Later, my mother said of the funeral, ‘At least that organist meant I wasn’t sitting there crying snot.’
The church’s regular organist was on long-term sick leave, and the replacement’s playing was godawful. The psalm accompaniment was garbled, the notes hobbling off like winged birds. I felt sorry for them. Even the priest, standing hands folded amid a sea of garlands and bouquets, looked aggrieved.
The abundance of flowers was the only merry thing, and thick. Roses, chrysanthemums, gerberas. The church was full.
My mother led the singing. She bawled her lungs out, determined to be heard above the slow murder of ‘Sorrow and Joy’, the crackling discord as peace failed to descend ‘O’er Land and City’. From the banks of pews behind us, voices rang loud and clear. Everybody pulled together.
Then the psalms were over. The priest emptied his little trowel of earth over the coffin, down onto the shiny lacquer. Now the moment I’d been dreading.
We rose, those of us supposed to carry it. Just in time the Tarantula leant forward and whispered, ‘It’s not as 28heavy as you think.’ For a moment I felt it in my arm. The weight misjudged, the lightness, my elbow flying upwards, my hand letting go in fright, the thing crashing to the floor. Then we lined up, and my skin stuck to the handle on the side of the coffin. I concentrated. At the very moment we lifted, the air around me smelled of Omma. It was sudden, penetrating. Her perfume, hair. Freshly ironed cotton. I completely forgot to worry about the white wood, which would splinter as the coffin thundered to the floor, the body, Omma’s waxen cheek against the cold stone. When the organist struck a deep and unexpectedly clear tone, my legs simply began to move. I kept time, moving away from Omma’s scent. It hung still, as though she’d come to a halt in the aisle. Watching us go.
The hearse drove. The wake was being held at the community centre. We walked the short stretch through the fog, taking the path that began between the church and the old village school. What with the weddings and the funerals, the cars were packed tight in the small church car park. Behind it was the school, which wasn’t a school any more but was still called that, because it was my mother’s childhood home.
In those days the brick building had been divided into teachers’ accommodation and schoolrooms. I know that an oak hedge separated the ornamental garden from the fruit garden behind the building. That the hedge rustled 29darkly when it was August and evening, and they came home from summer on the Faroe Islands, loaded with dried fish and mutton and duty-free cigarettes from the boat.
In the fruit garden, one of the trees grew summer apples. Coming home from summer: a wedge of torchlight in the faintly scorched August darkness. Nettles grown caustic while the building stood empty. Stinging legs, longing and release, the first foaming white bite of apple.
The school was my mother’s childhood, one of the places she could mean when she said home.
I know that Abbe built the House among the Fields later, after Ma grew up—after the village school and the other small schools nearby were emptied, and the children swilled onto grey concrete.
From the big windows in the community centre’s main hall, the uppermost branches of the apple tree were just visible. The room was long and high-ceilinged, sanatorium-white.
Along the row of windows sat the people wanting schnapps. They were the majority, so many that we all had to help with pouring. With a cold bottle of Brøndum sweating in my palm and one of Omma’s sea-green crystal glasses, I went from chair to chair and served. Everybody drank from the same green glass. Saliva collected along the rim. 30
The server is supposed to raise their eyes when offering the glass; it doesn’t do to stand there gaping at the floor. Every hand around the glass was connected to a dark sleeve, and above it hovered two commiserating eyes. Here and there a few pairs of eyes had begun to swim. ‘Here you are,’ I muttered, avoiding the eyes and counting sleeves.
On the other side of the aisle sat the pious, the ones drinking only coffee. Paper tablecloths rustled. The same acoustic as a sports hall. Then a small woman got to her feet. She belonged on the side of the blessed. On her round, densely wrinkled face were traces of Sørvágur, my omma’s relatives.
‘Marita was something special,’ she said. ‘I never doubted that, and nor did Marita.’
Several people grinned. Among the schnapps drinkers there were a few chuckles.
The old lady stared straight ahead and blinked, but her voice was firm. She spoke as though telling a saga, with the old-fashioned grammar some islanders use when they speak Faroese in Danish.
‘It was indeed a sorry time when Marita left us, and heavy was the long spell we were kept apart by the war. But it was good she lived long and happily with her beloved Fritz, and that together they were granted both children and grandchildren.’
A strange hand caught my wrist in a small, sweaty squeeze that made the glass slosh. I looked over at Abbe, 31Omma’s beloved Fritz. He was slumped. His hands had dropped to the table.
Once, when Abbe got drunk, Omma had an accident. While he lay unconscious on the sofa after many trips to the lean-to, she tripped at the top of the stairs, fell, and cracked her left hemisphere. When the alcohol wore off, he found her where she was lying. After that she had to go to a speech therapist.
It happened in the wintertime, during Christmas party season.
The night was silver-black and slippery. My mother sped the whole way to the hospital, muttering incantations against the traffic police. She hit the car park running and kept speeding down the hospital corridor, her bag clutched in her arms, now muttering the ward numbers, 112, 114, 116—here!
We hurtled inside.
On the ward, among trolleys and turquoise floral curtains, was Omma. She sat plumb straight in a chair, her pale nylon legs decorously folded beneath her housecoat, the waves in her hair newly permed and shiny. She’d made the bed.
Her face was lopsided. One cheek lay flat against her skull like a deflated tyre, while the other looked like a bluish-violet football. She smiled. ‘Goodness, is that you?’ she asked, grinning with her crooked blue mouth.
* * *
32I stood in the aisle between the rows of tables, gazing into a full glass of schnapps. It glowed green against my fingers. I was thinking they were strangers, the people sitting here. Foreigners. They’d flown in from home, and now they were sitting here. I had no idea who we were. So it seemed to me. That I was floating. Meanwhile the old lady was finishing her speech. ‘To Marita’s memory,’ she said. A man’s voice at my elbow repeated, ‘To Marita’s memory.’ A wet sigh went from table to table.
The wake lasted all afternoon.
The fog was beginning to lift, separating like sour milk and creeping off in all directions. In the car park by the school a few off-white strips lingered, irresolutely luminous in the winter dark.
The car was cold. The Tarantula cursed softly into his beard as he fumbled with the heater, switching on the radio and getting into gear. My mother’s hair poked over the edge of the front seat, immobile. On the back seat beside me sat Omma.
Along Køge Bay motorway, the remains of the fog hung in the trees like wet tinsel.
Omma wanted to say something. Her mouth worked slowly, concentratedly. I looked away. Yellow and white headlights flickered past in a blur, now dense as bolts, now dissolved in outstretched lightning. 33
Omma put her hand on mine. Her face was calm now. It appeared and disappeared with the light of the oncoming cars. ‘No island is an island,’ she said. Then she patted my cheek and departed.