The Eyes of Lira Kazan

Sunleif was in front, with the men of Tórshavn. An alert had just been sounded: a shoal of pilot whales was out at sea passing the archipelago; the moment had come to start beating them towards the shore. Already the crowds were hurrying to the beach. Children ran down too – they weren’t at school as it was Ólavsøka, the national holiday. Flowers and ribbons had been hung up on the lamp posts. Sunleif had become a man on a day like this. He had been thirteen with blond curly hair and he had killed his first dolphin – there had been blood up to his shoulders – under the proud gaze of his father. Nowadays his hands and muscled arms were as big as his father’s.

Sunleif stood up straight. He liked to think that Louchsky might be watching him walking towards the sea. That was why he stood in front, with the locals, gazing at the crowd and at the sea. He wanted his guests, Louchsky and his entourage, and the lawyer Rassmussen, to admire the impressive shape of his thighs beneath the wetsuit rolled down to the waist. He wanted them to see what a colossus he was, carved by the Faroe Islands, at the crossroads of all the winds and currents of the Atlantic.

Last time Louchsky had gone too far, humiliating him in his own house, on his own island. The words still burned through him: “You’re my piggy bank! I can smash my piggy bank whenever I want!” the Russian had shouted. And then he had added: “You’ve got fifteen days, or else…” Or else, what? Fifteen days had gone by.

And Eyvin explained to the guests how Stephensen senior had been the first in all the islands to process fish on a large scale. Eyvin was Sunleif’s right-hand man, the last of the Viking race, a frail young man who had been through business schools in London and Paris. He calculated and thought fast, knew all the difficult cases by heart, and he knew how to keep quiet and draw up acceptable balance sheets. Today Eyvin’s job was to avoid difficult questions.

Louchsky didn’t listen to Eyvin talking. He hated walking and he despised this festive crowd, these women in their long dresses and scarves, and men in caps; their wooden houses were tarred and built close together to protect themselves against the storms and the dark winters. How could he ever have entrusted so much money to that swaggering fool Sunleif in his frogman costume?

They had first met fifteen years earlier in St Petersburg in a gilded nineteenth-century drawing room. It was at the time when Communism was coming to an end and oil was a hundred dollars a barrel. Sergei Louchsky was involved in arranging foreign investments in the gas company. Sunleif, the fish merchant facing him, seemed very recently arrived in his banker’s outfit, pulling at his collar as though he was short of air. But if appearances weren’t in his favour, the figures were. The fish mogul was opening a branch in London, and then another on the Côte d’Azure; money was pouring in, shares were soaring, rich clients were drawing in more rich clients. Rumours of success grew fast, and the reason was simple: Grind Bank, as it was called, was lending money at rates that undercut any competition, in exchange for which it asked for no guarantees, simply that its borrowers should buy its own shares with some of the money being lent. The bank’s shares rose thanks to the bank’s own money. Simple, and completely mad. A runaway train. But nobody wanted to see it like that. Caution was not an option, there was no point in it back in the Nineties; growth was vertiginous, banks were offering suicidal loans, and the whole world was caught up in the madness. Louchsky soon saw how useful it could be to put his money there – the little Faroe bank would be a useful laundry, just what he was looking for.

And so for all these years the two men had been giving each other big manly slaps on the back. One would lose the smell of fish, the other the oil stains on his oligarch’s outfit. Everything was turned into money. They had got into the habit of meeting in London, in the office of Rassmussen, Louchsky’s lawyer, and now Sunleif’s. Louchsky never came to the Faroes, until now that things had started to go wrong.

The crowd carried on towards the landing beach, while the men went on to the port, where the motorboats were waiting. They walked through a few more narrow streets, past different-coloured houses, blue, mustard-yellow and blood-red. There was certainly going to be blood. Sunleif hadn’t told them exactly what was going to happen that day, he didn’t want to spoil the surprise. He was thrilled at the thought of his guests’ faces turning as white as their collars when the serious fun began. They had been delighted when he had told them that his rodeo would infuriate the ecologists. These financial sharks were going to see something now, they had no idea. It was a beautiful day, the sea was calm; dark shadows on the water seemed to foretell something, but they were just the reflections of the cliffs, which would one day fall into the sea and disappear. Here the sea destroyed everything.

Ten motorboats were ready to cast off. Everybody climbed on board; Louchsky, the lawyer, Eyvin and Sunleif together. The pilot started the engine. Sunleif stripped off his T-shirt, pulled on the top half of the wetsuit and fastened the zip, compressing his fat stomach, as though to indicate to them all “I’m going in the water, boys”. Completely unaware of the horrified expression on his guests’ faces, he believed in himself as part of a great tradition, that of man against the elements. The boats launched off, with Sunleif’s in the lead. He stood, the sun beating down on his already reddening head, shouting over the noise of the engines. He pointed out the islands, naming each one, boasting about their beauty; he told them that to the far north of Tórshavn the land came to an end with enormous precipices from which one can sense on the horizon the edge of the Arctic sea ice. Sunleif was in his element. He had returned to his native land after having made such efforts to blend in at all those board meetings.

The victims were unprepared for their fate. The motorboats took up their positions, encircling the animals, then turned around and began to drive them towards the coast. The dolphins now tried to escape. They turned to right and left, diving down beneath the waves. But the hunters stayed with them, tracking them mercilessly, exhausting them, blocking their way. It took time, not to let a single one escape, but that was the fun of it, the excitement, the roar of the engines over the agility of the beast, the superiority of man over the cleverest of animals. There were yells of excitement on the boats as the men quaffed strong beer. Sunleif had plenty of beer on his boat, but he was the only one drinking. A radio message came saying that two dolphins had escaped to starboard. Sunleif pushed the pilot aside, took the wheel and swung round 180 degrees, shaking the whole boat in pursuit of the fugitives.

He shouldn’t have shouted, or looked at the Russian at that moment. Police is police, even in Faroese. Louchsky had had enough of being stuck on this boat with thirty dying dolphins and a gang of retarded Vikings in full carnival costume. He stared at Sunleif and put his hand to his neck in a threatening gesture.

They were both thinking the same: their machinations had finally been exposed, the authorities who controlled the markets and analysed everything were onto them. Sunleif suddenly shivered inside his wetsuit. In his shiny black outfit he looked like one of the big fish floundering in the bay under the hooks, at the end of their strength; he was going to die too, because for him to lose would be to die. The police had come to arrest him, or at least to interrogate him. Nobody on board wanted to go down with him; they all observed him from the other end of the boat. But Sunleif suddenly grabbed his spear and waved it, his neck and shoulders bulging.

And he plunged the spear into the flesh of the nearest animal, again and again, until the hook caught and pulled it up into the boat. Then he pulled out a foot-long knife and plunged it deep into the dolphin’s neck, through the thick layer of fat and flesh. The blade disappeared, then Sunleif plunged his hand in, reaching for the arteries and the nervous system. Blood spurted over the boat, and all the other boats. The sea was now turning red with the dolphins’ blood.

The dolphins did not die at once, that depended on the skill of the hunter. Some of the men stayed belching on the boats, others plunged into the water from the beach, carrying hooks; they finished off the stranded animals, pulling them in by their fins, pushing them onto the sand. There was already a pile of thirty or so dolphins, dying or dead, piled up like bags washed up by the sea. The only movements were death spasms. They say in the Faroes that animals die in silence. Others maintained that they could hear cries of pain coming from the cliffs.

Louchsky didn’t bother to answer. He had not moved once, and still held on to the handrail. Sunleif had become like an animal now; he threw himself onto a second dolphin that had come up close to the boat, as though begging to be finished off. He jumped into the water up to his waist, bathing in blood; it was all over him – hands, body and face – it looked as though he was himself pouring with blood.

The policemen were waiting there on the beach, two plain-clothes officers, looking a bit stiff, easily distinguishable in the crowd. Each inhabitant would go home with some fat and some meat. Until then the children climbed, laughing, onto the backs of the animals vomiting up their blood. Sunleif, in the water up to his thighs, had seen the men. He was in no hurry, he wanted to bring his great display to an end first. He was the colossus, the chief, the picador and the matador; he was Hercules, the embodiment of all the strength and ferocity of mankind. He wasn’t afraid of blood, no, he drank it, he wallowed in it. Let them come! Let the cops come, and the Russians, and all those money sharks, let the blood flow – it wouldn’t be his! He still liked to believe that Louchsky was impressed by him.

Finally he stood up and waded out of the water, stepped over the bodies, patted the children kindly on the head: he envied them, having fun riding on a big dead fish, not yet men. He walked, dripping, towards the policemen; his heart was pounding, not from fear of course, it was just his body warming up. Turning round he saw his guests climbing out of the boat, Louchsky in the distance watching him, and he knew what the other was thinking: “You’re a dead man if you talk.” He knew, too, that it was a lot better to fall into the hands of the police than those of the mafia. He walked through the crowd, greeting his workers. He had to look confident in front of them.

But now the landscape around him suddenly began to seem like a lost paradise. He looked at his father’s factories, remembered how he had said “You’re a man now” the first time he had waded out of the red water as he was doing today. He saw the white wooden church where he had been baptized and married, and the old Tórshavn primary school, a huge building, now a shop, where he had been the gang leader even then. Beyond, past the corrugated-iron roofs, some of them covered in earth and grass, his own stone house. How many dark winters he had spent here, listening to the breakers sending their salty foam into the steep little streets, dreading the hurricane-like storms. He turned round once more, and for the first time ever, because one only understands death when one gets close to it, he found something macabre in the blue-green Faroe waters turning to red.