“The what?”
“Throw!”
“Is there something in there?” Jonathan felt a bit uneasy.
“The Cat King.” Jens Símun gave Jonathan one of the withering looks that were his specialty. “The Cat King is in there, and we are killing him.”
“Hold on a minute.” Jonathan grabbed Jens Símun’s arm, which was braced for the next throw. “There’s a cat in there?”
Jens Símun wrested his arm away and got his shot off. “That’s what I said.”
“You can’t do that.” Jonathan stepped in front of the line of boys. “Stop that.” He held his hand up.
“Get out of the way,” one of them yelled. “Get out of the way or you’ll get hit.”
Jonathan looked at Jens Símun. “Tell them to stop for a minute.”
“Wait,” Jens Símun growled at his troops.
Jonathan went over to the barrel and looked into it. Huddled at the bottom, his fur fluffed out in fear, his back arched to the limit, was Tróndur. His open, panting mouth oozed white bubbles. Jonathan reached in a hand to remove him and pulled it out immediately, deeply scratched and bleeding.
“Move!” yelled Jens Símun.
“That’s your uncle’s cat,” Jonathan said. He didn’t move.
“Now he’s the Cat King,” said Jens Símun. “Move.”
“Why are you doing this?” Jonathan took a few steps toward Jens Símun. Some of the boys used the opportunity to get in a hit, and stones bounced around Jonathan’s feet.
“We always do this,” said Jens Símun. “It’s traditional.” He emphasized the last word with a grin. Then he threw another stone.
Jonathan retreated to the sidelines. From out of the barrel came a deep yowl, which only spurred the boys to throw more and larger stones. Jonathan went into the Dahls’ house to get assistance.
But the men were out fishing. “It’s such good weather,” said Maria. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re killing Tróndur—in a barrel.” Jonathan put his hands up to his face. “It’s terrible.”
“Sit down,” said Maria, pushing him into a chair.
“I tried to get them to stop. I couldn’t.”
Maria brought him a cup of tea. “Drink that.”
“Can’t we stop it?” Jonathan looked up at her.
Maria sat down at the table with him. “So, so, so,” she said. She folded her hands and looked at Jonathan. “Now listen,” she said. “This is an old custom—we don’t really believe in it anymore, but the children still like to do it. People always did this at Shrovetide. They’d take an old cat and call him the King, and then they’d kill him. They thought that all the bad things they’d done, and the bad luck, would go with the Cat King, you see. It would clean away the bad luck. So it really isn’t a terrible thing.” She stood up. “Anyhow, it’s only the children. We don’t think that way anymore.” She smiled at Jonathan, as if she was sure this explanation would make him feel better.
“A scapegoat,” Jonathan said to himself in English. Maria looked puzzled. “I’ve heard of this,” he told her. “But”—he was growing agitated again—“people don’t do this anymore! This is something people haven’t done for centuries!”
Maria went over to her stove. “We do it,” she said.
Jonathan could tell he’d insulted her. “Maria—” He didn’t know what to say. “I mean—well, it’s a very old custom. I’m surprised, I guess. I’m surprised anybody still does it.”
“I told you we didn’t believe it.” Maria’s voice was even and expressionless. Jonathan couldn’t see her face.
“Then why—” He stopped; no use asking. But she could tell him one thing: “How does the cat die? After all, the stones don’t hit it because it’s in the barrel.”
Maria turned around and put her hand on her chest, then made a fist. “Heart stops,” she said, and went back to cooking.
“Oh,” said Jonathan.
For the first time in many months, Jonathan missed Cambridge. Wanting to be somewhere other than the Faroes was not the same as wanting to be home; he’d spent plenty of time wishing for Copenhagen or Paris or anyplace with a decent climate and a better diet. But now he wished he were home—specifically, in Widener Library, where thousands of feet pursuing knowledge had worn a groove in the marble floors and where he could assuage his uneasiness by reading about scapegoats rather than by turning on the radio to drown out the noise of Tróndur’s death.
Tróndur must have been in possession of all nine lives when he was put into the barrel, for he took a long time to die. His yowling persisted even after sunset, which occurred these days at the normal hour of five o’clock. Sitting in his twilit kitchen with the BBC chatting through the static and the stones thudding against the barrel, Jonathan tried to calm himself with logic. Guy Fawkes burnt in effigy was a scapegoat, kids at Halloween put on masks to drive out evil spirits, Jesus was the ultimate scapegoat, even spring cleaning—Jonathan gave up on this line of thought. Listing parallels didn’t quell his agitation. Then he tried to be pleased that the Faroes had offered up to him such raw proof of their primitive nature: the anthropology department was going to have to eat its collective hat over this! But at the moment he didn’t give a damn about the anthropology department, though he was pretty sure they’d be impressed. He wasn’t impressed, he was shaken.
He kept coming back to an image from his first year in graduate school. He’d taken a course in taboo that relied heavily on Leviticus, one of the few codifications of the forbidden not written by an anthropologist. The lists of impermissible clothing, marriages, and food had stupefied him, and it was in the context of this boredom that the goat had struck him so forcibly. “And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the Lord, and the other lot for the scapegoat.” The scene had risen before him in perfect detail, and he saw it again now: the rude, mud-brick altar, the hot wind blowing sand, the two goats with their white bellies and nervous tails, the string dipped in blood tied around the scapegoat’s neck by the priest’s strong brown hands. Then the animal pushed out into the desert, balking, bleating, flinging up sand with its unwilling hooves. Jonathan had identified with that goat.
Sitting in his steamy kitchen, he found his sympathies had shifted. He no longer saw himself in such a sentimental, pitying light—and therein lay his unease. For if he was not the sacrifice, he was necessarily the one with the knife.
A Visit
The boat that bore Daniela was still a speck out on the ocean when Jonathan ambled down to the dock. He’d spent a slow afternoon listening to Scottish ship-to-shore radio, which tended to run along these lines: “So.” “Aye.” “You know the cow died.” “Aye.” “So.” He was tired of the taciturn north. Last night Heðin had stayed away, though for once Jonathan was eager to talk about Daniela. But Heðin had wanted precisely to avoid that conversation, just as Sigurd, instead of chatting, had kept his head in the potato bin while Jonathan bought out the store. Weather, history, and village gossip were the only fit topics for talk in their book; an anxious or excited heart was not something to be discussed. Grumbling about this to himself only made Jonathan more nervous about Daniela. She was Faroese too, and, despite Paris, she was no more forthcoming than his neighbors in Skopun.
He looked out to where the Másin shone white against waves that were green on the crests and purple in the depths. The boat’s kittiwake escort was visible now, a chattering halo announcing the estimated time of arrival. Practice on the few boats about during the chill, dull winter had paid off, and he was now able to calculate distance at sea—or rather to know it, for there was no formula. It was a sort of natural magic, like reading the clouds, which in these past months of rain he’d also been able to do.
Now the sun was out, and he could no more foretell the weather than he could predict the course of Daniela’s visit. The Másin cut her engines in preparation for the slow journey through the maze of jetties. In the silence he could hear the kittiwakes’ thin piping cries as t
hey turned back to sea in search of another vessel.
Jonathan decided to buy some halibut. Being occupied at the moment Daniela arrived appealed to him. At the least, he wanted to have evidence of a practical reason for being on the dock. And so it was with a fish dangling from each hand that he moved through the crowd to find her.
She was standing beside the boat with her small, square bag between her feet, looking like any Faroese girl on a visit: gray overcoat, city shoes, face pale from seasickness. When she saw him, her cheeks turned pink. “Hello,” she said, “I’m here.”
She was so pretty, with her fair hair braided around her head and her brass buttons marching down her chest, that he regretted the fish for preventing him from embracing her, which might possibly have seemed natural at this moment. But as they stood looking at each other the moment passed, leaving them silent and awkward.
“Was the trip rough?”
“Did you get a haircut?”
They had spoken at the same time. If Jonathan’s hands had been free he would have tried to amend his awful haircut. “I was going to mention it,” he mumbled.
“You look different,” she said. “You look more—Faroese.”
“Were you seasick?” He didn’t want to pursue how he looked.
“Yes. I haven’t been on a boat for a while. But now I’m fine.”
“I got us some good dinner.” He lifted the fish for her to admire.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she said. “You know, we buy fish in stores now in Tórshavn.” She shook her head. “I sound like Eyvindur.”
“How is Eyvindur?”
She picked up her bag without answering. Then she said, “Okay,” which might have referred to Eyvindur but seemed more likely as an indication that it was time to leave the dock.
They walked uphill in a silence that at first seemed companionable, then made Jonathan uneasy. His head was full of unsaid words: descriptions of who lived in what house—but why would she want to know? offers of activities for the afternoon—take a walk, have a temun, jump right into bed; the final offer stopped him from mentioning the others. By the time they arrived at his door he was thoroughly confused. Everything she did or didn’t do seemed to reverberate with meaning—but he couldn’t understand what it meant. Now, for instance, she was putting her suitcase in the hall; did that mean she too wanted to postpone the assignment of bedrooms? And how about the fact that she was taking off her shoes and leaving them next to the suitcase? Good Faroese manners or an invitation to further disrobing? Had she said nothing on the walk because everything was understood, or was she waiting for him to clear things up, or, worse, was she bored?
Jonathan flopped the halibut into the sink and Daniela sat down at the table. Keeping his back to her, he began to clean the fish.
“Shall we have a temun?”
He stopped mid-scrape and turned around. “My hands are all fishy.”
“I’ll do it.” She put the kettle on the electric ring and went straight to the crockery cupboard.
Jonathan watched as she opened the cutlery drawer, took the teapot from the cabinet next to the sink, found bread, butter, and jam and put them on the wooden board that he kept at the end of the counter. “How do you know where everything is?”
“All Faroese kitchens are the same.”
“One of these drawers is filled with hundred-year-old eggs. The first day I was here I opened it, looking for a spoon, and I got so depressed I had to go out for a walk.”
Daniela looked up from the teapot. “Last drawer on the left?”
“Does everyone in the Faroes keep petrified eggs in the last drawer on the left?”
She smiled. “No. But everyone keeps things they don’t know what to do with in that drawer.” She peeped into the kettle to see if the water was boiling. “I’m sure even in America that drawer has strange things in it.”
“They don’t smell bad,” said Jonathan. “I expected they would.”
“When you’re done with the fish, there’s hot water to wash your hands.”
He turned around to look at her, a woman who had hot water ready for him. She was setting the table, her clear profile poised above the teacups. Months ago, during his bout of fantasy, he’d imagined her doing homey things like this. In his fantasies she’d been beautiful; she was not as beautiful as he’d made her, but she was here. He sliced off the last fillet. “I’m done,” he said. Would she bring him the water?
But her domesticity did not extend that far. “Good. The tea’s done too.”
Jonathan got himself his water and cleaned his hands in the yellow plastic bowl that, on washdays, he used for soaking his socks. Stealing another look at Daniela, he saw her struggling to pour the tea without losing the lid of the teapot—a near-hopeless effort. “It doesn’t stay on,” he told her, embarrassed for all the cracked, mended, worn-out items in his house. This kitchen, with its dusty curtains and warped linoleum, was not a romantic setting; his bedroom, where the bowlegged bedsteads hunched against a wall decorated with a map of Nowhere drawn in mildew, was no better. “I’m afraid everything here is slightly broken.”
“It reminds me of my grandmother’s house in Saksun. That’s where I grew up, you know.”
“I thought you’d grown up in Tórshavn.”
“Tórshavn is no place for children.” She put two spoons heaped high with sugar in her tea.
“What about Eyvindur’s children?”
“Mmmm,” she said. “Eyvindur always does things his own way.”
“So,” said Jonathan. He didn’t know where to go next. “You grew up in Saksun?”
“Yes. My father went to the Løgting when Marius and I were still quite young, and we grew up in Saksun at my mother’s mother’s house. Have you been there? It’s very beautiful.”
Jonathan shook his head. “I haven’t traveled much.”
“We could look out over the whole Atlantic there—no islands to the west of us.” She sipped her tea dreamily.
“We can do that here too.” Jonathan broke into her dream. “We can take a walk to the Troll’s Head—” He scrambled to his feet.
“I want to eat something first.”
Jonathan dropped back into his chair. He had no appetite, and now that he had the idea of taking a walk, he was eager to go before the light failed.
“We could go tomorrow,” she said. She took a big bite of bread and butter.
“It might rain.”
She shook her head. “It won’t. We can take a picnic.”
“Fine,” said Jonathan. That took care of tomorrow, but this afternoon and tonight loomed ahead of them. He was so overwhelmed by nervousness at her presence that he disregarded it and put his head into his hands and sighed.
“Are you troubled?”
He looked up. She was chewing and smiling. Her old-fashioned syntax made him smile too. “I’m tired,” he lied. He decided to pull himself together. “Tell me where you learned to speak English so well.”
“In Denmark.”
“You went to university there?” She nodded. She was as tightfisted as ever with personal information. “You don’t like to talk about yourself, do you?” he asked.
They were both surprised by his boldness: she blushed, he lowered his eyes. Then, feeling he had nothing to lose, he persisted. “Why? Why are you like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.” Jonathan poured himself another cup of tea. He felt manly and capable all of a sudden, and he remembered that he had once kissed her. That fact had been buried in the heap of wishes and worries he’d piled on the image of her, but he’d done it—he could recall the texture of her skin, the dark doorway where they’d stood pressed together. He looked at her until she looked up at him. “I don’t believe you,” he said again.
“It’s so complicated.”
He waited. Something in her voice made him think she would tell him.
She drew a breath. “I’m a hybrid,” she said. “We talked about it that n
ight.” She sighed. “The only people who are content here are people who have never left. Once you’ve been somewhere else, life here doesn’t quite make sense. It’s all so hard.” She gave him a wan smile. “It’s all slightly broken.”
“I think it works the other way too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Once you’ve been here, life elsewhere doesn’t make sense. I had a long talk about this with Wooley: you know, the other anthropologist. Both of us had a secret plan to stay—to never go home.”
“Jim was here?” Daniela’s face brightened.
Jonathan winced. They were lovers, obviously. The perfidy of Wooley! The question of Daniela’s psychology disappeared under Jonathan’s horrible need to know about her relations with Wooley. “He was here in November. I haven’t seen him since. Have you?” He thought this rather well done.
“Oh, yes,” she said, cheerfully. “He’s living in Tórshavn now. So I see him all the time.”
Jonathan was astounded. “Living in Tórshavn?”
“He’s working at the Folklore Institute with Marius. He comes for dinner after work.”
“Every night?” It was more than he could bear.
“No, not every night.” Daniela looked puzzled. “Often. You know,” she went on, “it’s odd that he’s never mentioned his visit to you.”
Jonathan nodded dully. He didn’t think it was odd at all. Adding to his misery were memories of bragging about Daniela to Wooley. Oh, God, what had he said? Whatever it was, Wooley several nights a week had the opportunity to gloat. Jonathan put his head back in his hands.
Talking about Wooley seemed to have enlivened Daniela, and she bustled about, clearing the table and washing the dishes while Jonathan stared into his teacup. When she was finished, she sat down in the chair beside him rather than the one across the table, where she’d been before. She was close enough for him to sense the warmth of her body and to see the fair, delicate hair on her arms, moist from washing.
“So you like it here? Will you stay?”
“How can I?” Jonathan straightened out of his slump and looked away from her. “How can I?” he repeated. This time his tone was less rhetorical, and he looked back at her as if perhaps she could tell him how. It struck him that they had a depressing effect on each other. Their similarities, which he’d noticed that evening at Eyvindur’s, were not comforting. This probably explained Wooley.
Far Afield Page 28