Canis Fæcalis stood right behind His Majesty, and as the sharp blade came hissing down from the guillotine to slice the king’s head off, his sphincter relaxed. As soon as Canis Fæcalis smelled that there was a need, he stuck his pointed snout beneath the shift and fulfilled his official duty. The strange thing was, the dog remained standing there. It seemed to wonder why His Majesty’s asshole did not contract again.
And so this part of European cultural history came to a close.
Eigil and Karin saw each other between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. It was a long meeting. Karin did not return to Fuglafjørður until the first week in January.
Patricide
THE MOST UNFORTUNATE event to come out of Ergisstova, which more or less affected all of the family, was the patricide on Misaklettur. It was from that cliff the Hordalander, Nils Selleg, commonly called Nils Tvibur, but also known as the Corporal, or Muhammad, fell to his death, and the person who pushed him was none other than Gregor, his own flesh and blood.
Father and son had been out on the Móanesfløta plain, and on the way home the snack-hungry old man had the idea of climbing down for some puffin chicks. Nils did not care that the people of Kálgarður owned the rights to the birds on Misaklettur. His palette craved puffin chicks, and the ancient yeoman’s god shone on him as he climbed down among the colony.
Gregor sat on the edge holding a rope the old man was using for security, but the descent was easy, and when Nils had reached the grassy ledge, he let go of the rope and stood a moment listening to the din of countless bird beaks. Thousands of birds ate and shit here multiple times a day, and Nils loved the powerful smell coming from the rookery. Bird droppings were excellent fertilizer and a good defense, and the birds had their hollows all the way out to Misaklettur’s point. The cliff was a giant heart beating to the heavens. Every hollow clamored, and the roar from Røstin Sound, which broke white and foaming in the intense afternoon light, reached the cliff’s top.
Nils had killed two chicks and had his arm in a third hollow when he glanced up to see a large chunk of sod hurtling down toward him. Leaping out of the way was impossible. With his right arm still in the hollow, he grabbed onto a clump of dead grass with his other hand just as the lump struck his neck and back, knocking both legs out from under him.
Gregor carefully stretched himself over the edge, and he could not believe his eyes. About twelve fathoms below he saw his father’s heavy shoulders shift, and for a split second he looked straight into his father’s eyes. They glinted with shock, but also with a strange accusatory force.
The boy felt dizzy. This is not how it should have gone. His father should not be trying to get up. He should be dead. Dead as a rock! He should be smashed to bits, food for the ravens and jackdaws hundreds of fathoms below on the beach!
Gregor began to snivel and whine, just like he did when his father came after him back home with a rope. He considered running away, but where would he go? His father would find him in town, or if he headed north up the island.
Gregor tried to think clearly and to control his terror. At the moment he had nothing to fear, and it could be his father would not be able to climb back up. Maybe he had broken a leg or maybe even two.
A few rocks stuck out of the place where he had pried loose the clump of turf, and he used these to stone his father. He gathered every loose rock he could find, but the old man had already gotten his feet beneath him and was trying to take shelter beneath an overhang. His lower back and side seared; he probably had some broken ribs.
Perhaps he should try to calm his son down, Nils Tvibur thought, as he took shelter beneath the overhang. Perhaps Gregor did not mean to be so malicious. Perhaps it was just a momentary confusion that had seized him. It could happen. A person did not always have proper self-control. You could do things you did not actually mean. He himself had knocked his father to the ground.
Good God! Nils exclaimed. It had been half a century since he had left Selleg. Nonetheless, he had not planned that headbutt that felled his father. It had just happened.
“Shut up, Nils,” he interrupted himself. What could he possibly do to calm his son? Gregor would never trust him. He typically subdued his son with a rope. And that right there was the great misfortune. Rope language was all that idiot understood.
Ah! Nils sighed, pressing himself back against the cliff. His son lacked the characteristics of a leader. The boy never let moonlight play in the full ladle before drinking from the water barrel. His own offspring had the miserable eyes of a sheep thief.
Nils had also rebuked Aksal, his brother-in-law, but that was with a mountain staff and had been several years ago. He had caught his brother-in-law mounting a heifer in a dark stall. And that damned sodomite was known among Sumbingurs as the Wise One.
True, his brother-in-law knew a lot, he read books in both English and Danish, but all these years he had instilled his venom in Gregor and now it was beginning to take hold. That was the way it all connected. First Aksal had turned his sister against Nils, and then he had done the same with her daughters, Hjørdis and Adelborg, or Hjørdis, at any rate. She was married and lived in Fámjins, and she rarely came south to Sumba for a visit. Adelborg was married to a drunk out in Keri, but she was one you could talk to. Nils had never been close-fisted with her or her household, and her children called him Grandpa. You could thank her for that.
Nils’s eyes teared and suddenly he remembered Betta í Geil. That memory surprised him so much that a sound like a laugh escaped him.
He had not known many women in his life. He could count the Kristiania prostitutes with whom he had slept on two hands. He had only really gotten to know one of them. Her name was Mari Kolsbu, and one evening, when he went looking for her in the narrow streets of the whore district around Rådhuset, he learned she had run away. She had been caught up in Hans Nielsen Hauge’s revival movement as the man traveled from town to town and farm to farm preaching the true word.
Yet it was only together with Betta that he had been happy, the way people ought to be happy when they truly desire each other or they truly care about each other. And Betta had also cried her bitter and exhausted tears on his shoulder. That had been before the rape, though. After that everything changed.
Nils was deeply touched at the thought of his old flame. They had had some good times together, in any case, she was the only woman he had ever made laugh. Sometimes when he thought of their relationship, he characterized their nights as two wild horses with blood on their hooves. He remembered Betta’s terror when he came whinnying toward her with his terrible stallion cock. And she laughed when he said that there were few men north of Skagerrak who had his kind of equipment. The mere weight of his testicles would knock King Bernadotte silly.
Then the more troubled face of Djøssan appeared to him. She was clever and skillful, that she was, but he had never loved her. In all their years together they had never even reached an understanding, and it was rare that they even spoke. And if anyone had a long memory, it was Djøssan. Could she have brought their son to attempt . . . ? Nils could not bring himself to say the word patricide. However, the abusive words he had rained down on her person over the years were repulsive, and he groaned now just thinking about it. As a housewife and cook, he branded her the biggest poisoner on the island, and as a wife she was a bag of bones and stunk of ass at both ends. The blows he had rained down on her were also unpleasant to recall, but she had never complained. He respected her for that. If any woman was fit to fetch water for Muhammad’s horse, it was Djøssan úr Ergisstova.
Two more dirt clumps came flying from above, but Nils was able to press himself against the cliff and watch as they whizzed past and burst against Misaklettur. Perhaps he should have simply stay put. That was a time-honored strategy for wearing your enemy out. Yet he was not capable of it. Not Nils Tvibur. He felt the rage boil in his chest, clenched his teeth, and began to skillfully claw his way up. A rock from above bloodied the fingertips of his right hand, but he p
ersisted. He had the devil in him now, and the pain in his side and his torn fingernails were like whale oil poured on fire, causing fury to flame up anew.
And he knew the terrain around the cliff’s edge, knew there was not much loose material left to cast down at him. He began to taunt and ridicule his son, hurling curse words up at him; often it did not take much more than that to paralyze the wretch.
A few fathoms from the edge was a good-sized rock, and Gregor had just gotten his arms around it and was on his way back to the rim when he saw his father’s battered head appear. The old man had just gotten his left knee onto the grass and was about to stand up when Gregor, with both hands and a heavy thrust of his hips, sent the rock flying, striking his father squarely in the chest.
It was only a brief moment, not more than two or three heartbeats, but for that length of time father and son looked into each other’s eyes. And the Hordalander Nils Selleg, commonly called Nils Tvibur, but also known as the Corporal, or Muhammad, fell to his death. The Faroes had been his home for thirty-nine years, sixteen of those in Tórshavn and twenty-three in Sumba. He plummeted all the way down the cliff and died on the flat rocky beach, which today the Sumbingurs call Corporal Rock.
A Fucking Night in Tvøroyri
DOCTOR NAPOLEON WOKE to the maid hammering on his bedroom door: “Pole, Pole,” she cried fearfully, “There’s someone at the door, they look half-dead.” Then she began to cry. “You have to come down. I think it’s Jóakim.”
Shuddering at the idea of a dead man scraping against the door, Napoleon pulled on his pants and shirt.
It had been a miserable evening. The Glen Rose had arrived with a young man who had developed gangrene. George Harrison and the helmsman had followed him into the consultation room, and immediately Napoleon saw there was nothing he could do. The man’s left hand and wrist were coal black and he had a high fever.
Napoleon asked the man to sit at the examining table and served him a tall glass of Hollands gin. He asked how far up the pain went, and the man pointed at his shoulder and said, fuck. He handed Pole the empty glass, was given another, and repeated his word, fuck.
Napoleon knew that some patients were more pliable when they saw the operation implements with their own eyes, and the young man seemed the sort who would rather lose his hand than his life. The amputation saw lay next to the scalpel, and the iron that would be used to cauterize the wound glowed red on the stove.
The consultation room was at the east end of the building, and double walls had been constructed and the space between them filled with dirt in order to soundproof the room. An additional layer of dirt above the ceiling filled almost the whole space between floors.
Suddenly the young man glanced at the skipper, his eyes glinting from spitefully narrowed slits, and with outright shamelessness he said: fuck your fucking Jesus.
Pole started and saw how these words surprised the skipper. George was a man of middle height with thick, round cheeks and friendly eyes. When he preached, he was easily moved to tears, and he tended to exclaim with arms crossed at his breast: Oh, my sweet Lord.
Meanwhile, the gin was taking effect, and the young man repeatedly said good-bye to his hand, lifting it to his cheek and kissing its scorching back. There was now a hefty variety of fuck-expressions. He also called Napoleon a fucking butcher, only the whites of his eye visible, but he did not resist as Pole bound a strap around his arm just below the bicep. Pole said my good lad and persuaded him to lie down. He placed a firm leather cushion beneath his upper arm and also bound his shoulders and arm fast to the table.
The skipper, who teared up easily, was now bawling uncontrollably.
He said the young man had cut himself on the trawl six days ago, but the wound was not serious. He had prayed for the man, indeed, he had earnestly prayed for him, but there must be some serious sins at work, because the Mighty had not listened.
George Harrison and the helmsman were told to be quiet, and with the scalpel Pole made an incision halfway around the young man’s upper arm. The young man jerked and screamed, but fortunately he fainted as the saw blade began to draw white shavings from the bone. As soon as the arm was free, Pole took the branding iron from the stove, and its glowing red surface pressed against the wound with a thiiisssss. Although the flesh was rather crusted, he was nonetheless able to sew up the wound and bind the arm.
It was not until Pole had his pound sterling in his waistcoat pocket that he looked sharply at the skipper and told him that he prayed to the wrong god.
George Harrison asked what Pole meant.
Pole said in English: “You have been praying to the God that may gives fish to skippers, but who doesn’t give a damn about young men suffering!”
A couple of hours after midnight, the Glen Rose’s anchor chain could be heard rattling through the hawsehole, and shortly thereafter it steered out of Trongisvágsfjørður at full sail.
Napoleon hurried down from the loft and found Jóakim in the yard. He and the maid each took one of Jóakim’s arms, and when they had reached the hallway Pole told her to boil some water. Jóakim smelled strongly of alcohol and was more or less unconscious. However, whether this was due to drunkenness or his wounds was difficult to say. His face was bloody and swollen, but the strangest thing of all was that Jóakim was naked from the waist down. As such Napoleon did not ask for further help from the maid, but wrestled his cousin onto the table himself.
He closely inspected Jóakim’s face and chest, and saw that one knee was open to the bone. It wasn’t until he turned his cousin onto his stomach, however, that Napoleon realized that something was seriously wrong.
His thighs and legs were covered in blood, and the spot from his anus to his testicles was a bloody mess. At first Napoleon thought that was all it was, but when he began to wash the wound with hot soapy water, he realized that Jóakim’s guts were hanging out. About five inches of Jóakim’s intestine had been ripped out and hung like a clump below his groin.
Napoleon was so shaken that he retrieved the Hollands gin bottle and downed a glass on an empty stomach. The intestine was torn out and his anus ripped apart. That was the short, horrifying diagnosis.
“What have you done, you poor fool?” he whispered, and it soon became clear to him what had happened. Aside from being punched and kicked, a wooden shaft or something similar had been shoved up Jóakim’s anus; the wood had not been smooth, because the intestine had been shredded as the shaft had been forced in and out, likely multiple times.
“Oh, God in Heaven,” Napoleon sighed. The Great Sodomite had been at it again. That was how things were connected. And inflammation had already set in. Napoleon could feel an unpleasant heat from around the wound and could see it pulsing with his own eyes.
There was nothing science could do. Even the most skillful Edinburgh surgeon could not do anything in this situation. It was not even possible to set up a drain, and what would be the use of draining the pus away when the intestine itself was torn?
Nonetheless, Pole placed a kerosene lamp on the table and with a pair of tweezers he began to pick splinters from the wound. For a long while he tended to his cousin. He washed him, gave him morphine, stroked his hair, and covered him with a blanket. During the moments Jóakim regained consciousness, he tried to speak to him, and as far as he understood, Jóakim and a Scott by the name of Ronnie Harrison had been in the Trade Monopoly’s boathouse located near Sixpence.
There was a sickroom as the west end of the house, but Napoleon did not want to call the maid and ask her to prepare it for Jóakim.
Pole felt exhausted and the incident itself was so shameful. Yet, right was right. He had sometimes thought that Jóakim might be a sodomite. There was something feminine about him, and suddenly he remembered that Tóvó once said that Jóakim’s face reminded him of Baker Restorff’s cakes, dried plums on top and pudding beneath. Maybe that was a kind of code between sodomites? Maybe he had already made advances on Tóvó, maybe he had already ruined the boy? At any rat
e, they were good friends and had often gone boating or to the mountains together. Alone.
As Tóvó’s doctor and master, Pole had warned the boy about the dangers of masturbation, but he had not thought that Tóvó had the particular characteristics of an onanist, at least not as Tissot described them in his classic, L’Onanisme. Pole, who owned the Danish translation, had told Tóvó what the French doctor meant when he wrote that the emission of semen caused a severe pain in the eyes, which afterward could result in sensitivity to daylight. The eyes also lose their luster, eventually causing those affected to become feeble-minded, especially when they have cultivated the habit early on.
In Observations, Panum also wrote about masturbation: Among other examples, I can cite the instance of a mother who, when her son desired to marry, forbade him to do so, and taught him to practice onanism as a substitute. The unfortunate fellow carried this habit to such excess that his mind became weakened; and in his more lucid moments he cursed his mother with the most horrible oaths, because “she had wasted away his oil of life.”
Pole’s medical experience gave him a certain familiarity with such dreadful occurrences, but the idea that he had an onanist beneath his roof filled him with loathing.
Tóvó? Tóvó was no longer his responsibility. He had made a man of the boy, at least as much of a one as he could. He had taught Tóvó to read and write, and there comes a time in life when everyone must stand on his own two feet. Pole himself did not intend to spend the rest of his life in Tvøroyri, and he had also made that clear to Tóvó. Last year a Danish merchant named Thomsen had bought the Trade Monopoly’s old building, and it had not been much more than a year since since the church had been relocated from Froðba to Tvøroyri.
The Brahmadells Page 12