Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  As Jonathan put a cup of tea and a slice of cake in front of him, Jens Símun said, “Poison.”

  “What? The cake?”

  “That mouse was poisoned. That’s why it smelled so bad.”

  “I didn’t put poison out.” Jonathan took a piece of cake for himself.

  “Somebody did. It came to your house to die. That’s why Tróndur didn’t go after it. He could smell the poison.”

  Jonathan was unwilling to credit Tróndur with so much logic, but he nodded anyhow, happy to agree with almost anything Jens Símun said.

  “That’s a good cat,” said Jens Símun.

  And Jonathan, grateful, said, “Yes, very good.”

  Jens Símun was gone, leaving a trail of crumbs and Tróndur—“In case there are more mice.” Tróndur ate the crumbs but showed no interest in the world beneath the floor. Jonathan wondered if he should spend the night at the Dahls’; his bedroom stank more than ever, even with the window open. When Heðin came over after dinner (whale night again; rubbing and complaints again), Jonathan took him upstairs.

  “Do you think I ought to sleep in here?”

  Heðin was more interested in Jonathan’s things than in his predicament. He poked around on the bedside table, looking at the books and the alarm clock, opened the door to the closet and the top drawer of the bureau, examined Jonathan’s hairbrush. “A wooden hairbrush,” he said. “I’ve never seen that. We have plastic.”

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “It’s a nice bedroom.” Heðin nodded at the furniture. “And you have two beds.” He grinned and sat down on the one Jonathan used. “Good for guests.” He winked.

  “What about the poison, and the smell?”

  “That’ll go away.” Heðin stretched out on Jonathan’s bed. “You want to trade for the night? I’ll stay here, you can sleep at my house? I could go get Kristina.”

  “You don’t think it’s dangerous?”

  Heðin shut his eyes. “I would like to have a nice big bedroom like this.” He sat up. “I’ll build one. Next spring. I’ll be building a house next spring.”

  “Oh.” For politeness, Jonathan asked, “Where?”

  Heðin went over to the window and pointed at a muddy stretch that lay between the house opposite and a small drying shed. “That’s our land.”

  “It won’t be a big house,” Jonathan said.

  “That’s our shed, too. We can get rid of that. You’ll help us.”

  “Mmm.” Jonathan grunted. “Want some cake?”

  Heðin stayed late, drawing possible floor plans in Jonathan’s notebook and eating up the cake. Watching Heðin debate whether two extra bedrooms for children were enough made Jonathan feel like a teenager; he was just hoping to get a date—and with a girl whose interest in him was uncertain.

  “Two will do,” Heðin concluded as midnight approached. “We can have four babies, then.”

  Jonathan yawned. “What will you name them?”

  “Petur, Jens Símun, Sigurd, and Heðin. Or Kristina, if it’s a girl.”

  “Suppose they’re all girls?”

  “They won’t be. We have many sons in my family.”

  Huddled under his eiderdown trying not to breathe in too much of the foul air in his bedroom, Jonathan was haunted by this sentence of Heðin’s. In its cockiness, reverence for lineage, and quasi-magical reliance on the past as a predictor, it exemplified Faroese pretensions to a primitive life. Maybe “pretensions” was too strong, although, like the crushing intimacy of Skopun, this quality had begun to bother Jonathan. Behavior that two months ago he would have seen as expressions of culture he now saw as poses—the favored pose, naturally, being the Viking. Long, meditative examinations of the pattern of waves, head held high, chest braced against the wind: just a dramatic way of passing a few hours on a rainy afternoon. If he chanced to observe them at this, so much the better for Jens Símun, or Petur, or whoever was playing out the charade with himself. They were all entertaining themselves by pretending to be their ancestors. Jonathan suspected they had romanticized their origins even more than he had.

  This line of thought was depressing. Rolling around in his bed, Jonathan wished for it not to be true, to be rather a product of his grumpiness that would evaporate if he could get a breather in Tórshavn. He imagined the concrete arms of Skopun’s harbor open to him on his return, the familiarity of the muddy street, the pleasure of seeing Jón Hendrik on his box in the store—all the subtle and comforting delights of coming home that make the everyday rewarding. In the middle of trying to project himself into this future, he fell asleep.

  The clouds blew away while he slept, and though the wind was still fierce, the bustle on the dock the next morning was evidence that a change was in the offing. Gregor the fishmonger perched hopefully on a crate, awaiting something to sell; Jens Símun sat in his boat scraping at the paint; Heðin and his cronies were smoking and baiting a pot of lines.

  Jonathan’s clouds too had blown off, and he felt vigorous and well organized. He nailed the broken floor boards back into place, put Tróndur into an old pillowcase, and went over to Jens Símun’s to give him back. Tróndur didn’t like traveling in the pillowcase. He bit and scratched and tore his way through it so that when they arrived, Jonathan was holding in his arms a cat cloaked in tattered strips of muslin. He seemed delighted to be home and jumped out of Jonathan’s grasp, running around the kitchen sniffing every inch of floor and dragging his white train behind him.

  Sigrid laughed. “What a funny cat,” she said. “I guess he didn’t get the mice—but he would have, you know.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jonathan. And though he didn’t believe Tróndur would ever have done anything, he was surprised to find that he regretted giving him back. He was a weird sort of company. “Thanks anyhow,” he said to Sigrid. “Thank Jens Símun again for me.”

  “Sit, have a temun.”

  Jonathan debated this. A homemade cake on the table looked inviting, but he was determined to get organized for his trip. “I can’t today,” he said.

  “Oh, yes, you’re going to Tórshavn.” Sigrid nodded. “Well, you will go tomorrow, I reckon.”

  “I reckon so.” Jonathan decided that “I reckon so” was preferable to “I hope so”: it was positive thinking, and it signaled his departure from the kitchen.

  “So, so, so,” said Sigrid.

  * * *

  Jonathan washed some socks and pawed around in his bureau, dissatisfied with all his clothes, even the new ones he’d bought in the fall in Tórshavn, which had taken a beating and now looked as shabby as the rest. All his trousers were stained with fish offal and mud, his underwear was gray, his socks were full of holes, his gloves were splitting on the thumbs. Examination of himself in the mirror was no more rewarding: too much hair and skin as pale as a boiled potato.

  He devoted the rest of the afternoon to self-improvement: a bath, a close shave, nail-cutting; basting of the gloves; disposal of the most tattered underpants; removal of the mud encrusted on his clogs. Flushed from the bath and his efforts, he was much more pleased the next time he looked in the mirror. A haircut would really do the trick, though, and Jonathan decided to pay a visit to the Dahls. Maybe he could get an after-dinner trim from Maria.

  It was Petur, however, who was the family barber. He draped Jonathan in an old dish towel and centered him under the kitchen light; little Jens Símun and Heðin rode shotgun at the table. “Watch out, Papa! You’re cutting too much on that side,” from Jens Símun; then from Heðin, “Not enough! Make it shorter!” Petur’s nervous trick of snapping the scissors in the air while planning his next move made Jonathan edgy.

  As he sat trying not to wriggle, Jonathan wished he’d been less impetuous about sprucing himself up. Any Tórshavn barber would have more confidence than Petur, who kept darting in at Jonathan’s head and then reconsidering, backing off, and taking a slice of oxygen instead. After a particularly long pause in the action, Jonathan asked, “Is anything wrong?”
>
  “I seem to have made it a little lopsided,” Petur confessed.

  “Even it out, then.”

  “It’s more—well, I’d say it’s more, ah, uneven all around, if you see what I mean.”

  Jonathan went up to the bathroom to see what he meant.

  Petur had managed to get a zigzag effect all around his head. It was so amazing that Jonathan started to laugh.

  “You like it?” Petur had followed him and was lurking in the hall.

  Jonathan looked at him and then looked in the mirror again.

  “You don’t like it.” Petur sighed.

  They went back to the kitchen. Jonathan held a small mirror of Maria’s and directed Petur. As more and more of his hair fell to the floor, Jonathan’s spirits sank; he was not going to be looking good for his trip.

  In the end, though, it wasn’t too bad, at least Jonathan kept telling himself it wasn’t too bad. It was too short, especially around the ears, but the zigzags were gone. He put the mirror face down on the table; he knew how it looked.

  “Thank you, Petur,” he said. “It’s not too bad.”

  “You look like a chicken,” said little Jens Símun.

  “She’ll like you anyhow, Jonathan,” said Heðin. And Maria came over to pat him on the head. “It’s not too bad,” she said.

  Jonathan was drinking coffee and chewing on a hard cardamom biscuit, wondering how much his hair could grow in a week and whether it was enough to make postponing the trip worthwhile, when Sigurd clattered into the kitchen announcing a telephone call. He stopped mid-sentence to stare at Jonathan.

  “I got a haircut,” Jonathan said firmly.

  “Aha,” said Sigurd. “You got a phone call, too.” He moved around Jonathan as he spoke, viewing the haircut from different angles. “You got a phone call. You better come and take your phone call.”

  “Maybe it’s your mama and papa calling from America,” said Maria.

  “Maybe,” said Jonathan. He was sure it was Eyvindur calling to update the menu.

  But, as Sigurd couldn’t restrain himself from blurting out the moment they left the house, it was Daniela.

  “She has called you, Jonathan. She’s a very nice girl, she speaks very good Faroese, very proper.” Sigurd babbled on in his excitement. “She asked for you by name.”

  “What else would she do?”

  “When Eyvindur Poulsen calls, he just yells that he wants the American. Well, he’s crazy, everybody knows that.” Sigurd stole a glance at Jonathan’s hair. “Why did you get that haircut?”

  Jonathan didn’t answer. His body was almost devoid of sensation, except for a delicate tingling in his limbs as he walked. And his mind was a blank. He surveyed it for hopes, fantasies, worries: it contained nothing, it was simply a receptor.

  So in an almost meditative state he picked up the receiver and motioned Sigurd out of the room. Sigurd pretended to go away, but Jonathan saw him lingering outside the half-open door. Jonathan turned his back and said, “Hello.”

  “Jonathan.”

  “Daniela.”

  He heard her draw a breath. “Jonathan, I know it was a long time ago that you invited me to visit, but I would like to come now.”

  “Good.” said Jonathan. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I will come the day after tomorrow.”

  “Good.”

  “On the afternoon boat.”

  Jonathan tried a variation. “Great.” Then, inspired, he added, “I’ll be there.”

  “Then I will see you the day after tomorrow.”

  Now that she was about to hang up, Jonathan wanted to talk. “It’s cold here,” he said. “The weather’s been bad. Bring lots of socks.”

  “I know.”

  “And—” Jonathan wanted to warn her about the haircut, but he didn’t know how to phrase it: I have a horrible haircut? I have a haircut that you might think is horrible?

  “Yes?” said Daniela.

  “Oh, just—bring socks.”

  “Okay. Goodbye.”

  “Daniela!”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll see you,” said Jonathan.

  He went into the kitchen, where Sigurd and Jón Hendrick were pretending to play cards.

  “She’s coming,” he told them. They didn’t look up. “I just thought you’d like to know.”

  “Who?” asked Jón Hendrik.

  “His fiancée, from Tórshavn,” Sigurd said.

  Jón Hendrik nodded. Sigurd made a big show of trumping some cards of Jón Hendrik’s. Jonathan could tell it was an act because about half the deck was on the floor under Sigurd’s chair. Obligingly, he waited for Sigurd to start pumping him for information. But Sigurd neither asked a question nor asked him to sit down. In fact, after about five minutes, he said, “It’s late, isn’t it?”

  Jonathan could take a hint; he left. The sky was a patchwork of stars and clouds, and the air gusty with fresh winds. A burst of excitement shot through him: she was coming! He made a detour down to the deserted dock, unwilling to go straight home, and stood looking at the waves that would bring her to him. What had changed her mind? What was in her mind? He couldn’t imagine—and soon he stopped trying. She was coming, she wanted to come, she would be here with him, and he could spend an entire day and night in delicious anticipation of her.

  No sensation of pleasure is closer to pain than waiting for the arrival of a beloved, especially an unfamiliar one. In the midst of turning the mattress, airing the pillows, sweeping the stairs, Jonathan would stop from a pang of thrilling anxiety: maybe she was just coming on a friendly visit. But no, shaking the eiderdown to fluff up the feathers, she was coming to stay here, with him, where there were bedrooms. The fact that there was more than one caused him hours of confusion. He didn’t want to assume too much by putting her in his bedroom; on the other hand, if he gave her a separate room, wouldn’t that communicate a lack of interest on his part? He made up the guest room and trusted Fate to keep her out of it. Scrubbing his bathroom floor, he worried that they wouldn’t have anything to say to each other. And he became convinced while washing the kitchen table that her visit was prompted by nothing more than a Tórshavn strain of the cabin fever he’d been experiencing these last weeks: she wasn’t really coming to see him, just to have a change. But in between these seizures of doubt were whole hours of bliss, in which the fact of her arrival sweetened every minute. And the uncertainty of what would happen was, at these times, an added pleasure. He enjoyed scripting their first kiss, now in the kitchen, now in the hallway, now at the door to her bedroom—which she would never enter.

  It was exhausting work, cleaning the house and waiting for her to arrive. The cleaning was finished first, leaving him like a guest in his own home, fearful of making a mess. One errand he’d better undertake, Jonathan realized, was to call Eyvindur and tell him he wasn’t coming. He ate a piece of bread while standing at the sink and then went over to Sigurd’s.

  Eyvindur was not in a good mood. “Yah, yah, I know you aren’t coming. Okay, goodbye.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jonathan protested.

  “What?”

  Jonathan didn’t know what, exactly. He’d thought Eyvindur would be pleased with this turn of events. “Daniela’s coming here,” he said, repeating his opening line of the conversation.

  “You told me. Okay, goodbye.”

  “Eyvindur, is something wrong?”

  “Good-weather friend. Hah! Bad-weather friend.”

  “Do you mean ‘fair-weather friend’?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Jonathan could imagine the dark, dour expression on Eyvindur’s face. “I’m not trying to insult you,” he said.

  But now Eyvindur laughed. “When the weather’s bad you say you’ll come, but when it’s good you don’t. That’s a bad-weather friend.” He laughed again. “It’s a joke. Hah.”

  “Hah,” said Jonathan, trying to please.

  “Okay, goodbye,” said Eyvindur, and this t
ime he hung up.

  Jonathan spent a few minutes brooding about what could be ailing Eyvindur, but he was too cheery to sustain interest in it. By the time he reached Sigurd’s store, the only thing on his mind was a list of wonderful foods he was going to buy for Daniela. Tinned Danish pâté, an extra-large portion of Tilsit, a whole dozen eggs, a bottle of pickles: Sigurd obediently fetched these items and stacked them on the counter, maintaining silence on the topic of Jonathan’s visitor. Jonathan was disappointed; he wanted the opportunity to talk about her.

  “You know, my friend from Tórshavn’s coming,” he said.

  Sigurd grunted. “Anything else?” he asked. “Potatoes?”

  “Okay, potatoes.” Even Sigurd’s refusal to talk couldn’t dampen his spirits. “Lots of potatoes.”

  Jonathan dumped his groceries on his clean kitchen table and went back out to the dock.

  For the first time in days the mail boat was in. Jonathan’s heart jumped at the sight of it. This time tomorrow, he’d be looking for Daniela’s tidy head in the crowd. Gregor was doing a brisk business in fish. Jonathan bought six dab for his dinner and asked if there was halibut.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” said Gregor.

  This was just what Jonathan wanted to hear. He’d been hoping to give Daniela a halibut feast. He smiled at Gregor, at the smooth ocean sparkling between Skopun and Tórshavn, at the sky that today was an enameled blue bowl above him, and, jauntily swinging his string of fish, headed home.

  He was filleting the dab in the sink when a tremendous commotion arose out on the street: yelling, banging, clattering. He craned his neck out the window but couldn’t see anything. It got louder. He went out to investigate.

  It was just a bunch of boys destroying a barrel. Little Jens Símun was directing a group of about ten. Everybody was throwing stones at the barrel, which had been suspended on a rope between the Dahls’ old shed and the corner house.

  “What are you doing?” Jonathan asked little Jens Símun, more from friendliness than from curiosity.

  “Throw!” yelled Jens Símun. Then he turned to Jonathan. “It’s the Cat King,” he said. He picked up a stone and threw it.