Far Afield (4 page)

“I’m going to be on a stamp,” Eyvindur was saying. “One like this.” He moved toward a particularly dark and mysterious painting. “I sold it to the Parliament. It’s there now. But it’s like this, except it’s bigger.” He moved close to one of his windows and stared out into the pale amber evening of early summer. “This country,” he said. “I have been to Italy. That’s the way in which I found out that I was Italian. I am speaking in similes, of course. I went there to study painting. Do you know how surprising it was for me to go from here to there? Have you been there?”

Jonathan nodded. Hot, cramped, interminable trip from Paris to Rome in August, sharing his couchette with a self-confessed Fascist who missed the good old days; but the pots of oleander, the Alpine winds that cooled their passage, the gilded ceilings of churches and of noon—five days had been enough for him to know five years would not be enough. “How long were you there?” he asked.

“Two years. How I missed the Faroes! I suffered without the ocean. I went once, swimming somewhere on the Riviera. I had never swimmed before. You say swimmed?”

“Swum. Swim, swam, swum.”

“I had never swam?”

“No. I swam, I have swum.” Eyvindur scowled. “It’s irregular,” Jonathan said. “You just have to memorize it.”

“Too many colors there, in Italy,” Eyvindur went on. “But I stayed. I learned about all the colors. I learned to eat things I did not want to eat. Hah!” He pointed at Jonathan. “You will have to do the same.”

“I guess so.” Jonathan thought of the blocks of whale fat. Being forced to eat gnocchi didn’t seem an equal hardship.

“There aren’t enough rocks there,” Eyvindur concluded, sitting down on his sofa beside a stuffed sheep.

Jonathan decided to take a different approach to the evening. He leaned forward. “Tell me about your political activities. Professor Olsen says you are an important figure in nationalist politics.”

“Oh, I am bored with all of that. And you could never make sensibility of it. It’s too complicated.”

“But that’s why I’m here.”

“No. It’s absurd. We are just pretending. I do it to make some trouble. In America you have baseball; we have politics. Who cares what we do here in this little country? You must study the old ways.” He too leaned forward. “Study the dancing, study the stories, find the old people who are dying and ask them about the old ways. This politics, it’s what we do to make ourselves feel real. You understand me?”

“No.”

“Why are we getting all jazzed up—you say that, all jazzed up?”

“You can.”

“All jazzied up about politics. We, the Faroese. It
doesn’t matter what we decide. We teach Danish in the school, we don’t teach Danish in the school; we get out of NATO, we stay in NATO—nobody knows. Nobody in the world knows anything about us.”

“Jazzed,” said Jonathan, “not jazzied.”

“Okay. Jazzed. But you understand?”

“But self-determination?” Jonathan was the child of liberal parents.

Eyvindur lifted both his arms up and opened them, in the old gesture of offering, toward the window. “You see the sky? You see the ocean there? That is the Faroes. That is what we are. I paint that because that is what is very important and typical. And now”—his voice changed, became jaunty—“you will eat a very typical meal. I will describe everything. You must promise to try, even if you think it is nasty.”

Jonathan felt uneasy making this promise. Professor Olsen’s sole comment on current Faroese culture (in contrast to his lengthy and enthusiastic rhapsodies on Faroese philology) was a terse “What they eat! Oh, my God.” But when in Rome: Jonathan squinted at Eyvindur, trying to imagine him in Rome. It was unimaginable. Jonathan had as yet no evidence of Eyvindur’s Italianness. He was not what Jonathan had expected, but neither was he svelte, manifold of personality, perfected by centuries of social maneuvering and aesthetic supremacy. We are not in Rome, he told himself, but we are somewhere strange. I will eat whale fat.

Anna waited for them at the table; the girls had been put to bed. Several wooden boards were arranged diagonally in the center of the table. There were no forks and no glasses. Eyvindur pulled out a chair for Jonathan and began his inventory.

“Spik. Okay. This is whale blubber, and it’s made with salt. That’s how you preservate it. You scrape off the salt and you cut it thin and put it on bread. Also that’s very
good with
turrur fiskur
. Here’s
turrur fiskur
.” Eyvindur pointed at what Jonathan had figured to be a sort of napkin; it was white, shredded, and looked like clotted paper towel. “It’s rotten fish, halibut is best. You hang it out and then it gets turned and then it gets fine like this.”

“Turned?” asked Jonathan. He was determined to keep an anthropological stance.

“It gets softened by getting rotten but then it gets hard again. That’s turned. It happens as well to meat.
Kjøt
. That’s
kjøt
.” What was indicated was a board containing small pieces of wood, possibly cherry, Jonathan had thought.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s lamb. You hang it out and it gets soft. First it gets maggots. But they die. Then it’s soft, then it’s hard, after six months it gets really fine. Like this. Then you can keep it all year. It’s very good with butter, but it’s very good without too. Now here, this; it’s
grind
. You know
grind
, of course.”

Jonathan did know
grind. Grind
had been the determining factor in coming here.
Grind
was whale.
Grind
was whale meat, and schools of whale flashing in the sea, and the killing of whales by driving them onto beaches and attacking them with knives and then dancing medieval snaking lines of conquest until dawn.
Grind
was the savage heritage, the pagan bloodline, the native ritual par excellence;
grind
meant the difference between excommunication and begrudging tolerance from the anthropology department. Jonathan nodded at Eyvindur, who continued.

“This here’s prune soup. It’s just a stupid thing from Denmark. We eat it anyhow. It’s pretty good. This is
drýlur
.” Eyvindur lifted a flat, round, rocklike object. “It’s bread. It’s terrible. We Faroese ate this before we could afford to eat white bread. Nobody eats it now. Very typical. Here’s some white bread, so you won’t be hungry. You come another night, we’ll have stuffed puffins. Even Olsen thought they were good.”

“What do I eat first?” Jonathan asked.

“What do you want?”

“Isn’t there some sort of order?”

“Eat,” said Eyvindur. “Eat some
kjøt
.” He picked up a slice, or chip, of the meat and passed it across the table.

Jonathan shut his eyes and put it into his mouth.

Leathery, sweet with rot, salted by the salty air in which it had hung, this piece of meat seemed to Jonathan a consecrated tidbit, his admission slip to the Body of Elsewhere—the gray and cloudy archipelagic universe. Eating it, he knew himself for a carnivore in the simplest sense, and that simplicity of understanding brought with it a vision of the life to come. Faint still, as the outline of the harbor was faint under morning mist, the landscape of a new psychic country beckoned him. Its only discernible feature at that moment was happiness, and he had too little experience of happiness to conceive an image for it. Rather he sensed it as a miasma, a particularly benevolent species of fog that wrapped these islands, and Jonathan along with them, in its insubstantial but all-encompassing arms.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” said Eyvindur, interpreting Jonathan’s beatific expression literally.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” said Jonathan, which made Eyvindur roar with laughter.

“Just wait until you eat some
spik
,” he threatened. “Here. Eat some
spik
.”

But Jonathan couldn’t get it past his lips. Eyvindur suggested he add rotten fish to his bread and
spik
. “It’s good. They are natural companions.” Oddly, this proved to be true. The fish tasted exactly as it looked, like fish paper, but its dryness cut the oily slime of the blubber, in fact, demanded some sort of oiliness for ingestion to be possible. Having downed this less pleasant installment, Jonathan fell on the soup eagerly, hoping to wash his mouth out with something familiar. But the prunes refused to cut the taste of fish; if anything, they increased it.

“Is there fish in here?” he asked.

“Yes. That is fish soup with prunes. You make from cod heads a soup, then you can take the cod heads and stuff them with cod liver and you have something they like in the villages,
livurhøvd
, but I don’t like it, so Anna doesn’t make it. But that is fish soup in there. In Denmark, they make it without fish, so I suppose this is actually typical Faroese food.”

“Can I try the
drýlur
?”

“No. No.” Eyvindur grabbed it and held it to his breast. “Jonathan, I must make a confession.” He grinned. “This is really a stone I have painted to resemble a
drýlur
. It’s very good, no? I have done a beautiful job making it into a
drýlur
. I wanted to give you a full Faroese meal in all its typicality, Anna and I both wanted this. But Anna cannot make
drýlur
. Nobody can make them anymore. We’ve forgotten how, because they are so stinking bad to eat. They are just like rocks to eat. So, I decided, why not take a rock and make it into a
dr
ý
lur
? It’s conceptive art, isn’t it?”

“Conceptual,” said Jonathan. “What are they made of, when they aren’t rocks?”

“Barley. They are made of barley or rye. You have to cook them in ashes of pat.”

“Ashes of pat? What do you mean?” Jonathan snagged a second piece of
kjøt
, which was, so far, the best thing on the table.

“Pat. It’s everywhere.” Eyvindur waved one arm, still holding the
dr
ý
lur
close with the other. “It’s the land, it’s—” He was stymied again. “You cut it up and it burns. The land. You understand? We here in the Faroes, we are so poor we have to burn our own country to keep warm and to cook.”

“I’m sorry,” Jonathan said, “but I don’t understand you.”

Eyvindur got up abruptly. “I will call Magnus. He
will know this word in English. I thought
pat
was right.”

Jonathan and Anna were left alone with the food. They smiled at each other, then looked away. Fifteen seconds later they smiled again. Anna reached for the plate of
kjøt
and offered it to Jonathan. In slow, carefully articulated Faroese she said, “
Kjøt
is very good. It is good you like to eat it. It makes you strong.”

Jonathan answered, just as slowly, “I like it very much.” There was nothing more to say. Eyvindur was rumbling and crowing on the telephone in the hall, out of sight but surely waving his arms. Jonathan chewed meat and formulated the sentence, “What island were you born on?”

“Suðuroy,” Anna answered. “That is in the south. We have a beach.”

Jonathan tried to convey being impressed by raising his eyebrows and nodding.

“Peat,” said Eyvindur. He pronounced it to rhyme with
Fiat
. Jonathan remained puzzled until Eyvindur spelled it.

“Oh, peat,” he said finally. “I didn’t know you still cut peat here.”

“We don’t, really. Now everybody has kerosene. Or heating. We have heating.” He indicated a bulbous iron item in the corner. “But peat, yes, peat means pat. That’s it.” He yawned.

“I have to go.” Jonathan scrambled to his feet. “I can’t thank you enough.”

“No, no. You haven’t eaten
grind
. You haven’t had tea. Sit. We have to find you a house to live in—but I have already found you this. Anna’s father’s brother’s mother-in-law, she’s dead, she has a house on Sandoy and you can have it. You have to pay, though. Can you pay? Here, eat
grind
while I tell you how much.”

Grind
tasted familiar to Jonathan. After a few bites he realized he’d eaten it for lunch one day at the Seaman’s
Home, covered with lumpy brown gravy and served with large, undercooked potatoes. These accompaniments had identified it as beef in Jonathan’s mind, though he’d thought it a bad sort of beef. Naked and eaten with bread, it was a worse sort of beef but a fleshy and appealing sort of fish.

“You like it?”

“Yes.” Jonathan shifted the
grind
in his mouth. “It’s chewy, though.”

“That happens when it gets old. So. It’s five hundred kroner.”

“A month?” Even with his airline winnings this was beyond his means.

“For the year. You are here for the year, aren’t you?”

“Oh. Oh, that’s fine.” Quick conversion gave Jonathan about a hundred and fifty dollars for a year’s rent. “That’s too little, in fact.”

“You want to pay more? You have fundings from the CIA?”

“No. Five hundred kroner is fine.”

“Hah. Maybe you have fundings from the United States Government to explore the system.”

“What system? Why does everybody think I’m from the CIA? Why would the CIA be interested in the Faroes?”

“The bomb system up there in the mountain.
You
know. Your country put it there.”

“Missile silos?”

“I don’t know what it does. I want to get rid of it. I am making a big fuss in Parliament about it. I call everybody on the telephone and talk about it. It’s something from NATO. It’s a cancerousness on our country.”

Jonathan perceived a smokescreen. Eyvindur even lit a cigarette to add to the confusion. Neither said anything for a minute. Jonathan took the opportunity to finish chewing his
grind
. Anna offered him a second piece, but he was unwilling to embark on another seven-minute stretch of
chewing and declined. Eyvindur put his ashes on his plate and smoked with his head tilted back, sending smoke up to the ceiling in gray plumes.

“We won’t talk about it,” he said suddenly. “We are all friends. You are right, of course. The CIA would not be interested in the Faroes. So we will not talk about it.” He put his cigarette out in a lump of butter on his plate; it hissed.