Far Afield (8 page)

They were tall, for sheep, and uncouth, with excrement and mud matted into their luxuriant, pricey hair. The rams’ horns curled round and round, sometimes growing so tightly to the head that they seemed about to pierce the eye. The ewes’ teats hung low, tugged down by lambs who, despite their smallness, were not cute the way lambs were supposed to be. These were clearly wild animals. They looked Jonathan in the eye and snorted with disdain and menace. A few of the bigger rams pawed the turf and butted the air in his direction the first time Jonathan appeared. He stood his ground. He had survived the avenging bird and
he would survive sheep. To keep him in his place, though, two rams staged a battle for his edification. Stamping and snorting, they rushed at each other and bashed their heads together with such force that Jonathan was sure sheep brains would fly. But the sheep were apparently as hardheaded as he. After five minutes’ smashing and crashing, they went back to lunch.

Jonathan was impressed with the display, but he didn’t want the sheep to think he was scared. He sat down on a rock to eat his lunch too. After all, the sheep were company, of a sort.

Jonathan and the sheep ate lunch together for several days, during which they observed each other closely. Jonathan counted forty-five sheep: seven rams, twenty ewes, and eighteen lambs. About half the population was black, a quarter white, and the other quarter various shades of brown. He wondered if wool prices reflected this division
(NEVER DYED
had been the second line of the label in the sweaters in Iceland). The lead ram was getting old and fat; his authority was challenged now and then by a spry gray ram (the only gray in the herd), who would sidle up to the old sire and horn in on his patch of grass. Stamping and snorting; then they’d munch side by side for a while. After lunch everyone took a nap in his own fashion, Jonathan on his back, rams nodding and drooping on their feet, ewes on their sides mauled by sucking lambs, who’d fall off the nipple midstream into open-mouthed dreams of milk. The end of naptime was announced by the leader, who roused the herd to a trot toward unclipped fields farther west. They chewed their cuds as they walked, sticking their necks out more like chickens than like sheep, and left Jonathan at the rear, seeing a white herd of a friendlier species in his clouds.

Jonathan concluded they were harmless. They must have concluded the same, for by the third day a few raised their heads in what seemed a greeting at his footstep. And
one came close to sniff at his bread and cheese, bringing to Jonathan’s nose the musky smell of wild meat, then belching a breath that reminded him of mown lawns on summer evenings. Curious, he reached out to pat it, thinking to scratch it on the forehead the way a dog likes to be scratched. The sheep—she was a young ewe—bucked backward away from his hand, looked up at him darkly from under her bony brow, and stood four feet off, still sniffing, with her neck extended. Jonathan tossed a hunk of cheese at her. She ate it and glared at him.

“Do you want more?” Jonathan asked. He repeated the question in Faroese. The ewe burped again and went back to her companions.

Having broken the silence, Jonathan was seized with a desire to speak. It was an activity he didn’t indulge in much these days. He had to ease himself into it, saying in an undertone, “Well, what do you know,” several times to accustom himself and the sheep to the sound of his voice.

“What
do
you know,” he said, shifting his emphasis slightly to recapture for his lonely ears the sound of irony, subtlety, so entirely absent from his daily requests for bread or letters. “Who would have thought,” he continued, “that I would be eating lunch with sheep. Not”—he bowed slightly toward them—“that I object to your company. Far from it. I mean, beggars can’t be choosers. No, I don’t mean that. In fact, I think on the whole I would rather eat lunch with you than with anybody else on this island. But whose fault is that?” Jonathan lifted his eyes to the clouds, then readdressed himself to the sheep. He was gratified to see that they were all quite attentive, standing still on their pronged feet and chewing their balls of grass. “It’s not what I expected, though. Well, what did I expect? Did I think I’d have fun?” He sighed. “But you know, I am having fun, sort of. In fact, I’m definitely having fun. This is fun. Who wouldn’t enjoy sitting on top of a cliff covered with tundra
eating bread and cheese with fifty animals that smell bad? No.” He kept getting it wrong. “Okay, so they smell bad. Or they smell like sheep.”

He stood up for a different approach.

“I have left the world,” he announced. Stunned by the truth of this, he sat down. Was there anything else worth saying? The clouds scudded above him, soundless and active, casting shapely shadows on the earth. Jonathan got to his feet again. “And in conclusion,” he said, “I would like to express my gratitude for your faith in me, and all your hard work, and assure you that I will keep your interests in the forefront of my concerns and will do my level best to represent you fairly in our nation’s capital.” So help me God, he added mentally.

The next day Jonathan changed his schedule. He braved the dock, bought some fish called
scrubba
from a man who had a crate full of them, flipping and flopping over one another, cleaned them at his sink (fins and scales flying, sticking to his hands, guts tearing while being extracted, fish bile steaming his eyes to a squint), and ate the lot-eight fillets—for lunch. He used half a pound of Danish butter to fry them. The kitchen stank. He wrote a letter to his parents while digesting; it described the nature of political parties in the Faroes and was monotone, as if written by a robot. Jonathan had learned all the information in the letter six months before leaving Cambridge. He reread the first two chapters of one of the murder mysteries and tried to reconstruct the outcome. He washed some of his socks in the plastic dishwashing tub and cursed soap flakes. “What you need is detergent,” he said as he arranged the socks on a line he had strung above the kerosene stove. It was two-thirty. At four, he had decided, he would go.

He sat at the table waiting for four o’clock, which seemed slow in coming. It occurred to him that it might be nice to take a candy bar along; he’d noticed some Lindt bars in the store. Leaving now (it was three) in order to have
time to buy candy was permissible, wasn’t it? By the time he’d waited in line and learned the word for chocolate it would be three-fifteen. Or was buying candy part of the trip itself? On such fine points our lives pivot—but how else was he to keep up discipline? He would mail the letter, which would take at least ten minutes, then head for the store, slowly, saying good day to everyone—well, at least two people.

Resolved. He checked the pilot in the stove to be sure it was burning blue; a yellow flame meant the kerosene was running low. Blue. Tonight he would listen to Radio Free Europe. Last night he’d heard “I’m a Diving Duck”: Dive to the bottom, honey, and I’ll never come up.

In the store he found Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut, better than Lindt. Jonathan in Cambridge was a chocolate connoisseur. Lindt tended to a dusty aftertaste.
Chocolate
, like
Mama
, was the same word the world over. The tobacco man from the post office was up and about today and greeted him before Jonathan had a chance to say
Góðan dag
. “Good day the American!” he said in English. All in all, an auspicious sendoff.

Jonathan had decided to walk to the end of the island—the outcropping due west of the village known as the Troll’s Head, which on a map looked about ten miles away and jutted out from the mass of land like a finger pointing toward America. Foremost among his reasons was the desire to walk at night, to be out of the house in the sun-spattered, long-shadowed false twilight of ten-thirty on a Faroese summer’s eve. But he had also begun to justify his wanderings by considering them exploration rather than retreat, and this was a place he had not yet been. Finally, in an acknowledgment of his possible alternate career, he was looking for the birds.

The Danish guidebook he had plodded through with a dictionary the month before he left home, scanning it for hints about the climate and the local habits that would help
him figure out what to take (all those hand-selected items in the perished suitcase), had, like every other foreign commentator on the Faroes, emphasized birds. He would find them, it said, “on the rocky headlands of the islands, nesting in the cliffs and grass. Fulmars, kittiwakes, gannets, guillemots, and puffins nest in abundance,” the guide had continued, “in addition to countless species of gull.” So far, Jonathan had seen: the avenging bird, whose species he did not know; five herring gulls who’d trailed the mail boat from Tórshavn to Skopun and their brother herring gulls on the roof at the Tórshavn pier; some sparrows taking a bath in his neighbor’s backyard dust.

Their names were romantic, tasting of salt winds on the tongue. Kittiwake, fulmar, guillemot, he repeated to himself as he walked out of town, past the cement breakwater, past the last houses, the fields fenced in wire draped loosely between sticks, over the first hill, off the macadam, onto the dirt, past the sheep, who watched him go by without comment. Gannet and puffin. The great black-backed gull. And the mysterious booby, the shy, big bird who spent half its life in circumnavigation, who bred near the Arctic and wintered off Tierra del Fuego.

Jonathan pushed onward into the unfamiliar. Here, beyond the range of sheep, the tundra was thicker, studded with more, and more varied, flowers: daisies, black-eyed susans, orchids tipped purple and red, mosses with white-star blossoms, buttercups, and heathers. The day, like all the days since he’d arrived on Sandoy, was bright and breezy, high gusts of the sea lifting toward him, sweet smell of warmed earth rising at each step he took. No trees swayed to tell which way the wind blew. He tracked its passage in the grass instead, where each puff bent a momentary pathway, as though a phantom traveler accompanied him.

It was a silent region. Far below, three hundred feet down the cliff, the sea and the rock met and parted angrily, but this ocean was so violent that the sound was continuous
and therefore unnoticed. And Jonathan’s feet on the loamy carpet made no noise. A passing fly could have been a helicopter for the start it gave him. He was beyond the reach of airplanes (for it was Wednesday, and airplanes came only Tuesdays and Thursdays); beyond the laws of light and dark (for it was getting on toward eight, and the sun still stood above); beyond, it seemed, the realm of words. For Jonathan sensed a profounder silence: an internal one.

In Jonathan the need to observe and take note of the world was so pressing that even a trip around the corner in Cambridge generated the equivalent of five pages of commentary—not mere notation, but speculation and attempt at synthetic description: that is, a description that reveals—as though his internal life were a perpetual effort at writing a case study of Jonathan and his perceptions. He did not know to locate his unhappiness in this effort, but the traces of this very exertion on his face and character were what revealed him to those others wise enough to read the signs as miserable.

Jonathan’s life was entirely filtered through words. Words were his sixth sense, a brushing of his consciousness against the world that was necessary for experience to be felt. Nothing could be known that was not named.

The magic of naming: a name can conjure, halt, speed onward, locate; make the vague distinct, make the ominous merely eerie; mostly, tame the new, the wild, the never-seen and cage them with the understood. “The words to wrap around the thing,” Jonathan had said once in conversation with Professor Olsen, who’d cocked his head, alerted to something. But Olsen had let it pass. That wrapping Jonathan struggled with—it’s rotund, he’d say of a smell; it’s ambivalent, of a symphony: he was working on a very high level—had the effect of dulling the impact of life. Yet for him it
was
life.

Jonathan’s home was the English language, a large mansion. He roamed its deep German basement, leaned
against its Latin pillars, admired its Greek buttresses and joists, disliked but was familiar with its French interior furnishings. And throughout his roamings he kept his ears wide for the old, the very old, what he considered to be the root—Anglo-Saxon—not willing or able to see the whole as something other than the sum of its parts, reducing always, wanting this complexity to have its source in one pure well. Everything else he considered adulteration.
Sangfroid
was spit in the beer. Why say
cogitate
when you could say
think?

This language love had led him to the Faroes. Jonathan had spent many late nights and weekend afternoons reading the dictionary, moving from
AUTHOR
to
AUTHORITY
, mulling over
AUTOECIOUS
(having all stages of a life cycle occur on the same host; did this apply to humans living on earth?). One Sunday he’d found a chart of Indo-European languages at the end of the introduction. Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Old Church Slavonic; Dard; Tocharian A and B—what a host of unthought-of, unlearnable-because-no-longer-extant languages. Oscan and Umbrian, indeed! But there, tucked between Icelandic and Norwegian, and tracing its ancestry in one straight line back to Old Norse, was Faroese. Pure. Closer, in terms of forkings and dilutions, to the source (Germanic, some proto-tongue probably never congealed enough at any period to be called a language) than poor beloved English, which had been squeezed out through West Germanic, Old English, and Middle English, with countless blendings and borrowings from other branches along the way.

He looked up
FAROESE
and found one of those circular definitions that compose the bulk of dictionaries: Language spoken by inhabitants of Faroe Islands (see). He saw: A group of islands in the North Atlantic Ocean between the Shetlands and Iceland. They didn’t account for much on the map of northern Europe, his next stop. A map of Scandinavia offered the Faroes in insert, floating above Norway
in a green box and looking larger than all of Sweden. The Widener card catalogue listed the Danish guidebook, a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelogues also published in Denmark, an epidemiological monograph on measles (this was translated), and a volume of “studies in island life” by Nelson Annandale called
The Faroes and Iceland
. Oxford had published this, giving Jonathan momentary hope he’d stumbled onto something worthwhile. He charged into the stacks and came out half an hour later with measles and Annandale. The next day he bought a Danish dictionary, withdrew two of the travelogues, and stayed up late trying, with the aid of his high-school German and his years of reading etymological notes pertaining to Old English in dictionaries, to make sense out of the language. By the end of the week he’d written a proposal for a village study. Its main point—the one he reiterated to every tight-lipped professor in the department over the next year—was that no modern anthropologist had ever been there, that the literature (such as it was) stopped in 1905 with Annandale, who hardly qualified as an anthropologist.