The second doctor, the man with the orange, was better known as Peter Ludvig Panum.
For five months the two traveled the islands and administered medical aid. On top of that, Panum thoroughly examined living conditions on the Faroes. He studied factors such as housing, hygiene, the Faroese diet, and how food was prepared. The smallest detail made it into his notes. He also described the clothing, and how the weather affected the general health of both body and soul.
His results were published in the medical journal Bibliothek for Læger in the spring of 1847.
But what no one, not even Panum himself, knew before June 17, 1846, was that his treatise would prove one of modern epidemiology’s great breakthroughs.
Manicus, too, documented his sojourn in the Faroes, and even though his report, which appeared in the medical journal Ugeskrift for Læger, was not as comprehensive as Panum’s, he had a sharper eye for the connection between medical complications and social living conditions. He writes: Bøigden Sumbø was one of the sites where the epidemic claimed the most victims. The poverty of its inhabitants, the poor housing conditions, and the fact that measles suddenly gripped the larger part of the inadequately nourished population—who, moreover, were susceptible to any sort of remedy—explains this.
Manicus further added that the disease: . . . spared nearly all of the Danish families and was significantly milder among the well-to-do native inhabitants.
In a footnote to her doctoral thesis Knowledge and Power, which was published in 2006, Beinta í Jákupsstovu writes: The mid-1800s was a period characterized by strong ideological currents; Manicus might have sympathized with political ideas surrounding the promotion of social equality or with Faroese nationalism.
She admits, however, that no sources exist to support this idea.
Mogul
MOGUL RESTED HIS head in Tóvó’s lap. He yawned deeply, and when the boy began to pick the sleep from his brown eyes, he did not resist, and he also swallowed the puss-ball that the boy rolled between his fingers and placed on his long tongue.
The dog probably knew that Tóvó was the reason he was still alive. He was twelve years old, and as sometimes happens with an old dog, he could snap at people. He did the same with other domestic animals, and one day, after he had mauled one of Frú Løbner’s hens, Martimann said Mogul’s days were numbered.
Tóvó did not know what numbered days actually meant. He could count to nineteen, and he knew there was such a thing as “counting the days of Christmas,” which referred to a Faroese dance tradition, but that was surely not what his father meant. But when Martimann tied up the dog and went for his muzzleloader, it was clear to the boy that Mogul was about to be shot. That was what numbered days meant.
Tóvó began to sob. He said it was the chicken that had started it. That bird had crossed Mogul so many times. It had been sent by the Devil, and at night, when everyone was sleeping, Tóvó was going to set fire to every chicken in town.
Martimann was astonished by the strong words. He had also never seen Tóvó stomp and shake his fists like that. The boy was only six, but at that moment he resembled a raging dwarf. Tóvó put his arms around Mogul’s neck and said that he would never let go.
For a moment Martimann considered the situation. He knew how much the boy loved the dog, and if he shot it, his son would undoubtedly consider him as an enemy for a long time to come. He could give Frú Løbner some fish in exchange for the mauled hen, she would probably accept that. And it was such a sweet picture: Tóvó sobbing with his arms around Mogul’s neck, while the dog sat there inquiringly.
Martimann untied the rope, but to show that he still had a bit of authority, he gave the dog a kick that sent it spinning across the yard.
But Tóvó continued to cry. He hated his father. Hoped a whale would bite his arm off, or that a stone would come flying through the air and strike him right between the eyes.
The Little Wandering Church
ALTHOUGH IT WAS a regular weekday, Havn was a ghost town and had been for several weeks. Not a hammer stroke was to be heard between the houses, not a single woman washed her clothes in the river, and no playful children rolled barrel hoops in the alleyways. The city, which could normally man 16 eight-rower boats, could hardly man a single boat in May or June.
From a bird’s eye view, the thatched houses resembled giant limpets stuck to the rocks with no sign of life.
The situation was so dire that the Dean Hans of the church bought several barrels of grain with poor relief funds. One large pot sat on the stove of the midwife, Adelheid Debess, another hung over a hearth belonging to an old married couple up on the hill. A few of the sick were able to fetch their own soup, but households where every family member was coughing and vomiting needed others to bring them their meals, and in some cases also to feed them.
One of the selfless souls caring for the sick was Old Tóvó. In his younger days he had been known as a skirt-chaser, but women still let him slip his hand beneath their necks and lift their heads while he gave them water or soup to drink. He inhaled their sweet, feminine aroma, and, indeed, he confided to a female relative from Bakkahella that he always liked it when women were sick, because they were so compliant. She tried to smile, saying he had always been a blowhard.
No one entered the church. Ever since the measles had seized the city, the church opened its doors only to the dead. Up to eight coffins at a time stood on trestles in the choir and down the center aisle. Protocol dictated that in cases of disease the coffins should be tarred on the inside, and the smell of tar and rot filled the church with a boundless despair. The dead were whisked from their homes as soon as possible, and they were neither washed nor prepared in another way before the cart retrieved them. One old tradition was to bind the big toes together so that the dead could not walk again, but measles had undermined most traditions. And who knew if the dead even wanted to walk. Why should they? In May and June, death in Tórshavn was about as bare as it could get. Ghosting around as autumn storms were shrouding the city in a salt-sea fog was not to be recommended either to living souls or to spooks.
Adelheid dried her tears and smiled. It must be a bizarre coffin flotilla indeed, she thought, setting a course for eternity’s waters. The sails were the garments people were wearing when they died: nightgowns, loose pants, shawls, and tattered shifts.
Sure, sure, answered her husband, Ludda-Kristjan, and shrugged his left shoulder. He was one of those short-fused folk from Kák, but he could not do much against his wife. He did not dare tell her to shut her damn mouth and stop all this pretentious nonsense. However, that was how the flock around Dean Lund talked. Their sentimentality was disgusting.
One exception was the Norwegian Corporal Nils Tvibur, or Muhammad, as he was called. On The Feast of the Cross, back at the beginning of May, he was in Ludda-Kristjan’s workshop and he said there was no point in wasting good wood. Given the circumstances, it was enough to make every coffin a foot high, and if the epidemic continued, they would have to reassess the situation.
Ludda-Kristjan asked if he was thinking of a mass grave, and that was exactly what Nils had in mind. Once a mass grave was dug, the dead would have to be wrapped in linen and lime sprinkled over the corpses.
Among Fort Skansin’s soldiers, Nils Tvibur was the one Amtmand Pløyen trusted the most. The Corporal meant what he said; the man was no sycophant. The soldiers were responsible for unloading the ships that came to trade, and it was this trade that funded operations at Skansin; as corporal, Nils was the obvious choice for foreman. And even though he could be hard on people, even on his own men, he was good at getting things done.
Nils’s Christian name was Selleg, and he came from the Sveio peninsula in Hordaland. No one ever called him Nils Selleg, though, and in the fort’s log he always signed as “Nils Tvibur.” He was called Tvibur because he was a twin. But since he had been born second, it was his older brother who had inherited the farm.
Nils Tvibur, though, was not one to shy from w
ork, and when the gravedigger succumbed in May to the measles, Nils took up his spade, and he also drove the horses that pulled the cart. If a corpse was too tall to fit in the coffin, he broke the neck so he could nail the lid shut.
“Damn,” he said one day after Dean Hans had blessed a man from Hoyvík whose neck he had just broken. “He looks like he’s listening to something I can’t hear. So long as it’s not the footfalls of Iblis.”
Dean Hans blanched at the name of Iblis. “Don’t you go saying the name of Muslim Satan in a Christian church,” he said, crossing the corpse anew.
“Of course,” Nils replied.
There were few days that the corporal and the pastor did not cross paths, and one day Dean Hans asked why Nils was so infatuated with the Muslim faith.
Nils responded that religion in general did not really interest him. Neither the Muslim nor the Christian religion, nor Judaism for that matter. But last year a man had died whom he had greatly respected, the newspaper editor Henrik Wergeland. Nils said that he had not read the man’s poetry, but the things he had written about religious freedom—those were manly words indeed. It was Wergeland who had opened his eyes to Muhammad, or the great Desert Captain, as Nils liked to call him. Since then he had tried as much as possible to follow the Muslim way of life. He knew that the Muslim people lived next to the high mountains where Noah’s ark was stranded. Their cities spread south toward the Persian Gulf, and Muslims also lived along the entire North African coast. They were not too stingy to give alms to the poor, but they were also fearless warriors.
It was the general state of emergency that prompted Pastor Hans to make an unusual decision. Since the church only had room for the dead, he decided to sally forth and take hymns and prayers out to the townsfolk.
In the beginning, he walked alone, making brief stops at Bakkahella, at Doktaragrund, up by the library, or simply whenever he saw a door ajar. He prayed an Our Father, blessed the household, and then sang a verse.
After he was joined by Anna Sofie and Henrietta Løbner, who were mother and daughter, other poor souls turned out as well. For the most part, they sang “Fare, World, Farewell” by the Danish hymnodist Thomas Kingo. They sang it to the saraband melody, and their swaying steps made the group look solemn and strange.
No poet, of course, has made a greater impact on the Faroese national spirit than Thomas Kingo, and when Professor Christian Matras translated “Fare, World, Farewell” into the Faroese in 1929, he walked, humming, the same narrow streets as Pastor Hans did in an effort to instill the verses with Kingo’s unique musicality.
The group also sang Oehlenschläger’s more contemporary and milder hymn, “Teach Me, Oh Wood, to Fade Glad Away”, and when they passed the Geil family house, Tóvó sometimes stood at the door, watching and listening to the little wandering church.
Tóvó’s Flies
THAT MORNING TÓVÓ’S mother woke him. During the last two days she had been up to his room a few times, but she had not said a word. She was not her usual self, and now that the measles and its side effects no longer gripped her, she sometimes broke into such heartrending sobs that Tóvó had to cover his ears, and when that did not help, he simply left the house. He had no idea these crying spells heralded a budding insanity, and that in the coming years his mother would earn the nickname Crazy Betta.
In his Observations, Panum wrote: . . . there is hardly any other country, or indeed any metropolis, in which mental diseases are so frequent in proportion to the number of people as on the Faroes.
Tóvó’s brother, Lýðar, and his sister, Ebba, were still confined to their beds, and their grandfather had placed a vomit bucket on the bench in between them. An old home remedy suggested that tidal seawater had curative powers, and so their great-grandfather often made the trip to the little promontory of Bursatangi to rinse out the bucket. He covered it with a lid to keep the flies out, but nonetheless they buzzed around this interesting wooden container. Sometimes they sat on the rim, and as they cleaned their shiny legs, Tóvó struck. Most flies he killed as soon as he caught them, but others he tortured to death. He would place the prisoner on its back and feel the faint buzzing of the fly’s body as a tickle against his forefinger and thumb, and before the tiny heart would beat its last, he’d have the fly’s plucked wings and legs arranged on the bench. Other flies he drowned in a quart measure-pot. Like a ship with no oarsman, the fly would sail around and around the small, tin-lined sea. The fly tried reach the edge, but every time it had almost gotten two or three legs beneath it, it would be mercilessly shoved away again, until eventually it gave up fighting for its miserable life.
The tobacco tin, which Tóvó had stashed behind the Heergaard stove’s clawed lion feet, often contained nineteen dead flies. A piece of twine was wrapped around the container, and when Tóvó removed the lid, it smelled slightly of rot, but mostly of chewing tobacco. The flies that had not been tortured to death lay with wings pressed tight to their bodies and skinny legs curled up. Like they were begging forgiveness for their very existence.
Whether tortured, crushed, or drowned, the flies all had one thing in common: they were victims in the war Tóvó single-handedly waged against the measles. From what he understood, measles were a kind of fly. One single glance from those itty bitty measles-eyes and people immediately went feverish and began to cough and rave like mad. Some also sang like mad, a humming mixed with guttural sounds, until they were either exhausted, asleep, or blue in the face.
Still, Tóvó did not understand why the measles flies had not beamed their rays in Great-Grandfather’s direction, or why Mogul was unaffected. A few cows, on the other hand, definitely had measles, the way they were behaving.
Here is what the cows should do. They should go up to the small lake, Hoyvíkstjørn, and out onto the Konmansmýri marsh, where they could eat grass and clover and thyme, and where their calves could frolic so they sprang straight up into the air. Sometimes the cattle grazed way up near Svartifossur, and one sunny day last summer, when Betta and her children went there to pick berries, they saw several white ravens and a heron fishing in the falls.
Svartifossur was not as high a waterfall as Villingardalsfossur, and it was also lower than the streams that cast themselves over the cliffs at Kaldbaksbotnur, but Svartifossur was still the most beautiful of the waterfalls. The rocks were dark, and when the sun shone they were wonderfully warm when you touched and sat on them. Small red flowers glinted among the plants growing along the stream and hanging from the rocks, and in the rocky crevices you could see whole bunches of yellow roseroot. According to Lýðar, the high rushes that grew north of the waterfall were called “grass knives,” because they were so sharp you could cut yourself on them.
Their mother said rainbows also loved Svartifossur, and her children believed her. Svartifossur was where the rainbows’ colors were mixed, and after that, proud and beautiful, they would straddle the fjord across to Nólsoy. Sometimes a rainbow would hit Heimistova, where their paternal grandmother and grandfather lived, and sometimes a rainbow would reach all the way north to Eystnes on Eysturoy. Svartifossur was a paradise for all berry lovers, their mother said, wiping red berry juice from her small daughter’s lips. Lýðar lay splashing in the stream, and when he came out again, his mother wrapped the naked boy in her shawl.
Now everything was different. There was no one left to milk the cows, which had gone mad and bellowed through people’s doors.
The fact Mogul numbered among Tóvó’s worries was due to the reaction he had had against his father the day Martimann was going to kill the dog, but the boy dared not tell anyone that, not even his great-grandfather.
However, he did ask Great-Grandfather why he did not get sick.
Old Tóvó replied that, fact of the matter was, he had already had the measles when he was a child, back in 1781 when the measles had last swept through the island, and you could not get the disease twice. That was also why he was not afraid to visit people and help them. And perhaps the old man se
nsed that something else was bothering the boy, because he added that foul-breathed dogs could not get the disease either.
Tóvó asked if the disease really did come flying through the air. His great-grandfather explained that a ship had come from Denmark on Annunciation Day, and that that ship had brought the disease to Tórshavn.
Tóvó had heard of Denmark and he knew that a prince lived there. He had even seen the prince when he had come to Havn in a warship two years ago. Suddenly, he frowned and asked: why would the prince send a ship full of measles-flies to the Faroes?
Old Tóvó suppressed a smile when he looked into the boy’s serious and lovable face. He had not been as fond of his own children as he was of Tóvó. And the boy was so clever. The journey between thought and question happened in the blink of an eye. His great-grandfather knew about all the dead flies Tóvó kept in that tobacco tin, and one day he had watched the boy drown one poor creature in the quarter measure-pot. However, he said nothing, just waited outside until the deed was done.
Now he explained to Tóvó that, of all the castles in the world, the measles castle was the hardest to conquer. Only the most cunning of princes could sneak through the gate and raise the flag of victory.
Grandma Pisan
THE CART STOPPED for the first time in front of the Geil family house on Pentecost. Great-grandfather opened the door so that Nils Tvibur and another man could enter and retrieve Pisan, or Grandma Pisan, as the children called her.
Pisan was from Hestoy, and when Farmer Támar’s oldest son got her pregnant and she gave birth to a daughter, she took her own child’s life.
That was what Old Tóvó told his great-grandson several years later.
Pisan gave birth to her daughter in a peat shed up on the island of Hestur, he said. And the child was healthy. She smelled so freshly of the womb, and Pisan could feel the warm breath from the newly inflated lungs against her neck and cheeks. She said that the breath coming from the tiny nostrils and mouth was like a storm, the most violent she had ever experienced. She put the baby to her breast, and when the child had nursed its fill, Pisan did what plenty of other unmarried mothers did back during the years of the Slave Law, which forbade anyone who did not own land from marrying—she killed her own child. With the little nape resting trustfully against her palm, she pressed her thumb to the baby’s throat, and when its breathing had stopped, she wrapped it in the lined shawl on which she had given birth, bundled it up, and then sank her unbaptized daughter in a small pond south of Fagradalsvatn.
The Brahmadells Page 2