’s churning, it slid in and out of perceptibility in the way that the landscape appeared and disappeared in the mist. But by stilling his breath and, to some degree, his jumping pulse, Jonathan was able to pick it out, the low continuo in the cantata of sea and wind. Pressing his foot hard on the soft ground he was able to feel it thrumming. It was the machine pulse of the system, he was sure. Then he saw, not twenty yards ahead, its feet.

It stood on iron-gray cement blocks with the feet of a monster bird, long iron talons that dug into the base. As Jonathan looked upward the clouds moved upward also, revealing two towers topped with funnels that spun slowly, slowly, like eyes on stalks surveying all. The middle section—a sort of torso from which the towers emerged—was clad like a battleship in metal squares riveted along each edge. The hum seemed to grow louder as the clouds dispersed.

Jonathan wanted to approach it, but hesitated. Perhaps the surrounding terrain was mined? Perhaps his mere presence would “set it off”? He didn’t know what this might entail: anything from a vast explosion to sirens and red lights
flashing in a basement in Virginia, where bored recruits played checkers day and night on the off chance that something might happen. He walked gingerly across the space between them. Ten feet from it he saw a small white sign screwed into one of the base blocks. It said
PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
. Well, he was a taxpayer, he could investigate what his government did with his money. Self-righteously he drew up next to it and, placing a trembling but determined hand on one of its girder legs, peered out over the cliff that was the machine’s aerie.

For the third time in as many weeks Jonathan saw the Faroes in a long perspective. From the airplane, from the Tórshavn hills, and now from this windy perch beside his steel compatriot, he’d seen islands strung on the green silk of sea, and kept his distance in the distance: he had surveyed. But the greensward that softened and tinted the cliffs was made of individual blades of grass, the houses that were at best bright dots along the shore had people in them, the whitecaps buoyed and bounced trawlers whose wakes he could barely detect. Fifty feet above him, the funnels swiveled from left to right, a never-ending surveillance. The girder throbbed under his fingers. Jonathan let go his hold on the machine and took another deep breath. He cast one last glance at the big picture and then, turning around, descended through the clouds into the details of the landscape.

Home

Every morning when he awoke in his bed in his house and looked up three feet to his low ceiling papered in faded strips of trellised roses, Jonathan had to listen to a string of clichés: A house is not a home; Home is where the heart
is; A man’s home is his castle; There’s no place like home. All lies.

Rising, washing his cold face in cold water in his bathroom with a view of three islands, he contradicted every item. A house
is
a home. He put American toothpaste on his toothbrush to demonstrate. Home is where the
coffee
is. An elegant chrome coffeepot bought in Tórshavn jiggled and hissed on the cast-iron stove. A man’s home is his castle—that was harder to refute: a parlor filled with an old lady’s collection of porcelain dolls, pink lampshades, stiff-cushioned chairs, mangy rugs crocheted by relatives; two bedrooms, three beds, none of which had a tolerable mattress; a refrigerator perched on a block of cement in the hallway, a luxury much expounded on by Eyvindur, though even Jonathan knew it was useless: the hallway itself was an adequate refrigerator; a kitchen with a hot plate (two burners), a kerosene stove, a good pine table, and a drawer filled with antique hard-boiled eggs—all of this was his.

Jonathan waged a daily battle against the urge to retreat, to hole up in his castle and read the four Agatha Christie mysteries he’d found in a stationery store near the Seaman’s Home or concoct field notes out of the movements of his neighbor’s dogs.

But. There’s no place like home.

An ambiguous statement, in the same category as Feed a cold and starve a fever. Was that: If you feed a cold you will be starving a fever? Or was it two separate sentences: Colds should be fed; fevers should be starved. On the home front, the sentence refused to resolve into a Good Thing or a Bad Thing. Like an optical joke, the “no-placeness” of home oscillated between cause for relief and cause for dismay. And, complicating matters further, “home” was itself ambiguous. Was home Cambridge? The Seaman’s Home? This purported castle on the island of Sandoy?

The real question was, was Jonathan any worse off
here than “at home”? Better here than at the Seaman’s Home, that was easy. No whale meat masquerading as steak, no HP Sauce glowering at him from its greasy bottle, silently urging
USE ME
to the interloper in unWonderfulland. Astute use of his index finger at the village grocery had improved Jonathan’s diet and, slowly, his vocabulary. He got fresh blocks of butter, bricks of smelly cheese, bread as crisp and crumbly as any he’d had in France, even, on courageous days, a few flat fish strung through the gills with twine from a three-toothed fellow on the dock. Pear juice, anchovy paste in a tube, and decent German salami were also available. And his daily foraging trip to the store three hundred yards of mud away was certainly an amusement for the villagers. Jonathan was happy to please. They laughed at him but they said good morning to him, and each day the shopkeeper taught him a new word. Boot, string, screwdriver, toilet paper, apron, motor oil, pepper, aspirin: like every store, it was full of nouns.

Better here than in Cambridge? This was harder to say. On the negative side, it was very strange here, but he’d expected that. The village was small and mean, his house drafty and crooked, its cement walls having shifted over the years. The movie theater that had raised his spirits when he first saw it had proved a mirage, in that it was closed (perpetually, it seemed) for repairs. His Faroese, though impressive to the natives, still felt like gravel in his mouth and lead in his mind. Jonathan at home—in Cambridge—was a talker. He was witty, acerbic, full of opinions, most of them unasked for, many of them uncomplimentary. Abroad he was bereft of irony, allusion, metaphor: he was just another lunk, and one who didn’t know the ropes, either.

And he seemed unable to learn them. In the first days he had taken on the groceries, the dock, and the post office, where each letter was weighed and the weight looked up in a book of prices, and then a new book, full of stamps,
opened, and a stamp taken out; and the whole process was repeated for the next letter. Meanwhile, from one corner came the mouth-shuffling of an old man chewing tobacco—
rumpah, grumpah, wroompah, paaft!
—who then adjusted himself on his seat, a crate stamped
FAROE FISH
in blue on the side, and inserted a new morsel to accompany the next letter. His chin and lips were brown. When Jonathan got tired of looking at the postal officer leafing through his books he would look at those slack sienna lips and shudder. But these three challenges were the only ones Jonathan had to meet to survive. Everything else was above and beyond, extraordinary measures, work.

To avoid work, he took walks. And from these arose the question of in what way Cambridge compared. It did not. Cambridge did not offer anything resembling scenery. Nor did it offer serenity. And though he didn’t understand why, Jonathan mute and foreign and tramping the tundra to escape his obligations to anthropology was serene.

The roads led roughly west or roughly east; just south of the village was a mountain, and the sea lay at its northern edge. The eastern road passed through a village named Húsavík on its way to the third village, Sandur, and was heavily trafficked by trucks of chickens, bread, boat fuel, and cousins on visiting jaunts. Skopun, Jonathan’s home, was where the mail boat landed, so anything requiring transportation off the island had to get there—
mail
in this case being interpreted so loosely as to include cars, a bride-to-be on her way to her wedding in Tórshavn, and all the wool that had been cleaned and carded in the village of Sandur over the winter and was now bound in hemp sacking for delivery to the sweater factory in Klaksvík, two islands farther north. An afternoon dodging mud and stares on this road had given Jonathan a preference for the other one.

He probably would have preferred the western road in any case. Even on a slow day, the eastern road had a destination; the western road did not. It died out slowly,
dwindling to one lane, becoming dirt (both roads were paved with a narrow macadam strip that perched tentatively on the mud), and resolving to a trodden grass swath. On the high fields that crowned the island’s outermost cliffs, all Jonathan could see before him was the road. At least, this was how he phrased it to himself, amazed to know, finally, that anything could lead somewhere, once you got off the track.

Jonathan was definitely off the track. For the first time in his life he had nothing to do. That is, having made an uneasy peace with his inability to do anything that resembled his idea of anthropology, he was left aimless but alive on the Faroe Islands. He had to fill his days, and his days were remarkably long. The sun rose from its half slumber at one-thirty in the morning and glared down with an insomniac sheen until well after eleven at night, when it wilted below the edge of the mountain, leaving the sky streaked with pink and yellow announcements of its imminent return. The solstice had come and gone, but the sun seemed intent on being a permanent fixture. Like Jonathan on the hills.

Jonathan walked, initially, in the afternoons, fortified by lunch and by having “interacted” to the degree he was capable: purchase of cheese, inquiry after mail, stroll along the dock to watch the gutting, filleting, cleaning, repairing, weighing, embarking, and unloading that constituted the Faroese economy. He made sure to be home by seven in the evening to listen to the BBC news on his shortwave radio (purchase funded by Icelandair). Through the fuzz and burble he heard mostly about sessions in Parliament, but it was in English and comforting. He hoped each day to tire himself enough to be able to sleep. He failed. He read all the murder mysteries. He twiddled his dials and listened to Radio Glasgow, Radio Bergen, Radio Free Europe, which played the blues late at night, making servicemen in Frankfurt, teenagers in Budapest, and Jonathan in
isolation sad and frustrated with the interference. Was it natural or communist generated? Whole verses would drop out, leaving a mournful hum that was the technical equivalent of the lonesome guitar riffs it had replaced.

And so he began taking longer walks. He packed his lunch and ate it on bluffs above the Atlantic, lying afterward on the orchid-studded blanket of grass and looking at the shapes of the clouds. Childhood games with clouds came back to him: a fish, a fleet of ships, a country composed of islands—the celestial mirror world held, in the end, nothing so different from the terrestrial one. He pushed farther down the road each day.

One day he came to the region of sheep. He’d wondered where they were. A small but thriving wool industry supplemented fish in the Faroese balance of trade. Faroese wool was prized enough to be advertised as such in sweater stores in Iceland:
HANDMADE IN FAROE WOOL
read labels in pullovers he hadn’t bought during his waiting period in Reykjavik. But Faroe wool on the hoof was somewhat intimidating. Jonathan’s only previous experience with sheep had been to look at them through train windows in France and to dismiss them as dumb for getting in his way when he was riding a bicycle through a flock from a neighbor’s farm on Mount Desert. Jonathan was the interloper here, and the sheep knew it.