Hjartvard met two boys and asked if they could tell him where Gamla Danmark was. One boy said the café was next to Hans Bernhard Arge’s forge, Utí við Grind.
Hjartvard said he did not know what Utí við Grind meant.
A sarcastic gleam came into the boy’s eye. He pushed his lower lip out, creating an underbite that resembled Hjartvard’s, and in Suðuroyar dialect he said that all you had to do was walk straight ahead, go three assholes to the left, and there was Gamla Danmark.
The boys walked away laughing, but their laughter stopped abruptly. It all happened so quickly. Before the boy knew it, a monstrous fist had closed over his shoulder, and the next moment his feet were dangling and he could feel the rural giant’s breath hot on his face.
“I didn’t come all the way here to be laughed at,” Hjartvard whispered.
“I know,” the boy replied, trying to hide his face in his hands.
“I don’t give a damn which house is to the left or right in this city, but I do give a damn at being laughed at.”
“I didn’t mean it!” the boy cried.
Suddenly, there was the smell of urine, and a wet spot formed on the boy’s pants. He had pissed himself, and he wailed so pathetically that Hjartvard instantly realized he had gone too far.
He sat the boy down, but the idiot stayed put; it seemed as if he had forgotten how to breath. All he did was inhale, and the small amount of air that did escape wheezed through his nostrils.
An older couple had stopped farther up the road, and the woman asked in a shrill voice what was going on.
“Get lost,” Hjartvard told the boy. “Didn’t you hear what I just said?”
But the boy did not seem to hear anything at all, and did not move from where he sat.
The older couple approached them, and it was only when the woman reached for the boy that he seemed to fully exhale. At that point he began to howl in earnest. And he did not stop, he just cried and cried, like he had been paid to do it.
The woman glanced up at Hjartvard and asked what had happened.
Hjartvard said he had no idea. But that the child was the spawn of Satan, that much he knew.
Hjartvard tossed his head, grabbed his suitcase, and marched straight-backed through the flag-bedecked city.
While he walked, he wondered at all the freshly trimmed grass sod roofs. Of course, if the birch bark was in good condition, the damp hardly reached the attic. Still, it was striking to see the city that was both trimmed and flag-covered. In the south the grass hung so far down it covered the windows, and now that he thought about it, it made the houses look as though they were drowsing, whereas in Havn everything looked so young and attractive.
But the low cliffs around the city were nothing special. And yet, Kirkjubøreyn and Húsareyn shot up like two long patches of turf and smoldered in the afternoon sun, and the higher slopes on Nólsoy also shone bright red.
Never before had he seen so many people gathered together in one location. At home it could be a little cramped in the sheep pens, as well as in the shop on Ólafløttur when the Danish weeklies arrived.
Hjartvard also remembered all the people who came together that time the loudmouthed Kirkjubø farmer came south to campaign for the telephone. The farmer insisted that speech could travel through a thin copper wire.
Hjartvard could not see that the man was lying—he thought the wire must be hollow, and some strange forces either pulled or pushed words through the gap.
In any case, it ended in laughter when an elderly Sumbingur asked the farmer if you could also fetch the doctor through the wire.
A large crowd had gathered in front of an open workshed, and Hjartvard heard several voices shout: “Come on, Berint, come on!”
When he could finally make out what was going on, he saw two men, each with a knife, sitting and eating sheep heads; by all appearances, they were competing.
One of the men resembled a heron. His long elegant neck stuck out quite a ways from his collar, and while his jaws worked, his Adam’s apple quickly bobbed up and down. He had shoved his blue dress cap beneath his thigh, and a few thin strands of hair fell from his forehead onto his cheek. Hjartvard liked his appearance. The man was either a shipsmith or a schoolteacher or a parish clerk.
The other was definitely among the stoutest men, and Hjartvard heard someone call him Berint the Great Beast, from Oyrareingir. He had a full beard, and chewed bits of food decorated the entirety of its woolly splendor. He had removed his coat and loosened his tie, and every time he reached for the beer bottle, people clapped, since a huge, hairy crack was exposed between his waistcoat and waistband.
Hjartvard could not count all of the picked-clean sheep skulls laying in two heaps on the table, but he overheard a woman who seemed to be rooting for the heron-like man say he had tallied at least nine and a half sheep heads.
Hjartvard moved on, and had soon reached a pretty stone bridge, in the middle of which people had formed a dancing ring. They sang a song about the Scottish rogue Sinklar, and although Hjartvard liked the ballad and had sung it down south, he was not one to join in. What he most needed was a stiff drink.
From the bridge one could see Tórshavn’s tiny forest, which Aksal had mentioned and, on that subject, had said that during St. Olaf’s the darkness there belonged to lovers.
The debauchery, at any rate, between those trees was infamous.
All Hjartvard wanted was a drink. What the Havnarfolk did with their evenings, if they wanted to go stretching each other’s assholes, that was their business and also their shame.
In a little hollow across the river he loosened the cord around his suitcase, took out a triple half-pint bottle of gin, and took a seat. He closed his eyes while he drank three swallows, letting the liquid slowly run down his throat. The effect was immediate and he enjoyed the calm that descended on his mind. He was both cooled and reassured by a common snipe calling and the river’s murmuring.
The last thought he had before his eyes closed was that he had promised his brother Heindrikur a bird rifle. And he should not forget that.
Adelborg, his father’s sister, had scolded him more than once for treating his younger brother so harshly, and she said that Sumbingurs gossiped about the brutality in their home.
Hjartvard told her to hold her tongue, said that all Sumbingurs beat their children, and that it was written the Book of Psalms that: Whoever spares the rod hates his children, but the one who loves his children is careful to discipline them. That was what Aksal had said more than once.
Adelborg just shook her head.
And deep down Hjartvard knew she was right. Heindrikur was terrified of him. Sometimes when Hjartvard heard his brother crying in the night, he dragged him from his bed in a mindless rage, stared down into his face, and dared him to whimper again. Then Heindrikur sometimes admitted that he missed their mother. And it was not easy to resist such words. Sometimes both brothers broke down crying, and at moments like those Hjartvard swore to himself that he would be a better person.
Half an hour later Hjartvard woke up to find the landscape ablaze. To the southeast the sunset stretched blue and red toward Kirkjubøreyn, and to the northwest a fiery tongue lapped the more rounded head of Konufelli Mountain.
And he was ravenous. Adelborg, who had kept house for the brothers since Aksal died in April, had packed him a few rolls and a small lamb shoulder in a cloth, and as the dancers continued their song down on the bridge, he ate his fill and washed it down with small sips of gin.
At the very end of Tróndargøta, Hjartvard finally found the café with the unusual name of Gamla Danmark.
The building had been assembled using some large rocks the sea had washed into a heap, and out of the open, lit windows he could hear boisterous chatter.
Café-Jenny wiped up an unconscious man’s vomit as Hjartvard asked if they had any vacancies. She asked him to excuse her while she tried to revive the drunk, and Hjartvard asked if he could do anything to help. She thanked him, and h
e lifted the drunk and carried him outside.
Hjartvard heard the sea surging and was tempted to dump the man down the rocky slope; surely he would wake when he hit the bottom. However, people were standing out in the yard, and Tórshavnars seemed so damn sensitive that a person was branded a criminal just for giving some Satan’s spawn a little scolding. He set the man down, but could not help himself. Before he entirely removed his hands, he gripped the drunk’s nose and squeezed hard enough that blood trickled from both nostrils.
After he came back inside, Hjartvard felt a tap on the back, and when he turned around he found an old man sitting there grinning, a silver-tipped cane in his hands. Whether the man was also drunk or just very old, Hjartvard could not tell, but it was obvious he had seen better days.
The man said good evening and asked Hjartvard if perhaps he was related to Nils Tvibur.
Hjartvard proudly replied that he was indeed Corporal Nils Tvibur’s grandson.
At that the old man began to laugh. And it was no ordinary laugh. It was unusually shrill and importunate. The man had the high squealing cackle of a castrate, and while gleeful tears streamed from his eyes, he pounded the floor with his cane.
Café-Jenny said that she did not usually rent rooms, but that last St. Olaf’s she had rigged up some bunks, and if he wanted he could have one.
Hjartvard glanced at the old man, then replied that the man who was too proud to sleep on a bunk while living did not deserve to sleep in his native soil when dead.
True, Jenny said.
Petroleum lamp in hand, she conducted Hjartvard up into a room in the attic.
On the lower bunk right by the door sat a man around thirty years of age. He wore red and green polka-dotted stockings, light-green knickers, and a waistcoat, jacket, and tie. He had a writing pad on his lap, and when Hjartvard entered, he looked at him over his glasses, said good evening in Danish, and continued to write.
Hjartvard gave his roommate a long look, then he sang a verse from the ballad of Svend Felding.
All my days I have heard
Danish men are so pious:
I thank Father God in Heaven,
here must be one of them coming.
The Dane smiled and unscrewed the cap on his fountain pen. He set his writing pad aside, stood up, offered Hjartvard his hand, and said that his name was H. P. Hølund and that he was an ethnographer.”
Kristensa abruptly turned her head toward Eigil and asked who H. P. Hølund was. She had never heard of him.
Eigil replied that Hølund was a fictional character, someone he had made up.
“You can’t just slip any random person into a novel,” his mother said.
“Of course you can,” Eigil replied. “The world of the novel has many doors, and obeys its own laws.”
“Well, well,” his mother murmured.
“Hjartvard placed his suitcase on a little table by the window. He had no idea what an ethnographer was. Perhaps an ethnographer bought or sold fish, or perhaps he worked for a newspaper. He was not an author; at least he did not resemble the great writer Saxo depicted in Aksal’s Danish chronicles.
Hjartvard untied the cord and opened his suitcase, and immediately picked up the fine scent of his Skridnaland gin. A cup stood on the window seal, and after wiping it clean with the small tablecloth, Hjartvard filled it and offered it to the ethnographer.
Hølund thanked him, offered a toast, and then to his own surprise, emptied it.
After Hjartvard had also drunk, he presented himself as a King’s yeoman from Ergisstova on Sumba. His kin had worked the farm since the days Duke Christian mixed blood with Martin Luther and started driving the papal spooks from Skåne, Norway, and Denmark, not to mention had had Bishop Jón á Hólum killed, and had made that hellion Jens Gregersøn Riber the first Lutheran bishop of the Faroes.
Hjartvard took a deep breath and continued, saying that Jens Gregersøn Riber did not have much good in him. He was one of those horny monks whom papal power had kept in check, and one of the first things the scamp did when he came to the Faroes was to knock up a woman from Kirkjubøur. It was true. But the worst thing about it was, the child was born with hooves.
“Wait, I didn’t quite understand,” Hølund interrupted him.
“I said the child was born with hooves. One was black like night, the other gleamed like moonlight on glass. And that tells me that Riber’s seed was drenched in evil. That’s why Kirkjubø folk are the way they are.”
“Do you mean the Patursson family?” Hølund asked.
“Yes, I mean the family who even this moment are trying to sow doubt about the holy oath the Faroese swore in their day to King Frederick III. They’re descended from that hoofed child.”
Hølund reached for his writing equipment. “You said that one hoof gleamed like glass?”
“That’s what Aksal the Wise said, the wisest man Sumba has ever produced.”
Aksal the Wise. Hølund chewed on that name a bit. He wanted to ask the newcomer if he was a Christian or a pagan, because he remembered there was a place in Sumba called Hørg. He remembered it from the work Faroese Folk Tales and Fables by Dr. Jakobsen, and the story, or rather the trilogy he had liked best, and which was as much literature as history, was the one about the Laðangarður yeoman, his daughter Sterka Marjun, and her sons, the Harga Brothers. Dr. Jakobsen’s work was one of the reasons Hølund had come to the Faroes in the first place. The fact that his half-brother was a pastor in Nes certainly did not hurt the situation.
In the same way that Knud Rasmussen had found a doorway into the Inuit culture, Hølund hoped during his visit to find an entrance into ancient Faroese culture. Such an entrance must exist, and if he found it, he could do his part to recreate an old identity, or at least contribute to the task.
One thing that had fascinated Hølund during the months he had spent at his half-brother’s vicarage in Nes was when the Toftirmen and Nesmen sang psalms. He liked to stand at his open window and listen as they rowed south along the shore at dawn, and in his journal he described their singing as the most magnificent High Mass he had ever experienced.
While the mountains acted as altar walls, the stars played the role of candles in the choir, and Hølund believed that the power and beauty the song carried were not solely devoted to Christ, but were equally an attempt to come to terms with nature’s might. The fishermen were trying to tame the sea with their song, and that was what was so precious and lovely.
Or put another way, the kernel of Faroese Christianity was a fusion of Jesus worship and pantheism. That idea was embodied in the mythical creatures particular to the Faroes, things like nixies, mermen, and sea monsters, beings that for centuries had existed side-by-side with the Old Testament patriarchs. There were other mystical creatures such as huldre and wights, but they could not be called distinctly Faroese, and anyway, they were associated with the dry elements. Hølund was also working on a thesis about Faroese Sunmen that he called The North Atlantic Pagan Aristocrats. The fact that Hølund was currently staying in Tórshavn, however, was due to the fact that he and his brother had quarreled. The pastor said that Hølund’s ethnographic studies were pure escapism. He had fled from the great war south on the mainland, and he had also fled from Copenhagen, from their old and domineering mother.
And Hølund did not entirely disagree with his brother.
However, his half-brother the pastor added—and this was the root of the quarrel—that Hølund shamelessly stole from more serious men like Hammershaimb and Dr. Jakobsen. He also insisted that the very heart of his brother’s academic ambitions was a veiled hatred of him and the church he represented.
Now Hølund was about to head back to Denmark, and by pure chance he had met a Sumbingur who perhaps knew a thing or two about sacrificial ritual sites.
He had not found any pagan traces in the Hørg trilogy, and he had to admit that it was due to simple laziness that he had not yet visited Suðuroy. However, he had several drawings of altars from throughout the N
ordic countries, and perhaps this Ergisstova yeoman or Aksal the Wise could show him the remnants of a sacrificial site, or perhaps even several. Hølund remembered there was also a place on Suðuroy called Hov, which in Old Norsk meant “heathen temple” or “place of worship.”
“You need to clear your head,” Hjartvard said and emptied the rest of his flask into the other man’s cup.
While Hølund took a sip and lit a cigar, Hjartvard told stories about his family. Hølund immediately recognized that some of what he said was pure drunken brag. However, he also felt the boasts contained a kernel of truth.
Hjartvard said his grandfather was descended from old Norwegian soldiers, that his great-grandfather and his brother had been stationed in Copenhagen in 1807, and that they had sailed with the low canon boats that sank so many British warships.
And the desire to perform heroic deeds had certainly been inherited. He told Hølund that it had nearly killed him on May 25th last year when German submarines sank nine Faroese sloops off of Føroya Banki. The day was foggy and silent, and the explosions that sank the sloops could be heard all the way to Sumba.
His mother’s father came from a Jutlandish family of pastors, and he himself had thought of studying to become a pastor, but he said all that changed when his mother died in childbirth ten years ago. His wise uncle Aksal, his mother’s brother, claimed that the Jutlandish Krogh branch of their family could trace its lineage all the way back to the giant Svend Felding.
Hølund remarked that Svend Felding was considered a mythological figure, and that the boundary between history and myth blurred, or completely disappeared, after seven generations.
Exhaustion had overcome Hjartvard, or perhaps he was just drunk. He dragged his shoes off his feet and flung himself onto the bunk.
Before closing his eyes, he said that whoresons and drifters might have trouble counting their family seven generations back, but that was no problem for a man related to the Desert Captain.”
A Little Failed Family
The Brahmadells Page 25