And that was exactly what happened. One day after school, Evert and his gang had chased Eigil into the bike shed. They had been especially malicious that day. They had emptied his school bag, scattering his books and notebooks among the bikes, and one of his tormentors had stomped on his lunch box, which was made of tin and bound by a rubber band.
Before Eigil knew it, he had grabbed Evert, and he was surprised himself to see the boy fly into the bikes. And he was not the only one startled. All the boys were shocked at the considerable strength that had been so unexpectedly revealed.
And then the Devil blazed up in Nil Tvibur’s great-great-grandson. All at once, he shoved the bicycles aside, and when he got his hands on Evert again, he tried to follow his mother’s advice to the letter.
Sometimes Eigil went to the printing house after school on harsh winter days. It was so cozy to sit on a stool next to the radiator and read, and he liked the smell of the ink and all the sounds from the various printing machines.
Eigil had no idea that Ingvald was even more delighted by these visits, and that, as a stepfather, he considered them to be a kind of knighthood, honoring him with the role of father.
Eigil thought all of the printers working at the Bókhandil were cut from the same cloth. Perhaps this world of lead simply attracted scrawny men, a flock of linguistic skeletons who printed newspapers, funeral hymns, and books.
When Eigil began to write later, it was Ingvald who provided good literary advice. Among the books he had set were The New Testament, translated into the Faroese by Jákup Dahl, Faroese Folk Tales and Fables, and Life Stories and Poems, both by Dr. Jakobsen. And whatever Ingvald set and read, he remembered. With his thoughtful eyebrows raised, he could recite from memory how this or that author had expressed himself, and also which language usage was more modern or more antiquated.
He was a bachelor when he and Kristensa met, and after they were married he stuck to his bachelor ways.
His daughters laughed affectionately at their father when he saved the tags on the Christmas gifts he received. He was known to smooth and set aside the shiny silver candy wrappers, and part of his morning ritual was to roll three or sometimes four cigarettes, which he smoked over the course of the day. He bicycled to and from work, and his pant legs were always neatly fastened with bicycle clips.
However, Eigil never called Ingvald father, and Ingvald was also not the type to express such a wish. He obviously did not wish to intrude.
“You make it sound like not wanting to intrude is some kind of weird character trait,” Karin said.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Eigil replied. “People who are passionate about something—whether you’re talking about a child or an idea—are bound to be intrusive. There’s no other way forward.”
Indifference was also a terrible emotion, Eigil thought. Or rather, indifference meant that no other emotions were present. Indifference was a hole scoured by caustic soda and cleansed by fire. He also said he could not tolerate humility, because in most cases it simply represented a hidden inferiority complex.
“I’m not sure I follow,” Karin said. “Do you dislike Ingvald?”
“No, I like him. But I like him in the same way you’d like an obedient dog.”
Karin did not like these words. Although she did not know Ingvald, it dismayed her to hear Eigil compare his stepfather to a four-legged animal.
Eigil said that the Faroes were an extremely clannish society, and that one of the particularities of clan bonds was that they were based on smell. Those who lacked a father did not necessarily smell bad, but they smelled different. The connection between children and parents was essentially based on everyone smelling right. That was just how it was. One reason for this, of course, was that people in the same household ate the same food, so everything from visits to the john to sweat smelled similar. Families also used the same words and pronounced them with much the same intonation. What was genetically inherited and what was socially determined, that was six of one, half dozen of the other.
Nonetheless, he said he was an outsider in his own family. He did not smell of lead like Ingvald and both of his sisters. After a person left home, Eigil estimated it took three to four years to cleanse one’s family from one’s body. Only then could you be an independent individual.
What one could not cleanse, however, was DNA.
Eigil had a nagging suspicion that his grandfather’s brother, Hjartvard Tvibur, was also his father. That was why he sometimes feared that he had inherited the violent nature that had probably entered the family with his Norwegian great-great-grandfather, Nils Tvibur.
Karin simply sat and listened to all this with a foolish grin, and when Eigil suggested they invite his family to dinner, she could not bring herself to protest. Or rather, she dared not protest. She had a headache and she regretted ever coming to Tórshavn. She lived with her mother alone in Fuglafjørður. In the mid-70s, Karin had studied nursing in Copenhagen, but when her father suddenly died, she returned home to her mother, and since then she worked in the municipal doctor’s office in Fuglafjørður.
She told her mother about her relationship with Eigil Tvibur and that she had come to care about the man. That was why her mother read the book Between Tórshavn and San Francisco, and she paid enough attention to know that Eigil Tvibur was the star of the Self-Governance Party’s Sydstreymoy branch.
And he also besieged Karin with letters. Some weeks two letters would come through the mail slot, and her mother would ask which it was she was in love with, the letters or the letter-writer.
Karin told her the truth: that she hoped the letters reflected the letter-writer. She was no longer a young woman, and could picture living together with a man and having a child.
And now she realized that Eigil frightened her a bit, and that the seeds of this anxiety must have been sown in their relationship already.
Eigil noticed her distress. Carefully, he took her hands in his and said that she had nothing to fear.
“You can be such a brute,” Karin said. “Your words scare me. You have try and be a little . . .”
“. . . nicer?” he suggested.
“Stop putting words in my mouth,” Karin replied. “It’s giving me a headache.”
For a moment they sat in silence, and then Eigil asked if she thought it was a bad idea to invite his family to dinner.
Karin smiled. “Just promise me you won’t be so savage and I’ll be happy.”
For a moment she was silent and then she asked why he had cried when Dusty Springfield sang.
“Were you listening?”
“You weren’t in bed.”
“I just feel sorry for Dusty,” Eigil said quietly.
“Was that why you were crying?”
“I don’t know exactly why. I don’t usually sit and cry.”
And that was the truth. What Eigil did not venture to say, however, because it sounded artificial or even like something borrowed from a book, was that deep down he was afraid of happiness. Excessively happy people were fools. They knew their way down life’s narrow path, but the true life, the grandiose and the festive life, not to mention the life that crushed people, that was found on a broader road.
He was captivated by Karin, and she loved with a passion he could not remember having ever experienced. However, he already sensed that their relationship was entering the fool’s path.
Two days later Karin met Kristensa, Ingvald, and Tórharda for the first time. Eigil’s older sister, Svanhild, was studying to be a doctor in Copenhagen and had not come home during the Christmas break. She had not been home in nearly a year and a half. Svanhild lived with a Norwegian woman, and when she told her mother the truth about the relationship, Kristensa, suffering one of her attacks, had said that the wickedness from Ergisstova knew no bounds. Then she had gone into her room and locked the door, and mother and daughter had not spoken since that day.
Even though Kristensa had lived in Havn for the last thirty-five years, she had mo
stly retained her childhood dialect. For Saturday she said leyvardegur instead of leygardagur, and the tje-sounds were largely unaltered.
This was not the first time she had met one of Eigil’s girlfriends; they came and went, and if she thought back, she could not remember any of them making a real impression on his life. Maybe Tóra av Sandi, but she had married a man from her hometown out of the blue, and that was that.
Eigil was too proud, and Kristensa told him that. Yes, he was an educated man who knew how to present himself, and she was proud that the boy she had borne and raised was spoken of with respect among the cultural elites. However, he liked the spotlight too much, both as an author and as a local politician, and that was a nasty trait.
When Eigil called to invite them to dinner, his mother could immediately tell by his voice that something unusual was afoot. Normally terse, his tone was lighter and more open. Eigil had not been to visit her in over a week, and even though she had called on New Year’s Day, no one had answered the telephone. She immediately asked who else was coming to dinner, and he said that he had met a woman from Fuglafjørður named Karin, and that she would handle the potatoes.
And that quasi-cheerful tone characterized the first hour of their visit.
Tórharda was twenty-two years old and still lived with her parents. She had her father’s face, but whereas Ingvald was taciturn and had small gray eyes, Tórharda was talkative and had the large brown eyes from the Sumba family line. She worked as a gardener and wanted to go to school for agriculture. Although she had not told her mother, she could imagine herself taking over the Ergisstova farm. Her mother’s uncle Nils was in his early sixties, and neither his daughter Margit nor his son Jenis showed any interest in farming.
Eigil had fried a leg of lamb. Like many other middle-class Faroese, in the last four or five years he had started drinking wine with his meals. He owned large, bulbous glasses with long stems, and Kristensa thought it was contrived to sip at wine. If you could drink water or milk out of a nice ordinary glass, why could you not use that same glass for wine? And then he had also started cooking with garlic and parsley. He even used those terrible herbs with fish. She did not usually invite him to dinner anyway. It was as if fish balls, rissole, and whale meat and blubber were no longer good enough for his accountant’s stomach.
On this early New Year’s Day, he had placed pieces of garlic in the meat and sprinkled a blend of lemon zest, thyme, rosemary, and oregano over it. In the frying pan, he had poured a mixture of white wine and water, and the fine wine flavored the sauce.
Karin praised the meal, saying that she was not used to such fine food in Fuglafjørður.
Kristensa asked what she usually ate.
Fish balls, corned beaf, boiled cod in onion gravy. On Sundays she and her mother sometimes ate at Muntra, the local restaurant. Ordinary food mainly, and then fermented mutton on Christmas Eve of course.
Kristensa said that this kind of sumptuous fare was not what Sumbingurs were brought up on in her day.
Eigil said the meat was from Sumba.
Kristensa tried to pretend everything was normal. She said that they had eaten meat on holidays, but that was it. However, she said it in such a strange way, then she set down her knife and fork and excused herself.
The bile was already rising to her throat as she stepped through the bathroom door, but she managed to get the door locked, and then, kneeling before the toilet, she surrendered the entire meal. All that meat from that hellhole known as Sumba, not to mention the potatoes cooked by that New Year’s Slut. Angry tears streamed from her eyes, but she tried to vomit as quietly as she could, and she hated the stink surging out of her.
Afterward, she rinsed her mouth and face with cold water, and while she inspected her mournful expression in the mirror, she wondered how Eigil could be heartless enough to serve meat from Sumba.
When she returned to the living room, Kristensa settled into the large reading chair.
Eigil brought her a cup of coffee and asked what was wrong.
His mother answered that if you had grown up under a dictator, something was always wrong.
“Don’t talk about Ergisstova on a day like today.”
“Did you have to serve meat from Sumba?”
“Oh Jesus,” Eigil sighed.
“Sure, call on Jesus. That’s what Sumbingurs do, too. But has that ever helped that damned people?”
Ingvald had already stood up from the table.
“Come, dear, let’s go home,” he said.
He gave her his arm and led her into the hall. While Tórharda was also preparing to leave, she told Karin that her mother was “allergic to Sumba.”
“Why didn’t Mom say anything to me?” Eigil asked his sister.
“There was nothing to say,” Tórharda answered. “Everything was fine when we left the house. These attacks just happen, and then you know how it is. No one can control them, least of all you and me.”
City Council Politician Eigil Tvibur
. . . income must correspond to expenditures, that’s the ABCs of basic economics. No matter the party or political tone, a banana costs one kroner seventy at the SMS shopping center. It makes no difference if a Social Democrat stands at checkout proclaiming his love for banana farmers in Paraguay.
Revolutionary agitation at the checkout is just a bluff.
A ton of inch-sized gravel stones from the Hundsarabotnur quarry, sixty kroner.
Genuine Faroese gravel.
The fatherland in cubit measure.
The new incinerator on Hjalli, this twentieth-century midden with the country’s tallest chimney, a mini-hell charing the leavings of 18,783 modern consumers, not to mention the packaging from all the Moloch-importers, the smoke-ejaculating iron phallus, roasting oystercatcher chicks in their eggs . . .
Thus Eigil could sit and scribble during city council meetings. The meetings were not interesting. Every meeting since he had been elected to the city council was dominated by checking off the agenda. The 1988 budget for Tórshavn’s municipality was around 231 million kroner, the 1989 budget around 253 million. It took a decided and detailed form of government to operate kindergartens, schools, oversee road maintenance, pay salaries, and otherwise manage all other normal municipal responsibilities.
The investments made in the 80s had been necessary, of course, but they had also been expensive. The indoor swimming pool, which came into use right before 1983, cost around 42 million kroner.
By the time the elderly residents moved into the Lágargarður nursing home in 1987, the price tag for that project had reached almost 70 million.
The Hjalli incinerator was also finished in ’87 and cost around the same as the Lágargarður nursing home.
The water reservoir up in Villingardalur was completed the following year, and along with the treatment plant and the road leading up to it, the price reached 110 million kroner.
Midway through the 80s, the port undertook a major project east of the old breakwater, and when all was said and done, the project, which included space for warehouses and a modern container port, cost around 140 million kroner. The port authorities, who oversaw the city’s maritime operations, had miscalculated and had to ask the municipality to assume a loan worth 70 million kroner.
The small port of Sund on Kaldbaksfjørdur was another thing entirely. The plan was that a Faroese-Icelandic industrial firm would build an ultra-modern fish-processing plant on the wharf, but when the wharf was finished the firm pulled out of the project. By then the municipality had expropriated most of the infield belonging to the Sund farm, and fighting the expropriation so negatively impacted the health of the farmer that it killed him. So aside from a dead landownder, Tórshavnars were stuck with a bill for 50 million kroner.
That sum rested on the shoulders of around 11,000 taxpayers.
Sports were also a major investment in the eighties, and one Eigil firmly supported. Unconditionally. Not because he was particularly interested in sports, or was trying to
curry favor among young people. Not at all. In his eyes, Bjørn Borg, Maradona, and Mike Tyson were as brain-dead as the masses who worshipped their triumphs. Eigil had the same arrogant, nineteenth-century attitude toward the masses as Napoleon Nolsøe. He could understand Pole, who had shed no tears for dying babies during the measles epidemic. Like Pole, Eigil thought there was much greater cause to weep for an adult, especially if he had been a good person. People were okay individually, but as a mass they could be threatening and unpredictable. Eigil reasoned like this: A city is an artificial being wherein nature and culture are in constant struggle, and for culture to gain the advantage, it was necessary to keep serious threats in check. Anywhere 15,000 people were gathered was crawling with bacteria, and that was why, for example, sewers were dug in the ground. Sea travel required a certain control over the sea itself, and so seawalls were built. And it was also necessary to control the natural savagery harbored in youth. Therefore, it was sound political policy not to be stingy, but to provide young people with sports halls and playing fields. Athletes were not the ones who increased crime statistics. Exhausted soccer players were too tired to bomb people’s eyebrows off. Table tennis players and volleyball players were asleep by midnight, not to mention all the heroes of boat racing. They did not trespass on private or public property or go stalking lone women to rape them in the garden.
Now the city council’s majority was trying to get rid of deadweight. They privatized the bus routes and closed the quarry at Oyggjarvegur. Havn was also saddled with a large fleet of houses that were either in miserable condition or were poorly maintained. Among these decrepit properties were Nils Tvibur’s Mosque, William Heinsen’s childhood home, and Sloan’s house. The latter two were deemed to have culture-historical value and were restored. The former ended on the for-sale list.
The Self-Governance Party had only one seat on the city council. The biggest ballot winner in the ’88 election, and also in the ’84 election, for that matter, was Poul Michelsen, who represented the People’s Party. Before becoming mayor, he had controlled a rather large wholesale company, and Eigil soon realized that he governed the city council coalition in the same way. The man was democratic as long as the other city council members were of the same mind. However, when the other politicians shied from making unpopular decisions, or when they allowed committee matters to stew, wanting to hold special referendums on the smallest details, Poul Michelsen hung his democratic jacket in the closet and entered the council chambers in his despot’s robe.
The Brahmadells Page 22