Jacobsen wrote: There is a kinship between the aftermath of Panum’s visit to the islands and the instincts it unleashed and the social mass- or group hysteria, not to mention the affect- and conflict psychology, which a century later came to a glaring outbreak during the doctor’s affair in Klaksvík, and placed one of the islands’ largest towns under a state of siege after the doctor’s case became truly politically infected.
Eigil found himself incapable of sketching a closer psychological profile of this man, who reverently wrote about cultivated Danes, especially Panum and Pløyen, even while he defiled Faroese nationalists.
And Marianne Bøge also never succeeded at the task. Or rather, the subject had never come up, and since they had lost contact, it also no longer mattered. However, Eigil had suspected her of being in love with the professor, and not only that, he was convinced she had been his mistress. The refined slut, who lived alone with two daughters, loved loud men, which is why she had been Eigil’s nighttime companion. He could easily imagine that she was also the type who enjoyed hearing middle-aged men shout their pathetic ejaculations into the dark. And when you threw a spiteful Faroese anti-nationalist into the mix, she almost writhed with ephemeral desire.
Yet Marianne also believed the professor had had two faces.
She said that she and some other students had gone drinking with the professor, and Ole Jacobsen did not use gentle words when he criticized Christian Matras, the poet whom in his public lecture he had just praised to the skies.
Jacobsen thought that the academic exam in 1928 destroyed Matras as a poet, and that the man had been a kíkur, an inflated whale stomach, all his days. For a time the kíkur was filled with air from socialistic compressors. Then nationalistic hoses were connected. For a few years the kíkur had floated around with bishops Kingo and Grundvig, basking in the warmth of church hymns. He was a great consumer of Pan-Scandinavian, and at times Francophilic, air, and after returning to the Faroes in 1965 and accepting a professorship at Fróðskaparsetrinum, he was so full of every air imaginable that he practically hovered over Faroese waters.
Marianne claimed that deep down Ole Jacobsen suffered from the lack of that Mosaic yearning that prompted others of his generation to return home after the exile of the war years, and to begin rebuilding what was left of the Faroes. Instead, he remained in Denmark and created a safe bourgeois framework for his own life, whereas the nationalists undertook to modernize the old homeland.
On page 68 in Volume VI of the journal From the Faroes – Úr Føroyum, Jacobsen wrote that Faroese students studying in Copenhagen had once threatened to tear Panum limb from limb for the way his Observations described the Faroes. Jacobsen wrote: If these details about Faroese reactions—which, after all, do not stem from popular, but from so-called intellectual Faroese sources—are not exaggerated, and, truthfully, one must say they are not, then one will perhaps ask whether these people and their insolent representatives truly were ignorant of all other possibilities. Or were the conditions that Panum criticized so provocative and insulting that, on the islands where he had healed around 1,000 victims of the epidemic, he could expect nothing more than censure and threats of a beating as payment for an accomplishment the rest of the world found admirable, and which was viewed as a sacrificial human effort and a great scientific achievement?
What Panum actually wrote in his Observations was: “. . . I myself observed and treated about 1,000 victims . . .” His colleague August Manicus treated around the same number of patients, which means that about a fourth of the Faroese population was in their hands.
However, Panum did not actually say he healed 1,000 Faroese, as Ole Jacobsen claimed. And it was not out of humility that Panum so expressed himself, but simply because it was not possible to cure people once infected. Ole Jacobsen should have known that. The introduction, in fact, proves that he did know it, and yet failed to mention that fact.
Instead, he uses religiously charged words like healing and victim. He makes Panum seem semi-divine, and that is not because he loves men like Panum—irrational people seldom love. No, he makes the man seem godlike because he needs Panum’s reputation to act as a stepping stone to: “these people and their insolent representatives who truly were ignorant of all other possibilities.”
As Panum wrote in his Observations: “The Faroe Islands would probably not have lost nearly 1,000 inhabitants if an edict directed against the introduction of measles had not been removed some years ago.”
These words cannot be interpreted as other than as a direct medical accusation against the incompetence that characterized Faroese authorities, particularly Amtmand Pløyen, and of course Landkirurg Regenburg. Yet Ole Jacobsen was also silent on this subject.
Fuck you, Ole Jacobsen, Eigil thought as he turned from Jóannes Paturssonargøta onto Dalavegur, patting the churchyard fence.
You Reap What You Sow
ELSPA TÓRA LAMHAUGE greeted Eigil when he entered the reception at 9:00 A.M.
He flashed her a peace sign with his left hand.
It happened before he knew it, the spreading of forefinger and middle finger. It was not something he usually did, and he regretted his assumed playfulness.
Peace signs, fist bumps, the extended right arm Nazi salute—none of those had ever attracted him.
Elspa Tóra, on the other hand, flirted with him every now and then, and sometimes she called him my friend or my dear. She was a woman barely in her fifties. When her children left home, she went back to work, and for the last seven years had worked the reception desk at the P/F Rógv accounting firm.
Today she simply smiled and said that the director would like to see him in the Inner Sanctum.
Eigil stopped at the desk and asked if she thought he looked strange.
She gave him a concerned glance and shook her head. She said she was sorry he had not been re-elected to the city council, but that it would take more than a headline in the Sosialurin to make her change her mind about the city’s most handsome sheik.
Eigil was so moved that his eyes filled with tears.
She handed him her handkerchief, and while he dried his eyes, he said that she must bear with him, he was little fragile at the moment. Kjartan á Rógvi had seen Eigil outside, and when Eigil entered his office, he was standing before a large wall painting by Ingálvur av Reyni titled They Wait, which meant the boss had something serious on his mind.
Kjartan liked having this particular painting behind him on the occasions he was interviewed for TV or photographed for some newspaper.
Eigil was convinced that what Kjartan lacked in natural dignity he borrowed from this great work, or from the visual arts in general.
Kjartan began by saying that his telephone had not stopped ringing all weekend, and added that what was printed in the Sosialurin was nothing less than a scandal.
The newspaper was on his desk. He flipped to the lead story, and then to the letters to the editor, and after reading several snippets aloud, he asked what the hell was going on. As the firm’s director, he thought he had a right to know.
Eigil patted the leather chair and asked if Kjartan planned to offer him a seat.
Kjartan stared at him in disbelief, and then grew furious.
He did not give a shit if Eigil sat, stood, or lay down. That was beside the point. He wanted to know what was going on. Nothing more.
“Okay,” said Eigil. “Should we talk about the article first, or is it the public urination you find more interesting? I don’t know if you’ve heard, but pissing or spitting on graves is actually the most popular underground sport on the Faroes, perhaps in all the Nordic countries. And you know why? Because Northerners hate each other.”
Kjartan á Rógvi walked over to the window, and when he had calmed down, he said that the matter was serious. The reputation of a well-respected firm was at stake, whose clients numbered some of the largest companies in the country, and in addition to legal advisers also had eleven full time employees. That a top employee had
dishonored a grave was extremely concerning.
Eigil replied that the firm actually had ten employees. The eleventh had just quit.
Kjartan gripped his head. “I’m too old for this bullshit,” he shouted. “You can’t be so childish.”
“If we were just talking about childishness, everything would be good,” Eigil responded.
“I don’t understand,” said Kjartan. “You’ve changed.”
“Maybe I have. But the fact of the matter is, I don’t want to listen to such garbage so early in the morning. The most petty, bourgeois newspaper in all the northern countries has character-assassinated the man who used to be number two in this firm. That’s what’s going on.
“I’ve been hung out to dry, and you know what that means? It means, among other things, that people get to vandalize my car. They get to call me up and insult me. That’s the real problem, not that your and Amalia’s weekend was ruined.”
“You reap what you sow,” Kjartan replied.
Eigil’s eyes filled with tears, but this time he simply let them run, while he whispered: “So you’ve finally gotten me into the catapult so you can shoot me to Hell.”
Eigil saw sudden fear bloom in Kjartan’s eyes, and in the same breath understood why. He realized he was holding up the leather chair, about to hurl it across the desk. He was so surprised he dropped the chair with a clatter. One of the back legs struck the floor and broke, and the chair toppled onto its side.
Kjartan tried to say speak, but could not.
“You can expense the chair leg,” Eigil said.
He took his key ring out of his pocket, removed the keys to the building and to his office, and set them on the desk.
“I have some books and folders in my office. Elspa Tóra can pack them up.” Then he said farewell and left.
PART FIVE
The Mosque
ONE LOVELY DAY in March 1993, someone knocked on the Mosque’s front door, and Eigil opened it onto an old man standing in the yard. He was wearing a Faroese hat and a long coat, and was carrying a leather bag in his hand. Eigil could see the man wanted to speak with him, and invited him inside.
The old man said that his grandfather was Lýðar í Geil, and that Lýðar had been Tórálvur í Geil’s brother. He said he was aware of the friendship that had subsisted between the Norwegian corporal Nils Tvibur and his great-uncle, and added that he had thought a lot about Eigil since the Sosialurin wrote that he had purchased the Mosque.
But he had not come to visit just to talk about old friendships.
The man opened his bag and set a small bundle of letters bound with a faded ribbon on the kitchen table. He also set an American book called Leaves of Grass on the table; he said the book and the letters had been kept in his great-uncle’s sea chest. Since Eigil was a writer and also the Mosque’s owner, he might be curious about these things.
After they had talked a while, Eigil placed two glasses and a bottle of whiskey on the table, but the old man said he could not drink if he did not have something to smoke with it.
Eigil told him to wait two minutes and he would run down to Haldor’s shop for a pack of cigarettes.
“If you’re going to buy something,” the old man called after him, “buy cheroots.”
Eigil returned with a pack of Lucca, and while the comfortable smoke filled the kitchen, they sipped their drinks.
The old man was talkative and told Eigil about everything the sea chest had held. Besides the letters, there was a Danish bible printed in 1842, some awls, and also a photograph of a great-great-aunt’s gravestone in Denmark.
The chest had also contained an amusing painting of a dancing girl. He could remember it well. Whether the girl’s name was Edga or Edgar Degas, or if that was the name of painter, the man really could not say. A lawyer had liked the painting so much that he had bought it. Or rather, the lawyer had handled a matter for his father, and when it came time to settle up, the lawyer had said that instead of money his father could give him the painting hanging in the parlor.
Eigil asked the old man to repeat the painter’s name, since he was not sure he had heard right. Again the man said Edga, or Edgar Degas.
Eigil tried to act casual. He was familiar with the paintings of Degas and other French impressionists, and he also knew that their paintings sold for millions.
But he could not bring himself to say this out loud.
Nonetheless, he asked for the lawyer’s name, and the old man said it was Husted-Andersen.
In terms of the letters, the old man knew that Doctor Napoleon Nolsøe’s widow, Henrietta Nolsøe, daughter of Commandant Løbner, had kept them after her husband died, and that she had given them to Tóvó when he returned from Denmark in 1901. And so generous was this Henrietta that she also gave Tóvó an old telescope that had once belonged to Nólsoyar Páll. He said that Henrietta had liked his great-uncle, that she had truly cared about him, and that Tóvó was sorely grieved when the sweet lady died in 1906.
They had finished about half a pint from the bottle when Eigil asked if it was true what he had heard, namely, that Tóvó refused to speak both his mother tongue and Danish when he returned from prison.
The old man replied that there was at least a kernel of truth there.
As he understood it, the many years Tóvó had spent in Vridsløselille had changed him. He avoided most people, which meant that only very few ever heard him speak.
However, the old man’s father remembered Tóvó well, and all the times they had spoken together had been in Faroese. He could say that for certain, because Faroese was the only language his father knew.
Eventually, the old man pulled on his coat, saying that he had to catch the next boat out.
Eigil told him he would copy the letters and send the original back to Nólsoy.
“Nonsense,” the old man said. He said Nólsoy had so many originals that, two or three more, and the long, narrow island would be in real danger of capsizing.
A Years-Old Autumn
LIKE SO MANY other houses in the á Reyni district of Tórshavn city, the Mosque had not been equipped with a toilet when Eigil had bought it. There was a dry closet behind a curtain in the bedroom, and in it a low shelf with a can labeled Scented Disinfectant. This chemical horror was mixed with water, and the first few times you sat on the pot, you could expect a green liquid to slosh up your backside, and if it happened to be a woman sitting there, ahh, Eigil sighed, poor she-devil.
He had searched the house thoroughly from the crawl space to the attic.
The space between the attic floorboards and the roof’s crown was only a meter high; if Eigil wanted to go up into the attic, he had to crawl or squirm his way in. So he stood on the small white kitchen table, which he had positioned beneath the hatch, and with flashlight in hand he explored the attic.
The dark shapes visible between the roof timbers had to be birch bark, but a moment passed before Eigil realized that the threads hanging from the attic ceiling were roots.
The entire space above the room and also a substantial portion over the kitchen was a veritable root forest. The thickest roots were like the tip of a child’s finger; from there they grew smaller, with the thinnest roots being fine as thread. In some places the roots had attached themselves to the attic floor, and when Eigil carefully blew into the forest, everything moved—dust swept across the wooden boards and the entire attic lived.
Eigil reached for a narrow box he also discovered there, and when he removed the dusty lid, he found several shoes and some cans of English shoe polish. He knew that a cobbler had kept his workshop in the house after the last war. The shoes were worn out, and judging by the battered upper leather and noticeable bunion marks, they had probably belonged to workmen who were either dead or who had not had the means to retrieve the shoes.
Unsurprisingly, woodboring beetles lived in the rafters. The tiny beasts had dug a countless number of holes, and in some places so little was left of the rafters that Eigil could scratch light brown
dust out of them with his nails. There was little doubt it was pure habit keeping the roof up. He tried to find a word to describe the smell, and suddenly he realized it smelled like autumn. That was precisely it. A years-old autumn with long roots had overtaken the attic.
One of the last residents had mounted an oil burner in the old coal stove’s combustion chamber, but it was difficult to say when fire had last appeared beneath its cast-iron rings. Nonetheless, the faint odor of petroleum permeated the kitchen floorboards.
And there were still houses in the neighborhood that burned petroleum. Haldor, who currently owned Restorff’s old shop, was one of the last in the city to sell petroleum in cans. On still, foggy days, when the smoke barely crept from the chimney mouths, all of Høgareyn stank of petroleum. The thick fog slipped slowly between the tarred gables, drawing the petroleum smell with it and pressing it against the windowpanes. And it was like the smell had both color and shape; small bluish bubbles grew out of it and spread like scales over the thin glass. The smell hung in every blade of grass, and if someone had left a floor rag or a sweater on the clothesline, that too would absorb the smell.
To Eigil, the odor seemed so strong that a single match would be enough to set the fog on fire and burn down all the houses on the rocks.
And Høgareyn, and all of Tinganes for that matter, was little more than rocks. The only dirt to be found was on the furry house roofs, where grass and sorrel, and in some places even marsh marigolds grew as well, and on foggy days everything was enveloped in the miserable petroleum odor.
Besides the stove and sink and the small white table, the kitchen contained two stools and nothing else. Eigil bought a sofa, as well as a coffee machine and an electric oven.
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