Debes continues:
Since Nólsoyar Páll was unable to give the name Napoleon to one of his own children, he convinced his brother, Jákup Nolsøe, who was a trade envoy, and who was married to Onnu Katrinu Petersdatter Skeel, to use the name Napoleon. And so it was. They called one son Napoleon Nolsøe. And that was undoubtedly the first Faroese to be named Napoleon. In any case, he was the first practicing doctor.
A few low wooden steps led to the door of the man who was named after an emperor, and as Tóvó entered the small apothecary, which sold opium drops and small bundles of sugar candies, licorice, and French brandy in bottles with glass stoppers, the doctor snapped a wet rag on the counter, spraying droplets.
“Shut the door, hurry, hurry! I don’t want any more of those black beasts in here!”
Tóvó saw some enormous flies against the bright window. They looked as big as candy sugars. Or maybe it was just the sun playing tricks. That was probably it. Sometimes you saw something that was not real, and sometimes you dreamt things that were not real. The sun teased people, that was what it was. Everything it touched shone so beautifully and it could run away with the senses. And especially on a day like today when Mama was back on her feet and might even fire up the stove. As long as the fire stays out of my fly can, Tóvó thought, squinting his eyes so that the window flies were reduced to tiny buzzes.
“What do you need?”
Carefully, Tóvó placed the telescope on the counter, and with his forefinger against the dark red silk, he pushed the telescope toward the doctor. For a moment, he could not remember if he was supposed to get Napoleon drops or opium drops, but then he said that Mama wanted a bottle of opium.
“Does your mother think that this is a Jew shop?”
“My sister and my brother are coughing so bad.”
“Everyone in this blasted hole is coughing, and if I were to fill my shop with your junk, I’d be ruined soon enough.”
Then the doctor snapped his rag and took out two flies at once “Stay there, you black harbingers of summer.” The words slipped from his mouth.
Suddenly, his eyes glinted. He repeated his words: black harbingers of summer. He repeated his words again and again, and his narrow lips relaxed into a wide smile. It was like he was tasting them.
Napoleon had the same sideburns as his father, but while the old man had retained his dark hair and youthful hairline, the son was white-haired and balding.
The doctor set down the rag and loosed the ties around the red silk.
“Mama said that my grandfather got that from Nólsoyar Páll. She wants a bottle of those drops in return.”
“Hmm,” said the doctor, “so Gudda í Geil is your great-aunt, and you’re one of the Brahmadells.” Head tilted, he considered Tóvó: “The smallest Brahmadella in the city, no doubt.”
“I’m bigger than my sister,” Tóvó replied.
“Of course you are. Forgive me, my friend. But a poet’s glass! Paris 1791. P. N. Very, very interesting.”
Then Napoleon saw Tóvó’s orange and asked where he got it.
Tóvó said that a man in a big coat had given it to him, and that the orange was for his mother.
Napoleon laughed appreciatively and went over to the window.
“And here I thought Old Tóvó was your grandfather,” he said, as he polished the telescope’s lenses.
“My grandfather died on Nólsoyar Pall’s ship. Mama said the ship was cursed, and that Nólsoy is full of ghosts. But Nólsoy might not even be real. Mama said that too. The island is only a dream, and maybe it’ll sink someday, then all that’ll be left is a stupid clog floating on the water. Do you believe that? Can dreams sink?”
Napoleon glanced at the boy. The world held some strange things, he said, putting the telescope to his left eye.
The houses on Krákusteinur nearly leaped into the apothecary, and he remembered how he and other small boys used to dance around burning bird beaks to the east of those houses. That was back when there was a beak tax and men between the ages of 15 and 50 had to render up bird beaks to help control nuisance birds, things like crows, ravens or skuas, or face a fine. He wanted to ask Tóvó if he had ever experienced the nevtoldansa, the beak tax dance, but then realized the amusement belonged to a bygone age, back before the beak tax was abolished. Besides, the boy would find his own fires to dance around.
Napoleon figured the boy was the Martimann’s son. Still, Napoleon did not want to ask. Having a child’s desperate sorrow cast onto his counter would completely ruin the day. And he did not like this conversation either. The boy was too small to speak so grimly and wisely.
Later that night, Napoleon spied after the schooner. He had woken up around midnight from the sound of the anchor chain rattling through its hawseholes. Although he kept out of sight of the visitors, he watched the men as they passed by the office somewhat later. Amtmand Pløyen and that crude Nils Tvibur accompanied by the newly arrived doctors, and he heard his name mentioned as they passed his front door.
The Uncle’s Big Mouth
ONLY FIVE DAYS ago Doctor Napoleon and Landkirurg Regenburg had met together with Pløyen. They had no idea at the time that medical help was on the way from Copenhagen. On the table in front of them, Pløyen had placed the map of the Faroe Islands drawn by the commandant of the Tórshavn garrison, Christian Born. He pointed to those areas where measles was raging, and said that the disease had also been confirmed in the town of Trongisvágur south on Suðuroy.
He sighed and glanced up at Regenburg. “I pray to God measles is a miasmatic disease.”
“The science is unclear on the matter,” Regenburg answered.
Pløyen turned beet red. “I’m not talking about scientific measles. I’m talking about a disease that kills! Do you understand me? I’m talking about all the corpses Nils Tvibur has been hauling away in his damned cart!”
Doctor Napoleon brushed some lint off his shoulder. He could certainly understand Pløyen’s heartfelt sigh, but he really disliked hearing the man yell. Pløyen had lost most of his upper teeth, and when he became angry, he could control neither his lisp nor the saliva that sprayed from his open mouth. How disgusting, Napoleon thought—and the stench that came from the man’s mouth was rancid. Other people like the Norwegian corporal or the officer aboard the Havfruen could bark like that, but not the king’s deputy! And Pløyen was also Napoleon’s patient. Twice in the last year he had snipped Pløyen’s hemorrhoids, and the fact that the man’s upper and lower orifices were equally repugnant nauseated him.
And all this “miasmatic” talk was so backward and peculiar. Napoleon himself had not been entirely clear what the word meant and so had to look it up. Miasma was a Greek word meaning “to pollute,” and in a medical context, it meant “airborne pollution” or “airborne contagion.” Yet in reality, how the measles spread was meaningless. The real question was how to stop or further prevent the outbreak. But that was typical Pløyen: filling his big mouth with fine words, which turned out to be completely irrelevant.
One Sunday afternoon, as they were playing Ombre at the Club, Napoleon stated that deep down Pløyen was nothing but an incarnate plebeian snob. That was the real foundation for his clumsy ballad, Grindavísan, which was written in honor of the Faroese pilot-whale hunt, and to which authority-loving Faroese danced exuberantly.
At his table was an old shop assistant, a half-drunk farmer from Velbastað, shouting “Long live the Sunmen” at steady intervals, and the seventy-five-year-old Pastor Schrøter in his leather corset. The pastor’s left hand had been dead for years, but he could make use of it by placing the cards between his thumb and forefinger.
Pastor Schrøter was actually half-doctor, and that served him well on Suðuroy. Otherwise, he was learned in many ways, and knew several modern languages. All the educated men who came to the Faroes visited him and received knowledge, both oral and written. So wrote Christian Matras in a newspaper article for Oyggjaskeggja in 1952.
Schrøter had been a frien
d of Nólsoyar Páll and had owned a share of the ship Royndin Friða, and during the Napoleonic Wars, up until the 1820s even, he had been as much smuggler as pastor.
Now he peered over the rim of his lorgnettes and asked Napoleon to explain his allegation.
“It’s not an allegation,” Napoleon answered. “It’s a fact.”
They were sitting in the reading room, and the rustling of newspapers suddenly ceased. Astonished eyes peered from behind the pages, and abruptly it was so still that they could hear the firewood sighing in the tall black Bilegger stove. And what exactly was the wood sighing about? Perhaps it sighed: I’m burning, I’m burning, I was a forest. Or: I’m burning, I’m burning, once I housed songbirds.
The waiter stuck his head into the reading room and asked if everything was okay. And it was. When Napoleon was in his element, the world was bright and festive. He asked if a hymn to pilot-whale blubber might rank as high poetry? Or if pilot-whale meat would make a suitable poetic subject—if, that is, it did not drip too much?
“What would a poet like Lord Byron, who squandered his precious gifts on the Greek Revolution and died in a tent on the front lines, have said about the bard of the pilot whale hunt? Or what would that venerable erotomane, Aarestrup, have said about the strophe, Quick lad, pilot whales to slaughter, that is our pleasure? Of course, on the Flatland they don’t kill pilot whales anymore, so translated to Danish the lines might be: Quick lad, pigs to slaughter, that is our pleasure.”
Napoleon shook his head. It was only on the Faroes that a barbaric hocus-pocus man like Pløyen could be taken seriously.
Schrøter stroked his chin, and when Napoleon announced that he had a riddle, the pastor took a mouthful of gin.
Could anyone tell him, Napoleon asked, what kind of creature could convince Faroese peasants that Danish tyranny was the absolute synthesis of European statesmanship?
Schrøter swallowed his gin the wrong way, his double chin swinging as he coughed, and while the half-drunk Velbastað farmer slapped him between the shoulders, the words gurgled out of the pastor’s throat: “Anyway, you’ve got your uncle’s big mouth.”
The Honorable Official
PLØYEN WAS NONETHELESS a popular man, perhaps the most popular government official who had ever worked in the Faroes. And there are solid reasons for that.
In the book The Faroese Country, which was published in 2001, Professor Hans Jacob Debes awards Pløyen this praise: The most energetic and constructive effort to pave the way for material progress on the Faroes was carried out by the respected government official Chr. Pløyen.
Deeds for the land on the east side of the sound between Streymoy and Eysturoy, and also in Hvítanes, where outlier towns would be built, bore his signature. Added to Pløyen’s list of achievements was the introduction of longline fishing to the Faroes. The man also spoke flawless Faroese.
In 1991, communist and author D. P. Danielsen published a novel on the outlier population of Hvítanes, the Nesmen, where Pløyen achieved nearly sacrosanct status: And if the Nesmen had no idol to which to turn, if they thought their true God was damnably slow at answering prayers, now they had found one. After that day no one under the sun could say an ill word about Amtmand Pløyen in the presence of a Nesman.
No roses without thorns, however. In the jubilee publication written in connection with the 100th year anniversary of the Faroese National Library, the academic M. A. Jacobsen gave Pløyen, or rather, an incident in which Pløyen was featured, a different evaluation:
The bank directors (Pløyen, Lunddahl, and G. F. Tillisch) set aside 100 rigsdaler as a prize for whoever was able to produce the best Faroese grammar. However, the bank wanted to remain anonymous, and therefore the private archivist Finnur Magnusson was asked to place an announcement in the newspapers. We know that V. U. Hammershaimb, who took the official’s exam in 1847, intended to win the prize. He wrote a letter to Rafn from Tórshavn dated August 16, 1847 (printed in “Breve fra og til Carl Christian Rafn”, pub. B. Grøndal): “Since I’ve come to Thorshavn, there has been much unrest. Two Danish warships have anchored here and the officers swarm around constantly. Now a farewell celebration has been held for the Amtmand who is leaving us; I am, therefore, far from finished with the Faroese grammar, but do you not think that Etatsråd Magnusson would accept it, even if it arrived a little after the specified day, as long as no one else has submitted something?”
The deadline expired on September 23, 1848, and no grammar arrived. Whether Hammershaimb submitted his too late we do not know—it was not printed until 1854, and Finnur Magnusson died Dec. 24, 1847. In 1849, however, 100 rigsdaler were paid to Pløyen’s estate. He had already permanently left the Faroes. We know that Lunddahl had requested the funds, but he received no answer. The bank directors, Lunddahl and Tillisch, decided in a meeting on March 8, 1849 that the Library should receive the money.
According to the available accounts, the money was never repaid.
In other words, the honorable Pløyen was the man who stole the award meant first for the father of the Faroese written language, and after that for operations at the Faroese National Library. And 100 rigsdaler was no small sum. As a comparison, it can be noted that in 1846 the monthly salary for a sergeant in Tórshavn’s garrison was 12 rigsdaler, and that a barrel of barley cost 10 rigsdaler.
Angelica archangelica
THE SAME DAY that Doctor Napoleon—or Pole, as he was known by those close to him—met with Pløyen and Regenburg, he ran into Ludda-Kristjan on the street. They had been childhood playmates, and as in their boyhood days, Ludda-Kristjan’s left shoulder twitched when he got excited. He whispered out of the corner of his mouth that the evening before last he had seen two riders heading west over the river, and that one rider had been Amtmand Pløyen and the other Nils Tvibur. With an air of mystery, Ludda-Kristjan asked if Pole had any idea where they might have gone.
Napoleon shrugged his shoulders, and Ludda-Kristjan continued whispering that the Amtmand had lost his faith. He was the king’s highest representative in a country that seemed to have been forsaken by God, and that was why he had traveled to Skælingsfjall on the longest day of the year.
“So what?” said Pole.
“Shh, not so loud. Have you forgotten that the yokel farmers meet on Skælingsfjall on the longest day?”
“I remember, now that you mention it,” Napoleon replied.
“Those heathen devils are praying to the sun! That’s why they gather on the mountain every year. They’re Sunmen! The sun is the landowner’s old god.”
Napoleon recalled this as he looked at Pløyen’s angry red face. It was one thing to govern the Faroe Islands in peacetime, but now that the country’s timber was being devoted to coffins, the ground was shifting toward the old traditions. When family fathers in their best years were being mowed down by the measles, there was every reason to shake the dust from one’s mourning garb and set about praying to Jesus Christ in Heaven, not to mention the sun and Nils Tvibur’s great Desert Captain, to preserve the Faroes. The newborns did not trouble Napoleon too much. If social circumstances truly shaped one’s personality, then having the measles stop the heart of predisposed scoundrels was a good way to avoid grief. Maybe the infant would have become a drunk or unwed mother, a burden on the poor relief fund? Tórshavn had yet to hatch any painters like Rafael or playwrights like Oehlenschläger, so instead of cursing the measles, perhaps it was better to bow one’s head in thanks for the harsh renovation that mercilessly cleansed every foul corridor.
Napoleon also had his doubts about the miasmatic idea, or rather: He had not given the word much thought in years, and the word was all but absent in the new medical works coming from the Edinburgh school and from Germany. The miasmatic viewpoint had to do with an older understanding of illness, in particular fever-related diseases, but thanks to that idiot Regenburg the officials and their wives were walking around saying “miasma, miasma,” as if it were some industrious spirit blasting people with its devilry. Ple
nty of people also went around in those beaked masks that supposedly warded off infection, and encountering a flock of the bird people in some gloomy corridor was anything but pleasant; it was unclear whether these eerie creatures had invaded and conquered the city, or whether one simply had found oneself in a nightmare.
It was Ludda-Kristjan who made and sold the masks, and he explained to his old playmate that the masks were like medicine: if you believed it helped, then it helped. The masks especially sold like hot cakes among the members of the singing church. Ludda-Kristjan, however, could say with absolute certainty that the masks were not solely donned to prevent infection. Some of the singers feared the ill, plague-like wind coming from Frú Løbner’s backside.
Napoleon subscribed to the Danish medical journals Bibliothek for Læger and Ugeskrift for Læger. He had read about the tiny creatures mainland doctors were studying beneath microscopes. In general, so much was happening within medical science, especially when it came to surgery and pharmaceuticals, that Harvey, indeed Edward Jenner, were almost outdated. Despite new instruments like mercury thermometers and stethoscopes, however, there was always room for error.
The first measles outbreak on April 7th or 8th was diagnosed by Regenburg as rheumatic fever. And although there were certain similarities between the two diseases, for example, high fever and fatigue, the Landkirurg’s diagnosis was a complete disaster, particularly when one considered the consequences.
Doctor Napoleon tried to calm himself. He was well aware his own roll deserved no applause. He had made his share from selling morphine, not to mention various oils and salves into which he mixed ambergris, cinnamon, and anise. Still, however willing people were to pay handsomely for a few grams of ground senna leaf—or for an outright lie, really, just so long as it was written in Latin—there were boundaries for how much you could swindle people.
That is what he was thinking when he advised that farmer out in Húsi on Koltri to eat flowering angelica to prevent complications from the measles.
The Brahmadells Page 5