Copyright © by Jóanes Nielsen, 2011
Published by agreement with Leonhardt & Høier Literary Agency A/S, Copenhagen
Translation copyright © by Kerri A. Pierce, 2017
Originally published in the Faroe Islands as Brahmadellarnir.
First edition, 2017
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Nielsen, Jóanes, author. | Pierce, Kerri A., translator.
Title: The Brahmadells / Jóanes Nielsen; translated by Kerri A. Pierce.
Other titles: Brahmadellarnir. English.
Description: Rochester, New York: Open Letter, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017027998 (print) | LCCN 2017034673 (ebook) | ISBN 9781940953731 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Families—Faroe Islands—Fiction. | Faroe Islands—History—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Sagas. | FICTION / Cultural Heritage. | LCGFT: Epic fiction
Classification: LCC PT7599.N54 (ebook) | LCC PT7599.N54 B7313 2017 (print) | DDC 839/.6993—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027998
This book is published with the support of the Mentanargrunnur Landsins,
The National Cultural Foundation of the Faroe Islands
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Dewey Hall 1-219, Box 278968, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
CONTENTS
Part One
The 185th Birthday
The Orange
Manicus and Panum
Mogul
The Little Wandering Church
Tóvó’s Flies
Grandma Pisan
Sorrow and Rhyme
The Master Barber
The Story of a Nickname
The Telescope and the Opium Drops
The Uncle’s Big Mouth
The Honorable Official
Angelica archangelica
The Lapsed Prayer
A Daguerrotype
Part Two
Carl Emil and Pole
The Doctor’s House in Tvøroyri
Starfish, Sheep Droppings, and Dead Birds
A Visit from Froðba
My Sweet Lord
A Faroese Hussar
The Night Visit
The Ergisstova Farmer
The Dream of Landownership
The Sunmen
Some Words Concerning Kristensa, Eigil, and Karin
The Cultural History of the Shit Dog
Patricide
A Fucking Night in Tvøroyri
The Gentle Singer
The Hour of Farewell
Part Three
Death and Flight Dreams
The Løbners and Michael Müller
Frú and Frúgvin Løbner
Courtly Love
The Officer, the Godfather, and More on Courtly Love
Clandestine Love. Continuation of Courtly Love
The House Altar
Torshavn’s Workers Union
Maundy Thursday Dinner
A Toast to Deep Respect
The Strike and the Treacherous Crew Member
The Fight That Changed It All
The King Is a Castrate
God Will Give Thee Strength
Part Four
The Fools’ Narrow Way
City Council Politician Eigil Tvibur
The Rattling Keyring
The Eye in the Jewelry Box
It Happened on St. Olaf’s Day, 1918
A Little Failed Family
The Gold-Rimmed Entrance to Death
You Reap What You Sow
Part Five
The Mosque
A Years-Old Autumn
Ghosts and Tears
A Wounded Sumbingur
The Lead Story Writer, the Torturer, and the Beanpole
The Arrest
O, Jesus, Friend to the Melancholy
PART ONE
The 185th Birthday
EIGIL TVIBUR SHUT the cemetery gate behind him and, as so often happened when stepping into the shadow of the great oaks, his mind eased. The trees were among the city’s oldest living residents, and thanks to their age and their beauty they were treated with enormous respect. When the municipality first installed drainpipes and sidewalks along Dr. Jakobsensgøta in the 60s, it proved necessary to move the stone wall on the south side somewhat further in. That left two of the trees standing just outside the cemetery, and in order to protect them, attractive iron grills were placed around the trunks.
The spruces farther up the yard were also a pleasure to behold. A good century back, Gerd, the wife of the businessman Obram úr Oyndarfjørði, transported some root cuttings back to the Faroes in a tub. She had been to visit her family in Bergen, and the tub spent the entire trip back from her old hometown securely fastened to the ship’s deck. Perhaps it was the act of defying storms from sky and sea that had implanted something joyful and proud in the trees’ souls. Eigil, in any case, had the feeling that one bright day the spruces would burst out singing that patriotic Norwegian hymn: Yes, we love this land . . .
The rowanberry trees, for their part, were gaunt and grew best on the cemetery’s west side. Some had even been planted outside the yard. Indeed, a true penchant for experimentation had swept that part of Tórshavn, or Havn, as it was often called, right before World War I. The trees had grown quickly, and the beautiful crowns with their conspicuous light-green leaves had provided pleasure to almost five generations of west-side city inhabitants, not to mention to the countless starlings and sparrows that had sat singing in the branches throughout the years. Now the trees had stopped growing, something that was obvious from the topmost branches, which were leafless, barkless, and brittle. Green and reddish carpets of moss grew up the trunks, and when the sun was shining, golden light beams seeped through their loosely woven crowns. In truth, the trees had come to resemble the people over whom they watched. And that was not so strange. The roots had long been absorbing their bodies and, eventually, you are what you eat.
The gravel crunched beneath his boot soles, and like always, when Eigil reached the nameless children’s graves, he stopped. He knew nothing of their history. Presumably, they were stillborns or newborns seized by a sudden, devastating death. The graves looked just like the zinc laundry tubs women used, but bottomless and tipped upside-down. There was also no cross at the head of these graves. In the months of June and July, buttercups and orchids grew on the gravesites, yellow and reddish-blue summer flags waving from their slender stalks.
Eigil continued to the grave of Napoleon Nolsøe, a former Landkirurg, or country surgeon. His hatred of the man had once been so great that on New Year’s Eve, 1980, he had defiled Nolsøe’s grave. He had been convinced that Napoleon Nolsøe was the prototype for modern Faroese nationalists, and that it was on his account that the cultural aspect of nationalism in particular had developed into an epidemic.
And if only Eigil had kept his mouth shut about defiling the grave, nothing would have happened!
Yet in December 1992, when Eigil was up for re-election on Tórshavn’s city council, his crime appeared in the newspaper Sosialurin. The man who had represented the Self-Governance Party on the city council for four years was hung out as a gravepisser! The newspaper wrote that he had disgraced an honorable man’s grave in the same way the Nazis and anti-Semites had when they painted their spiteful slogans across Jewish graves. Or worse: Whereas the anti-Semites’ paint came from a can or bottle and could be considered impersonal, urine was not.
With only the hallway lamp lit, as he stood and spoke into his floor-length mir
ror, he had justified his actions by saying it was the fault of that man of letters, Ole Jacobsen. In volume six of From the Faroes – Úr Føroyum, which the Danish-Faroese Society had published in 1971, and which Ole Jacobsen had edited, the scholar had succeeded in convincing the reader, or at least Eigil Tvibur, that Napoleon Nolsøe had broken the Hippocratic Oath in 1846. And it was not just a hard accusation—it was enough to destroy the man’s legacy.
In 1846, the Faroes were ravaged by the measles; in Tórshavn alone, 50 out of 800 inhabitants died. Doctor Napoleon Nolsøe, whose practice was then located in Nólsoyarstova, was asked by Pløyen, the Amtmand or Prefect, to travel south to Suðuroy to help with the crisis. He was promised 50 rigsdaler a month. Yet Nolsøe refused to travel.
A few years after Eigil read Ole Jacobsen’s article, Bókmentasøga I by Árni Dahl was published. In volume one of the literary history, it was clear that Dahl greatly respected Nolsøe. Page 75 featured a large photograph of the man, which was accompanied by a short biography followed by a few snippets composed in Faroese by Cand. med. & chir. N. Nolsøe.
This woke Eigil’s fury. The brand of nationalist who claimed to love native verse but couldn’t care less about the country’s inhabitants had always disgusted him. As composer Regin Dahl put it: Love the country, hate the people. Or maybe it was the opposite. Eigil could not stand that kind of catchphrase. But that was more or less how Ole Jacobsen’s article described Napoleon Nolsøe: He loved Faroese folk ballads, but in 1846 he had turned his back on his dying countrymen.
If Eigil had his way, a man like Napoleon Nolsøe would never appear in Faroese literary history. He simply had no place there. Not that Eigil was against giving authorial villains their just due in histories or reference works or even naming streets and ships after them. Not at all. One of his great skaldic heroes was the Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun, and without authors such as the Marquis de Sade, Céline, and Jean Genet, the French literary mouth would be lacking much of its bite.
But Dr. Napoleon was no Genet, and had done nothing worthy of literary acclaim. He may have contributed to the development of Faroese orthography, but that was about it. The man had recorded a large number of folk ballads, but he had not actually composed anything himself, and what he did record had already been collected and documented by others. Napoleon Nolsøe had transcribed transcripts, that was his great achievement, and to fill literary history with copyists would be both unfitting and ridiculous.
At a meeting of the Writers’ Association, Eigil had declared that the names appearing in Faroese literary history were just as randomly chosen as the names appearing on the Association’s membership roster. One belonged because he had translated two or three minimalistic children’s books a quarter century ago. Another had participated in a short story contest launched by well-meaning pedagogues as many years back, and where the result had been purely sentimental pedagogical drivel! And a third might have edited a festschrift for some alcoholic sleepwalker at the Academy. Such largely formed the Writers’ Association membership roster. The few authors who actually deserved to be there had been branded the “cultural mafia” in the media.
The danger here was that when another Árni Dahl decided to write a new literary history in half a century or so, that person would turn to the association’s membership roster in search of suitable representatives. People who were undoubtedly skilled with the copier would be called significant bearers of Faroese culture.
Eigil could see only one reason that Dr. Napoleon was honored with a place among the Faroese full and half gods: He had the right DNA profile! The doctor was the son of the old business agent Jákup Nolsøe, and therefore the nephew of poet and national icon, Nólsoyar Páll. It was for that reason and none other that Árni Dahl had smuggled him in through the back door of his literary history.
When Eigil reached Napoleon’s grave, he put down his bag. It was August 26th, and today exactly one hundred eighty-five years had passed since Napoleon’s birth. Eigil placed a hand on the headstone and wished Napoleon happy birthday, and as he had done so often before, he also asked Napoleon’s forgiveness for having sullied his sleeping bones.
On the other side of the cemetery path was a concrete basin with a water tap. Eigil ran some water into a bowl, screwed the lid off the cleaning solution, and added the strong liquid to the water. He did not immediately notice when some of the rinse splashed onto his coat sleeve, and when he finally saw the spot, it did not disturb him. Truthfully, it fit his overall appearance. He had neither washed nor shaved in several days, and his bright brown eyes sought the source of every small sound, be it a rustle in the newly fallen leaves or a bird suddenly bursting into song. Compared to his body, his head was noticeably small; he was a huge man, and the grimy coat made him look even more massive.
Eigil had thought to clean the entire headstone, and also to scrape off the moss and the lichen, but that would only disfigure the stone. Yes, the patina would certainly vanish. He knelt down before the gravestone and with a little screwdriver began cleaning the engraved letters of debris. And there were 128 letters in total. But Eigil had plenty of time, and when he finished his cleaning, he took a paintbrush from his bag and began to brush and wash each individual letter with the cleaning solution.
Like a scoured corpse, Eigil thought, and a giggle broke through his lips. Exactly, a scoured corpse. Like a skeleton protected by dry skins, or as Eliot wrote of the whispering voices:
. . .
Quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar.
Stay calm, Eigil, stay calm, he told himself.
A rose branch twisted around the marble plate. It had been neatly etched into the gray material and a little soft moss grew in the concave stone leaves.
Smiling, Eigil asked himself whether it would have bothered Napoleon Nolsøe that Nils Tvibur’s great-grandson was sitting here painting the letters with silver-bronze.
Eigil and Karin had planned to drink a birthday toast at the gravesite, and his bag held a bottle of Chablis and two glasses. He uncorked the bottle, lit a cigarette, and considered the freshly scrubbed letters:
HERE LIES BURIED
RETIRED LANDCHIRURG
NAPOLEON NOLSØE
MARCH 3rd 1878
THIS STONE ERECTED
BY HIS FRIENDS IN REMEMBRANCE
OF WHAT HE MEANT TO THEM
IN HIS DAY.
Yet Karin did not come. They had agreed that she would be here at four o’clock, and now it was nearly half past five.
He blew smoke past his lips; he didn’t usually smoke, but it calmed him to have a cigarette between his fingers.
Shit, could he have offended her?
His mind turned to the Dusty Springfield song “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.” He had played it over and over during the wonderful week they had spent together.
It suddenly occurred to Eigil that perhaps they had not set a date after all, or that perhaps they had only done it in his mind. He had planned to invite her to eat at the new restaurant in Nólsoyarstova. The building had been Napoleon Nolsøe’s childhood home. Later on he kept his medical practice there, and when he married Henrietta Løbner in 1874, she had moved into Nólsoyarstova as well.
The perfect setting for a cozy meal.
Could all the hell he was catching from the Self-Governance Party have ruined that plan?
Something was off.
The history of oppression on this island, its failures, the violence. The family histories that he had so immersed himself in. All of it now repeating itself through him.
Eigil felt how his hand shook as he poured wine into his glass, and when he glanced toward the cemetery gate, he dropped the glass altogether.
There stood his mother. The face of the person closest to him in the world was far too anxious, and she was clutching her hands together as if she were afraid she might lose them. She stood in front of the open ceme
tery gate, two policemen at her side.
The Orange
THE PASSENGER SPRANG from the cutter. His coat spread around him like a sail, and while he hung in the air with both arms outstretched he looked just like a bird.
Though the sight was neither unusual nor ridiculous, Tóvó still covered his mouth, biting his fingers to keep from bursting into uncontrollable laughter. There were three travel trunks onboard the cutter, each holding medicine and various instruments for minor surgeries: scalpels, scissors, amputation saws, and a copious amount of gauze. Also: alcohol, camphor, laxatives, quinine, opium drops, and mercury ointment.
Farther out lay the three-masted schooner Havfruen. They had enjoyed a good wind from Copenhagen. The first day they beat to windward, but after they were free of Skagerrak, the wind had blown from the south and the southeast. The voyage was made in seven days at full sail, and at midnight they dropped anchor in Tórshavn’s harbor.
Finally, the trunks were unloaded and the passenger turned to Tóvó. Immediately, the amusement left the boy’s eyes, and the passenger discovered the laughter-prone person was a six year old who had come to the dock to watch. The passenger had friendly, but searching eyes. He took an orange from his coat pocket and handed the boy the odd reddish-yellow object. Tóvó did not know Danish, but he understood enough to know that en appelsin was something you could eat.
Manicus and Panum
ONLY TWO WEEKS had passed since newspapers in the Danish capital had published an account of the measles epidemic ravaging the Faroe Islands. The article first appeared in Fædrelandet on June 17, 1846, and even though the article was unsigned, it was a given that Dr. Napoleon Nolsøe was the author; or conversely that, inspired by Dr. Napoleon, it had been written by Niels C. Winther, or “Doffa,” as his friends called him. The Berlingske Tidende reprinted the article, and the news was considered so alarming that the Finance Chamber immediately took the initiative of sending medical aid to the Faroes. Two doctors were asked to assume the task.
One was twenty-six-year-old August Manicus. His father, Claus Manicus, had been Landkirurg on the Faroe Islands from 1820-28, so August had spent his childhood in Tórshavn and had been the playmate of Venzil Hammershaimb and Doffa.
The Brahmadells Page 1