Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  “But of course! Do you think I would have you marry somebody you didn’t know?” Eyvindur beamed. “But you know her professionally. Now you will know her privately.” He winked. Jonathan winced and looked over at Daniela.

  She was shaking her head and smiling to herself, looking not at the three people to her left but at the floor, where the toys that had tripped Eyvindur the last time Jonathan was here still lay. She leaned over and picked up a stuffed giraffe. “Are the children asleep?” she asked.

  “No, no. Go and say hello to them,” Eyvindur said. “Go.” He pulled away from his wife’s arm and shooed the women out. Anna raised her eyebrows but obeyed; Daniela, leaving her shoes behind, got up and followed Anna down the hallway.

  Eyvindur grabbed Jonathan’s shoulder and pushed him onto the sofa. “Now listen,” he said in English, “she is the most perfect person for you. Why? Because she is very cultured, she speaks English, she is very Faroese but with a Continental flavor, just as I am, and she is so fucking beautiful. No?”

  “Well,” Jonathan began.

  “And listen to this. She went to school in Denmark and lived in Paris and she is descended from the very famous painter I told you about, Ruth Smith, the most famous family in the whole Faroes, everybody in the family is famous and special. Her brother runs the Folklore Institute, her father is a member of Parliament, her mother—” Here Eyvindur ran out of steam, or perhaps the mother was not as notable as the rest of the family.

  “I’ll have to get to know her, Eyvindur,” Jonathan ventured. “I’m sure she’s as wonderful as you say. I am looking forward to—” He paused. What was he looking forward to? Eyvindur’s broad, affable face, intent on him, was poised five inches away. Eyvindur’s efforts to find him a mate were oppressive yet touching, and Jonathan felt the burden of gratitude for something he wasn’t sure he wanted. That is, he wanted it abstractly, but as embodied in Daniela Smith it was not quite right. Wasn’t it best to forestall disappointment on all sides and admit this early, before the situation got too complicated? “I think it’s best to say—” Jonathan started.

  Eyvindur cut him off. “Jonathan, are you a homosexualien? Is that why you don’t have a wife?”

  “Homosexual,” said Jonathan automatically.

  “What is it like?” Eyvindur leaned even closer, eager.

  “No, I meant the word is homosexual, not homosexualien. I’m not.”

  “You can tell me. I don’t care. I am very broad-headed.”

  “I’m not. Eyvindur, I’m just not sure about Daniela. Well, I guess I’ll have to get to know her.”

  “Okay.” Eyvindur sounded dubious. “It’s really fine if you are. I won’t tell her.” He frowned. “But it would be better, because then she would not think that perhaps you do not like her.”

  “I like her! I like women. I’m not interested in men. I like her.” Jonathan put his hand on Eyvindur’s knee to emphasize his sincerity. Eyvindur pulled his head back a little and Jonathan burst out laughing. “Honestly, I’m crazy about women. It’s just that after you and Anna have gone to all this trouble, I don’t want you to be disappointed if Daniela and I don’t get married.”

  “Well, no, of course, you have to get to know her,” Eyvindur said soberly.

  “I’m sure we’ll be friends. Maybe we will fall in love. Who knows? She’s lovely, Eyvindur.” Jonathan felt that he was complimenting Eyvindur on a painting.

  “Yeah, she’s so fucking beautiful,” he said with a leer. “I like her boobies.”

  Daniela’s “boobles” had not seemed especially wonderful to Jonathan, but they were more evident than Anna’s, and he had the uncomfortable insight that he might be Eyvindur’s stand-in. This, however, was mitigated by Eyvindur’s apparent acceptance of his heterosexuality: only two regular guys would talk about breasts. Chucking sincerity in favor of expedience, Jonathan said “Yeah” in as heartfelt a tone as he could manage.

  “What can be keeping those women?” Eyvindur said. He was done with the man-to-man talk, Jonathan guessed. “I’m hungry.”

  “Me too,” said Jonathan. “Puffins?”

  “Puffins from Mykines—the best. For you.”

  Mykines made him think of Swithin and Wooley. “Did you know there is another American anthropologist here, living on Fugloy?”

  “No, there isn’t. I would know. Who told you that?”

  “An Englishman I met at the hotel.”

  “He is joking with you. If there was another American here, I would know about it. This”—he leaned close to Jonathan again—“is a very small country.”

  “The one on Fugloy?” asked Daniela, who’d come into the room while Eyvindur was talking.

  Jonathan’s brief respite from competition—maybe Swithin had invented Wooley, maybe he himself had invented Swithin—ended. “Do you know him?” Probably, he thought, Wooley was Daniela’s lover; though two minutes before he’d been scrambling out of her metaphorical bed, he now felt possessive and trespassed upon.

  “I met him when he arrived, last October. Isn’t his name Jim?”

  “How did you meet him? Did he lose his luggage too?” Jonathan was hopeful.

  She laughed. “No. I met him through my brother, Marius.”

  “Her brother runs the Folklore Institute,” Eyvindur said.

  “My brother works at the Folklore Institute,” she corrected.

  “Everybody else there is half dead,” said Eyvindur.

  “Should I go talk to them?” Jonathan asked. “I don’t understand what they are doing, exactly.”

  “Well, Jonathan”—Eyvindur puffed himself up in the chest and expanded on the sofa—“they aren’t doing very much. They did good things when they started ten years ago. Jens Pauli and Magnus collected the kvœðir and wrote them down. That was good. Because now nobody can remember them and they have to look up the words in the book before they go out dancing.”

  “Really?”

  “Almost,” said Eyvindur.

  Jonathan decided not to pursue it. Eyvindur was probably the least reliable informant in the history of the world.

  “But what they are obsessed with now—and Jonathan, it is an obsession—is the purity of the language.”

  “Oh, Marius thinks that’s silly,” said Daniela.

  “But for Jens Pauli and Magnus, it is a mission. They are language police. They study old documents and old newspapers and they are always hunting around in little villages for original Faroese words. They are trying to eliminate Danish words from the language. And when there is a word that there never was an old word for because it didn’t exist—like for a truck that makes cement—then they invent a Faroese word and tell everybody they have to use this instead of the normal Danish word. They are on the radio once a week to tell people how to talk. Each week they invent new words and tell people to use them.”

  “But I thought you were such a champion of Faroese things,” said Jonathan. “This sounds like something you would approve of.”

  “Jonathan! I am not an idiot. We live in the modern world. We are not a godforsaken, isolated colony in the middle of the ocean anymore. We have a balance of trade. We catch many tons of fish. We are in NATO.”

  “I thought you disapproved of NATO.”

  “I do, but we are in it. These two language policemen are living in a dream—like your professor, Olsen. He kept asking me where the runes were. There are no runes here.” Eyvindur shook his head.

  Jonathan looked at Daniela to see what she made of all this. She was smiling her secret smile for the floor. “Your brother isn’t interested in this language business?”

  “No. He’s working on a collection of folk tales, which Magnus gathered years ago and never organized.”

  “Marius is a music jockey,” said Eyvindur. “He has many talents.”

  Before Jonathan could ask what a music jockey was, Anna summoned them to dinner.

  A robin-sized roasted bird lay on each plate, with its wings and feet tied together so that it resembl
ed a trussed calf. Daniela showed Jonathan how to undo the string and open the breast cavity, which was stuffed with a crumbling, raisin-dotted mass. Eyvindur was busy heaping boiled potatoes on his plate. Jonathan leaned close to Daniela and whispered, “What’s a music jockey?”

  Her breath brushed his cheek as she answered. “He means disc jockey.”

  She smelled good, of clean skin and soap. Because he wanted another whiff of her, he whispered a second question: “What’s in here?”

  “It’s cake,” she said.

  In between bites of cake and puffin, Jonathan glanced at Daniela. Her self-sufficiency interested him. He liked her private smiles, her lightly mocking attitude toward Eyvindur, her direct answers to questions. Most of all he liked the fact that her expectations of the evening appeared to be even lower than his. She seemed to take the matchmaking as a joke, another one of Eyvindur’s eccentric ideas.

  “Is this not the best food you have eaten in the Faroes?” Eyvindur boomed out.

  Jonathan was able to answer yes. Although slightly tinged with fish (not surprising, as puffins subsisted on herring), puffin meat was delicious, somewhat like Cornish game hen. Jonathan was not as delighted by the cake, but the dinner was nonetheless an easy winner in the Good Food in the Faroes contest. A little salad would have been nice—but, he chided himself, there was going to be no salad, and he should be happy he wasn’t eating livurhøvd, served to further his culinary education. “Absolutely the best,” he said.

  “You will never eat it again,” Eyvindur intoned.

  “Why?”

  Daniela giggled.

  “Don’t laugh!” Eyvindur waved his fork, distributing cake crumbs. “You will be gone, you will be home in America, next year when the puffins come again. You will always remember this evening when you ate stuffed puffins.”

  “But I might eat them in Skopun,” Jonathan protested.

  “Who is going to give you puffins in Skopun? Are you going to catch them yourself? No.”

  “Can’t I buy them?”

  “Faroese food is not for sale.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” said Jonathan. He thought of the bags and bags of salt cod stacked in Sigurd’s store, the canned red cabbage that flanked the block of cheese where two flies ate lunch.

  “Real Faroese food,” said Anna. “Lamb and puffins. You must catch those yourself. I don’t get them in the store.”

  Jonathan doubted Eyvindur spent much of his time out on the cliffs trying to snag puffins in a butterfly net. Eyvindur interpreted the furrow in Jonathan’s brow correctly.

  “Anna’s cousin in Vestmanna, he sends things to us. Puffins in the summer, and fulmars, and part of a lamb.”

  “And grind?”

  A general sigh went round the table. “No. He doesn’t send that. And we don’t get much grind in Tórshavn. The whales don’t come here often now, because the harbor is too busy.” Eyvindur shook his head. “And you know, you can buy grind now. In a store. I think this is terrible. People on other islands are selling off part of their grind.”

  “But if they didn’t, you wouldn’t get any,” said Jonathan.

  “Yes, but it is not right. It is not proper Faroese behavior.”

  “I buy it,” said Anna. “I want to eat it, so I buy it.”

  Eyvindur pointed his fork at his wife but said nothing.

  “How long are you staying?” Daniela asked.

  “A year.”

  “You must stay three years,” said Eyvindur. “Four years. Forever!” He grinned at Daniela. “Make him stay.”

  “And how do you like our way of life?” she continued.

  Jonathan was taken aback. No one had yet asked him this question. His admiration for Daniela increased immediately, Eyvindur, for all his Italian sojourn and his chat about the modern world, was as Faroe-bound as old Jón Hendrik in Skopun. Neither one of them believed that the Faroese way of life was just that—a way of life. It was the way of life, and all others were divergences or variations. The Faroese generally seemed to feel about their culture the way evangelists feel about their religion: they didn’t see how a newcomer, once exposed, could fail to be converted. So Daniela was unusual. Jonathan wondered if she knew it, and, further, if she found it uncomfortable to be an atheist—at least, an agnostic—among so many true believers.

  This curiosity led him to respond, “I don’t know much about your way of life yet. How do you like it?” She didn’t answer, so he went on. “Eyvindur tells me you lived abroad.”

  “Yes.” That seemed to be all she was going to say without more prodding.

  “In Paris?” This didn’t even warrant a word; she nodded. “Did you have a hard time adjusting to life there?”

  “Don’t you find it difficult, adjusting?” she asked.

  “You would make a good anthropologist,” said Jonathan, with a smile. “You know how to answer a question with another question.” She smiled back. Jonathan decided they were flirting. “So,” he said softly, “did you?”

  “I knew some people. My great-aunt had friends there, and they were kind to me.”

  “Ruth Smith, the famous painter,” Eyvindur said. “She studied in Paris when she was young. But then she came home to paint her own country.”

  Jonathan wished Eyvindur would let up a little. Daniela had taken cover again and was gnawing on puffin bones with an abstracted expression on her face. Anna seemed to share Jonathan’s feelings; she scowled at Eyvindur and shook her head. But Eyvindur was on a roll.

  “You know Ruth Smith?” Jonathan didn’t bother answering; they’d had this conversation the last time he’d been there. “She is world-famous in Denmark! You don’t know her?”

  “No.”

  “She is very influential. Without her, I would never have become a painter.”

  “Why did you go there?” Jonathan asked Daniela.

  “Oh, Paris,” she said, as if this were explanation enough.

  “She is a painter too. She is a very excellent painter.”

  “Oh, Eyvindur, I am not good. And I don’t paint anymore. That’s finished.”

  Was this modesty, depression, or the truth? Jonathan tried to get a look at Daniela’s face for a clue. Obligingly, she turned toward him. What he saw told him nothing. Her wide-set blue eyes were friendly but blank; her mouth, with its full lower lip, a little chapped or bitten (he’d noticed her fingernails were bitten down when she helped him with the puffin), was almost smiling but not quite. If her face had any message, it was You will never know me. And while on an American face this would have been a challenge, on Daniela’s face it was merely a fact.

  The familiar cultural exhaustion was sneaking over Jonathan. In deference to Anna, the dinner conversation was in Faroese. And discussing Paris and painting in Faroese was more tiring than discussing sheep driving—perhaps because he’d never had occasion to talk about sheep in English. Flirtation in Faroese was apparently beyond him, though he had to admit that it was hard to know where to locate the blame for flirtation’s failure tonight. Jonathan knew he wasn’t going to marry Daniela, but he would have been willing to go on flirting with her—to flatter her, himself, their hosts. She wasn’t having any.

  Jonathan rearranged himself mentally. If no flirtation, then information. And alertness! A cup of coffee—but that was in the same universe as salad, some unreachable universe where food made sense and girls enjoyed a little attention at dinner. In this universe, puffins, the never-ending daytime of evening, the burden of anthropology to be done.

  “What’s Wooley like? The other anthropologist,” he asked Daniela.

  “I spent only one evening with him,” she said.

  But she seemed to have no trouble figuring Jonathan out in half an evening; he was beginning to feel frankly spurned. “Did you enjoy him?” he asked, somewhat nastily.

  “His Faroese is not very good,” she said, “not like yours.”

  Jonathan was not to be wooed. “What university is he from?”

  “
I don’t remember him saying anything about that. Marius might know.”

  “You should go visit him, Jonathan,” said Eyvindur. “Aren’t you lonely for a countryman?”

  “Not yet,” he answered. He couldn’t imagine ever being lonely enough to visit his rival.

  “Now, Marius could fix your homesickness,” Eyvindur said.

  “I’m not homesick.”

  “He has a radio program of your music,” Eyvindur continued, paying no attention. “He has hundreds of American records. He plays them on Thursday afternoons.”

  “Wednesday afternoons,” said Daniela. She ran her fingers through her hair and looked at Jonathan.

  She was flirting. He smiled. She looked away. On impulse, he let his leg fall against hers under the table. She didn’t flinch, but he, startled by the sensation, drew his leg away immediately. What was ailing him? He couldn’t tell if his skittishness was a sympathetic imitation of hers or something of his own. Either way, it was making the evening confusing.

  Eyvindur was smoking and watching the two of them. Anna had begun to clear the table. Jonathan stood up to help her; movement would dispel his discomfort, he hoped. But Anna protested.

  “Sit, you are a guest.”

  “I like to help,” said Jonathan.

  “In America, do the guests wash the dishes?” Eyvindur asked.

  “Sometimes. If you are friends with the host.”

  “A democracy. We are not a democracy.” He was in his smoking pose, leaning back in his chair, head tilted up, nostrils pluming smoke as if he were a dragon in a saga.

  “Oh?” said Jonathan. He knew that they were, a sort of parliamentary democracy. But Eyvindur was probably about to make a sweeping generalization, and this was his buildup to it.

  “We are not free,” said Eyvindur.

  “That’s ridiculous,” said Anna, clearing Eyvindur’s plate. She turned to Jonathan. “We are free. In the Faroes, everybody can do as he pleases.”

  “We are not free,” Eyvindur repeated.

  “What do you mean, exactly?”

  “What I mean is real freedom, Jonathan. We have a free press, yes, we have votes, yes, we can live where we like and say what we like. But what kind of a life can you have here in this country? Tell me that.” He leaned forward, his cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth. “Hah! You can be a fisherman, or you can be a farmer, or you can be an institutionalized outlaw like me—that’s what I am. You have a wife who washes the dishes: very nice. You have your little home all paid for: very nice. You have your disability pension if you get hurt while you are out fishing. And let’s say you don’t want to work, you are a crazy person who wants to roam around talking to yourself—fine! Just go to the pension office and say, I am a crazy person who doesn’t want to work, and they give you money. I get money because when I was young I had tuberculosis and I couldn’t work. That’s how I could become a painter. Everybody knows I’m not sick now, but I still get money. This is because everybody must be inside the system. No exceptions.” He leaned farther over the table and put his cigarette out on Daniela’s plate, which Anna hadn’t yet removed. “We’re always taken care of.”