Far Afield (5 page)

Jonathan decided it was time to leave. Offers of tea could not make him stay. “I must go,” he said. “This has been an extraordinary evening. Absolutely—”

“Jonathan. Jonathan. You must not take offense because I have very black ideas. It’s my Italian side.
You
are our friend. You are not from the CIA. I am just spitting up foolishness. Please. You will come back, we will have stuffed puffins and arrange your marriage. Everything in the Faroes is wonderful—you’ll see. Maybe the food isn’t what you like, but you’ll get used to it. Ask other people. They will tell you I have black ideas and become unpleasant, but it doesn’t mean I am unfriendly. You will come back and describe the university of Harvard to me and also Chicago.”

“I’ve never been to Chicago, but I can describe Harvard to you for hours.” Jonathan laughed. It was, he realized, the first time he’d laughed all evening. “Thank you, thank you both.” He smiled at them, one on each side of the table, Anna nodding with sleepiness, Eyvindur debating another cigarette by tapping it on the fake
dr
ý
lur
.

“Okay,” said Eyvindur. “Okay.
Vœlkomin
.” He and Anna stayed at the table as Jonathan walked down the hall to the door. “Thanks again,” Jonathan called back to them. There was no response. He stepped out into the twilight of Tórshavn at one o’clock in the morning.

Twilight, two lights, thought Jonathan, looking at a sky too pale to permit a star but dark enough directly overhead to reveal the moon. All around the horizon—of which
he could see three quarters from this hill—a pink glare with yellow highlights edged into what passed for night: a grayness dotted with grayer clouds. It was early June: fifteen or more days for the light to overtake the night. Jonathan wondered how much moon would be visible by midsummer. In a switch of the more usual metaphor, he felt himself being eroded by the approaching, increasing light, as though darkness were his territory. He sighed. A weight equal to the poundage of his suitcase seemed to have landed on him with its disappearance. He sat down on a rock by the side of the road and looked out over the harbor that had earlier failed to meet his standards of beauty.

How much easier to be a pioneer from the safety of his office in William James Hall. Resisting his professors was not so different from resisting some parental injunction: take a deep breath and do it. The world hadn’t fallen apart. Jonathan had thought himself courageous. Indeed, he wouldn’t have dared to come to the Faroes without that self-confidence. But his self-confidence was beginning to seem, if not exactly misplaced, then inapplicable. There was nothing here to resist or grab hold of—his two specialties.

Eyvindur, for instance: how was it possible to understand him? Both his chauvinism and his “black” mood seemed suspect to Jonathan. The native poses—the food, the rhapsodies over his view—were surely just that, poses assumed to spark the anthropological interest. His sophistication and his irony learned in Italy were transparent, barely covering someone quite different underneath: but who? The patriot incensed about nuclear devices in his territory? The tired father who sat with his equally tired wife looking at the dirty dishes? Jonathan was dismayed to find in himself the expectation that the Faroese people would be simple. But why shouldn’t he expect that? A science that made much of such simplicities as who traded beans or feathers with what cousin or whether dinner was
cooked in one pot or two was an inadequate lens through which to consider the mysteries of human motivation. Reductionist. Jonathan kicked mud off his clog.

The sun had now risen and hovered over the ocean. It was a quarter to two. Dinner churned inside Jonathan’s stomach, which struggled noisily to process material it had never before encountered. If the people proved too complex, there was always the food. What myriad degrees of rot and raw were waiting for analysis and categorization. Jonathan tried to imagine a year of sniffing and tasting. Now how long did you say you hung this outside? It was ludicrous, but perhaps easier than trying to encompass the entire society in some sort of formal village study. Below him, lights were going out in Tórshavn; it appeared the natives waited until sunrise to go to sleep. Tórshavn was not a village, though. Life might be different, maybe more encompassable, outside the capital, in his house on the island of Sandoy.

Jonathan sighed again and wished for a beer. But there was no beer. This country had no nighttime, no trees, no napkins, no beer. Professor Olsen had lamented this to Jonathan several times. Instead of beer, they had national liquor allocation: those who paid their taxes got a certificate entitling them to buy a case of beer or four bottles of hard liquor (aquavit was most popular) each quarter, handed out to the law-abiding by government dispensaries. Outsiders such as Jonathan, however, were omitted from this system. And as the Faroese drank up each quarter’s supply immediately in a two- or three-day binge, there was nothing left over to offer a visiting friend. A near-beer was available at the hotel, but it was thin and bitter and did not satisfy.

A dark, gloomy bar and a beer and a jukebox: all these things existed in the Hebrides, source of world-famous malts and brews. Why hadn’t he gone there? Perhaps he could go there and the anthropology department would never know the difference. For didn’t they also eat a sort
of rotten meat? Didn’t they fish and raise sheep and live gloomy lives under an overcast sky? Jonathan realized that this was the second time he had turned to the Hebrides as potential relief from the Faroes and was amused that within two weeks his standards had shifted to accommodate local ones. He knew he was right about the anthropology department; from the viewpoint of Cambridge, little distinguished Tórshavn from Stornaway. But he was no longer in Cambridge.

As if to prove this to himself once and for all, Jonathan stared out to sea, for the first time since he’d sat down, and gave himself over to the view. To the left was open ocean, frothing now from a wind that had risen with the sun, and tinted purple beneath the green. Below him was the capital, still ugly. To the right, a long dense spit jutted out, and beyond it a pale blue cloud of land appeared to be suspended above the water: his future home, Sandoy. As always in these islands, the very surfaces curved with the globe. Water and land described portions of circles as though molded from a malleable substance. But the arcs tilted in such a way that they seemed incomplete, tipping dangerously up into the air at one end so the land looked as though it might at any moment slide down into the ocean. It gave Jonathan a touch of vertigo.

More than beer, now, he wished for a companion. Someone familiar through whom he could filter all that was strange and by this make what was ugly beautiful and what was unknown and daunting mysterious and promising.

But Jonathan was alone in the world. And the reasons for this, like the reasons for his self-confidence, had been left in Cambridge. In Cambridge it was pleasant to walk through the familiar streets at his own pace, to sit by himself in the café where he ate lunch with the paper, to enter every party given by his classmates expectant and yet safe in his solitude. No broken heart motivated him; Jonathan’s relations with women were few and cool and had not disturbed
his life. Because he was tall and fair, intelligent, and possibly headed for success, he was sought after. His congenial, even responses deterred most women from persisting. Some few, evangelists of love, tried to take him on for reformation. He was not to be reformed. He could resist seductions of every sort, even the ringing of the telephone.

And the Faroes’ seductions too were resistible. Jonathan’s detached gaze turned momentarily to himself and were disheartened by the view. In plain terms, he thought himself a fool. Any of five women he knew at home would have been a warm, living creature to sit beside on this rock, to wonder at the sliding landscape with, to plan the next day’s journey with. What arrogance to plan his life around his determination not to be trapped with another human being. Wasn’t he trapped in himself? And wasn’t something—either stolid or frightened—blocking his senses, so that he sat here on the rim of the world, on the edge of adventure, sulking and thinking of beer?

Insight, like pain, passes quickly and can’t be accurately recalled. Jonathan at the bottom of the hill, where he shortly was, was Jonathan cursing the mud of the road and the volcano of dinner, with the siren voice of doubt fading on the wind.

Early Warning

Jonathan awoke with a case of nerves. Some schedule was not being met. He decided to go to the dock to find out when the mail boat went to Sandoy, but the activity there only confirmed his feeling that everyone else had something to do and he was a sluggard. Winches creaked, stacks of
crates grew as he stood on the concrete pier, open boxes of silver fish alternately glinted and dimmed with the movement of the clouds. The harbormaster in his corrugated tin shack told him the boat left daily at two, “except if the weather prevents.” He was eager to embark on a conversation in English, and Jonathan, to give himself the semblance of involvement, was eager to oblige. They toured the harbor together. The man showed no interest in Jonathan’s reasons for being there; his attention was entirely focused on the boats, their crews, and their cargos.

Másin, Ritan
—the mail boats were named after birds: the gull, the kittiwake. The fishing boats seemed to be named after places:
Mykines, Eysturoy
, the islands of their captains’ births, maybe. Seven thousand pounds of cod lay in each hold, some gasping still. And from here, where did the fish go? asked Jonathan. To the fish factory, where some was ground into meal and most salted to be sent to Spain. “The Spanish like salt fish,” the harbormaster said, “just like the Faroese.” Boats whose holds were filled with disassembled radios, motorcycles, refrigerators, boats bringing eggs and vegetables up from Denmark on a journey with a high mortality rate, boats out of Scotland stopping on their way to the best summer fishing in Greenland, these last bobbing high in the water because their holds were empty. Small boats whose crew of four sat on the edge of the dock mending their nets, Danish Navy boats that disgorged troops of nineteen-year-olds in white uniforms and blue caps, boats beaten and chewed by the sea, boats that sparkled and gleamed, trawlers, tankers, rowboats, steamboats. Smuggling boats. “What do they smuggle?” “Alcohol,” said the harbormaster. “I let them.” “Why?” “It’s not much. I know when they are coming, and I give them two hours to unload it. Then I come down here to the side of the boat, so they know it’s time to stop.”

The harbor smelled of oiled machinery, a piercing
rusty odor, and fish dying, the odor of blood and brine. Mixed in with these was the smell of rope that had been soaked in salt and dried by wind over and over, a sharp tang. Here and there a blowtorch added its sulfur. And also here was the smell of movement, change, departure. Nothing was steady or fixed. In that rough water, even anchored, lashed vessels drifted forty feet out from shore and rode the waves the seawall couldn’t hold back.

It all made Jonathan more agitated. He should be on a boat, heading for his new home. At the very least he should be on a boat investigating how “things worked”; who owned the boat, who had shares in the boat, who was related to whom, how the profits were divided.

“Tomorrow at two?” he asked the harbormaster, to indicate that he was leaving now, to return to the Seaman’s Home and brood on his faults.

“And nine in the morning as well.”

“Oh? You didn’t say that.”

“Yes. Nine and two. And you can come back at three-thirty, with the return of the two o’clock.”

“Why did you only say two o’clock before?” Jonathan saw withholding of information and became curious and slightly insulted.

“Well, today, today you can only go at two. Because the nine o’clock has already left, don’t you see?”

Jonathan saw that he was in a ridiculous mood in which everything was abrasive and disturbing. Here was a perfectly reasonable explanation, a down-to-earth, northern-sensibility sort of explanation. But he felt patronized. An American would have said nine and two, leaving it to Jonathan to figure he’d missed the nine; the harbormaster, wanting to spare Jonathan the pain of having missed the nine, was willing to pretend there was only a two. Following this line of reasoning—
un
reasoning—would only worsen his temper.

“Well. At nine, then,” he said. “Do you sell the ticket?”

“On the boat. Everything on the boat. The
Másin
. If the weather doesn’t prevent.”

“Yes, the weather.” It probably would, and then he’d have another drenched, hopeless day in Tórshavn.

Jonathan walked slowly back to the hotel for lunch, debating whether it would be boiled cod with boiled potatoes or what he now knew to be whale with gravy and boiled potatoes. Once there had been a fried fishcake. It was the only time he’d been able to make use of the HP Sauce that sat between the salt and pepper on each table; the Faroese put it on potatoes, but Jonathan didn’t like that. It did, however, soften and improve the nearly impenetrable batter of the fishcake. He voted for cod.

Cod it was, cooked beyond necessity—beyond conscience—to a bleached stiff mass. Jonathan shut his eyes and wished for an artichoke, a little pot of hollandaise, a goose sausage, an endive salad: a roadside inn near Nîmes. The last green vegetable that had touched his lips had been an Icelandic one, many weeks before. A slow cementing process was occurring inside him; each day the amount he expelled decreased in comparison to the amount he ingested. Soon, at this rate, he would lose the ability to excrete. Modifying his intake didn’t seem to help, and besides, boredom and anxiety made him hungrier than usual. Beyond that he was simply hungry—for anything that resembled a meal as he knew it. The more cod was heaped on his plate, the more he spent hours of his day conjuring dinners, actual and fictitious, that had given or could give him pleasure. Like a prisoner or an invalid, he lived in a world shrunk to the basics.