Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  “And this means you aren’t free?” Jonathan asked.

  “Sometimes he gets into this mood,” said Anna. She picked up Daniela’s plate.

  “It’s not a mood. It’s the truth. We are in prison.”

  “In America people starve because nobody takes care of them,” Jonathan said. He was sure Eyvindur wouldn’t believe this. He had never met a European willing to give up his idea of rich America.

  “Yes! Yes! You have social unrest. We are sheep. Nobody is restless here.”

  “Do you agree?” Jonathan asked Daniela. He considered putting his hand on her arm, then decided not to.

  “It’s true that we are not restless. If you are restless, you must leave the country.”

  “As you did,” said Jonathan.

  “And I,” said Eyvindur. “I left this stupid country where everybody puts their noses in your business, looking over your shoulder to see what you are painting, coming over to see what you are having for dinner, because they have nothing else to do.”

  “But you came back, both of you.”

  “It’s my home,” said Daniela.

  Jonathan waited for Eyvindur’s reason. Eyvindur stood up.

  “A man does not choose his homeland, Jonathan,” he said. “Come, we will drink whiskey in the living room and become maudlin.” He looked at Jonathan. “I know you think I am already maudlin. You are wondering what I will be like after I drink whiskey.”

  Jonathan laughed; that was exactly what he had been thinking. He felt a rush of affection for Eyvindur—for understanding him, for understanding himself, for possessing the one thing Americans, with all their freedom, lacked: realism. What Jonathan meant by realism was a fatalism leavened by pleasure in the oddities of this life, which could be amusing on its inexorable downward course. Brushing up against this consciousness had been the charm of his previous trips to Europe, and he was charmed anew to find it here, though he supposed it might be a mainland specialty, imported from Italy by Eyvindur alone. Another cultural trail to follow: Did Faroese happiness lie in this cheerful hopelessness? Was the American conviction that Things Would Improve the source of his—and his country’s—miseries?

  Daniela and Jonathan followed Eyvindur into the living room, where he pulled the whiskey bottle out from behind some books on a shelf. Not much was left in it. “Two glasses, Anna,” he called. “You share one,” he said to them. Anna brought the glasses in hands still soapy from washing dishes. When she’d gone back into the kitchen, Eyvindur sat down next to Daniela on the sofa and put his arm across the top of the pillow, so that her head would be under his protection were she to lean back.

  Jonathan was on the other side of Daniela. He had to lean over her to see Eyvindur. He didn’t like this arrangement, which made him feel that he was in a waiting room and also that he and Eyvindur were competing for Daniela’s attention.

  Eyvindur poured the whiskey and passed a glass to Jonathan. “I suppose you think I treat Anna in a very chauvinistical manner,” he said. He had switched to English.

  “Um.” Jonathan took a sip and handed the glass to Daniela.

  “I get amusement at playing like a Viking with her. She understands. We have a very good marriage.”

  “Oh,” said Jonathan. He didn’t want to hear about it. He wanted more whiskey. He put his hand out for the glass. Daniela was staring out the window. He nudged her knee with his. She moved a little farther away from him. “Whiskey,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Daniela. She took a sip before handing it over.

  “Marriage is the most important thing in the world,” said Eyvindur. Jonathan noticed that Eyvindur had already drunk most of his whiskey. “It is much more important than painting. My babies! My beautiful babies. What painting would ever be as beautiful to me as my babies? They are my inspiration, they are my teachers. Truly, Jonathan”—he leaned across Daniela’s lap—“I have learned to see the world again as new, like a baby myself, from them.” He subsided back into his spot and finished off his whiskey.

  Jonathan disapproved of this concept of the child as teacher, which was common in Cambridge, where all the parents he knew were graduate students who claimed their toddlers had taught them more about psychology, biology, or physics than they had ever learned from books. Any child whose parents pontificated about this had Jonathan for an ally immediately, and he thought now sadly of Marta and little Anna asleep in their beds, burdened by their careers as instructors in seeing. Why didn’t people leave children alone? But would he do any better? Wouldn’t he see his children as informants from the child world, whom he could pump for data about sensations and emotions lost to him?

  “They’re just kids, Eyvindur,” he said.

  “ ‘Kids,’ I love this word for babies. The American language is marvelous.” Eyvindur patted Daniela’s thigh enthusiastically. She shifted back toward Jonathan.

  Jonathan now felt sympathy for everybody washing over him in a whiskey-induced tide: poor Daniela, trapped between two oafs, poor babies the world over, poor Eyvindur, whose marriage probably wasn’t as happy as he claimed, poor Anna, who seemed to have finished her washing and shuffled off to bed without saying good night, leaving the “grown-ups” to their drinking and their English, which she couldn’t understand. He was lucky. He was free: nobody’s child, nobody’s father, nobody’s husband. He looked at Daniela; he wasn’t going to be her husband. Maybe he could be her lover, though.

  But did she like him? He found it difficult even to guess what she might be thinking at this moment, holding the whiskey glass in her bitten fingers, drawn into herself so as to be smaller than usual and not brush against the men on either side of her. Jonathan looked at the size of her wrist and compared it to his own and worried: such a thin, frail shaft of bone, how could she manage in the world?

  He scolded himself for “chauvinistical” thinking; she clearly could manage well. Nothing about her suggested the helplessness that waited under the surface of many American girls’ competence. Quite the opposite: Jonathan was sure that a tough heart beat beneath that frilly blouse. With light-headed, late-night, X-ray vision, he saw through the silk and through the breast so admired by Eyvindur to her organ clenched like a fist. That was the barrier to flirtation, not culture or language or his lack of appeal.

  This was sad information. Her wounds—for surely someone guarded was someone wounded—made Daniela familiar and less appealing to Jonathan. She was not after all very different from him. Her methods of expressing her unhappiness were exotic, but the unhappiness was not. Tolstoy was wrong: it was unhappiness that was the same the world over, recognizable and tediously comprehensible. Happiness—that phantom—varied, and its every manifestation was a mystery, a lure, and a dare: Catch me!

  It was time to go, back to the hotel where he would sleep alone. Jonathan wished he were home in Skopun, where the foreignness was some kind of comfort. He put his hand on Daniela’s shoulder.

  “Shall I walk you home?” he asked.

  Eyvindur’s head, which had been drooping, bobbed up. “You’re leaving?”

  “It’s late,” said Daniela. “I have to work tomorrow.”

  “We have not discussed Harvard,” said Eyvindur. “I don’t care about it anyhow. Go.”

  Was he insulted? Jonathan looked at Daniela; she was smiling at Eyvindur. “You’re tired too,” she said. She sounded like a wife. To Jonathan she said, “He gets up very early, to paint.”

  “That’s what you should do,” Eyvindur mumbled. He lurched to his feet. “Good night, thank you.”

  “Thank you,” Jonathan said, standing up as well. “Thank you for a wonderful dinner—”

  “Better than last time, eh?” Eyvindur interrupted. “So. Back to Skopun tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll come for dinner another night?” He sounded forlorn.

  “Of course,” said Jonathan. He suddenly had the feeling that it might be a long time before he saw Eyvindur again. His year stretched in front of him.
He put out his hand. And Eyvindur did what Jonathan had wanted to do, pulled him into a hug. He smelled of tobacco and turpentine and man—warm, slightly sweaty, adult.

  “You,” said Eyvindur, “take care. Take care.”

  * * *

  Daniela lived halfway down the hill from Eyvindur. “Alone?” asked Jonathan, as they stumbled among the cobbles.

  “With Marius. Girls don’t live alone in the Faroes. It’s not Paris.”

  “That’s for sure,” said Jonathan. “Why did you come back?”

  “I told you.” She sounded irritated.

  “People do leave their homes.”

  “Not Faroe people.” Daniela turned away from him. “The Greeks had a story about a man who lost all his strength when his feet weren’t on the earth.”

  “Antaeus. He was a giant.”

  “Because the earth was his mother,” Daniela went on. She turned back. “We are like that. Perhaps we are very simple people.”

  They had reached her house. “But all your education—” Jonathan stopped himself; it really wasn’t his business.

  “Maybe that’s not so important,” Daniela said. She didn’t sound sure.

  Jonathan did the only thing he could: kissed her goodbye. Goodbye to Tórshavn, goodbye to Paris, goodbye to their never-to-be-shared future. It was a lovely kiss, a sad and intelligent kiss, and they both gave themselves over to it. They separated as gently as they had come together, as if aware of each other’s fragility. Jonathan put his hand on her cheek for a final farewell. “Good night,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Daniela, and opened the door.

  Continuing down the hill, Jonathan came to the spot where weeks before he had sat and surveyed Tórshavn and wished for beer. He stopped. Tórshavn looked the same, or worse, now that he’d learned to see the country as beautiful. He sat again, to consider whether he was also the same.

  But instead of thinking about himself, he began to imagine a map of the Faroes, with people marking the important points: Petur and his brothers to the south, in Skopun; Eyvindur and Daniela here in the center; Swithin to the west, on Mykines; Wooley on Fugloy, as far north as he could go. And in the east, Europe, locus of Jonathan’s yearnings, which he must now, he realized, subdue.

  For he too was a landmark. He existed as a point on all these people’s maps. He could be counted on to chase sheep, he could be invited to dinner, he could be considered, and rejected, as a future husband. He had auditioned for the part of the Anthropologist, and he had gotten it. Even his simultaneous billing with Wooley didn’t, at the moment, dilute his pleasure or his surprise.

  Surprise because his own competence was always a surprise to Jonathan. The pleasure was separate. He didn’t dare to take pleasure in competence, which inevitably smacked of chance—a fortuitous achievement when he wasn’t looking, so to speak. The pleasure was the odd and marvelous details of this life, which were now the details of his life.

  Jonathan stood up. He felt big. He felt he could take on anything—whales, winter, Wooley. The ocean boomed below, slapped the shore in loud applause for Jonathan. Jonathan bowed. He agreed with the ocean; he had done something remarkable: he was, finally, here.

  Blood

  October, and for weeks the island had lain in an equinoctial calm. Starless, exotic summer had given way to an ordinary autumn, with dawn and dusk at ordinary times. The soft, smooth tundra had turned brittle and brown, and the sea, too, had lost its summer sheen. Dark slow swells broke on the jetty day after day, a steady tide that pulled the world toward winter.

  The fishing had picked up with cooler weather, and the dock was now awash in lines and bait pots. Stacks of fish-filled crates waited outside the filleting plant’s door. At Sigurd’s store captains heaped provisions on the counter: cigarettes, rope and tar, condensed milk, buoys, screwdrivers, batteries. Boats bound for Greenland, bound for Norway, baited for herring, baited for cod, out for blood.

  Jonathan’s contribution to all this activity was note taking. It began as camouflage for his essential uselessness; he was forever standing four feet from the center of some piece of business he didn’t understand and asking for an explanation. In this way he quickly filled one of his spiral-bound notebooks with sketches of fishhooks, instructions on how to coil lines in a pot, diagrams of boats’ holds, some salty curses, and a garbled version of a myth common in northern latitudes concerning a seal-woman and love.

  In the evenings at home, eating his eight fillets of lemon sole or his two slabs of halibut, Jonathan reread the day’s gatherings and wondered what they meant. Sometimes his wonder was simple: writing in pencil against the top of a box or his own knee didn’t make for easy reading. Mostly, though, he wondered if all this information added up to anything. Was it on the brink of making sense? Was he engaged in making an impressionist portrait of Skopun, whose features he would recognize only when he was done and stood ten feet away from what, at close range, looked like smears and daubs? Or, the inevitable alternative, was he just wasting time?

  But the inevitable seemed to have lost its inevitability. He trotted up and down the village paths, staring and scribbling; he went everywhere and wrote down everything, and by ten o’clock each night he had flopped into bed, dreamless. The occupation he’d invented for himself was a full-time one, and as he did it in public, everybody could see what a good worker he was. The finished notebook on the kitchen windowsill assuaged his remaining doubts. He grew more and more willing to put the question of meaning on hold. He was gathering data—reams of data—and doing it well. Conclusions and assertions would have to wait for Cambridge, where they were hard currency. Hard currency here was how much cod the Skarvanes brought in and whether Jens Símun would get a sheepdog.

  Within a week or two his cover story had become reality; he had a job, just like everybody else. Jonathan liked having a job. His mission was simple: record. A student’s mission was tricky: be wise, be willing to learn; be inventive, remember the facts; be smart, don’t be a smart-ass. After seven years on that tightrope, he was daily delighted to click his mechanical-pencil lead out another notch and be ready for work. No extensive mental preparation was needed for curiosity. The more he indulged his curiosity, in fact, the stronger it grew, until Jonathan suspected that his aloofness was only protective coloring. He appeared to have a boundless interest in other people’s affairs. Licensed—mandated—to stick his nose into everybody’s business, he was happier than he’d been in years.

  The villagers too were happy to see him doing his job. A man must have work, and Jonathan out of work, stirring his septic tank and reading his murder mysteries, was a sorry sight. Petur and Jens Símun had decided to offer him a place in the boat if he didn’t collect himself; they were relieved to see the notebook in his hands day after day, because it wasn’t a very large boat. But now things were as they should be, and Jonathan was going about his proper work, which was playing Boswell to everybody’s Johnson. Although nobody had ever thought village life worth chronicling before Jonathan turned up proposing to do it, everyone now agreed that the immortalization of Skopun and its inhabitants in Jonathan’s book was fitting and good.

  For Jonathan had told them he was writing a book. A thesis was a sort of book, he reasoned, and his attempt to describe a thesis, and scholarship generally, to Heðin had been a bust. It would be published as a book, he hoped, and so he said it was a book. The Faroese approved of books and read many during the winter; Sigurd the shopkeeper poring over Gulliver’s Travels was typical. Petur had read Hamlet, Jens Símun had cast his bicolored eyes on Ibsen (though he confessed he’d never finished a play, just “looked to see what happened”), all the village children knew Andersen and Grimm. “There’s nothing else to do in the winter,” Heðin said. “Just read and listen to ship-to-shore radio.”

  Heðin and Jonathan had become friends. Every third or fourth evening little Jens Símun was sent by his mother to ask Jonathan, “Aren’t you coming to eat?” Olí had returned to Vestmanna; it was natural,
Jonathan supposed, that Heðin would want to fill his young uncle’s absence with Jonathan’s presence. Soon he realized he had shortshrifted himself with this analysis. Heðin liked him. Heðin came to visit him, unannounced, on evenings when Jonathan hadn’t come for dinner. Jonathan would walk downstairs from the bathroom after dinner and find Heðin making tea or eating an end of bread or leafing through the notebook left on the table. Sometimes he brought a bottle of near-beer, and they sat on the front steps sharing it, watching the stars emerge from the darkness that comforted Jonathan, who had yet to live through a winter without light.

  Snaggle-tooth, lanky, green-eyed Heðin had lost no time in turning their private conversations toward his favorite topic, sex. He seemed to have had a great deal of experience for one so young and, to Jonathan’s eyes, unprepossessing. He asked Jonathan the English words for acts Jonathan had only contemplated performing; claimed to have fucked a ewe; and added sex to his earlier list of wintertime activities: “There’s nothing else to do,” he repeated, “so we all get busy in the bed.” By matchlight and cigarette glow, Jonathan studied Heðin’s face, trying to locate his appeal. Perhaps he had what Jonathan had overheard a woman in a Cambridge café describe as “animal magnetism.” His huge hands, swollen from work at sea, were capable of spanning a woman’s waist easily, firmly, to hold her in place while he had his way with her. But according to Heðin, they didn’t need to be held down.