And the pupil was brown. Eigil himself had brown eyes, and so did his mother, and Margit. His mother said their brown eyes came from the Norwegian side of their family, and Eigil pictured a whole swarm of brown eyes setting forth from western Norway across the Atlantic and landing in Sumba.
Eigil asked Margit if she knew why their great-uncle had a glass eye. She did not. The Sunday school teacher in Betania had once said that whoever saw a nixie could be certain their eyes would rot out of their heads, so Hjartvard must have seen a nixie. Suddenly, she hesitated. She could not actually remember if the Sunday school teacher had said that a person would lose both eyes or only one.
Eigil was eleven years old that summer; it was his first time in Sumba, but it was like the place remained closed to him, at least the town that lived in his mother’s stories did.
The sky reached high over Beinisvørð, and the two neighboring cliffs, Spinarnir and Blæing, looked nearly blue as Eigil stood outside the Billhús and observed their outlines.
Even stronger light streamed from the great sea, and the eternal sighing, which echoed along Sumba’s entire rocky shore, out at Pollinum and east toward Sandi Lítlá, filled the townspeople with a sharp and mighty sound. Nowhere else in the country could you find such dancers and singers as there were in Sumba.
When it rained early in the morning, it was as if the entire town was covered in a layer of brightness, and the drops sprung cheerfully from the buckets or off the red tarp spread over Uncle Nils’s mower.
But the light was not compatible with the dark brutality of his mother’s stories.
Eigil was especially interested in the stories about his great-grandfather Gregor, or Gregor hjá Djøssuni, as the Sumbingurs called him.
Gregor was born in 1858, and by the time he was twelve was already helping the Sumba church-bell ringer. In truth, the bell ringer was not an old man—he was at most in his thirties, but he was not entirely bright. Like so many other Faroese during the second half of the nineteenth century, he had been ruined by drink.
Nils Tvibur told his son that it was the same in Norway. He told his son the story of Hans Nielsen Hauge, who tried to encourage the northmen to put the stopper back in the brandy bottle and put their lives in God’s hands. However, his father continued, Hauge was no Muhammad, and the northmen did not have the Arab’s strength.
Nonetheless, the words stayed with Gregor, but what pleased him most was that his father approved of his sexton work. With a happy heart he let the bell ring east to Bø, up to Kvíggjá, and all the way out to Hørg, and he felt like he had been called to wake the town from its sinful brandy-stupor.
Eight years after Gregor murdered his father, he married Susanne Krogh, commonly known as Sunkan, the oldest daughter of Pastor Krogh from Leirar. They were married in the newly built church in Bug.
In these years Gregor was considered one of Sumba’s stewards. He was of slighter build than his father, but whereas his father Nils had projected something sinister, his son was said to have the most good-natured eyes. Aside from three cows, he was also responsible for the town’s bull, and when children from “brandy homes” occasionally asked for something to eat, he never refused them.
However, beneath all the good deeds and humility lived a tortured soul, and as the years passed it became ever clearer that Gregor was an oddity. He talked to himself, and when his wife asked what he had said or whether something was wrong, he might say that as long as you were breathing, hope was ahead. And his wife could not deny that. He might also say that it was foam bulls you heard bellowing in the ocean currents, or that Sumbingurs only believed in the drying house and the power of grave-mould.
And it was true. Sumbingurs had the bad habit of stealing into the graveyard to fetch consecrated ground, which they then placed beneath the pillows and blankets of people they disliked. Yes, generally speaking, Sumba was a town where the underworldly kept a firm grip on the living.
However, Gregor’s words were neither evocations, nor were they pieces of a conversation. The words came, so to speak, from nothing, and that was what terrified Sunkan. Bit by bit she was forced to acknowledge that her husband had locked himself away, and no matter how she tried to get through to him, it only got worse.
Gregor’s most peaceful moments were up in the church tower on Sunday mornings when he could dream away uninterrupted.
Occasionally his father’s ghost would visit, and the first time Gregor saw his father’s head coming through the trapdoor, he was filled with terror. As he used to do as a child when the old man beat him, he crept along the tower floor saying he had not meant it, and if his father wanted, he was welcome to spill his blood.
It turned out that was unnecessary. The years spent on the other side had transformed and gentled Nils Tvibur, and eventually his father became Gregor’s best friend. And that was what was most meaningful to Gregor. His father seemed to have forgiven him. And what does a son want more than his father’s approval?
He also began making special trips to the tower during the week, and might sit and pick clean a gooseneck or some puffins while he waited for his father.
Sometimes the old man took off his shroud and showed his son his body. His rib cage resembled the small storehouses, known as meat safes, that people were beginning to hang in their houses. Yet this safe was empty and shattered; the birds had picked it clean while he lay on the beach with the large rocks looming over him.
His son told him that the place where he had been found was now called Corporal Rock, and he said that the Sumbingurs thought it was quite the accomplishment to make a fifty-meter freefall into death’s literal embrace.
Gregor did not want to tell his father, however, that no one had mourned him. He had come to town an outsider, and had vanished into death just as much an outsider.
His son loved to hear stories about Muhammad, or the Desert Captain, as his father called him. His father also described the storehouses found in death’s realm, the ebony doorsteps, and the pure gold hooks from which the drying bodies hung. No foam bulls burst forth to smash boats asunder, and mermen and nixies were best friends with the dead.
Gregor sat and listened, a foolish grin on his face. He could be so far away that he did not even realize someone was calling his name. It was outright bizarre to hear someone who wanted his cow serviced standing there shouting his errand up the church tower.
Sunkan never fetched her husband herself. She always sent Hjartvard, their eldest son, and he would bring his father home.
Not unexpectedly, some comedian composed a satirical poem about Gregor, and whenever Kristensa told Eigil about his great-grandfather’s hallucinations, she would repeat a couple of verses from the poem she believed Pól Johannis á Øgrum had written:
Gregor stands in the tower
shouting to the bones:
“Have you seen a Corporal
buried in the sod?
Have you seen a Corporal,
who fell from a tall cliff?
Some believe his own son
broke his big fat neck.”
In summer of 1907 Sunkan reached out to the young pastor Frederik Moe, and one Sunday after he had preached in Sumba’s church Moe visited Ergisstova. He knew that Sunkan was the daughter of his predecessor, Pastor Krogh, and like others on Suðuroy he had also heard the rumors surrounding Sumba’s patricide.
Sunkan had dressed her husband up, had combed his hair and beard, and her large, gentle eyes followed the young pastor as he prayed over Gregor.
The pastor told Gregor he was possessed by evil spirits, and that he had been for many years. That was why he had killed his father. It was also Satan who had commanded him to go into the church and disgrace God’s house from within. Satan, namely, sought weak links, and a twelve year-old bell ringer did not always make the best churchwarden.
Sunkan saw that her husband did not understand Moe’s words, but she paled when the pastor further insisted that Gregor had consciously married into a pastor’s family, the
better to spread his diabolical poison. However, she was not in a position to speak, much less protest.
Nonetheless, she crossed herself several times during the pastor’s speech, and so great was her concern for her husband that she was relieved the pastor’s words did not reach him.
Now and then a thoughtless smile lit Gregor’s eye, and when Moe said Amen, Gregor echoed him out of old habit.
Thanks to Doctor Jørgensen, Gregor was sent to the Oringe mental hospital in Vordinborg around Midsummer’s Day in 1908. He sailed to Denmark with the cargo steamer Føringur. With him on the voyage were Sunkan and both their daughters. Aksal, Djøssan’s younger brother, was an old man by that time, and Sunkan asked him to look after both boys while she was away.
In 1908 Hjartvard turned fourteen, and his brother Heindrikur—Kristensa’s father and so Eigil’s grandfather—had just turned seven.
Unfortunately, Sunkan never returned to the Faroes.
It Happened on St. Olaf’s Day, 1918
ONE SUNDAY AFTERNOON, while Kristensa was still recovering in the hospital, Eigil asked if she wanted to hear a short story he had written about Hjartvard.
His mother thought a moment. Then she said that a true story was always worth hearing.
Eigil nodded, set his glasses on his nose, and began to read:
“It happened on St. Olaf’s Day, 1918.
Hjartvard had come north to Tórshavn with the ferry Smiril, and his plan was to stay with his relative, the bookbinder Hans Nikláa Jacobsen. Hjartvard’s great-uncle Aksal, who had raised the boys after their mother left for Denmark, had often spoken of their educated kin in the capital, and thought it could be useful to establish direct contact with the bookbinder folk.
Hans Jacobsen’s youngest son was the famous Dr. Jakobsen. Aksal claimed that this clever man spoke both living and dead languages. Hjartvard reasoned that a living language must be the language people spoke. But what a dead language might be was something he dared not ask his great-uncle Aksal, who sat with eyes half-closed as he spoke about Jakobsen. Hjartvard imagined that the doctor must have the power to communicate with dead kings and chieftains, which was how he had learned the languages of the dead.
He did not know as much about the bookbinder’s middle child, Onnu. She was a teacher in Copenhagen, and Aksal maintained that her surname, Horsbøl, implied Danish nobility.
The bookbinder’s oldest child was Sigrid Niclasen. She ran the family’s business and was also educated. She had written the play Jákup á Møn, and Aksal said it was such a great work that it had been translated into both Danish and English, as well as a dead language called Norn or Nornia.
In the 1890s Sigrid Niclasen and her husband bought the Quillinsgarð house, and when Sigrid was widowed, she took her parents into her home. Her mother died in 1899, and by then the bookbinder was so deaf that guests had to announce themselves from the doorway by shouting.
Hjartvard introduced himself as the grandson of the Norwegian corporal Nils Tvibur, and said that his grandfather and the bookbinder’s father had been friends. He also added that the Ergisstova siblings, Aksal and Djøssan, were second cousins to Jákup Sumbingur.
Hjartvard did not want to say that his father and the bookbinder were third cousins. His father was no longer on the Faroes, and he was also not a person one spoke about. Mental illness was a form of death; a person was still breathing, but it was a tainted breath, blown straight from underworldly bellows. Mental illness was an even greater blemish than the murder on Misaklettur, that is what Aksal said. Murder required courage, after all, especially when felling an angry Westland giant.
The bookbinder, who had just turned eighty-six, sat on a small bench by the stove, his upper body rocking back and forth. His underlip hung so low that you could see his gums and all his evenly-worn lower teeth.
He remembered the Corporal well, and the shouting man in the door was not unlike the scoundrel in appearance. He had the same hunched shoulders and strong jaw. He also knew that the Corporal had a son named Gregor, but he had forgotten what might have become of Gregor. If he took after his father, there was nothing more to say.
And then the young man tried to smile, and that is what terrified the bookbinder. Involuntarily, his old hands reached for the stove’s edge, and he felt the urge to call his daughter. Something had suddenly twisted the lower half of the man’s face, as if something had smashed his jaw and his teeth had been transformed into rows of razor-fine peaks. It was terrifying. His smile became a gateway to Hell, and the bookbinder, who had always tried to remain within the borders of the straight and narrow, had the deranged thought that Beelzebub himself had sent one of his minions to torment him.
In Memoirs and Autobiography, his contemporary, Sámal á Krákusteini, wrote that the Bookbinder was one of the city’s funereal singers, and it is due to his place as a former singer for the dead that the Krákustein fellow has this to say: The bookbinder N. H. Jacobsen escaped that particular duty after he demanded a kroner in payment; most often a person was invited to the funeral feast as compensation.
Now the bookbinder shouted and pointed at Hjartvard with his gnarled hand: “Away, you Satanspawn, you who have come to sing over my sinful body!”
The shout surprised Hjartvard, and Sigrid, who heard it down in the cellar and stuck her head through the cellar trapdoor, immediately saw that her father was scared to death.
She too received a smile from the giant, but did not grow afraid like her father.
She let the trapdoor bang shut, and without greeting Hjartvard or inquiring about his family, said that her father was unable to receive guests that day.
In a more friendly tone, she added that they were in process of moving into the old secondary school, so he would have to excuse them.
Hjartvard had a dried ram haunch in his trunk, which he had intended to give to his relatives in Havn. The ram had grazed on the lush pasture of Skridnaland west of Beinisvørð, and when they slaughtered it, the body weighed 72 pounds. A shiny layer of fat glistened around the handsome haunch, and its greenish tint was reminiscent of September grass. But if these were the types of people he would be meeting here, they would get nothing from the Ergisstova storehouse!
At the outer door Hjartvard turned to Sigrid. He was too tall for the door opening, so he had to bend his neck and tilt his head to the side, and standing in this strange position, he said that greater respect had sometimes met a Sumbingur in Tórshavn.
Then he left.
Once you step into the Inn, you immediately enter the taproom, which was packed full of St. Olaf Day’s guests. The Inn was black-tarred and three stories tall. It had extensions to the west and south, and stairs and hallways connected its great, staggering timber body. Chickens roamed the grass-sod roof, and if someone forgot to close a skylight or gable window, you could expect to discover a newly laid egg in a scarf or in a hat. The building had been mortised and nailed together, and when a couple offered up their love to Freya, or when the boisterous guests broke into song, or even when a strong southeasterly wind buffeted its walls, the partitions and French laps in the timber beams shook.
Despite the alcohol ban that had gone into effect with the 1907 referendum, people still smuggled strong drink from their hip flasks to their coffee cups, and Anna Katrina Djurhuus, who ran the Inn, pretended not to notice—it was St. Olaf’s, after all.
Unsurprisingly, all the rooms were occupied. In many cases, people slept two or three to a room, and the maids had their hands full emptying the chamberpots, filling the washing pitchers, and heating water for the men to shave.
Anna Katrina advised Hjartvard to go to Gamla Danmark, where it might still be possible to find a room. Hjartvard thanked her for the advice and asked if she could tell him where a house called the Mosque was located. The woman followed him out into the yard, pointed up Bringsnagøta, said that the Mosque was located at the top of the hill and that the house was recognizable by its blue front door.
Hjartvard wiped away a t
ear as he looked at the Mosque. The smoking chimney indicated someone lived there. A tar barrel was boiling in the yard, but the front door was closed. Still, he decided not to approach the house.
Aksal had said that the Corporal had bequeathed the house to a Tórshavnar named Tórálvur í Geil. Aksal remember Tórálvur, or Tóvó, as the Corporal had called him, because Tóvó had sometimes visited Sumba. He was servant to Napoleon Nolsøe, the doctor in Tvøroyri, and it was said that the beautifully cultivated Doctor’s Field was his work. A few years later he was sent to jail out of the country. He had instigated murder and arson in Tórshavn and supposedly ripped the testicles off some businessman. Around the turn of the century the man had returned home, and if he had been strange before, he was much more so now. People said he refused to speak his mother tongue, calling Faroese a fucking corrupt language, and if he heard people speak Danish, he immediately felt threatened and left. The little interaction he had with people was in English. That was the language he had used when he was out sailing the world.
Aksal thought there was sorcery involved in the Corporal’s socalled will, and he often said that the Brahmadells in Havn knew quite a bit more than the Lord’s Prayer.
Hjartvard eyed the Mosque. Perhaps the Brahmadells did practice magic, but it would take more than jailhouse sorcery to intimidate him!”
Eigil glanced over the rim of his glasses; he saw that his mother lay with her eyes closed and a small smile played around the corners of her mouth. He continued to read.
“Festively dressed St. Olaf’s Day guests passed Hjartvard by, and only now did he notice the dried mud on his shoes. He was wearing a white shirt and tie beneath his coat, and before coming here he had gone to Magnusi á Gørðunum’s boutique to buy himself a pair of Danish pressed trousers. He grabbed a clump of grass from the roadside, spit on the tips of his shoes, and wiped the mud off the black leather.
The Brahmadells Page 24