We packed the car and left Gásadalur. We were supposed to spend a day or two in Tórshavn then take the ferry back to Suðuroy.
I shut my eyes for the sharp bend just before the tunnel, thinking of the crosses you see planted by the roadside. The drooping flowers. Battered crash barrier. Sometimes there are sheep lolling in the middle of the carriageway. Leaping out of the fog. There’s no sign, no Caution! Leaping sheep!
I was looking forward to Aunt Anna’s homemade rye bread and the sound of her baby-blue fridge, which purred like a Jaguar.
Aunt Anna’s house was the heart of Tórshavn. In its midst sat Anna herself, half mythical figure, half librarian, with her chalk-white hair, her beautiful skin the delicate shade of skimmed milk, and her inexhaustible knowledge of the islands’ history. She could talk about the pirates who came all the way from Algeria, from Turkey, and about small, yellow-eyed Celts brought by the first Vikings who settled here. At Aunt Anna’s, being a tarantula child was an easy thing.
After the tunnel, the road sloped down past the grassy 74roofs of Bøur, the leaden beach and the outlook over Tindhólmur. The island thrust its jagged dragon’s spine up through the clouds. At one time no one lived there. It was cursed, they said, and left to erode in peace. Now there were the odd few summer cabins.
The road continued along the Sørvág Fjord, the shore, the level water ending at Mykines, then cut up through the village. We drove past the raised foundations of the church, the painted black wood, the gravestones with my DNA in the soil. And onward, past the white house in the meadow beyond the edge of the town, which had quietly crept upwards since we were there last.
We stayed in the white house one summer. That was with Omma and Abbe. I was six, maybe seven.
A gable window offered a view over the village and the fjord. I remembered the feeling of Mykines, which stole closer every time I blinked.
That summer I wore my wool jumper like it was the national dress. Several bigger children would play down by the river. They let me join in. I told them my family owned all the houses. They spoke Danish to me, and I thought I was speaking Faroese. I smothered slices of warm, cooked blood sausage under a mountain of powdered sugar. I watched the dusk swallow the flowers in the meadow. I was too small to understand that we were acting like tourists.
* * *
75The road between Sørvágur and Tórshavn crosses Mjørkadalur. The Valley of Fog. When it snapped into the valley, the sun disappeared. I put in earbuds.
It’s still early in the morning, sang Björk.
Elephant-grey clouds churned between the valley walls, a heavy centrifugal lightshow that alternated between shadow and more shadow.
High up on the mountain is the old military base, once run by the Americans, which has now been reassigned to the prison services. Today it’s a detention centre with space for twelve inmates. Longer sentences are served in Denmark. The killer who was held there recently while awaiting his verdict was the first in twenty-three years. I didn’t know where he was now. Herstedvester. Vridsløselille. It struck me that the Faroe Islands were perhaps the only country in the world without a proper prison. The thought made me proud, then ashamed.
‘How do they deal with juvenile detention centres, youth residential institutions, stuff like that?’
Neither the Tarantula nor my mother was sure. I persisted. If young people were being sent away from their own country into ours to be locked up, I said, if a mother had to drop several thousand kroner on a plane ticket every time she wanted to give her sixteen-year-old a hug and a change of underpants, shouldn’t we at least know about it? That sort of stuff? Here in the Danish Realm? 76
My mother didn’t think the Faroese youth were especially criminal. The Tarantula said something about sheep-tipping. Then my mother said there were plenty of good opportunities to commit juvenile crime on the Faroe Islands, if the youth were so inclined. I gave up. The clouds lingered, hanging in the valley.
We drove out into the light.
Aunt Anna had inherited Tórshavn’s heart from her mother. It occurred to me now that Anna’s mother was Great-Aunt Ingrún. That I hadn’t even realized. It made the house a different house. I lay in the guest bedroom in the bright night and stared out through the curtain.
I was sorry I’d made Ingrún so coarse and chestnutty, when Aunt Anna was mildness itself and had soft, finely drawn hands.
But now she was who she was, Ingrún. I couldn’t undo it. The image of the chestnut arms and drum-belly was stuck. The big hands.
To pour a kind of oil on the waters, I showed a grovelling affection for everything in the house. I trod softly on the stairs. I slipped vigilantly through the rooms, and handled every fork, every knick-knack, as if it were the brittlest glass.
We sat in the kitchen. On the baby-blue fridge hung a postcard depicting palm trees and an orange beach umbrella. The Tarantula drank a dark Faroese beer. It was evening. The sun was a white square on the curtain. 77
Aunt Anna measured my hands then began to knit. I inhaled the scent of the brown, slightly oily yarn.
Aunt Anna knitted in Faroese. The thread was over her right index finger, and the stitches slipped vertically from needle to needle, a smooth movement, shyoo, shyoo, shyoo, without any pumping of the elbow. The difference ran through her whole knitting body. ‘Look,’ said Ma, ‘Anna’s ravelling.’
It was Omma’s choice that everything in my mother’s life should happen in Danish, including knitting. She taught herself the Danish method and passed it on to my mother. Thus my mother’s knitting body was made Danish, and my knitting body was made Danish; it was the assimilation of needlecraft.
But then, with time, when everyone had learned what they were supposed to, Omma retreated behind her shyoo, shyoo, shyoo, and kept ravelling as she’d always done.
In the TV room in the House among the Fields, one afternoon:
The sound of Abbe’s lawnmower coming through the open window, the scent of grass. Omma sat in one of the brown velvet chairs. I was in a heap of tangled yarn in the other. The weekends when they looked after me used to pass like that. His & Hers.
Brooke was pregnant and arguing with Ridge.
I swore. I’d just dropped half my stitches. Omma put her knitting in her lap and made to take up mine. The 78wide-reaching presence of her fingers. Her eyes remained on the screen and Ridge’s polished jaw. As soon as she got hold of my green yarn, her hands switched into Danish. It happened automatically, I saw it. Omma’s hands spoke a clumsy foreign language, which was mine and the only one I knew. The needles clicked against each other, ugly.
After that I wasn’t in the mood any more to knit and watch The Bold and the Beautiful. My lovely green project disappeared into the yarn basket and died of assorted stab wounds while Omma went out to get some tea.
Now I was an angry spirit, now I didn’t want the wholemilk Lipton, now I drifted aimlessly around the house with green yarn tangling inside me.
I moved between the dark spots in the living room, the dusty indoor dark that hangs about the furniture when the sun is thick outside. I was a monster in the crack between the armchair and the wall. Sitting there crumpled, I drew the shadows to me like seawater and swallowed them down, ready to spit them out over any stray sailors.
Abbe brought the light in from the terrace.
He had a sharp fragrance in his hands, chive flowers and greenhouse damp. The smell of earth always clung to him, heavy and dry, as though with him he carried a place.
He saw me in my craggy cave. I hissed, a little tentatively. Then he fetched the book, wafted it and captured me. 79
The luxury engine in Aunt Anna’s fridge and her rhythmic shyoo, shyoo, shyoo drifted into the living room, where he sat down and found his place in Morten Pontoppidan’s retelling of the Odyssey.
When Abbe read aloud, it was in fact an infinitely shy dialogue. His longing for home appeared between the lines. I followed the text with one finger.
The chapter we read was about the island of the Wind King, where Odysseus drifted ashore and stayed a whole month. The island—Abbe lowered the book and raised his hands, showing me the wide expanse of blue and then the wall of bronze that rose from the water and thundered redly upward—the island was tethered behind this wall. It had to be, he explained, or it would float away and disappear across the sea.
Where did it come from, I asked.
I didn’t sleep in Tórshavn’s heart, I couldn’t.
The night was shining and still. The house pressed, like the shell of a chestnut, against my arms and legs. I had betrayed it.
I walked through the slanting streets. The town, as on weekday nights in the provinces, was a backdrop for what I had in my head, pasted up and two-dimensional, a canvas I spattered myself across.
In Viðarlundin, the city park by the art museum, I sat down by the statue of the fallen sailor on his stone anchor. He gazed straight over my head. Sparrows stared down 80from the gaunt trees. The notion I could reach my own beginning, my home in the blood, seemed idiotic.
During our stay in Tórshavn, I underwent small but noticeable physical changes. My hair changed structure, softening and smoothing out. The air washed the grains of melanin in my skin, making them glow. Lack of sleep played a part, too. I staggered through the colourless night like a faintly luminous amateur genealogist.
Early one morning I made my way down from the park to the old sod-roofed houses at Tinganes, lozenge-red, out on the spit of land. First you think it’s a North Atlantic branch of the open-air museum back in Copenhagen. Then maybe you remember these are ministries, the local parliament.
I felt an unrest in my body, a grief. I curled up on a bench with my back to parliament and faced the sea. Now Aeolia appeared again, the island of the Wind King.
It was Abbe who had taught me to collect floating islands. The Wind King’s, which Homer describes, was my first. There are no earlier depictions of a floating island in European literature, I don’t think, but there have been plenty since. My collection swelled.
Floating islands can be man-made, like the Urus’ rush islands in Lake Titicaca, their floating home, or they form naturally in large rivers and drift out to sea, sometimes overgrown with trees and full of wildlife. There was the island where St Brendan landed with his Irish monks, 81which turned out to be a whale. There were the islands Scottish seafarers drank into existence from a thirst for land, glimmering amid the banks of fog. The hovering paradise isles of Chinese myth and the floating, shadow-populated islands of the Celts. Everywhere, always, people had dreamed of floating islands, found them, built them—a welter of geological migration throughout history, mythological islands, literary islands, technological islands. A fleet. I saw it before me now, Aeolia at its head.
I knew that areola, the dark-red area around the nipple, meant ‘open space’. The obscure connection this implied between two of humanity’s most basic needs was comforting.