Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  The chart’s accuracy was flawed by the fact that Skopun lay northwest of a large rise that obscured the sun for a good hour of the morning. This meant that although a sort of light permeated the atmosphere beginning around eight-thirty, the source of that light didn’t make an appearance until almost ten. When it did, it looked tired already, rather as it had in Iceland at one in the morning, months earlier. And to make matters worse, drear had set in. Long murky clouds swooped across the sky, trying to erase the sun and frequently succeeding. No day passed without an interlude of rain; many days were entirely rainy, and on these everything in the world—the ocean, the cliffs, the dried, dead tundra, the cement-block houses—was a uniform, steely gray. Even the red roof of the church was soiled and dimmed by the weather.

  Jonathan was having quite a bad day. His window frames had swollen from the rain and wouldn’t shut properly, so a wet wind was sneaking into his once-cozy kitchen. And the direction this wind was blowing seemed to be down his chimney, for the stove kept rumbling and whooshing in an effort to stay alight. And then, though he’d postponed and postponed, hoping for a clear day, he’d finally had to give in and do his laundry, which was now hanging above the stove on improvised lines, dripping. Each drip hit the stovetop with a hiss and a puff of cooked soap; it was impossible to rinse clothes thoroughly in this cold hard water, but air drying had taken care of that in the summer. Those days were over. Jonathan looked for the thousandth time at the chart. By December twenty-first, the sun would rise at 9:45 (read 11:30 for Skopun) and set at 2:56. The most generous calculation couldn’t make much more than three hours out of that day.

  But though the laundry and the stove and the windows were irritations, they were not the cause of Jonathan’s bad day. The problem was Daniela.

  Heðin’s prediction had proved correct. At the end of October, when the nights shifted to “long,” Jonathan began to think obsessively about Daniela. His eiderdown puff wasn’t warm enough anymore, and he took to sleeping in a long-sleeved shirt and his underpants. As he lay in bed with the coverlet up to his nose, he thought about how warm he’d be if Daniela were under there too, especially if together they were generating a little extra heat. And so he called her.

  “Hello, Jonathan,” she said in her measured voice. Jonathan remembered just how measured she was and quailed at what he had proposed to do, which was to blurt, “Why don’t you come to visit me?” Instead he said, “How are you these days?”

  “Oh, I am fine. And you?”

  “I’m fine too. I mean—no, I’m fine. Weather’s a bit dreary down here in Skopun.”

  “So,” said Daniela.

  Was she going to hang up already? He gulped. In the kitchen Sigurd was shuffling about; he’d had to put the call through for Jonathan and now he was hanging around to see what was going to happen with the pretty girl in Tórshavn. English seemed to offer meager protection from Sigurd’s eavesdropping.

  “Well, so. Daniela, I thought perhaps you’d like to come for a visit here sometime. Would you?” His voice cracked a little, so he cleared his throat and restated his case. “I would really enjoy seeing you again, and I thought you might like to have a weekend away from town. Or something.”

  “Mmmmm,” said Daniela.

  What the hell does mmmmm mean? Jonathan wondered. But he didn’t ask. He said, “So, anyhow, if you’d like to come, I’d be pleased to see you.”

  “Oh,” said Daniela. Then she said, “Someone has just come into the office, Jonathan. I will have to call you again. I will call you soon.”

  “When is she coming?” Sigurd asked, as Jonathan shut the door to the parlor.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled. He mumbled the same thing that evening to Heðin, who’d heard about the phone call and come over to get the story.

  “What do you mean you don’t know? Call her back and say, ‘When are you coming?’ ”

  “If she wants to come she can call me.”

  “No. That’s not right, for the woman to call. You must call her tomorrow and ask when.” Heðin offered Jonathan the cigarette he’d just rolled, a special treat for the downcast suitor. “You must make the woman feel how much you want her. Then she can’t resist.”

  But Jonathan needed to feel that Daniela wanted him, and so he did not call again.

  In the week since their conversation, he’d had too much time to think about what she was likely to do and had worked himself into sad, long fits of doubt and equally long and elaborate happy fantasies: Daniela at the stove cooking their dinner, Daniela reading books while he made his daily gossip rounds, Daniela painting in the guest room while he wrote the first chapter of his thesis. These domestic scenes were as captivating as the sex scenes that followed them in his mind; they seemed a necessary foreplay, in fact. He cautioned himself against them. If she ever did turn up, he would have overloaded their relations so heavily that he would be in danger of acting like the groom in the joke who each day paints part of the horse green in an effort to catch the attention of the pretty rider, and when she finally exclaims, “Why, my horse is green!” he yelps, “Yeah, so let’s fuck!” But the issue here was not fucking; it was loving.

  Each day that Daniela didn’t call, Jonathan said to himself, She didn’t call; each night he went to bed thinking she might call tomorrow. He sustained a tingly condition of anticipation that made him jump at sudden noises and lift his head up from his book to stare into space, willing the telephone at Sigurd’s house to ring. So when his door opened on Friday afternoon, he was utterly surprised to see a man instead of Daniela, whom he had, in some dogged way, expected.

  It was Wooley, Jonathan was sure of that. And he was here for a while, judging by the fullness of his knapsack. And they were not going to get along.

  “Hey, bro,” said Wooley.

  Jonathan just looked at him. There was a lot of him to look at. He was tall, barrel-chested, and well made, a perfect specimen of American nutrition. He was wearing complicated rain gear—a long black slicker with many pockets and metal fastenings, red-topped black galoshes, and a Maine lobsterman’s yellow hat dangling off its string on his broad back. The slicker had a “designed” aura, as though it had been made in Paris or Milan: a playboy’s fantasy of foul-weather apparel. Wooley’s face atop all this was friendly and appealing, with even features and healthy skin. Something about him was unbelievable, though. He looked like a magazine advertisement for anthropology.

  “Jonathan, right?” said Wooley. He put his bag on the table.

  Jonathan nodded. “Jim Wooley?”

  “Yup,” said Wooley. He sat down.

  “Tea?” Jonathan offered.

  “Got coffee?”

  Jonathan made coffee. He did not ask the question foremost in his mind, How long are you staying? Instead he asked the polite version, “What brings you to Skopun?”

  “I figured I’d come before the weather made it impossible. I thought you’d be up to Fugloy by now, but this week I said to myself, He’s not coming, so I hopped on the boat.”

  Wooley at least had a burning desire to see him. Jonathan tried to make this into a compensation for Daniela’s lack of desire. But what good did Wooley do him? Was Wooley going to keep him warm at night? No. He was going to drink a lot of coffee (he’d downed one cup immediately and started on another) and talk, probably about himself, and all the while he would be investigating Jonathan and his progress.

  Jonathan felt hemmed in already. The kitchen was steamy from coffee production and laundry, and Wooley took up a lot of room.

  “I think I’ll get us some fish for dinner,” he said. “Halibut okay?”

  “Don’t you have any lamb left?” Wooley asked.

  Jonathan looked up from his sneaker laces. “Left?” He thought of Alice being offered “more” jam by the Mad Hatter. “Left from what?”

  “From the slaughter.”

  A momentary jolt of paranoia subsided as Jonathan realized that probably sheep were slaughtered at the same time on all the islands
. “No. I’ve just got legs, and they’re drying in the shed.” In Petur’s shed, to be accurate; without Petur, Sigurd, and Maria, his sheep would be tethered to his stove gnawing on a shoe. But they had provided him with chops (it was these Wooley was after; Jonathan had finished them), with a rug (at his bedside now), with a shed wherein the magical transformation of lamb leg into compacted, sweet meat candy would take place, and with five blood sausages. He wasn’t wild about these, and so he offered them to Wooley. “How about blood sausages?”

  “You make those?” Wooley sounded impressed.

  “Do you like them?” Jonathan didn’t want to admit he hadn’t made them.

  “Sure. But get some fish too.”

  On the dock negotiating for fish, Jonathan breathed a little easier. Never mind the rain that was rushing off his short slicker (yellow, purchased at Sigurd’s store, and a far cry from Wooley’s Armani creation) and soaking his blue jeans; never mind that there wasn’t any halibut and he had to take lemon sole instead; Jonathan was happier not being in the kitchen with Wooley. And if the weather kept up, he could be spending a lot of time in the kitchen with Wooley.

  “Do you think the weather will shift?” he asked the man who was selling him fish, counting out one-kroner coins in his sea-worn palm.

  “Hah?” he responded with disbelief. “Sure. It’ll shift in April, I reckon.”

  Jonathan walked over to Sigurd’s to get some potatoes. He had decided that the time had come to negotiate as well for some aquavit, and Sigurd seemed a likely prospect, given that he must have access to an unending supply of it for Jón Hendrik’s needs.

  “Your friend came,” Sigurd announced.

  This was a good lead-in. “Yes, and I want some aquavit to celebrate.” Sigurd’s face went blank. “I’ll pay whatever it costs.” Sigurd’s face darkened. “What I mean, I mean of course I will pay for it.” Jonathan was astonished at how quickly he had created a muddle.

  “You can’t get aquavit,” said Sigurd. He fingered the potatoes Jonathan had heaped on the counter. “Two kroner.”

  This looked to be the shortest transaction ever to take place in Sigurd’s store. He must be deeply offended. Jonathan played an ace he’d sworn he’d never use. “Sigurd, please forgive me if I said something wrong. I am a stranger here and I don’t know all your customs.”

  But Sigurd was much too smart to go for that. “Pah,” he said. He looked out the window. Then he looked at Jonathan and said, “You don’t want to understand. In America, you have everything.”

  Jonathan thought Sigurd was being unfair. He shook his head.

  Sigurd shook his head. “Okay. Listen. We need it. You don’t need it. We need it here. It is part of living here in the Faroes. You are visiting, and we will give you aquavit when you come for a temun, but that is all.”

  “But why can’t I buy some?”

  “Because there isn’t enough!” Sigurd was exasperated. “There’s plenty of sheep and fish and potatoes. Have those!” He put Jonathan’s potatoes into an old paper bag and pushed it toward him. “Two kroner,” he repeated.

  Jonathan grinned at Sigurd, trying to convey with his grin that he knew—and knew that Sigurd knew—that potatoes and aquavit were hardly equivalent. Charm had no more effect than forthrightness. Sigurd was implacable.

  “He’s got some anyhow,” Sigurd said suddenly.

  “Who?”

  “The Other American. He has a metal bottle. He was drinking on the boat.” Sigurd relaxed and put his hands on the counter, his usual pose. “He’s an idiot. It’s stupid to drink on a boat.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Bad luck,” said Sigurd. “Also, it makes you sick.”

  “Oh,” Jonathan said. “He’s not my friend,” he added.

  Surprise crossed Sigurd’s face. “He is your countryman.”

  Jonathan wished he lived in such a simple world. He had—or was approaching living there—until this Wooley arrived to drag him back to America. Now his efforts to be just another village oddball would be undone by foreignness-by-association with Wooley. And he had started the process himself with his ill-advised plea for Sigurd’s tolerance.

  “Jo-Na-Than,” Sigurd said, shaking his head affectionately. “Don’t you get homesick? Don’t you want to talk about home with the Other American?”

  “No. I like it here.”

  This pleased Sigurd. “Yah, life is good here, isn’t it?” He beamed. “In the Faroes, we are free.”

  Jonathan looked around Sigurd’s store. It was about the same size as his parents’ living room, lighted by one large, fly-dotted bulb that hung three feet above Sigurd’s head. The stock was haphazardly arranged on the shelves, with a few examples of motor oil beside a few examples of canned cabbage. At the end of the counter was the milk bucket, containing at this hour of the afternoon only the skim-milk dregs. A day-old newspaper and a cardboard display case of rolling tobacco were at Sigurd’s left elbow; at his right, the adding machine with its green keys, never used (Sigurd totted up prices on paper bags). Tacked to the wall behind Sigurd, a full suit of rain gear—hat, slicker, overalls, waders—arranged in human shape had faded over the years from yellow to beige: the ghostly guardian of the store. Jonathan thought of Eyvindur saying “We are not free” and thought also of the missile watchtower across the fjord—that third countryman who, like Jonathan and Wooley, was a trained observer from the land of the free.

  America: what a paradoxical homeland! Jonathan on previous trips to Europe had tucked his passport deep into his pocket, not to protect it but to protect himself, and relied on his excellent French to screen his origins. There was no virtue, this late in the century, in being an American. Jonathan knew he’d missed the era when his citizenship might have been something other than a juggling act. Freedom was no longer a major U.S. export; even domestic production seemed to be falling off. Jonathan’s freedom at home, like that of many city dwellers, was burdensome because he saw so many who lacked it. He could feel guilty or he could feel threatened, but he could not feel easy. Like the generation before his that had sat in, marched, burned, and bombed, he and his peers were permanently disenchanted with the government; unlike them, they had no ideal of a more perfect union.

  And so, in the matter of love of one’s country, as in the matter of love in general, Jonathan was an emotional virgin. Nationality was to him akin to an arranged marriage or being saddled with difficult parents. He thought of another of Eyvindur’s pronouncements: A man does not choose his homeland. In Eyvindur’s case, an explanation for attachment; in his own, an excuse for detachment.

  But the drive to love is strong. Jonathan in Sigurd’s store could—and did now, in the twilight—shut his eyes and know his visceral connection to the fine Georgian wood-frame houses (pre-Revolutionary, but still American) that fronted Brattle Street, to the joy of driving too fast down an interstate in one of his country’s homegrown oversized cars, and, most profoundly, to the comfort of feeling the entire continent at his back when he stood wind-buffeted on the rocks of Acadia, looking out to the ocean that had all the while, unknown to him, cradled these islands.

  He opened his eyes. Was this Arcadia? Had he reached Paradise—a fishy, rainy, circumscribed yet charmed universe where only nature demanded obedience, where intimacy performed the function of law, where patriotism was as easy as—or equivalent to—admiring the landscape? In all its dreary, disorganized splendor, the Faroes was a place Jonathan would be proud to call his home. What good was three thousand miles of country if he didn’t feel that it was his? Wasn’t home the place where you recognize yourself? Perhaps these two hundred square miles of peat and stone were a more congenial vantage point on the world. Perhaps he’d come not from but to the land of the free.

  Jonathan realized that Sigurd was watching him, waiting for his two kroner and a rejoinder to “we are free.”

  “I think you’re right,” he said. Sigurd cocked his head. Had he been expecting a quarrel? Probably; he looked prepared to a
rgue into the night for the existence of perfect freedom in the Faroes and surprised at Jonathan’s unwillingness to stick up for his own side.

  “How many people do you have there?” Sigurd asked. He was squinting, anticipatory, as if the answer would clarify why Jonathan didn’t love his country.

  “Eight million.” No, that was New York City. “Five hundred million.” That was implausible. Sigurd was bug-eyed. “Lots.” Jonathan finally settled it. “We have lots and lots.”

  “Soon you’ll have to move to the moon.” Sigurd laughed. “Where do they fit?”

  “It’s bigger than here.” Jonathan pushed his arm against the chilly, damp air, expanding Sigurd’s store.

  “I reckon so.” Sigurd nodded to himself over the size of America, then asked, “So, the Other American, you don’t know his family?”

  Jonathan put two kroner on the counter; how could he hope to be a member of this world? “I don’t,” he said gently, and went off to make dinner for Wooley.

  What an evening! Jonathan shivered with ire and chill under his coverlet, listening to Wooley banging drawers in the room where Daniela was supposed to have whiled away the afternoon painting.

  What it boiled down to was that Wooley took what Jonathan thought of as the “masculine” approach to life and anthropology. Some people became anthropologists because they already felt themselves outside of culture: this was Jonathan’s position. Others believed themselves so versatile and appealing that they would be accepted by any culture: this was Wooley’s position. Wooley was not one to worry that he’d overstayed his welcome, eaten too much, said the wrong thing, misunderstood someone’s intention. And Jonathan had to admit that this heedlessness was useful. Wooley had steamrolled his way into life on Fugloy with his bulk, his terrible pidgin Faroese, his daring that took him down cliffs on ropes to hunt puffins and earned him admiration from taciturn villagers (or so Wooley told it; but Jonathan believed him). Wooley would eat anything, provoking more native admiration. And Wooley blissfully enjoyed every rain-soaked, blundered-through moment of his Faroese existence; that was clear. No sulking in the kitchen for him.