She stands with her back to the low copse of planted trees, looking down the mountain to the village, blue in the August night, and the sheep that are like stones among unbroken grass. Further off, the sea is sleeping. Vágs Fjord is still, blue on blue against the sky above the ruler-straight horizon, strung taut between the headlands, a line only ghosts and legends can walk.
Now she closes her eyes. Bending all her young will she follows the blue road: past the Shetland Islands and Norway’s compact mountains, across the sea between Sweden and Denmark and then in over the low land, the butter land, the fields, the farms—all the way to the Zealand market town where Fritz must now be sleeping heavily.
Marita, her name is. She’ll be leaving soon, and this is where she starts: Suðuroy, the southernmost island in the Faroes. Here the fjords are deep and the hills rugged. The landscape is knottier and more abrupt than on Marita’s island, Vágar, but it’s the first one you come to from the rest of the world. 2
In the country she’s going to there is a railway. She pictures the tracks sluicing through the inhabited earth. People streaming away. Taking a train. You can get off wherever you like. In a city, perhaps. Another city. A forest.
The trees sit up high in the uncultivated land further away from the village.
The pines are battered and young. Windswept.
She hears the noise.
From up here the village looks tiny. The houses doze, turned towards the fjord. Their roofs catch the blue forelight, shining palely like the crown of an infant’s head.
Vágs Fjord is long and thin, a sausage of water between the mountains, which the currents of the sea have munched at. Au revoir, dollhouse fjord. She thinks it. There’s more to life than this.
She wants to hitch up her dress, take a running jump, sail clear over all of it—the parting, the journey. Now she’s in the new country, now she’s walking down a flat, paved street and into a house that smells of wood, and there stands her fiancé, there stands Fritz, as if no time has passed since they were separated, just turning and saying, ‘Oh, there you are.’ Just like that.
She spits. The taste of resin fills her mouth, tacky on her gums. She bit down on a pine cone; that was earlier. It crunched all the way into her jawbone. Her teeth ground 3and the pine cone crunched, while her hand did what it had to with the steel wire.
The wind pushed at the branches of the trees.
The rust-brown needles fell.
There, on the ground.
It’s later now, she’s on her feet, she’s standing. The sea tussles with the sun behind the horizon. There’s a distant crackle of red. Brooks clink, waterfalls whistle. She has to go, down there. Hesitantly she tilts her pelvis forward. Tenses. One short, stupid moment she’s afraid some of the steel wire has got stuck.
Marita is already in her church clothes. How far ahead, how cold-bloodedly, some might say, she was thinking before she struck out into the darkness. The dress is nice, the cut contemporary, taken from a Danish magazine. Marita sews her own clothes. Reads patterns and comes up with sleeves, bodices, skirt widths by eye. For a long time she’s dressed like someone meant for more than the factory by the harbour and an everyday life among fish. The smell of sour woollen socks in the village hall. Some of them down there think she believes she’s too good for them. The same people also think she isn’t good enough. Marita knows that. She’s fond of them now, in the way you’re fond of people you’re shortly going to leave.
The wind fumbles at her face, her sweaty skin. The first step of the descent is a jolt that runs from the sole of her 4foot through her leg and hips. Her muscles contract, squeezing mucosal membranes, damaged tissue.
She’s got to go now. She goes.
The terrain slopes more gently as she approaches the first houses. Some of the grass in the fields above the village is still high, some raked into heaps. The scent is tart. It sticks to the resting straw. Flicks up and prickles on the tongue. A rolling green scent of bare skin. She walks through it. Her abdomen feels heavy, hard and tight, a ball of small sharp nails.
In the upper village the houses are scattered towards the grassy fields, the open mountains. Many years later, Abbe, my grandfather, will plant his finger on one of these houses in a black-and-white photograph, and ‘There,’ he’ll say, ‘that’s where we lived.’ He’ll explain that the house is enthroned high above the other buildings because it’s old and grand.
Another ten years later, hesitantly, I’ll try out that explanation on Ma and Aunt Ása, in a white-scrubbed kitchen on the very same ground Marita’s walking past in silence now. They’ll laugh a little, those old and knowing women, and Aunt Ása will shake her head. ‘Deary me.’
The house has the mountains at its back, a little round-shouldered, not the grandest place, just solidly built. But the wall on its base of whitewashed stone casts a shadow over Marita. She crumples a little around that red, 5thudding flesh. Now she pinches some colour into her lips. Tries a smile.
The village has awoken. The church bell is calling out across the fjord. From the harbour and the houses people are dribbling towards the church at their customary Sunday trundle. But one person is defying the current, marching, almost, in the wrong direction. Marita sees him. She doesn’t smile. Their paths cross with quick, swift steps. Then, suddenly, afterwards, she finds herself about to giggle.
The man is exceptionally short-legged, even for one of the Vágbingar. He trots on, heading for the foreland west of the village, a fishing rod slung over his shoulder like a rifle. Whereas most people fish with hand lines, Red Ragnar has procured this strange contraption, and now he doesn’t fish with anything else. In the village they say he’s never short of a bright idea.
Ragnar, Abbe’s big brother, is an unskilled joiner like his dad. He’s the village’s only—or certainly its most ardent—communist.
That he never sets foot in church except for christenings and funerals goes without saying. And although he grudgingly forgoes paid work on Sundays, he refuses to waste a whole day on thumb-twiddling and religious piffle.
‘If the fish weren’t allowed to bite,’ he apparently once said, ‘then Jesus would pull out their teeth himself.’ 6
Now he’s reaching the lake on the flat stretch of land between the village and the west-facing rocks. The fishing rod gives an elastic twang. He stomps along beside the grey and quiet water on his stubby legs. His face is closed, the heavy brows drawn down.
Ragnar is shorter and stockier than his siblings. Darker, too. His beard is jet black, and curly chest hair bristles all the way up to his collar. They say he’s really the son of a Spanish sailor who lost his way and ended up, roundabout, on the island, creating all sorts of fuss. Among other odd bits of gossip it’s rumoured that his mother was carried off in the pureness of her youth, vanishing into the mountains and returning home with a changeling in her belly.
It’s true that Ragnar has a head full of strange ideas, and that his big, masculine face possesses a beauty certainly not inherited from his father. The heavy features are a touch anxious now. He turns them up, against the wind.
While Ragnar is passing the lake, Marita joins the thicket of people softly murmuring outside the church. She likes Ragnar’s deep-set eyes, overshadowed by shining black brows. She knows something of the strong mind within. The churning thoughts. His curiosity. His skin is open, his pores small funnels through which all the world is channelled and deposited. He carries it around with him. By now he must be walking the final stretch down the path to the tip of the land, where the terrain rises up a jot 7and the wind softens the grass. He has his own opinion—of course he does—but he doesn’t judge her.
The last Sunday service before Marita is due to leave smells faintly of fresh concrete. The church was consecrated that winter, the cold and damp becoming embedded in the foundations. The pews creak. Once everybody is seated, piety descends.
Now she’s listening to the pulse behind her temples.
The piece of steel wire has cut the opening of her uterus. Sharp little lesions. The pew is hard. The feeling like the stabbing of nails expands, creeping up into her spine and down into her thighs and calves. It penetrates her blood. She needs a piss. Now she wants to shake her feet, slam her shinbone into the pew in front, kick the feeling away.
It won’t be expelled immediately; it takes time. The inflammation does the work. Copenhagen is three days away by boat. Back home her suitcase is packed.
The priest unrolls his heavy blanket of flat, Danish sound across the rows of pews. His voice is a monotone, a solemn dakadakadak.
Before this building and before the one before, the village had a fabled church. Marita has heard it said that a rich widow gifted it to the village folk, that it came drifting on a barge all the way from Norway. You should have 8seen it. The house of the Lord on the sea. Gulls whiten the spire with their wings, and the bell whinnies metallically far and wide as the church bobs over the waves like a cork. Directionless. Free.
There’s nothing very sensational about the new concrete church.
It echoes a little, weighty as a dead cow. Marita keeps a watch on her breath. She smooths her restless legs. Above the bared heads sails the church’s model ship on its two cords. The voices of the congregation, their scarves and woollen shawls drawn around drowsy shoulders, blur into a grey-black dough. The ship is pitching and heaving now, on a shallow, slate-grey hum. ‘In your death is, like a portent,’ sings the congregation, ‘my resurrection nigh,’ Marita mimes along, standing on her raft of nails on the grey sea.