He had sometimes toyed with the idea of traveling to Ireland or Denmark for a time to write, and the thought occurred again after the confrontation with Kjartan á Rógvi. But the plan was abandoned. As it turned out, this spartan kitchen was unusually well suited to the activity of sitting and writing. He could sit long days there with his typewriter, an electric IBM with a ball head, more or less as rooted as what was growing beneath the roof, and when he could not do any more, he extracted himself carefully from his forest of words and threw himself onto the couch, where he slept peacefully underneath a woven blanket.
He remembered a photograph of Gabriel García Márquez sitting shoeless at a small white table and writing, and the photo’s appeal was that particular spartan element.
One of Leonard Cohen’s nymphs appeared at a similar table on the back of the record sleeve from Songs from a Room. Her hands were on the keyboard of a little manual typewriter; behind her stood the obligatory bed, which Leonard Cohen had schlepped with him the last thirty-five to forty years, in case he should meet a Nancy, Marianne, or Suzanne.
The only thing Eigil did to the house was to hire someone to replace the dry closet with a working toilet. The people next door were kind enough to allow him to couple his toilet to their septic tank.
That kindness reminded Eigil of an odd ferry trip to Bergen on the Norrøna in 1986. He had bunked with a baker from Klaksvík and, although most of the passengers on board were partying, Eigil had turned in early.
He was fast asleep when the baker returned to the cabin around midnight, so drunk he barely made it into his bunk. As it turned out, the man had recently had a colostomy, and something happened that was not supposed to happen—the bag burst.
While sleeping it off, the poor baker began to shit. And it kept running out his side. All night. Brown clumps piled into a minefield of filth and diarrhea, and when Eigil woke up and discovered the source of the terrible stink, he could do nothing but leave.
The result of that strange experience was the prose piece “The Shitdog’s Cultural History.”
Ghosts and Tears
ALL WAS AS it should be in the Mosque, until one night Eigil woke to find an unfamiliar man standing next to the sofa.
The front door was locked, so he could not have entered that way. Eigil wanted to ask the stranger who he was, but could not get the words out, and then suddenly the man was gone.
Two months after the stranger’s visit, Eigil experienced another bizarre phenomenon.
It was during the evening, and he was aware of Tórshavn’s church clock striking ten. A second later it felt like there was someone inside Tóvó’s old bedroom. Eigil stood up from the table, walked over to the bedroom door, and considered opening it, but was not brave enough. It was like all his courage drained away, it was all he could do to remain standing. It felt like a terrible pressure was being applied to the door, not so that it bulged, but a force so great that the door jam, the frame, and the door itself trembled, nearly bursting from the wall. And that force did not wish him well, of that he was certain. Suddenly, Eigil realized that it was pure evil pressing against that door. He felt that the Devil himself had arrived to Tórshavn.
Eigil stumbled to the typewriter, did not bother to shut it off, but just grabbed his coat and fled.
He did not want to tell his mother about these events because he knew how she would interpret them. And the fact that she was so sensitive, so mortally afraid, was strange, considering she had never shied away from telling stories about the underworldly.
Or maybe it was not so strange at all. Many Faroese blended questions of moral behavior with the supernatural. If you overstepped a certain moral threshold, you could count on the underwordly to come after you like tax collectors.
It was this idea that ensured parapsychology had not yet gotten the respect it deserved, and that was also why that pursuit of the supernatural had more of a gothic than scientific air about it.
It is worth mentioning here that Hjartvard Tvibur was apparently one of those individuals able to send messages from beyond the grave. Or so Margit, his cousin in Sumba, claimed. She and her husband visited Eigil one St. Olaf’s Day, and she told him that Hjartvard had once appeared to her in a dream, complaining that his feet were cold.
She could never remember Hjartvard’s voice being that afflicted while he was alive, and the dream would not leave her.
A few days later she went to the graveyard, and that was when she saw that a large hole had opened at the foot of Hjartvard’s grave. Apparently, the coffin lid had caved in and broken, allowing dirt to spill and rain to fall onto Hjartvard’s feet.
She had emptied three wheelbarrows full of dirt and sand into the hole and smoothed the grave’s surface.
The great mystery was how Hjartvard, who was dead, could have gotten the message across.
Or maybe someone else had carried the message for him.
But then, why would someone else care anything about Hjartvard Tvibur’s grave?
Kristensa did not find out about Eigil purchasing the Mosque until she came home from the hospital. Only then did he tell her that the Mosque was back in the family.
Kristensa did not reply. Still, she thought these last years had been too good to her son, and life was not generally good. Misfortune awaited everyone. But the idea that eventual tragedy might be connected to the Mosque filled her with terror.
Not until Eigil lost the city council election and had resigned from his accounting position did his mother break her silence. She called the Mosque a house of misfortune and told him to sell it or give it away. And in order to emphasize how fervently she meant her words, she said that, just think, Hjartvard had murdered poor Tóvó í Geil in that very house!
“You don’t know that,” Eigil replied. “No one knows that. There’s no proof.”
“Tóvó í Geil died on St. Olaf’s in 1918, and Hjartvard was in Tórshavn on that very day,” his mother said. “Besides, it was also never proven that your grandfather Gregor killed his father. Remember that. And yet he lost his mind.”
“It’s Nils Tvibur’s house!”
“No,” his mother whispered. “It’s a snake pit.”
“Enough,” Eigil said. “I bought the house because I thought you were going to die.”
“And you wanted something of your mother’s? Oh, you stupid boy! Get this through your skull: A villain came from Norway. He did one good deed in his life, and that was to care for a wretched boy from Havn, and that same boy was murdered by Hjartvard a lifetime later. Our family is weak, remember that. It takes so very little to call misfortune down over our poor heads.”
Two or three tears glinted in the corners of her eyes. No more than might balance on a knife point. But that point was so sharp it pierced Eigil’s heart.
Since he also woke to inexplicable sounds in the house on Jóannes Paturssonargøta, he began to ask himself the uncomfortable question of whether or not he, too, might be going out of his mind.
And it did not help matters any when Kristensa gave him a necklace with a cross on it one day. Eigil thanked her for her thoughtfulness, but his mother demanded he put it around his neck while she watched.
And if that was not enough, she then ordered him to go to the churchyard and clean Napoleon Nolsøe’s grave.
A Wounded Sumbingur
EIGIL HAD WORN the cross around his neck for several weeks when he decided to contact the psychologist Arnfinn Viðstein. Although they did not know each other, the Viðstein folk had old roots in the city. In fact, the piano that Dia við Stein received from Napoleon Nolsøe is to this day in Arnfinn’s keeping.
They met for seven sessions, but by their third meeting Arnfinn Viðstein came out and said that, in his opinion, Eigil was perfectly fine.
As for the parapsychological phenomena, he did not consider himself qualified to really address the subject. However, he stressed that during an emotionally unstable period it could be difficult to tell where to draw the boundary between old fas
hion ghostly visits and common paranoia.
At any rate, if he were to give a diagnosis of Eigil’s condition, he would call him a wounded Sumbingur.
In his opinion, what Eigil most needed was a conversation partner to help him unravel these different cultural and psychological complexities. If Eigil regarded him as a fitting opponent, he offered to follow him down into the darkness where art remained unarticulated, where rage had no definite course, and where fear could take such irrational form that it crippled one’s zest for life.
Eigil took his words to heart, and although their subsequent conversations did not alter much, it still felt like his mind expanded and his writing took off.
Eigil told the story of his great-great-grandfather’s house.
The first to move in after Nils Tvibur left Havn was the soldier Jardis av Signabø. The reason Jardis moved in had to do with a violent episode that took place on board a freight yacht in 1849. Nils Tvibur had beaten Jardis so badly that he ended up an invalid and had to give up his post. To atone for his crime, Nils gave Jardis the Mosque, and Jardis lived there until his death in 1865.
Then one of Restorff’s shop assistants moved into the Mosque. His name was Hansemann, but Eigil called him Dáran. He had carved his name into no fewer than three places along the kitchen walls, and as anyone knows, a moron’s most identifying characteristic is the tendency to write his name everywhere.
Hansemann had moved out by the time Tóvó took over the house in 1878.
During the 16 years Tóvó sat in Vridsløselille prison, his sister Ebba managed the house, and had let an old woman and her grandson live there.
The boy was named Rikard, and although he has been forgotten today, while he lived he was something of a legend, especially among older women.
Rikard was born dumb, and around thirteen or fourteen he acquired the terrible nickname Rikard Erection. He suffered from the condition today known as priapism, which is curable, though back in the 1880s that was not the case.
The disorder involves a recurring erection, and Rikard’s was of an extreme variety. He simply walked around with it protruding from his middle, and according to that day’s perception of disease, it was not considered unreasonable to call him an aberrant or even demonic young man.
In one of the many hopeless letters that an aging H. P. Hølund wrote to William Heinesen, Hølund stated that Rikard was the unofficial forefather of the entire Faroese royal dynasty. Later he moderated his expression. Perhaps Heinesen had written him back to inform him that it was historically inaccurate to use feudal titles in a Faroese context.
In any case, Rikard met his benefactor in the old Leynar farmer, Skeggin Pól.
The farmer had been in Havn selling sheep, and that evening he happened upon some kids poking fun at Rikard. They had chased the boy between two houses, and each time they heard him moan in fear, they broke down with laughter. They had started to pull his pants down when Skeggin Pól was suddenly among them.
By this time Skeggin Pól was a very old man, and although his dwarfish beard was still extensive, the bloom had faded. It had turned gray, and the dry wisps fluttered around his chest and shoulders. But the voice emerging from the old, matted wool was powerful and sharp. He practically hammered out the words, telling them to take their rotten bodies to Hell or else he would call a host of iniquities upon their heads.
Rikard’s grandmother was terrified when she saw the boy returning home with a dwarf at his heels, and immediately demanded to know what mischief he had gotten himself into this time.
Skeggin Pól told her to stop driveling, described what had happened, and said that everything was just fine.
Then he asked what was wrong with the boy.
The old woman said that Rikard had been motherless since two years of age, and that his father was a whoremonger from Skála who refused to recognize his offspring. The boy had been born dumb, and his father’s sins had given him that terrible horn.
She pointed to Rikard’s erection, crossed herself, and buried her face in her shawl.
Early the next morning the dwarf was back in their kitchen. He said that he was returning to Leynar when the tide shifted, and he thought to take the boy with him. He placed a dried mutton leg on the table, said that life was a proud song to the sun, and if she left the boy to him, she would receive two sacks of wool and a wether every year.
And it happened as Skeggin Pól wished.
Later that same morning, along with the the westwardly running current, Rikard set out in the bow of an eight-man boat, and in the following years he became the old farmer’s hand.
On longer trips, for example, to Vestmanna or Kollafjørður, the dwarf took Rikard along to help, and, in the still evenings, master and servant would fish out on Steyrur or by Láturgjógv.
He tended the geese and, on his own initiative, built small hare houses up on Navahjalla and by Hvassheyggjar.
As it turned out, Amtmand Dahlerup’s hares had learned to thrive not only on Sydstreymoy, but on the entire island.
The boy was also extremely dexterous with his hands. He cut the finest clog bottoms, mended tears, fashioned the wooden locks for storehouses, and also began making knife handles.
Skeggin Pól, it seemed, was correct when he argued that a farming society under Sunmen leadership was more humane than the new pecuniary society. He believed that it was uncivil and a great shame to send Faroese fools down to Danish crazy houses.
One of the first things Skeggin Pól did upon their arrival at Leynar was to give the boy a small woven belt, explaining to him that when the erection was at its worst, he should bind it against his stomach.
The good advice helped.
Otherwise, it was not uncommon for both married and unmarried women to inspect Rikard’s equipment, and they could do it safely, because Rikard told no tales.
The sodomite Melkir úr Norðstovu in Vestmanna also came to inspect Rikard’s equipment. He encouraged Rikard to masturbate and paid him a kroner to insert the famous erection into his asshole.
When Skeggin Pól died in the spring of 1891, Rikard had served him for five years.
With around one hundred kroner saved up in his pocket, Rikard traveled back to Havn to visit his grandmother, and, according to Hølund, that was the summer Rikard founded the so-called Faroese royal dynasty.
However, for the present story, there is another event of even greater significance.
Ebba gave birth to a late arrival, a girl named Álva after Tóvó.
One day some children were playing along Undir Kjallara on the Tinganes Peninsula when Álva slipped and fell into the water, into the forest of seaweed—and the person who dove after her was Rikard.
He knew Ebba had provided him and his grandmother with a roof over their heads and so he risked his life. He was able to save the girl, and Rikard himself was still alive when the men carried him into Henrietta Nolsøe’s kitchen. But there he died. It was on Pole’s old chaise longue that the courageous young man’s heart stopped beating.
Eigil told this and similar stories connected with the Mosque to the psychologist Arnfinn Viðstein.
He also repeated his mother’s claim that Tóvó had been murdered in his own house on St. Olaf’s in 1918.
Arnfinn asked if the events surrounding the death were ever investigated, but they were not.
Eigil said that the event had the same mystical overtone as so many of the other stories his mother had told him over the years about Ergisstova and her family.
Martin, Lýðar’s oldest son, inherited the Mosque, and he took everything from the house he deemed useful.
That was how the interesting sea chest made its way to Nólsoy.
Eigil mentioned the letters that the old Nólsoyingur man had left him, and he also talked about the valuable Degas painting that a clever lawyer weaseled away from Martin. In 1927, the Tórshavn Commune bought the Mosque, and now he was saddled with a haunted house and had no idea what to do with it.
Arnfinn Viðstei
n told him to consider following his mother’s advice and selling the house, and if he could not find a buyer, then to give it away when a good option presented itself.
With that the Tvibur cabala would lift, in the sense that Eigil would be doing the same good deed that his great-great-grandfather had done one hundred fifty years ago.
The Lead Story Writer, the Torturer, and the Beanpole
THE VERY DAY that Elspa Tóra Lamhauge informed Eigil it was none other than Jens Julian við Berbisá who had written the lead article about the grave scandal, and who generally had fed the Sosialurin horror stories about him, Eigil left Tórshavn in his Fiat and drove north toward Kolbeinagjógv.
He inserted a Kinks tape into the cassette player, and as he drove past the dark mountains, he sang along with old hits like “Sunny Afternoon” and “Death of a Clown.”
He stopped at the stone quarry in Hundsarabotnur, and while he pissed he looked up at the bright stars.
The tape played itself out on the bridge between Streymoy and Eysturoy, and for a moment he wondered at his lack of strong emotion. He felt mentally stable, and even his desire for revenge was strangely distant. It was like some foreign power had simply commanded him to carry out a violent act. The consequences were irrelevant.
The road was almost empty. It was evening and there were no birds in the sky either.
When he emerged from the tunnel on the way toward Millum Fjarða, he met a small Nissan truck, and as they passed each other, Eigil saw that the truck was loaded with sheep. A net had been spread around the wooden truck-bed, and even though it was not slaughter time, the sheep were undoubtedly headed to the slaughterhouse. Their wooly heads stared out into empty space, and the idea that they were bound for the knife, and that no mercy awaited them, was like a shock to Eigil.
He thrust the Kinks tape back into the cassette player, turned up the volume, and hit the gas.
The new steering wheel was larger, and not leather, so it did not feel as comfortable in his hands as the previous one.
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