Far Afield (10 page)

Labors, Herculean and Other

Sigurd, proprietor of the store with the salami and occasional language instructor, would be a good informant, Jonathan decided. He chose a balmy afternoon when he hoped there would be few customers for the initial interview. His audience was indeed small, but it was rapt: a toddler whose
hand was held by a girl too young to be her mother; two eight-year-old boys in hip boots who leaned together and giggled at everything Jonathan said; and Tobacco Man from the post office, whose secondary headquarters seemed to be a box in the corner of Sigurd’s store.

It began badly.

“My name is Johan,” Jonathan said.

Sigurd contradicted him immediately. “Your name is Jo-Na-Than.” He gave each syllable equal weight. “Jo-Na-Than Swift,” he added. Then, to clarify further,
“Gulliver’s Travels.”

Not far from true, thought Jonathan, though he wondered if he was being mocked. He looked into Sigurd’s eyes for disdain or distance; he saw only curiosity. Everybody in the store was waiting for him to say something else. He had a little speech prepared, so he gave it. “I am here to study the way people live, and the history. I hope you will talk to me about these things.”

“I don’t know any history. You should talk to Jón Hendrik.” Sigurd leaned his head toward the box in the corner. “Jón Hendrik,” he yelled, “tell this man some history.”

“The way you live now is more important,” Jonathan said quickly. He didn’t want to deal with Jón Hendrik and his dribbly brown mouth. Luckily, it appeared Jón Hendrik didn’t want to deal with him either. He spat and growled and chewed and mumbled, “Another time, another time.”

“Too bad,” said Sigurd. “He knows everything.” He leaned over the chipped wooden counter and said softly, “If you bring him some brandy, he’ll talk to you.”

“I can’t get any,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know how to get it,” he amended.

“Yes,” said Sigurd.

Yes, what? Jonathan scowled. But scowling wouldn’t help, was, in fact, just the sort of thing he’d resolved not to do. “Can you—” he began.

But Sigurd, who’d been staring out the small window beside Jón Hendrik, started talking rapidly to the young woman about, as far as Jonathan could tell, a boat of her father’s that was currently under repair in Sandur, the town on the other side of the island. The word
brenevin
—Faroese for liquor—cropped up occasionally. Jonathan stood on one foot, on the other foot, put his hands in his pockets, leaned on the counter. Was his conversation with Sigurd over? Was he supposed to leave? Nobody else was leaving; Jón Hendrik was chewing comfortably, the little boys had their heads together and were discussing Jonathan—he supposed—in frantic whispers. The toddler had not taken her eyes off Jonathan’s face from the moment he’d walked in, and she still stood gaping at him, her head lolling back on her short, soft baby neck. Sigurd and the girl talked faster and faster, the boys’ whispers got louder and louder, and Jonathan felt himself being obscured by a cloud of words—two of which popped out distinctly: “potato head.”

Sigurd heard them too. He turned around and put his face right between the little boys’ cheeks. “Don’t you talk that way about a stranger.” The boys’ eyes widened and blinked. “Ever,” he added. He straightened up and brought both hands down on the counter with a thump. “So,” he said, and smiled abstractedly at a point above Jonathan’s head.

Cast in the archetypal role of Stranger, Jonathan saw the interview in a new light. He was being humored, perhaps played with a little, mostly being checked out—but all under the protection of an ancient code of hospitality. Like all fierce, combative peoples, Vikings had had strict rules about how to treat foreigners, interlopers, ambassadors. You couldn’t kill your enemies while they were in your house. A sort of Bronze Age Geneva Convention. He sighed. He wasn’t going to get very far as long as he remained a stranger. But what else was he? He looked at the six faces around him, which ranged over the whole life span,
and despaired of knowing what animated them. Their blue eyes, which daily saw sea and clouds and one another, had never seen what Jonathan considered the world. To know them, he would have to know a world in which
this
was the world—- and that was impossible. He might as well have been a visitor from another planet.

This same thought must have been in the girl’s mind, for she let go of the toddler’s hand and poked Jonathan gently in the arm, as if checking his substantiality, then asked, “You are from America?”

“Yes,” said Jonathan, noting that she’d used the polite form of
you
, which he hadn’t mastered.

“What is the name of your village?”

“Boston.” Jonathan had an inspiration. “It’s a fishing village like Skopun, but it’s bigger.”

“And your father and mother live there?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “They must be sad that you have gone so far away from home.”

Jonathan conjured parents who might be sad about such a thing and nodded. Then he decided to meet his language problem head on. “I did not learn how to say
you
in the polite way—” he began. Everyone in the store laughed.

“That’s very good,” Sigurd said. “Then you will be a real Faroese. We don’t ever use that
you
.”

“But you used it,” Jonathan said to the girl.

“We use it with Danes,” she said.

“Danes like it,” Sigurd said.

“I’m not a Dane,” said Jonathan. Being a Dane was bad. Danes were colonial overlords. Better to be a Martian.

“Jo-Na-Than Swift,” said Sigurd. “But he was Irish, wasn’t he? He wasn’t from your country.”

Jonathan was struck by Sigurd’s making a fine distinction not usually important to outsiders, between Irish and English; did the Faroese consider themselves the Irish
of the Arctic, oppressed and misunderstood? This was a trail worth following.

“Well, what about the Danes?” he asked, liking the open-endedness of the question. “Nondirective” and “open-ended” were terms heard often in the anthropology department. Woe to the anthropologist who determined the outcome of his research by witlessly asking questions that led straight to answers.

Nobody wanted to talk about the Danes. “Danes,” said Sigurd, making it sound like a curse. And Jón Hendrik gargled in agreement.

“In America, are there trees?” One of the little boys had ventured out from his pal’s arm and come a few steps toward Jonathan. Everybody turned expectantly, waiting for his answer. They didn’t want to talk about Danes, he realized, because they wanted to hear about America, his native planet.

“Yes,” he said, “there are trees everywhere.”

“In America,” said Sigurd, “there is everything. Am I right?” He cocked his head at Jonathan.

“There aren’t any Faroese people in America,” said Jonathan, pleased with his own diplomacy.

But Jón Hendrik had something to say to this. “There are hundreds of Faroese in America.
You
just don’t know them, because you don’t know anything about the Faroes.” He shot a nearly black stream expertly into the corner behind him.

“Where are they?” Jonathan was skeptical.

“In Dorchester,” said Jón Hendrik, “and in New York City.”

“What do they do there?” Jonathan couldn’t imagine a Faroese in New York City, or Dorchester, for that matter.

“They
fish
,” said Jón Hendrik. Then he shut his eyes to indicate he wasn’t giving out any more information.

“Can you eat trees?” asked the little boy.

“No. They’re pretty to look at, that’s all.” Jonathan
reconsidered. “You can climb up them. Sometimes you can make a little house in the branches and sit up there.”

The boy’s mouth opened at this idea, urging Jonathan to greater heights. “You can make things out of them. Like this counter.” He touched it. “This is made from a tree.” He looked around the store for more examples, but the floor was concrete and the walls were cement block. A broom hanging on the wall behind him offered itself. “This handle is made from a tree.” He thought for a second. “Trees are good to stand under when the sun is too hot.”

“Too hot?” This was the girl.

“Sometimes in America in the summer, the sun is very hot.”

“Are you closer to the sun than we are?” asked Sigurd. “You can’t be. We have more sun than you do. We have daytime all night here.”

Jonathan couldn’t explain why this was so, though he had a vague notion that it had to do with the shape of the earth. Instead, he produced information he was sure of: “There used to be trees all over the Faroes too.”

“When?” This was from the other little boy.

“A very long time ago.”

“Did you see them, Jón Hendrik?” asked the boy, peering over the counter.

“He thinks he knows Faroese history,” was all Jón Hendrik said.

“If you wouldn’t be so unfriendly, he could learn Faroese history from you,” said Sigurd. He leaned over the counter again. “He’ll come around when he knows you better. It’s just his way.”

Jonathan nodded. He didn’t care if Jón Hendrik never “came around,” though he knew he would be the perfect informant. Sigurd, with his blue overalls and his literary references and his hardware-grocery-stationery-ship’s-chandler emporium, appealed to Jonathan much more. But he wasn’t here to make friends.

With that sobering thought, a desire to get out of the store arose in Jonathan. Surely he had overstayed his welcome, if he’d ever had one. On the dock and in the post office, Jonathan had watched people taking leave of each other, so he had an idea of how to do it. First, take hands out of pockets; second, say “So, so, so”; third, look at the floor—or ground; then, another “So, so, so,” accompanied by reinsertion of hands in pockets. The point of no return was signaled by the phrase “I reckon so,” addressed to the clouds and, if the other person were older or in some way venerable, repeated with nods and, rarely, a smile. But this was only one side of a streamlined version; when you got two people going, it could take up to twenty minutes, what with comments on the weather and the trading of “So, so, so,” until both parties were satisfied. Still, there was nothing for it but to launch in.

“So, so, so,” he ventured.

To which Sigurd in instinctive response said, “So, so, so.”

Jonathan took his hands out of his pockets (which he had omitted to do at the start) and put forth another “So, so, so.”

Going for the long version, Sigurd said, “Good weather.”

“Today,” said Jonathan. An inspired response, he was sure. He was still waiting for Faroese weather to turn on him; so far, soggy weeks in Tórshavn notwithstanding, he’d seen none of the fabled storm or drear.

“Today,” repeated Sigurd. He laughed. He turned to Jón Hendrik and shouted, “He says the weather’s good
today
.”

“He’ll see,” growled Jón Hendrik.

“He sees plenty,” Sigurd stated.

A balm of triumph suffused Jonathan; one person, at least, did not think him a boob.

“So,” said Sigurd.

A single
so
wasn’t in the script. And to confuse things further, the girl, pulling the child in her charge closer, chimed in with “I reckon so.”

Jonathan really did want to go. “I reckon so,” he said, hoping he could ride out on the girl’s coattails.

But, as he had suspected from his research, women’s scripts were different, and with a quick “So, so, so,” she was out the door, leaving him to thread his own way through the maze of farewell. And between his incompetence and Sigurd’s boredom (Jonathan could see no other explanation for Sigurd’s embarking on the epic version of goodbye), this might have taken the rest of the afternoon. They were rescued by the arrival of two fishermen in yellow outfits who needed tobacco and lubricating oil. Jonathan scuttled out into the street with a “Good day” and an all-American wave. This gesture evidently struck Sigurd as mysterious, for in Jonathan’s last glimpse of him, through the window beside Jón Hendrik’s head, he was open-mouthed and inattentive to his customers.

Pleased with his productive afternoon, Jonathan went down to the dock to watch the mail boat load for Tórshavn, which took ten minutes, then went to the post office. Improbably, Jón Hendrik had in those ten minutes transported himself to his major headquarters and was chewing in the corner when Jonathan arrived. “Good day the American!” he said. He tendered this greeting as if they had not been at loggerheads only fifteen minutes before.

Devilish, Jonathan said, “Fine weather.” But Jón Hendrik did not reply. There was mail: a letter from Professor Olsen and a bank statement from the Cambridge Trust Company, with Gerda’s tidy script forwarding it to the Faroes.

Feeling a little tired, Jonathan decided to go home and read his letters (a bank statement qualified, in these circumstances, as a letter) and then make himself corn muffins for dinner. And take notes on the day.

Jonathan’s preferred spot for letter reading was the toilet, so there he repaired. A pleasant twenty minutes passed during which he learned that his balance was $2,500 and that Olsen was thinking of coming to the Faroes at the beginning of September. (Jonathan doubted he would. Olsen had, in his two previous letters, announced that he was thinking of coming to the Faroes at the beginning of July and the beginning of August; Jonathan figured it was his way of assuring emotional support.) Gerda had enclosed a hurried note on the order of
We miss you, weather’s been lovely, off to Maine in twenty minutes, do write
. What was puzzling was that she had gone to the trouble of carefully opening the bank statement, tucking in her note, and sealing up the whole in such a way as to be nearly unnoticeable: was it meant to be a surprise? Or was she somehow apologizing for opening his mail?

Jonathan hitched his pants up and looked out the window at his view. It was magnificent. Never, in all the world, had there been such a well-situated toilet. The house was on the higher of the two village roads and in addition stood on a little rise of its own, so from this second-floor window Jonathan saw miles across the broad fjord to Streymoy, the main island, and up to the Troll’s Head where the birds’ kingdom lay. His daily twenty minutes in the bathroom were dependably enjoyable—he had even considered making the bathroom into his office. It was big enough; clearly, before indoor plumbing, it had been a bedroom. Even now, since it lacked a bathtub, there was room for a desk. But: Don’t shit where you work. Or something along those lines. He leaned over to flush.