Far Afield

  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.

  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.