Betta looked up at him with her astonished gemstone eyes. She said a Muslim had no business prattling about death’s domain. Regenburg could go to Hell with his good advice, and he could take his temple rat of a wife and every last soldier and all the confounded birdfolk in this despicable town with him.
Nils knew there was no point in responding to her deranged words. For many years, he had been infatuated with Betta, but even though Martimann sailed with the Scottish sloop Glen Rose every summer, he had never managed to catch her in conversation. He had only seen her about the town, usually holding a child by the hand or in her arms. True, she might occasionally bid him good day and smile, but her smile had nothing behind it.
Sitting next to her husband now, she resembled an enormous insect; her long, full hair was the net she threw over his beloved body. She said it was the driftwood from Nólsoy that had finished off Martimann, and that the wood was cursed. Everything to do with Nólsoy was cursed. Heimistova was a witches’ den, and it was witchcraft that had sunk the Royndin Fríða. Nólsoyar-Páll died there, and she had lost her father while she was still in her mother’s womb.
Betta pointed to the coffin in terror and said that the coffin was black-tarred, just like Hell, though at the word Hell, she smacked her mouth, crossed herself, and said that she had not meant it.
Old Tóvó sat next to her, but he did not dare to touch her arm. Perhaps she might hit him or say something she did not actually mean. He simply remarked that Martimann’s soul had departed long since, and that wherever he was, it was a good place to be.
“Would you shave Martimann for me?” Betta asked suddenly.
Her voice was weak and broken, and the request struck Nils’s heart. After that, she began talking about the Shoemaker from Jerusalem who wandered the worlds’ streets unshaven and filthy, and no one opened their door to him. The Shoemaker had not meant to be so disagreeable when Jesus had asked him for water, he was just so afraid of the Roman soldiers, and that was why he refused to give Jesus something to drink. Indeed, it was inconsiderate of Jesus to ask him for water, because he knew full well that he would be putting the man in an unnecessary bind.
And then Betta mentioned Hell again, and this time she was unashamed. Her hair and hands trembled as she said that the Geil house was a place in Hell, and that fire would soon shoot from the bay, and that no one would need to shave then because Satan, the Master Barber himself, would fix the problem.
A coughing spasm interrupted her terrifying words, and even though it seemed fruitless, the old man tried to comfort her. He also told Tóvó to come and tell his father good-bye, but Tóvó refused.
The boy also couldn’t bring himself to ask where his father was going, even though he knew that the cart took the dead to the church, and from there to a hole in the cemetery.
Tóvó was terrified, that was what. He had wished his father ill, and God, who heard all, had heard that terrible prayer. It was his fault his papa would never wake up, and so he could not tell Martimann good-bye.
Tóvó bit his fingers, not knowing whether it was laughter or tears that filled his throat.
Betta looked at her son, and the fact that he refused to bid his father farewell subdued her.
Hr. Hans had paused in the doorway. Now he slipped inside, and he was so tall that his head touched the ceiling beams. Softly he asked the Lord to watch over this sorely afflicted household, and when he had said amen, both coffin bearers went over to the bed. Nils Tvibur gripped Martimann under the arms, the masked man gripped him beneath his knees, and then they lifted him into the coffin. As they were bending to lift the coffin and depart, Nils suddenly hesitated and asked where the shaving things were.
Old Tóvó sprang quickly to his feet. He found the light-colored cloth in which the shaving knife and soap were wrapped, and he also carried a small basin with water over to the coffin.
Nils looked at Betta. “May I have the honor of shaving the honorable deceased?”
Betta was so stunned by the unexpected question that she could not speak. Nevertheless, she nodded.
Nils passed Old Tóvó his cap, and while he wet Martimann’s face and rubbed soap into the well-grown stubble, a reverent hush fell over the kitchen.
First he shaved Martimann’s upper lip, and the scraping of the knife sounded oddly ceremonious. It was a tiny sound, but it reached every ear. Then he shaved both cheeks, taking pains not to cut the skin, even though Martimann’s face was already cold. Although he was down on one knee, still he did not want to risk shaving the throat, because it was so difficult to reach with the blade. He also scraped the stubble from Martimann’s chin, and when he was finished, he wetted the light-colored cloth and carefully wiped the dead man’s face.
When Nils got to his feet, he was obviously affected. The others in the room also sighed in relief; they had more or less held their breath while Martimann was prepared.
Old Tóvó thanked Nils, and after that the two men lifted the casket and left.
Later Nils Tvibur remarked that if anyone had earned a royal sign of respect during the weeks that the measles raged, it was that old Brahmadella, or whatever the fuck the Havnarfolk called him.
It was only when the bearers had successfully finished and departed that the old man burst into tears. Suddenly, he was ancient, the oldest man in the city, perhaps in the city’s history. He was the same age as the Shoemaker from Jerusalem, and all the world’s sorrow stood written on his gray, unshaven face. He sat bowed, as he had on the night that he had watched over Martimann. In the Catholic lays against sickness, he had invoked the Angel Gabriel and the Holy Birgitte. Those mighty words had fallen like a cleansing cascade from his lips, he had been nearly out of his senses while he prayed and read, but still the words had been too weak.
At that moment Old Tóvó did not just hold the pain of humanity. His soft weeping also carried the fear of a wounded animal: The moment the coalfish lays with clapping gills on the shore, no clue where the sea has gone; the moment the poor lamb pisses in fear before the butcher’s knife slices its throat. And Pisan had died the same way as her newborn, with a rattling throat and a blue face.
Old Tóvó gasped for air. He had lost his wife and both his children. Poor Gudda had gone to work at 11 years of age, and her grave was in another country. Nor could he visit the grave of his son. Suffering was a form of vengeance, that was what. Whatever you did from carelessness, recklessness, or conscious malice, or by simply letting things alone, everything came back to roost, and if you were not ready for it, it would knock you to the ground. Whether it was Heaven or Hell taking its revenge, he did not know. Vengeance had no source; all you felt was the pain of it grip your heart, and that grip was firm and cold.
When the cart had departed and the crunch of its wheels in the gravel still hung in the yard, he sat with his cap in his hand and wept.
The days following were not any better. He was incapable of shouldering Betta’s sorrow, and he could get no words from her either, and when she cried, it was as if the heavens had broken and fallen over the house. He could not tolerate being there, and when he went for a walk or to visit someone, it was a comfort to have Tóvó with him.
Tóvó, though, wanted to be led by the hand, and that in itself bothered his great-grandfather. It was as if the boy had lost faith in his own feet and eyes. He had become as helpless as the flies that he drowned in the quart measure pot.
They slept in the same bed, and one evening Tóvó asked in a whisper why his great-grandfather had cried so horribly when the bird man and the corporal left with Martimann.
“Oh, my sweet child. Our family is dying. The Brahmadells are disappearing.”
“Was Grandma Pisan also a Brahmadella?” Tóvó wondered.
“Oh yes, certainly she was,” the old man replied.
“Then Father was a Brahmadella, too,” Tóvó said happily.
Before his great-grandfather had turned over to answer him, the boy was fast asleep.
The Story of a Nickn
ame
TÓRSHAVNARS CALLED HIS great-grandfather Old Tóvó or Tóvó í Geil, though he was Thorolf Thorolfsen in the parish register. The strange thing, however, was that when the boy’s name was entered into the parish register on August 3, 1769, the pastor, Johan Hendrik Samuelsen Weyhe, added the nickname of his own accord, writing that the male child was of the Brahmadells. The pastor’s handwriting, too, was visible after the names of the child’s father and paternal grandfather, where it was noted: of the Brahmadells. The reason for the addition is difficult to pinpoint. However, it was simply done in the moment and not out of malice.
In a letter exchanged with William Heinesen, the Danish ethnologist H. P. Hølund pursued the Brahmadella question further. There was no tradition, he knew, that allowed pastors to write nicknames in the parish register, and he thought there was something threatening or ominous in the words of the Brahmadells.
To place the matter in a larger context, Hølund referred to the book Faroese Yeomen of the King, 1984-1884, where the Faroese national archivist Anton Degn, among other things, wrote of the pastor: Hr. Weyhe was seemingly a talented and, especially when it came to oriental languages, a much admired man, and far exceeded his time in knowledge.
As Degn continued: In his latter years, [Hr. Weyhe] succumbed to the weakness which back then was common among clergymen in Norway and Denmark: “finding happiness in a bottle” . . .
Hølund believed that Pastor Weyhe himself was the origin of the nickname, and that the name itself originated in a drunken act.
Hølund attempted to clarify or interpret the name and referred to ancient India, where the Brahmins were the highest and most learned caste, and observed that a fitting translation of the word Brahma could be supreme god. However, why Pastor Johan appended the Italian preposition della, which signified “from” or “of,” onto brahma, which was a Sanskrit word or a Sanskrit name—that was something of a mystery. Indeed, properly speaking, the preposition should precede the nickname, but in Pastor Johan’s ears “dellabrahma” had probably sounded flat, eclipsing the orientally shaded allusion.
Hølund’s conclusion was that Pastor Johan had probably argued with either Old Tóvó’s father or grandfather, and in the pastor’s drunken state, the disagreement had become something distorted and unwholesome, causing the pastor to dare to record his frustration in the parish register.
The seventy-plus-year-old nickname had followed the family ever since.
The fact that the Brahmadella name truly did inspire fear was shown one day when Pastor Hans was passing the Geil house with his singing church. The man’s following had substantially increased in the last weeks, and they were so pious now that they did not so much walk as sway. With faces turned heavenward and arms crossed over their breasts, they sang the Oehlenschläger hymn “Teach Me, O Forest”. Frú Løbner’s soul had also continued to slip its earthly bonds, had grown increasingly freer of the earth, and weightlessness enveloped her as she swayed in the wake of tall, skeletal pastor.
Pastor Hans was so skinny that people jested about his remarkable appearance. Ludda-Kristjan, who could be quite droll among friends and acquaintances, had dropped the remark that Pastor Hans was only susceptible to two diseases: blackheads and osteoporosis.
When the pastor saw Old Tóvó standing in the door, he lifted his right hand and made the sign of the cross. The pastor’s smile was so disgustingly sweet and self-righteous that Old Tóvó slammed the door.
It was not just the pastor who saw what happened. Frú Løbner took Pastor Hans carefully by the arm and told him not to mind Tórálvur í Geil. She said the Brahmadells had no piety and were therefore incapable of appreciating good deeds.
Old Tóvó stood cursing in the hallway until the flock had passed. Intemperate devils, that’s what they were. Out taking a Sunday stroll through poor people’s misery and sorrow! All the years he spent repairing their shoes and boots, just so they could to walk drysoled through this diseased city.
It was the last pastor, Pastor Niels, who once tried to pay for a boot repair with some self-calligraphied scriptures. His bunions, which had ruptured the boot leather, had grown so big that they looked like budding horns.
And Old Tóvó told him that. He looked the pastor in the eye and told him that Hell was growing from his foot soles.
The Telescope and the Opium Drops
BETTA STUCK HER feet out of bed. Her hairy legs were well-formed, and her toenails were neat as tiny shells. She was wearing only a shirt, and while she wrapped the big shawl around her shoulders and beneath her heavy breasts, her toes sought out her clogs. She was not accustomed to the new wood floor, though, so when she found the clogs and started across it, it made such a racket that she kicked the shoes off again. There were some thick wool socks in the bed, and when she had pulled these on, she went over to the clothes chest. She unlocked the chest, lifted the lid, and took out the telescope bundled in a dark-red silk cloth.
As Betta walked to the peat box, she glanced at Mogul. Tóvó shrank back, certain his mother was about to kick the dog. Instead, Betta’s eyes took on a look of anxiety. She seemed to fear the dog and gave him a wide birth before sitting on the peat box.
For a moment, Betta closed her eyes, and then she asked Tóvó to come and sit beside her. Carefully, she untied the ribbons, unfolded the cloth, and for the first time in his life, Tóvó saw a telescope.
“P. N.,” she said, pointing to the letters engraved in the brass. “This telescope used to belong to Nólsoyar Páll. Pappi got it after his first tour aboard the Royndini. I want you to go to the Nólsoyar house and tell Doctor Napoleon that this telescope used to belong to his uncle, and tell him that your mama wants a bottle of opium drops in exchange for the telescope.”
Tóvó longed for her to say: Oh, my fortune’s child, or Mother’s little foal. She had such sweet words, and not just for him, but also for Lýðar and Ebba. But not today. She was not in a tender speaking mood. And she also did not notice her son’s loving gaze, or how his fingers fondled a corner of her shawl. He had the orange hidden beneath his sweater, and even though the Danish man had given him the strange fruit, he had decided that his mother should have it, but that he had better wait to give it to her. It made Tóvó happy simply to hear her voice, the fact that, in spite of everything, she still talked to him.
He did his sheepskin shoelaces, but once he was outside, he turned back around. “Opium?” he asked.
His mother nodded and her little foal galloped away, telescope in one hand and orange in the other. He raced straight across the road, a full meter between each glad step, only the tips of his shoes flinging the sand grains up. The bright bay quivered beneath the sunshine, and just like back then, back when everything was as it should be, dabbling ducks and eiders rummaged on the water’s surface.
Doctor Napoleon’s house was just beyond the river’s mouth, and it was the largest house in the city, full of windows that drank in the sun. No, the second largest, because the largest house in the city was the church; that was where God and all his angels lived, or nineteen angels at any rate. The big coalfish net hung from the church ceiling, and during the fall, when the bay simmered with coalfish, the whole city was there. The net was dragged through the east gable opening and was grabbed by 20, sometimes 25 nimble-footed men. The net was around 30 fathoms long and crept, worm-like, along Húsabrúgv, down though Bringsnagøta, then farther along Gongini, and when it had emerged on the tip of the headland, a line of the net was rowed out to Krákusteinur.
Martimann had been one of the most enthusiastic netmen, but Tóvó did not want to think about that at the moment.
Opium drops, he must not forget the name. Mama said the drops made the pain go away. Yet where did pain go? Maybe it had wings like measles flies? Or maybe it crept away like woodlice under rocks? Maybe pain lived with the Jóvóvamaður up by Svartifossur. Great-grandfather said that Jóvóvamaður was half-human, half-plant. The human half was little more than a finger in height, the rest of him wa
s roots extending far beneath the earth. He said the Jóvóvamaður was the Fly King, the Maggot King, and the Beetle King, so why could he not also be the King of Pain? Maybe it was Jóvóvamaður who sent pain to the city in the evenings? Oh! Woe to the poor soul who had left a door or window wide open!
The Amtmand’s House was also large, but not as tall as Doctor Napoleon’s. Still, if you counted all the additions and outlying building, the Amtmand’s House covered a substantial area up toward Glaðsheyggjur hill.
Húsagarður was also large, or maybe it was just all the people living on the farm there that made it feel big. Lots of grandfathers and grandmothers lived there, and women and men and also children whom Tóvó knew and with whom he played.
And of course the Royal Trade Monopoly buildings in Tórshavn were even larger.
Then there was the doctor’s house. Or rather, the house that belonged to his father, Jákup Nolsøe. Jákup was an old, robust man with broad hips and sideburns not unlike the corporal’s goat. Sometimes children bleated after him—mææææ, they said—but the old man ignored it.
Jákup Nolsøe believed the Faroes needed to prepare itself for the new era, and the fact he had great expectations for his son was shown by the forceful name Napoleon.
The famous historian from Gjógv, Hans Marius Debes, explains Napoleon’s name in his book, Stories from the Old Days:
During that time Napoleon Bonaparte was victoriously marching across Europe, and Nólsoyar Páll so admired him that people said he was completely insane for Napoleon. When Marin Malena was about to give birth to their second child, Nólsoyar Páll decided that if it were a son, he would be named Napoleon. And yet it was a daughter. Nonetheless, the name Napoleon was given and Nólsoyar Páll decided to call her Napolonia. Yet the pastor refused. He said Napolonia was no proper name, but that she could be called Apolonia, which came from the Greek god Apollo, and as such she was baptized.
The Brahmadells Page 4