“What do you think about this?” he’d ask, holding up one of his latest inventions.
“How about this?” he’d ask, showing me horses he’d carved, cows he’d made, the patches of brown he’d painted on their white bodies.
“Think we should make more like that?” he would ask and point at the sheep.
And once in a while he’d say: “Can I borrow the car tonight? I want to go down to the hospital.”
“Of course,” I’d answer and let him borrow the car, I never asked to go with him, never asked what he did down there, what he said to her, or if he said anything at all. Avoided the subject, talked about other things, figured he’d talk when he was ready, and the only thing to do, until then, was to wait.
It was different with Anna and Havstein, Anna took it hard, barely ate, barely slept, and was irritated by little things around her, breadcrumbs on the kitchen counter, the shower curtain not being pulled back, messy cupboards, and scruffy flower beds, she grabbed onto trivialities and they kept her afloat, meanwhile Havstein spent a huge amount of time analyzing what had happened, chance’s tragic lottery, I had to describe to him what had happened over and over again, moment by moment, frame by frame, like a film, answer all his questions, tell him what we’d talked about during those evenings we spent in her room, how Carl felt, how I felt, and this last question was always the hardest to answer, almost always answered: “I know it wasn’t my fault. I don’t think I was to blame.”
“Good,” he’d say. “Good.” And then the conversation would die.
Even Palli changed during those days. He sat with us more often in the evenings, helped out where necessary, asked Carl and I out on fishing trips, and we’d go with him almost every evening, we’d stand along the beach fishing without saying much, he’d help me with my equipment, selecting my spinners for me and taking my rod over when I got my hook stuck at the bottom, he taught me how to manipulate the spinner in the water, when I should tug on the line, when I should reel in, showed me the best places to stand. We caught a lot of fish on those evenings. And if the weather was right, we sat outside, in thick wool sweaters, grilling fish, three stooges on a rock, and all the fish in the world couldn’t change a thing.
So NN lay in the hospital in Tórshavn seeing nothing, hearing nothing, saying nothing. Received visits. From Carl. From Havstein, Palli, and Anna, they went there in the afternoons a couple of times a week. And me. To begin with I went almost every day after work, taking sandwiches with me. Things to read. Talked to her a lot. About everything, really. Anything that came to me. Stuff I’d read in the papers. Told her what had happened to her, and that we were all looking forward to her waking up. How it almost always turned out all right in the movies when beautiful people lay in comas for ages, that the longer they lay there, the bigger the chance they’d come back. I told her she was possibly the most beautiful thing that ever happened to me. I said that we could all go on vacation together when she woke up, to Denmark, perhaps. That would be nice. Or England. London. New York. We could take the bus. If she wanted. We could take the bus in every country. I promised green fairy-tale forests, filled to the brim with fresh fruits and exquisite flowers, gentle animals in soft teddy-bear fur with no dangerous small parts for kids. I talked and talked, and by the time I left in the evening my words were left strewn, on the walls, from the ceiling, on the floor, in disorder. I stopped it in the end. The talking. Sat and listened instead. For changes in her breathing. For her to suddenly wake up. But on the whole I just read. Or listened to the radio. Or something.
And then one day her mother came to visit too.
She entered that light room one average Monday afternoon, bright sunshine and April warmth in the air. She was petite, with long, dark hair and an enormous handbag. I’d been sitting with NN for an hour, an hour and a half maybe, with Havstein’s book about the Caribbean on my lap, I was sitting in the hospital reading my way through the island kingdoms, I’d gotten caught up in Grenada for some reason, I tried to memorize population figures, twenty-year-old hotel recommendations, sights that might no longer exist, lengths of swimming pools that might already be filled with sand. She gave me a little nod before hanging her jacket on the hook beside the door, sat in the chair beside me, looked at NN. We sat like that in silence for a moment.
“Are you going to go traveling?” She pointed at the book in my lap.
“No, no,” I answered. “I just like to know what I’m missing.”
Silence.
“What do you think she’s thinking about?” she said, almost to herself.
“I don’t know. Nothing, maybe.”
“She’s a beautiful girl, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” I answered. “The most beautiful person I’ve ever met.”
“Did you know she used to take buses all around the Faroes, going nowhere, for no reason? That’s what made her sick. All those buses.”
“Yes. I’ve heard.”
“You’re Mattias, is that right?”
“Yes.”
She gave me her name and shook my hand. “She talked a lot about you.”
She had? What had she said?
“Really?” I stammered.
“When she stayed with me at Christmas. She showed me pictures of you. I think she was almost getting well enough to leave Gjógv. Was that something she talked about?”
“Some. Not a lot. But some.”
“I don’t know where she would have gone. Do you? Denmark, maybe?”
“Maybe.”
She rose from her chair, went over to the bed and held NN’s hand, stroked her head, she was tiny in the sheets, melting into the white, and there was nothing but cables and the monotonous bleeping from the ECG tapping her rhythm into the room.
Air conditioning.
Traffic outside.
Springtime.
Her mother turned towards me.
“Was she with that … Carl?”
“What … when it happened?”
“No, were they together?” She almost blushed. “I mean, were they a couple? If you know what I mean?”
I nodded.
“Yes. I think so. Didn’t you know?”
“She said so little about it. I only knew that he existed, and that he was American.”
“We don’t know a lot more ourselves,” I said.
“It was you she talked about, you know. Goodness, what a to-do.” She laughed, tentatively. “As though she were studying for a test on you. It was you, day and night, it was like having a teenager in the house again.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Are you sure?”
I waited.
“Yes,” I said.
“She didn’t say anything about it?”
“Not directly.”
“And you?”
“Me?”
“Did you love her?” She corrected herself: “Do you love her?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
“Good.”
“I’m not sure that helps.”
“Or maybe it’s the only thing that helps?”
“Helps with what?”
“Everything.”
It was quiet for a moment and we sat and turned the thought over, and neither of us knew if it was true, or if it was just something one said: that it helps to be loved. NN was breathing evenly and the clock hands moved on undisturbed, second by second, I thought about outer space, that if I were to go now, for example, to the middle of the Milky Way, at the speed of light, it would take twenty years for me to arrive, while for NN, lying in her bed, 30,000 years would pass before I returned. But nobody can travel that fast.
That’s the way I’d think when I was sad.
It was Einstein who made sure we’d never travel too far from each other.
A nurse came into the room, nodded to us and took the readings at the side of the bed, pushed a button, turned a switch, made notes in the margin and disappeared again.
NN’s mother looked at the clock, checked
it against her watch.
“I really should go.”
That was when I realized. It was now or never.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“What’s her name?”
She looked at me as though she didn’t understand the question.
“You don’t know her name? What do you mean? Hasn’t she told you her name?”
“Nobody at the Factory knows it.” I answered. “Apart from Havstein. He might know it. It has something to do with those buses of hers, and not wanting anybody to know who she was, what her name was. So we’ve only ever called her NN.”
“No Name?”
“Exactly.”
She looked at her daughter in the bed. A bird might have flown past the window, a faint smile might have crossed her lips, revealing so much. But it didn’t. Nothing happened.
“Sofia. Her name is Sofia.”
Then she got up, took her jacket from the hook, buttoned up the buttons, turned to me again.
“Do you think she’ll get better?”
I thought about it. I knew what she wanted me to say. But I didn’t say it.
“No,” I said.
I continued visiting Sofia as often as possible, several times a week, but never saw her mother again. Perhaps she stopped coming, perhaps she just chose different times, other days, but our paths never met, never a trace of her when I came in the room.
The woods near the driveway into Hvítanesvegur was somehow never the same after the accident. It just shrank, no matter how much planting we did, and in the end there were hardly any woods there at all, just a cluster of ragged trees that most people drove right past, and the work was reduced to a couple of days a week, if the town council called us at all. Otherwise I sat at home at the Factory and waited, went to Palli’s job with him some days, helped out in various ways, did some welding, carried crates of fish, went in the van with the drivers taking fish into Tórshavn, then took the bus home.
Or I read.
I read Fielding’s Guide to the Caribbean plus the Bahamas.
Seven hundred and ninety pages and not a single photograph.
Havstein’s endless notes, underlinings, and added slips of paper.
Didn’t it ever occur to him that all the information was completely outdated? That Montserrat had been almost completely obliterated by the volcanic eruption in the nineties?
That Baby Doc no longer ruled Haiti?
It didn’t seem to make any difference.
Not really.
Strange how the whole Factory was quieter after Sofia disappeared. Not that it had been noisy before, but we all started to move around more quietly now, trod with lighter feet, avoided making the stairs creak, as though any loud noise might result in catastrophic consequences. We didn’t walk on pins, we walked on memories and we all wore invisible memory-cleansing suits, masks, helmets, and bullet-proof vests, we were beyond each other’s reach, when we talked it was about trivialities, about the weather, the car that needed fixing, a few brief exchanges about Sofia. Nobody suggested cleaning her room out, nobody said what we all knew, what we all thought, that whatever happened, she’d never come back. And that whatever happened, the Factory would never be the same. Neither did anyone say what Havstein must have thought all along, that he’d have problems the day the government contacted him about placing anybody new up here. Because it would be impossible for anybody new to come now. Without our noticing, or thinking about it, the boundaries had slowly glided out, further and further out, until they’d finally disappeared, and somewhere along the way the divide between institution and home had been completely eradicated by the great nothing. There was almost nothing left of the post-psychiatric home I’d come to that previous summer, where Havstein watched over us like a father. It had become nothing more than an oversized yet ordinary home, where we lived on the generosity of a state that still believed it paid for a functioning institution. As to Havstein, he spent most of his time in Múli, left each morning and came home in the evenings, was often tired, said less and less. I began to cook again, dinner when we were all there in the evening. Carl usually came in and helped me put out the plates, silverware, glasses, water, before everybody else came into the kitchen, took their places, ate from their plates, drank from their glasses.
And the days went on as though nothing had happened, rolling indefatigably on until one early afternoon in the middle of June, I was on my knees in the field at the end of Hvítanesvegur, with the sun burning on my neck and my fingers burrowed deep into the wet earth which I was preparing for the day’s tree planting. Herluf and Jógvan had driven in to the council to discuss the vacation schedule for the next month, unlike me they were employed full time by the council, doing a variety of work, tree planting, road work, anything required, and I was alone in the field, apart from the even stream of cars passing by up on the road, and the occasional sheep wandering past on the lookout for better grass. Herluf and Jógvan often went off on errands like this when we worked, so I was used to working alone for long stretches, and when they said they had to take a trip to town I was only too pleased, I could work at my own pace, concentrate on what I was doing, until nothing existed beyond my two hands as they worked in front of me, fingers stretching and closing on the earth before me, the small patch that changed appearance moment by moment, while the big landscape was reduced to a vague backdrop somewhere in the distance. Even the sounds around me entwined themselves into one amorphous hum of cars, birds that sang or only cried wishing they didn’t exist, the wind or the rain in the grass.
Maybe it was because it broke so sharply with the rhythm that I heard the sound of the car so clearly as it stopped on the bend above. Cars didn’t usually stop there. Car doors opened and shut. A trunk opened and shut. My hands were in the wet ground, and I knew who it was before I’d even turned.
Hadn’t I expected him to come sooner or later?
I turned to see Father walking down the slope toward me, a huge suitcase in his hand and a taxi disappearing back toward town. He zigzagged slowly towards me between the waterlogged holes in the field, clinging to his luggage, the only thing he knew that was safe from home.
Good God, how Father hated to travel.
I loved him then, in that moment, as I saw his face with that anxious expression, that worried brow, how much it had cost him to come here, to sit on a plane, to call Havstein to find out where I was, to talk to people until he found somebody who could drive him out here to find me, all the thoughts he’d had about what might happen when the taxi set him down and I was nowhere to be seen.
I stood up with gardening gloves on my hands and watched him as he walked toward me. I didn’t go to meet him. Nor was it necessary. Father crossed the field and the boundaries, one foot before the other, in calm, rhythmic steps as he looked around in all directions.
Yet I think he smiled as he walked.
I’m almost certain of it.
And when he finally reached me, I gave him a hug, suitcase standing on the grass beside us, I hugged him hard and said nothing. Thought then about Sofia, who slept and thought of nothing, about Jørn who I hadn’t spoken to for more than a year, about Helle, about whose whereabouts I knew nothing, nor who she slept with, about all the people I’d hidden from over the years.
I stood with Father before me.
“You came after all,” I said.
“Of course I came. I would have come sooner or later.”
I wanted to say so much, but couldn’t think what.
Looked up at a totally blue sky.
“Good flight?” I asked.
Father shook his head.
“Horrible, I thought we’d never get here.”
“You can take the boat the other way. To Bergen. It takes twenty-four hours, but it’s a nice trip. You like the sea better than the air anyway.”
“True. Mattias? What are you are doing here?”
“I’m planting trees,” I said, knowing that that wasn
’t what he was asking about.
“Why don’t you come home? Mother misses you very much.”
“And you?”
“Me too.”
“Maybe I’ll come home this summer,” I said.
“You promise? Not like last time, when you said you’d missed the flight?”
“I did miss the flight!”
“All right.”
“I’ll come soon. There are more flights during the summertime.”
He wanted me to come with him there and then, in a day or two, for us to take the boat back together, he wanted to be on the safe side, and I explained why I couldn’t leave yet, told him many things, not yet everything, that had happened these last months, since I’d last talked to him, all the things I’d left unsaid in my postcards.
“I, we broke the lease on your apartment. Since we didn’t hear from you.” I could hear from his voice that Father had a bad conscience. “It seemed stupid to keep paying for it, when you weren’t there, don’t you think? So we brought your things back home. Your car’s there too.”
“That’s fine. I was going to move out anyway.”
Tried to make a joke of it, but neither of us found it particularly funny. I picked up the thread again. “I don’t know if I can live back at home again. I might be a little too old for that.”
“We’ve talked about that, and we thought you could live at the cabin, until you find a flat.”
“In Jæren?”
“Yes. I’ve talked with some of the neighbors, and we could probably get you a job at one of the local farms for the summer, if you want.”
Father had thought of everything.
I’d barely thought about anything.
When Herluf and Jógvan came back half an hour later, Father and I were sitting against one of the tree trunks in the field, squinting into the sun and feeling okay, I explained the situation to Herluf, who thought it was just great, he was a soft-hearted guy, and it was fine if I wanted to take the rest of the day off, so I took Father over to the car, put his suitcase in the trunk, drove us through town, and stopped off to do some shopping at the SMS Center, and Father bought a book of knitting patterns, some souvenirs for Mother and a white T-shirt with a picture of a goat and the words I Love the Faroe Isles in blue, he put it on right away, and we got back into the car, drove toward the Factory in Gjógv, me contemplating how to explain my life up there, how things had changed when we’d pulled Carl from the water, after Sofia had been injured and things had darkened at the edges, and why I still hadn’t changed my mind and come home.
Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? Page 31
