On midsummer’s eve I walked down steep, small paths among the houses of Vágur, past low windows with yellowed curtains, patterned curtains, lace-trimmed net and tiebacks, cars parked at an angle.
The blue mountain rumbled above the village.
It happens that tourists, typically women, go into the mountain. They go into the mountain. Wander up and disappear. I felt I’d heard about these women, drawing north to die. A suicide holiday. A kind of longing for home. Perhaps they brought the longing with them on their travels, or it caught them in the air, the North Atlantic air.
I reached the upper borders of the village, the rim of the mountain.
The grass was asleep.
Migration takes place over three generations. The first generation feels the urge and has the will, the roughness: a heavy stone, moving unaided. The inconceivability of that.
You wade ashore somewhere, or you take the boat from one of the colonies, hitch your roots up around your ankles 55and set to drudgery. You live in shelters, in camps, under bridges, or you’re lucky enough to have an uncle.
Once money’s not too tight, you travel home in the one set of clothes that isn’t worn threadbare, your children in their Sunday whites, hair wet-combed. You buy big cars and have no place to park.
The next generation maybe straddles the gap, until something cracks, and becomes doubly bad, non-lingual, doubly alone. Or it grinds twice as hard, expands the business, buys the carport, gets the medical degree. Even if they do break through the layer of stone, these children of the crossing, drop out, choose with their hearts, like Ma did, like the Tarantula did, in their separate ways, it’s there: the drive to work. The brutal momentum of the stone—onward and upward, an impulse stunted and turned inwards, to be something, to return a profit on investment. That generation is still paying for the crossing.
Then comes the third generation. The fruit of the whole thing. Why be satisfied as a doctor, a lawyer, when you can be a dramatist? A bassoonist? A geologist. The third generation can afford to do without financial return, compelled to realize what’s inside themselves, to ship their spirit over too and call it self-actualization. Their roots quiver and search, carrying the dead particles of another soil.
The third generation is a size too small; it’s utterly cool and culture-free, or it’s half home, half poorly spoken, 56making an identity for itself in the furrow ploughed by the stone, bearing the moment of its blood’s arrival like a tattoo on its forehead, but in pen, self-drawn, and speaking its name proudly among foreigners, low-voiced among countrymen.
Generation little-me, myself-alone. Generation neithernor. The third generation is invisible, theoretical, assuming its skin matches the wallpaper—and it knows it, or it doesn’t know it, but it carries the crossing within it like a loss.
You could see it like this:
The suicide holiday is the antithesis of migration.
I thought more about it as I sat on a rock in the grass nearby. Above the village, beneath the undeveloped land on the mountain. The suicide holiday as descendant’s revenge. To be so ungrateful, to shake off the generations, past and future, to not fulfil oneself, not have children, to simply go on strike; let’s sneak out of this party and shrug, there at the finishing line before the mythical, entirely-at-home and therefore non-existent fourth generation.
The thought struck me with a sweetness, a fury. I could walk up into the mountain, up into the clouds, fall somewhere, break my neck, vanish out of my coat, my layer of fat, my lungs, into the moss. I could let the mountain take me, oversweep me with grass, overtread me with stone, and be enfolded in the ground below, its grey-brown arms of lava, its legs; I would be dissolved, melted down into the 57fibres of the moss. What remained of me would end at the beginning, nullify the outpouring of energy, the will, the stone’s brutal path, be stone-in-stone.
By the time I got back, the house had settled for the night.
The light was off in the cellar. I couldn’t find the switch. Fumbled. I gave up and crept down the railing into the dark. Finding my room, I got into bed beneath the floorboards, above the family’s foundations.
The next morning we trudged down the road from the upper village, heading to the Ruth Smith Museum by the harbour before we went to the village of Tvøroyri, where the MS Smyril set sail for Streymoy. We were going to take the ferry then pass through the tunnelled darkness to Vágar, to Gásadalur, but first Aunt Ása had offered to show us round the museum.
The car bumped over the potholes in the asphalt, past the house that had belonged to Ragnar and Beate. It had since been sold.
The house, square and little, stood nudged into the gap between some older buildings. The wall was weatherfaded, the paint chafed by the salt. The green was peeling slightly.
The hulder stone was still in the garden. I strained against the seatbelt, remembering how it felt beneath my palm. In childhood. The coating of moss, soft and slimy, with the hardness underneath. 58
The stone hummed when it was touched.
The power of the hulder, the hidden folk, reached far into the moss, into the skin. A watchful quivering felt in the hand, tempting as the sound of an electric fence.
We parked on the quay.
The Ruth Smith Museum overlooked the fjord, positioned among shipping containers and rowing boats set on blocks. It was a yellow building, the old village school. The opening times varied. Aunt Ása was in a club, and had the keys.
Now, in the old schoolroom, among dark yet still lush landscapes, beneath the desperate or heavy or resigned eyes of the painter’s fearsome self-portraits, there were no more deary me’s. Aunt Ása straightened her back as she talked about the painter’s life. Her white-scoured hand pointed us authoritatively from work to work. Her face gave off a warm pride the colour of whole milk, and I realized she saw the paintings like childhood friends made good.
The sun dropped onto the fine dust. The place had retained an element of the classroom. A snug drowsiness.
In a bust rendered by Gianfranco Nonne, the painter’s smile is resigned and froglike. I searched her eyes for a place to stay.
It was one May night she’d swum out and drowned. Just outside. Aunt Ása pointed through the window. In the fjord. They said she often swam alone, that she was an 59elite swimmer. She found it easy to swim but hard to let herself be borne with the current. That sort of mind. I stopped listening and never heard whether it had been officially designated a suicide.
I saw her. She was floating in the breakers, in the crushed mirror of the summer sky.
A dot in the universe.
A tiny, dwindling island.
Aunt Ása raised her voice slightly as she neared the end. I looked at her face. Saw her eyes were sparkling blue. She finished with Heinesen’s epitaph and sang without singing.
Ever shall we see amid the surf
Your strong, departed face.
Afterwards we took the ferry, alongside the rowers and the students queasy with booze. Some were still raucous. Others were asleep with their bobbles in their mouths. Outside, the islands’ grey-streaked faces glided by.