Far Afield (11 page)

The toilet, a new Danish model, had a roaring cataract of a flush that could sweep his shit to Tórshavn. But now it did not flush. The handle that usually sprang at his touch, unleashing a tremendous
whoosh
, refused to move. Jonathan scowled and tried again. Nothing. He jiggled the handle this way and that, ran some water in the sink to make sure
there was water (there was), opened the back of the toilet looking for obvious problems, tried again. This time a thin trickle made him hopeful. Several tries later, though, he had succeeded only in filling the bowl to the danger point, contents still afloat.

He shut the door on the situation and went downstairs to make muffins. Like many unmechanically minded people, Jonathan believed that if you gave the machine time to recover it would perform properly. He would let the toilet rest. He could piss in the sink, and probably by morning the toilet would somehow have healed itself.

In the morning, his production of yesterday greeted him when he stumbled into the bathroom. Tentatively, he tried the toilet handle; it was as rigid as it had been the day before. Pissing into the sink, Jonathan considered his options: wait for the miraculous self-healing process to begin; ask for advice; ask for somebody to fix it. The first seemed foolish; the second pointless (Jonathan knew his limits, and he doubted his ability to fix a toilet in English, never mind Faroese); and the third involved getting rid of the current contents of the toilet. Breakfast first, he decided.

Breakfast, with its accompanying internal rumbles, only brought home to Jonathan the fact that much of what humans eat is returned to the world as shit and confirmed his initial sense that option three was the way to go. But where was he to put this all-too-obvious evidence of his humanity? In a plastic bag, and then in the trash barrel outside the house. But the bread came naked from the bakery on the other side of the island; the cheese, cut from a big slab, was wrapped in brown paper; the fish was fresh out of the sea. All the traditional American locations for plastic were here so reduced to their origins that there was no need for Baggies. Then he remembered that salt cod, of which the Faroes produced most of the world supply, came in a thick plastic bag stapled shut at the top. He would go
to the “other” grocery store and purchase some, throw out the contents, and use the bag. Then he would find himself a toilet fixer.

Within an hour Jonathan was ready to find help. He had made a new friend in the proprietor of the second grocery store, a red-faced woman who was delighted that Americans ate salt cod—as Jonathan assured her they did, in order to cover his tracks. And he had for the first time sensed the life of the village: she and everyone in her store (the usual assortment of lounging kids, bored young mothers, and hurried fishermen) knew he was the American who had come to live with them. Everybody in town knew him. Of course: in a village of four hundred people, a visitor from outer space would not go unnoticed. He found a certain comfort in this, for it relieved him of the burden of self-explanation. A deeper comfort lay in this evidence that the tree falling in the forest made a noise. Life was not restricted to what went on in his head; life surged along on a tide of gossip and common interests, one of which was his unaccountable but real presence.

So, he had a verifiable existence. Cheered, Jonathan went over to Sigurd’s store to get help.

Sigurd diagnosed the problem immediately. “Full septic tank,” he said. But
septic tank
in Faroese wasn’t within Jonathan’s ken, so there was an interlude of diagram drawing on a scrap of brown paper. Particularly explicit was the overflowing heap of turds Sigurd inked into his cross-section of Jonathan’s front yard, stopping occasionally to hold his nose so there would be no doubt what he was representing. Pleased with his drawing, Sigurd beamed at Jonathan and said, “Full, completely full of shit.”
Shit
, an Anglo-Saxon word, was easy to recognize.

“What shall I do?”

“Empty it.” Sigurd nodded. “With a wheelbarrow.”
Wheelbarrow
necessitated another sketch.

This must be a joke, thought Jonathan. “That would take forever,” he objected. “Also, I don’t have a wheelbarrow.”

“I’ll send my brother Jens Símun.”

“He’ll help?”

“He has a wheelbarrow.”

“Where am I going to put it?”

“In the sea,” said Sigurd.

Jonathan went home in a downcast mood.

Jens Símun had one blue eye and one brown eye, and he was in Jonathan’s kitchen before the water for tea—which Jonathan had put on as soon as he got home—had come to a boil. He was bigger and rougher-looking than Sigurd, but these seemed to Jonathan good qualities in a person who was going to demonstrate shoveling shit.

“So, so, so,” said Jens Símun, shutting his blue eye. He sat down at the kitchen table. “A
temun
,” he said.

Jonathan produced a bachelor’s
temun:
bread, butter, plum jam, tea with plenty of milk. Jens Símun ate three pieces of bread with condiments, then asked for cake. Cake was the real point of a
temun
, Jonathan knew. What was it about island living that nourished a sweet tooth? He thought of the English and their treacle, the ranks of bad eclairs in the bakery on Mount Desert.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have any cake.”

“So, so, so.” Jens Símun took another slab of bread.

“What am I going to do with that?” Jonathan asked, leaning in the direction of his front yard.

“I have to look at it, to see how bad it is.” He chewed his bread slowly. “Sometimes you have to stir.”

“Stir?”

“Sometimes it’s too hard to get it out.”

Jonathan shut his eyes and hoped he wouldn’t have to stir.

But, of course, he did have to stir, Jens Símun proclaimed
after lifting what looked like a big manhole cover at the edge of the lawn. He shook his head: this was a very bad case indeed. As they stood looking into the dark depths, Jonathan’s next-door neighbor, with whom he had never exchanged a word, came out and joined them. He and Jens Símun flanked Jonathan, both shaking their heads. Then the neighbor disappeared behind his house and returned a minute later with a hose, dripping water, and a long pole. He handed these to Jonathan.

The idea was to run the water into the tank while stirring with the pole. This would “soften things up,” Jens Símun explained, and make it easier to remove the contents with the shovel that the neighbor, Petur, had brought after a second trip behind his house. Then, fill the wheelbarrow and take it down to the sea.

“Where?” Jonathan didn’t think he was supposed to dump it right into the harbor alongside the boats.

“Oh, to the west,” said Jens Símun airily, waving his hand toward the Troll’s Head.

Petur was more specific. “You see where the breakwater ends?” He pointed to a concrete wall jutting out from one of the arms of the natural harbor. “You go down there and dump over the wall, into the sea.” He turned back to his house. “Dump to the west,” he added, “because the current runs to the west.”

So Jonathan began his labors. Hercules, he remembered from
Gods and Heroes
, had diverted two rivers to wash away his piles of manure; Jonathan had only his hose and his hands. After the first trip to the breakwater with a full wheelbarrow, he decided that Sisyphus was a more appropriate role model; after the second trip, he stopped thinking.

For the early part of the afternoon, Jonathan worked steadily, achieving a rhythm: stirring was hard, but not as hard as excavation and loading the barrow; his recovery period was his walk to the sea. Though in the beginning
he’d feared the wheelbarrow would tip over, he soon realized that it had an implacable stability, and he was able to look at the scenery as he walked instead of peering anxiously at the front wheel. It was the dead time of day before the second mail boat arrived, when all the men were working and all the women were washing the lunch dishes. Jonathan and his noxious cargo were unobserved on their rounds.

He returned from his eighth or ninth trip to find his septic tank surrounded by visitors: Jens Símun, Petur the neighbor, a man he didn’t know, and the two little boys who had likened his head to a potato. The opportunity for a pause was welcome. Jonathan smiled, but nobody smiled back. He let the wheelbarrow drop to the ground with a thump and sighed. Jens Símun and Petur moved aside to allow him access to his hole.

Jonathan’s will failed him. This was not a task he could perform under observation, and clearly these people were here to watch. Didn’t they have anything better to do? No, they didn’t, Jonathan realized; there was not much to do in Skopun on a long summer’s evening. Whatever Jens Símun, Petur, and the third man worked at, they were probably finished by now, four-thirty. And boys of eight are famous the world over for having nothing to do. His septic tank was the newest movie in town.

But did that mean they had to stand so close? Jonathan the Anglo-Saxon liked to keep a few feet between himself and other people. As he set to stirring and shoveling again—for that seemed the only thing to do, and his pride, which would not let him walk away, was an adequate substitute for will—he had to be careful not to dump shit on their shoes or jab them with the handle of the shovel.

Now and again one offered a comment: “Tough work”; “Badly clogged”; “This happened to Johan Heinesen over on Nolsoy.” The little boys declined the chance to call Jonathan a shithead, for which he thanked God, or whatever
force had inflicted this situation on him. He felt that he was being tested. His patience was certainly being tried. And more and more he felt himself fulfilling—or attempting to fulfill—one of those tasks that in fairy tales win the maiden for the young knight and in myth win the favor of the gods.

Under their blue eyes, he’d loaded another barrowful. As he wheeled off down the road, he wondered if perhaps he’d return to find Jens Símun stirring for him. An idle hope, he supposed. Indeed, when he got back, nobody had moved. Not completely true, he saw; they had moved the number of inches necessary to accommodate the addition of Jón Hendrik’s thin, cranky body to the circle.

“In America, you hire people to do this, hah,” said Jón Hendrik in perfect English.

“In America, we have a sewage system,” Jonathan spat out, in perfect Faroese. He’d been looking up words in his dictionaries (English-Danish, Danish-Faroese) the night before.

“Now you are here,” Jón Hendrik said.

“Vœlkomin til Føroyar,”
Jonathan said, resuming his shoveling.

This remark, made in bad temper, was a big hit. Jón Hendrik laughed and stamped his foot on the ground in delight. Jens Símun’s multicolored eyes watered with tears, Petur slapped his thigh, and the unknown man had to lean on Petur for stability while he chortled. Jonathan was so surprised that he stopped working and stared at them.

“What’s so funny?” he asked.

“You are beginning to understand our country,” said Jón Hendrik. And as if this was what they had all been waiting for, the group dispersed. Even the boys wandered off to stare at somebody else.

Two wheelbarrows later one of the little boys came back into the yard and said, shyly and very softly, “Papa says you are to come for dinner.”

“Oh,” said Jonathan. “Where do you live?”

“There.” The boy pointed next door, to Petur’s house.

“Your father is Petur?”

Nods.

“Is that your brother, the boy you walk around with?” Jonathan figured he might as well get going on a kinship chart.

But this made the boy giggle. “That’s my
cousin
,” he said, as if only an idiot wouldn’t know.

“When should I come?”

This the little boy didn’t know. “Mom!” he yelled. A woman’s head popped out a window. “The American wants to know what time is dinner.”

“When he comes.”

“When you come, we’ll eat,” the boy repeated.

Jonathan leaned on his shovel. “I think I’ll come soon,” he said. “What’s your name?” The boy didn’t answer. “My name is Jonathan.”

“I know that,” said the boy. Then he skipped off into his house.

Twenty minutes later, sponged off in tepid water and dressed in clean clothes, Jonathan was knocking at his neighbors’ door. He could hear voices and kitchen noises, but nobody answered. After a few more knocks he opened the door and walked in.

He was in a kitchen similar to his own, but with life in it: framed embroidered mottoes on the wall, a row of cacti on the windowsill, a tablecloth, steam from cooking, noise from the conversation of Petur and a number of other people at the table and from the radio blaring in Faroese about tomorrow’s tides.

“Good evening,” said Jonathan.

“Jo-Na-Than,” said Petur, intoning it in Sigurd’s fashion. He stood up and began the introductions.

Maria at the stove was the wife, the nameless boy was Jens Símun, the cousin Jens Símun went around with was
Petur, a young man of about twenty was Heðin, another young man who looked a year or two older was Olí, and the girl from Sigurd’s store, minus the toddler, was Sigrid. Jonathan’s head was in a whirl. Petur concluded the introductions by clapping Jonathan on the shoulder and announcing, “And this is the American!”

Jonathan sat down and smiled feebly. He was hungry, tired, and puzzled by what all these people were doing in Petur’s kitchen. Everyone had a plate, so they were all staying for dinner; the question that interested him was whether they ate together every night. Plunging headlong into anthropology, he asked, “Are you all related to each other?”

Heðin or Olí—Jonathan had mixed them up immediately—said, “In America, you don’t have such big families?” Then everyone laughed.

But Petur, in the same sober way he had explained to Jonathan where to dump his wheelbarrow, outlined the connections meticulously.

“Heðin and Jens Símun are our sons, and Petur is Jens Símun’s son, my brother—”

Jonathan interrupted here. “You and Sigurd and Jens Símun are all brothers, then?”

“Yes. And Sigrid is Jens Símun’s daughter.”

“Your niece,” said Jonathan.

“Yes.”

“Petur’s sister.” Jonathan wanted to be sure he had everything straight.