Sámal was Ludda-Kristjan’s nephew and he was as short-fused as his uncle. He sat with his legs crossed and during his tirade he dropped his pipe to the floor.
“But maybe that’s the new worker politics you and the bailiff and Løbner’s salt-and-pepper cunt are trying to introduce,” he said. “What fine people you are. On the morning of Good Friday 1800 years ago, the Romans beat Jesus, they blackened his eyes and kicked him in the balls, and on that same day you have the nerve to offer us goods mice have been fucking in all winter. Does every worker in Tórshavn have the word idiot written across his forehead?”
The boatmen and the work crew all stared at Sámal aghast, and they looked from him to Obram. Tobacco still glowed in their pipes, but they had stopped smoking. Over twenty men were present, and they had never heard such impudent words spoken, at least not in Obram’s presence. And the speech was unrehearsed, that was what was so strange. Those stallion-hoofed words simply broke from Sámal’s mouth.
Obram set down the gin jug and walked over to the nail where his cane hung. He felt insulted and humiliated; something like this had never happened before.
Still, such words were not entirely unexpected. Lately, Obram thought he had sensed a certain hostility directed toward his person. Not that people had held back or pussy-footed around before. Well, some people certainly did that, especially the father and son from Hvítanes, the father especially. The old man was probably consumptive, the way he coughed, and he more or less expected his son to do the work for both of them. The old man was Obram’s informant, and when he repeated tales from the construction site, Obram always had to turn away on account of his fetid breath.
It was from the old Hvítaner that he first heard the work crew was thinking of demanding a higher wage.
The news was completely unexpected. Indeed, it shocked Obram to the core. He had come to Tórshavn in 1841 and still remembered what it was like under the Royal Trade Monopoly, when the fishing rod was a Tórshavnar’s livelihood. Conditions had never been better than they were today, and twice a month he personally counted between twenty-five and thirty kroners into each worker’s hand.
One evening Obram asked his wife if she had sensed any hostility from people.
Gerd was from Bergen, and although she had lived in Tórshavn for many years, she still spoke Norwegian. They met when Obram was working and attending technical school in Bergen.
At first Gerd was surprised to hear her husband ask such an odd question. It was unlike him. But since she thought his voice held an edge of true anxiety, she chose her words with care.
She said you tended to find in people whatever you were looking for. If you went looking for good-will and benevolence, you would find it. If you went searching for deviltry, there was certainly no lack of it. In her opinion, Tórshavnars were pleasant and orderly folk, and they were also sulky and difficult. In short, they were just as they had always been, at least for the years she had lived in Tórshavn. What she was trying to say was that they were heiðursmenn, men of honor. If something had changed, it was thanks to Ewald Hjøstrup, the young bailiff.
Gerd laid a hand on her husband’s arm and told him to avoid suspicion of those people the bailiff was out to get. Otherwise, before he knew it, he would be seeing trolls in broad daylight.
For several months, the bailiff had namely been working to found a so-called labor union. The idea was new to the Faroes, but it was not uncommon in Denmark and farther south on the continent. Old Europe was changing, and the battle for the soul of the steadily growing middle class intensified year after year. On May 5, 1872, Hjøstrup had participated in the famous Slaget på Fælleden, the Battle of the Commons. Well, more than participated. The twenty-seven year-old Hjøstrup stood at the head of the police force that arrested Louis Pio, Harald Brix, and Poul Geleff, the three leaders of the Danish socialist workers’ movement. Although he said nothing about it, the incident filled him with a reasonably cold satisfaction. He had ripped the German-sown socialist weed from home ground, and he was proud of it.
And Hjøstrup was an educated man; he had a way with words, especially when equipped with a rapt listener like Obram. As he explained to the Oyndfirðingur, a new and ravenous class of worker beasts had already gotten their teeth into Europe’s roasted bacon. These demanding units sprouted from the noise and soot of the continent’s factories. These beasts ate, slept, and bred in port-city hovels, signed aboard schooners and modern dampers, and their hands shoveled coal into the burning jaws of locomotives, which connected the continent from the Baltic Sea to the Bosphorus Strait.
The new Europe had already made its appearance in literature and Hjøstrup took that for an ill omen. He had closely read the scandalous novel The Red Room by the young Swede August Strindberg: And the day will come when things will be worse; on that day we shall come down from the White Mountains with a great noise, like a waterfall, and ask for the return of our beds. Ask? We shall take them! And you shall lie on wooden benches, as I’ve had to do, and eat potatoes until your stomachs are tight as a drum and you feel as if you had undergone the torture by water, as we . . . So threatened the Swede with his quasi-Biblical wording, and Hjøstrup told Obram it was just a matter of time before Faroese workers walked the same path as their fellows in neighboring lands.
Hjøstrup, together with Obram, invited some reliable residents to a meeting, and they had only one agenda—to found Tórshavn’s Workers Union. Among those invited were the bookbinder, Hans Niklái Jacobsen, young Pastor Ewaldsen, the doctor’s widow, Henrietta Nolsøe, and Sheriff Müller. The Sunman, Pætur úr Kirkjubø, also received an invitation, and he showed up to the first meeting wearing a stavnhetta and with a mountian staff in his hand.
The bookbinder wanted to know why no actual workers had been invited, considering the subject was a labor union. Hjøstrup told him that the union’s purpose was to produce good and faithful citizens, a task that was best handled by educated people. And Frú Nolsøe was a shining testament to the fact that there was truly a modern-minded leadership here, with women’s emancipation also on the agenda. The workers would be enlightened and cultivated, yet it would take time to encourage roses to grow in the outfield.
The Tórshavn’s Workers Union saw the light of day in July 1882—the very same union Sámal á Kák had mocked that evening in the basement cellar.
Afterward Sámal á Kák wondered where his audacity had come from, if audacity was even the right word. His tongue was rather loosened by a combination of rage, exhaustion, and gin. And perhaps he also wanted to show his brother-in-law, Tóvó, that he was no weakling. Sámal was married to Ebba and they lived in the old Geil house.
After Obram had set down the jug, he walked slowly toward Sámal. He had taken his cane down from its nail, and the way he gripped the silver shaft made it look like he was about to strike a blow. He stopped before the lime tub and for a moment leaned with all his weight on the cane.
“Why do you have to be a candle-snuffer on such a joyous evening?” he asked Sámal. “What have I done to you, that you’re comparing me to the Romans who bloodied Christ? Is it perhaps a crime to provide Tórshavnars an hourly wage? The city would’ve seen plenty of lean times without people from the towns and abroad to help you out. Do you see those stacks of fish? Go ahead, smell them. Don’t you realize that’s the smell of money and progress? Maybe we’ll have good weather on Easter Monday, and your wife and children can spread the fish out on the rocks. Isn’t that a good thing? Answer me, Sámal á Kák,” Obram suddenly shouted, and his voice was so powerful that the basement’s ceiling braces seemed to shake.
Sámal did not know what to say, and he had no time to speak anyway, before Obram shoved the handle of his cane beneath his chin.
“In the future, beware of using such strong words. It’s doubtful your shoulders can bear the weight.”
“There’s nothing wrong with using strong words.” The voice came from a gaunt man standing in the doorway. “If the words match the truth, stro
ng words are not only acceptable, but it’s one’s duty to speak them.”
Tóvó strode over to the lime tub to stand next to Sámal. “To be honest, I love strong words, and have ever since I learned my great-grandfather’s rhymes. Not to mention since Doctor Pole gave me the Bible. For too long the working man has been like the dust beneath the broom of powerful men. I realize the condition was that we should empty the ship, but this week has been a hard slog. It would befit you to put money on the table.”
The men looked at Tóvó í Geil in astonishment. He was the quiet sort who spent his days on a low footstool and bored and wedged. Sometimes you heard him sing about hammer kings, gunpowder barons, and wedge devils, and then a smile would light his otherwise serious face. Now he sounded almost like the Scottish preacher William Sloan, who in his terrible sermon on the Kongebrúgv said that no one was born a Christian, and to insist upon it, like some pastors did, was to send people straight to hell.
For a second it seemed Obram was going to respond. Then he walked over to the first lamp, unscrewed the wick, and snuffed the flame. He extinguished the second one, bade the men a good night, and wished them a Happy Easter.
Maundy Thursday Dinner
ALL WEEK TÓVÓ had been looking forward to eating fermented cod heads. He had acquired twelve decent-sized ones from a fisherman, had torn off their gills and stuffed them in a sack behind the house, and for the past couple of days the right odor of decomposition had hung about the bundle.
Ebba and Sámal and their son Martin were coming for dinner, and on Maundy Thursday morning Tóvó took the cod heads down to the stream to wash them and rinse the slime off, and then he carried them back to the house.
Since returning home in 1878, Tóvó had lived in Nils Tvibur’s old house on Bringsnagøta, which he now owned. The will Nils wrote when he took over the Ergisstova farm in Sumba made Tóvó heir to his house in Tórshavn. He had written the will in Havn, and ever since it had been kept at the bailiff’s office. Tóvó had known nothing about it. Absolutely nothing.
He had been home a few weeks when one day he was summoned to the bailiff’s office. Ewald Hjøstrup read the will aloud and then asked Tóvó if perhaps he were related to the deceased.
Tóvó told him the truth: they were not related, but he had known the corporal.
Hjøstrup asked if there was some concrete reason for the unexpected inheritance. Tóvó, however, said he could not think of anything. He had no desire to tell a stranger that thirty years ago Nils had taken him, a miserable boy, beneath his wing, and that his mother and Nils were lovers for a time.
As Hjøstrup spoke, or in the pauses between sentences, he would stroke his upper lip with his thumb and forefinger, and that irritated Tóvó. It was what the sailors did after they had been to the whorehouses on Paradise Street in Liverpool or Schipperstraat in Antwerp—they would lie in the dark of their berth sniffing their fingers. That was not how one should act in a public office, though, not in Tórshavn or anywhere else.
Hjøstrup asked if Tóvó knew that Nils Tvibur had died under suspicious circumstances. The news startled Tóvó, but he did not let it show, he just said, no, he knew nothing about it.
Hjøstrup also wanted to know what Tóvó had been doing out in the world. In fact, he was so impudent that Tóvó finally asked what any of that had to do with the will?
Nothing really, Hjøstrup answered, a bit surprised.
Tóvó asked if he needed to sign any papers, since he had no desire to stand here talking to a stranger about things that did not concern him.
Tóvó was furious when he left the bailiff’s office. He was clearly older than the bailiff, but the man had not asked him to sit, even though two empty chairs stood at the desk. But was it the impudent questions that fueled his fury, or was it something else that caused his heart to pound?
No. His emotional turmoil was due to the keys in his pocket and the deed in his hand. His heart was beating as if he had just landed on the king’s payroll. He had not expected this. Never in a million years! He had nothing but good things to say about Nils, but that he should inherit the Mosque? No, that Tóvó had never even dreamed of.
And so he wept as he walked back along Bringsnagøta, the tears running unabashedly down his cheeks. It was utterly inconceivable how a friendship between a grown man and a small boy could result in Tóvó being served, so to speak, a house on a silver platter, carried in from realm of death.
And then that arrogant police whelp, God knows where his sticky fingers had been.
Tóvó had another outburst, but this time it was not tears. He clutched the door and doubled over in laughter, and luckily he was alone. He covered his mouth with his hand, but the laughter gushed between his fingers. Finally, he got his merriment under control, was able to fit the key into the lock, and literally stepped into his new house laughing.
At dusk he heard a young seagull call from down the hill, and Tóvó immediately knew it was his nephew. That was how they greeted each other, with bird calls. Whereas Martin primarily sounded like a young seagull or a raven, Tóvó cooed like a dove or murmured like an eider, and occasionally he also clucked like a laying hen. Gentler sounds were his arena. The window was open, and Tóvó answered that playful shriek with a bit of middle-aged hen cluck.
The door led right into the kitchen, and beyond the kitchen was the room where Tóvó slept. In a sea chest at the foot of the bed was a Bible, a Norwegian geography textbook, an almanac, and a volume of poems by an American named Walt Whitman. The chest also held his sailor’s tools: sailmaker’s gloves, a grease horn with needles, and some stilettos, one made from a whale rib, two made from wood, and an iron one to splice wire with.
On the wall hung a painting he had bought at a little Paris shop. The girl in the painting was wearing a ballet skirt, and from a distance she looked like a flower. The painting was not more than two spans high and a little smaller in width. He had bought the painting for his mother, thinking she might be rather proud to have a pretty dancer hanging on the wall. But by the time Tóvó returned in 1878, his mother was already dead, and the painting remained in the sea chest until he moved into the Mosque. Someone named Edgar Degas had painted it, but Edgar was not in the shop the day Tóvó happened by. He bought the painting with the loose change in his pocket.
And Pole, too, was dead. That grieved Tóvó. They had parted coldly, and that had often plagued Tóvó. During the quarter century he had spent sailing around the world, he had written Pole at least ten letters, most of them in Danish. Pole had given him a Danish bible in 1858 when he signed aboard the Norwegian schooner Rosendal, and he found that biblical language suited him when he wanted to say something that came from the heart. Still, he liked Whitman’s language even better, and in one letter he wrote in English, Tóvó repeated whole passages of Whitman’s poems.
The conversation soon turned to the confrontation in the warehouse basement, and Ebba said that Obram had a long memory. Many days would pass before he forgot the harsh words that had been spoken.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Tóvó replied. Still, having a long memory was one thing, but being a louse was another. And that was something he had never taken Obram for.
Ebba was sitting on the peat box and had taken out her knitting. Although not yet forty, she was already a nervous woman, and sat and rocked and chewed her lips as she knitted. She had lost her lower front teeth, and while her jaw worked, her lower lip slid into the space between her remaining teeth, sharpening her chin like an old woman’s. The corner of her shawl was frequently raised to the corners of her eyes, but it was not for sorrow that she cried. To the contrary, Tóvó’s homecoming was the best thing to happen to her in many years. She knitted him stockings and sweaters, and during her evening prayers she thanked God that he had sent her brother home in one piece. No one else in Tórshavn, not one single person, invited her and her little household to dinner. She also thanked God for that.
The relationship with her older brother was not as
warm. Lýðar had inherited the old Heimistova farm on Nólsoy, and during the summer Martin normally visited his uncle. He helped with the hay harvest and rowed out to fish with the old Geil boat, which had also ended up at Nólsoy.
Lýðar claimed that George Harrison was Ebba’s real father, and insisted that she resembled the Harrisons both in mind and body.
Tóvó dislike hearing his brother talk like that. It was entirely possible, of course, that Oh-my-sweet-Lord had indeed been beneath his mother’s skirts; there was little those Scottish baptists would not do once it had occurred to them.
Ebba’s fretfulness, however, had more concrete grounds than traits potentially inherited from Fraserburgh. She was married to an alcoholic, and Sámal could be thoroughly unpleasant in a drunken bout. It had been a while, though, since the last binge. Ever since his uncle had gotten him a job with Obram úr Oyndarfirði, he had been as good as dry.
Ebba’s foremost affliction had been her mother. In truth, it was a great relief when she died, and that is exactly what Ebba told the pastor the day her mother’s coffin was carried from the church. And the pastor nodded. He added that God certainly had a plan when he filled Betta with black visions. His intention had been to test the compassion of her fellow man, and her daughter had stood the trial with the highest marks.
Ebba had also cared for Old Tóvó, in any case after he had gone blind. With him, though, it was completely different. He was so mild and obliging. In his later years, he had become what H. P. Hølund called: En Thorshavnsk Shaman. Young mothers visited the Geil house with their newborns and wanted him to lay his shaman hand on their babies’ heads, and happy was the mother if he also took the child, laid it on his chest, and stroked his bearded face against the baby’s soft chin.
And Tórshavnars were also fond of what they called his verses. And as often happens with valued or even loved words, it was not always easy to tell which were the author’s words, and what others might have added or perhaps omitted.
The Brahmadells Page 17