Far Afield (2 page)

“Thank you, Lars,” he said, and repeated
“Manga tak,”
which was perceived as the native language in Iceland, Denmark,
Sweden, Norway, and the Faroes. “I’m going to sleep now.”

“No sleep,” said Lars, smiling and shaking his head.

Too tired to argue or pursue it—was this a warning, an order, a prediction?—Jonathan went off down the corridor and got back under his puff.

It was a prediction, and accurate. The problem was the sun. Jonathan had reset his watch when he landed in Iceland, while waiting for his baggage to arrive, so one-thirty in the morning was correct. Nine-thirty at night in the U.S.A. The sun, now a normal sunlike yellow, had nothing to do with either of these times. And there were no curtains. Unbelievable, unbelievable. Jonathan shook his head and poked in drawers for a blanket to drape over the window, but no, there was no need for a blanket because of the eiderdown, which was much too hot to get under, what with the sun and the sulfurous energy of the unstoppable radiator—he was ready to cry. He sat on the bed and cried. He cried for his lost baggage, his mind, which he would also lose if he didn’t get more sleep, and his home, which already was but a speck across the ocean and whose balmy, tree-lined, predictable shore he would not see again for a year.

When he woke up, it was dark. His watch, resting on the pillow next to him, said ten-thirty. The room was gray and cool, the radiator quiet. His head was clear. He sat up in bed, wrapped in the puff, and made a list in his notebook.

Shirt, pants, socks
. A sweater? He made his way to the window, somewhat hampered by his wrapping. The day was chilled by a mist that had put out the sun. A sweater would be wise. There were many sweaters in his suitcase. And his vitamins, his paprika, his framed photograph of the pine woods on Mount Desert, which he’d taken along as a savage would bundle up his wooden ancestors when setting out on a journey. And his Mallory, his late Dickens,
his thermal underwear, his dehydrated vegetable soup: everything he’d considered necessary for a year in the bush.

You can get through a week, he said to himself. But the idea had been that he could not, that these things were essential to life. If this turned out not to be true, perhaps they would never show up, knowing themselves to be extraneous. Do not anthropomorphize, Jonathan told himself. He loved to tell himself this (it was an order he needed to give often), because the next thought, that he was the anthropomorphizing anthropologist, inevitably followed and made him laugh.

However, he didn’t laugh. He added
sweater
to his list and put himself into the shower, which smelled exactly like Hell. Fragrant with brimstone, swatting at his thighs with a tiny towel, he scribbled
soap, shampoo, toothbrush
on his list.

Two hours later, congratulating himself on his intelligence in adding a small bag to his purchases, Jonathan stood at the untended front desk of the hotel listing to the left with his bundles and hoping for Lars. He did this for five minutes before he noticed a bell near the ledger. He was about to ring it when a woman who looked to be Lars’s mother came out from behind a chintz curtain.

“Please?” she said.

“Good day,” said Jonathan, to gain time and to explore her English.

“Is it you the American who is traveling to the Faroes?”

“I am.” News traveled faster than he did, apparently. He had told only the ticket clerk at the airport.

“Please. The weather. You will not go today.”

Language difficulties again obscured the mood of this sentence: was he being threatened, informed, or pleaded with? Rain had started while he’d been shopping, but rain didn’t deter planes in America. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“Please. My husband speaks better.” She went behind
the curtain and was replaced shortly by Lars in thirty years, or herself as a man.

He was a man to inspire confidence. The blondness, the icy eyes, the chiseled features that on a woman or a boy were eerie and a little blank, on this man combined to create an ideal type. Miles of sea and years of horizons were in his eyes, untold yards of nets had passed through his hands, and every wind on earth had burnished his skin to a fine gold hue. Carved in wood, he could have been the figurehead on the first ship of the Viking fleet; in bronze, the statue in the city square.

“You can’t go today, lad,” he said. He sounded exactly like Paul McCartney. “You see, they haven’t any radar, and it’s a rough landing there, rough winds over there, so you’ll have to wait till it lifts up. The weather.” He gestured at the ceiling. “It’ll lift, in a day or two.”

“No radar,” said Jonathan, but more to keep him talking than to comment.

“You’d do better on a boat,” he conceded. “Do you like the sea?” He looked Jonathan up and down. “There’s many as can’t be on it.”

“Oh, I like it,” said Jonathan. He thought of the ferry out to the Cranberry Isles, with the black-backed gulls screaming at the cormorants, the comforting chug of the engine in the effervescence of July waves.

“Well, now, I could find you a boat.”

“I have my plane ticket.” Jonathan felt courage ebbing. After all, the Faroes lay hundreds of miles away over empty, open Atlantic. “How will I know, though, when I can leave?”

“I’ll tell you.” The hotelkeeper smiled, which brought brown wrinkles to his gilded face.

And how, Jonathan wondered, would he know? And what was he to do with himself in the meantime? He’d seen all of Reykjavik in his shopping spree; he couldn’t imagine occupying himself there for two days. Some of this must
have shown in his face, because the modern Viking put a large hand on his arm and said, “Come into the dining room and have some lunch, lad. There’ll be the time to make your plans after you eat.”

As Jonathan followed his host into the dining room, he wondered how to make him stay and talk; his voice was soothing, and Jonathan felt the lack of company. But was it proper for a guest to invite a hotelkeeper to lunch? And who would pay? The etiquette of this situation would have been daunting in America; here it was impenetrable. Jonathan resigned himself to ordering something awful out of ignorance and eating it alone. But the Viking drew up a chair for himself and spoke quickly to Lars, who had come to the table to take their order. Seeing them together, Jonathan was sure they were father and son.

“Herring in brine, herring in cream, herring with salt only. Salt cod—you may not like this. White bread for you. Americans eat only white bread, isn’t it so? Russian salad”—this was a bowl of chopped carrots and potatoes, swimming in what looked like mayonnaise—“soup of cod. Here’s a sausage from the butcher next door,
skyr
—you had that last night, excellent—and here’s some jam, lingonberry, very nice, from Sweden.”

Under his host’s benevolent ice gaze, Jonathan tried everything. Most of it was palatable, though the salt cod was indeed not to his liking: tough, more like an old piece of rope than food. The herrings in their various dressings were wonderful. He alternated between bread with herring and bread with jam, moistening himself with cod soup now and then. There was nothing to drink. Toward the end of the meal Lars carried two cups of tea, black as night in America, to the table.

And through all this the innkeeper talked.

“I shipped out of Liverpool fifteen years. That’s where I learned your language. We went all the way round the Cape of Good Hope, but I spent most of my life in these
waters. The fishing’s best here, in the north. Up by Spitzbergen it’s fine. Up there’s it’s sun all the time. You’d see it high and full all hours of the summer, not like it is here. It’s a brave sun up there. And you’re an ornithologist going to the Faroes.”

Jonathan shook his head, but his mouth was too full to contradict.

“You’ll find plenty of birds up there. Why, it’s a sportsman’s paradise. My mother was from there. Klaksvík. My father shipped over there and he got caught in a storm. Lots of bad storms off Klaksvík. He had to put up for weeks. He was in her house waiting for the weather to shift off. So he sent for her, when he got home. That was nearly a year later. And she came. Never saw the Faroes again. But she thought of it, I could see. She’d stand on the dock of a time and look out. She never went back, even when her mother died. I’ve been there.” He stopped and looked intently at Jonathan. “It’s a drear place, you know. But there’s something in it. Makes it hard to forget. Bad weather. All the time!” He laughed and wiped his mouth.

“But it’s a hard life, fishing,” he went on. Jonathan, mouth open, had been about to clear up the ornithology confusion. “Hard life for a boy, harder for a man. You work all the time. Where there’s always sun, there’s no sleep. Fifteen years was enough for one man’s life. I’m on the land now, in my home.” He surveyed his dining room. “But Lars, he wants to see the world. I’ve told him, you’ll see only ocean. You’ll see waves and more of them. But the young don’t listen to the old—or else, where would we be? If they listened to us, time would have stopped long ago.”

Jonathan’s ears tingled. This had the ring of authentic folk wisdom. He repeated it to himself. It justified his persisting in going to the Faroes against all his professors’ protests that this was not a foreign culture; youth paves the way to the future. But was he young enough to qualify as
“youth”? Since he’d passed twenty-five, the year before, Jonathan was prey to a sense of losing time, of moving too slowly. In bad moods he made depressing calculations about how old he’d be when he finished his thesis, which, depending on how bad the mood was, varied from twenty-eight to thirty-four.

“Johan,” said the hotelkeeper, suddenly breaking off his narrative. “Johan, you are not an ornithologist, I think.”

“No,” admitted Jonathan. Now he felt revealed, as though he were a spy. “But how did you know?”

“Ornithologists look like birds. I’ve seen many of them. They come here to Iceland, and they all look like birds. You know, that’ll happen with people and what they do, or their dogs, or their wives. I’ve seen husband and wife you can’t tell apart. It’s time as does it.”

More folk wisdom. Jonathan decided to act like an anthropologist. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

“Egil. Egil is a Faroese name, from my mother. It was her brother’s name, who died in a storm once.”

Was it possible to die twice in a storm? Jonathan feared it was. The whole world at this moment seemed a “drear place,” with the rainy darkness now as oppressive as last night’s low glare. Outside the dining room windows Reykjavik’s main street was a solid, uninviting block of cement doubled by growing puddles on the tarmac.

“So. Are you a spy for the CIA?”

“Is that what I look like?” Jonathan had to laugh. This was too improbable, being taken for a spy in a dump of an Icelandic hotel. “I’m a student. I study”—here he paused, because he had formulated an exact description, and this was its inauguration—“I study the folkways, the things people do from the old days. If they still hunt whales and sing the old songs and dance.”

“A spy,” said Egil. “A spy into the past. Isn’t it so?”
He laughed. Then he said, “These old ways, they are dead now. People don’t want to think about these old ways now. You won’t be getting much out of people on that score.”

Jonathan had worried himself silly on this point for months already. “Maybe not here, in Iceland. But in the Faroes, they still dance and hunt whales. I know they do.”

“Maybe so. Maybe they do.” Egil nodded and poked at one of the dishes of herring. “And maybe they’ll even talk to you of it. But maybe they’d rather be talking about progress, you know?” He popped a fat slice of herring into his mouth; Jonathan saw black stubs of molars marching back to his throat. “The Faroes are looking for their independence. They are thinking of their fish factories and their three-hundred-mile fishing limit and how to break from Denmark. They want”—here he couldn’t cover a smile—“to have their own foreign policy.”

“You have your own,” Jonathan pointed out.

“The influence of Iceland on the world—it’s like a mouse pissing into the ocean. And the Faroes! That’s like a flea pissing. We are small countries.” Egil’s eyes narrowed. Was he looking at some large, influential country on a horizon Jonathan couldn’t detect? “Small countries,” he said again. “You know that small men make much of themselves.”

“Like Napoleon?” The conversation seemed to be drifting away from Jonathan. He yawned. “I think I’m tired,” he said. “I think I have to rest some more. I’m exhausted.”

“Well, yes, you might be. And you’ve another long journey ahead of you. Rest up for it. You’ll be leaving tomorrow, I think. These winds are shifting.”

But winds in the north, though they rise up quickly, die down slowly, and two more days passed before Jonathan found himself again at the airport. His baggage had turned up in Copenhagen, the derisive ticket clerk told him, and would be arriving in the Faroes within the week. On his
hotel bill, Jonathan had noticed, he’d been charged for half the lunch he’d eaten with Egil. Lars had accompanied him to the movies, where they’d seen
Serpico
. Lars and the rest of the audience said “Bang bang” at appropriate points in the action; this was clearly not the first time any of them had seen the film.

Overdoses of sleep, food, and Reykjavik had brought Jonathan to an expectant yet placid state of mind that seemed to him a good beginning to a journey. Long stretches of nothing-to-do had not activated a bad mood of the sort that had threatened during lunch with Egil. On the contrary, he had slipped into a tolerance of boredom that was nearly happiness.

This calm was useful in the airplane. Without doubt it was the most nerve-racking trip he had ever taken. The plane was a Fokker from World War Two converted to a passenger plane by the addition of ten unsteady rows of seats from a bus. The one stewardess hurtled up and down the aisle, a warning to all to stay in their places. Every fifteen minutes a pocket of air threw them down or flung them up, the sensation lasting many, many seconds more than any bump or drop Jonathan had experienced on the Eastern Shuttle. Many passengers prayed, some vomited.