Ey∂is became a permanent fixture with me and Carl and in Tórsgøta after that, she’d sleep up in my room several times a week or I’d go back to her new apartment in Var∂agøta, and she’d come up to Gjógv for the weekends to Havstein’s great joy, he was so proud of me, he said, so pleased I’d dared to attach myself to someone again, there were slaps on the back and the red carpet treatment, I explained our situation to Ey∂is, that we weren’t quite normal, she took it surprisingly well, didn’t seem that surprised, and for a moment I was worried it had begun to show, that our faces were papered with the message that we weren’t fit to be left to our own devices. And maybe it was true, maybe we were wrong to hope things would improve day by day, still, we had to get away as soon as possible.
I dreaded talking about the Caribbean with Ey∂is, I’d told her the boat building was just a hobby to keep us occupied, and I’d totally gagged the others from mentioning anything about our real plans, for evacuation, which was a plain impossibility, since it was all we talked about when we were together, and making it taboo led to odd conversations filled with polite phrases about the weather and Faroese tradition and fishing and moving and Danish state support and the charms of puffins and Ólav’s Festival and everything else we’d already discussed to death a year before, so I was relieved one evening when we’d gone to bed early and I saw that Ey∂is had no intention of sleeping, that there were things she wanted to talk about.
“Why haven’t you said anything? Why haven’t any of you told me anything?”
I pretended not to understand.
“Told you what?”
“I know that the institution at Gjógv is being closed down in a couple of months, Mattias.”
“How do you know that?”
“How do I know? Are you serious? Christ, it’s common knowledge. Don’t you read the papers?”
“No,” I answered, as a shock went through me. I didn’t read papers. Barely watched TV any more. Neither did Palli, Anna, or Carl. I knew Havstein did, that he kept himself updated, but he never told us what they wrote.
“There’s a big debate going on in the papers and on TV. There’s a big protest about them closing you down. Didn’t you know, really?”
“No.”
“So what are you planning to do? When it’s over?”
I didn’t quite know how to answer, but she beat me to it.
“Please, don’t just disappear this time, Mattias. Promise to tell me well in advance this time, okay?”
“I’m leaving on April 1,” I said. “In two months’ time.”
“Where to?”
“Grenada. Or Tobago.”
“Where are they?”
“The Caribbean. You have to take a boat. It’s a long way.” She looked confused and shrank into the bed, I had to hunt for her in the sheets before I found her again. Then I told her about the boat, how it was nearing completion down by the harbor and how we were planning to go off unobserved on the first day of April, before anybody discovered it.
“Jesus Christ,” she said when I’d finished.
“Christ, indeed. But it’s not his fault.”
“Whose?”
“Jesus Christ’s.”
“You’re pathetic!”
“I know.”
She used four seconds to decide, before asking:
“Can I come?”
“Do you want to?” I asked, surprised.
“There’s not much to do around here anymore. Besides, I reckon it would be good for the Faroes to get a break from me. Not to mention you.”
“Me?”
“I think it would be good for you, too.”
“A break?”
“No, if I came.”
“You think so?”
“Everybody needs somebody to look after them.”
“Even people who keep themselves to themselves?”
She nodded, her head tilted.
“What did I know, thinking myself able to go alone all the way?”
“Excuse me?”
“You should read Robert Creeley.”
“Should I?”
“Mm.” She smiled and pushed me under the duvet.
And then something happened, as things have a habit of, without your being able to say how or why, when you’ve completely lost perspective, when you thought you’d decided on something quite different, it hits you. I lay there, face pressed into the duvet and mattress as Ey∂is sat yelping and laughing on top of me, and that was when it suddenly struck me there was nothing I wanted more than to take her with me, and the thought that I hadn’t already asked her myself terrified me. Ey∂is. She’d appeared from nowhere and I’d understood nothing. Hadn’t even given it a thought. But she was here now. And this is the moment which I can point to and say, here, right here, in a bed, in a pink room in Tórshavn, spring 2001, I exploded, Mattias, head over heels in love for the first time in fifteen years.
“So can I come?” she asked.
“Yes, you can. But you have to prove you’re crazy first. Otherwise you don’t get a life jacket.”
“I live alone in a cabin without electricity in the summer. Besides I’ve gone through a whole winter in Finland wearing only thin sneakers. And I’m the only girl on the Faroes with such short hair. Feel.”
I felt her head with one hand, rubbing her scalp back and forth.
“No reasonable person would have such short hair in a place like this.”
“No?”
“No, it’s very cold when the wind blows.”
“Yeah, you’re right. That’s insane.”
Which is how Ey∂is joined the team. She moved out of her apartment and in with me and Carl. Havstein, Anna, and Palli joined us a month later, in mid-February, to be nearer the boat and so as to be able to work down at the harbor every day. We’d begun clearing out the Factory, driving anything we’d decided to take aboard down to Tórshavn. Wasn’t much, some books, clothes, boxes, stereo, CDs, and the like. Then one day Havstein asked me and Carl to come up to Gjógv with a van he’d rented. We drove up in the morning and then stood there, in Havstein’s office and stared at the twelve massive filing cabinets.
“Are you serious?” asked Carl.
“Are you really going to take these with you?”
“That’s right.”
“Havstein,” I said, “they weigh a ton. At least. We’ll sink before we reach open sea.”
“Well. They have to come.”
Carl went optimistically toward one of the cabinets, tugged at it. It was heavy. Heavy as hell.
“No fucking way,” I said. “It’s impossible. Forget it.”
“They’re coming with me, or we’re not going.”
“They’re too heavy.”
“Maybe we can take the records out and leave the cabinets,” ventured Carl.
“They’ll still be too heavy.” I knew I was right. “What do you want with them? Are you thinking of starting a practice out there? You could at least tell us why you want to take one and a half tons of extra weight on board, don’t you think?”
“That’s my business.” Havstein stared at me. “I thought you knew that.”
“Still—”
“So, what’s it to be, boys?” said Carl.
He looked at me. I looked at him. We looked at Havstein.
“Come outside with me for a moment,” I said. Havstein followed me into the hallway. “Listen, it’s not just that they weigh a ton, think about their size, there won’t even be space on board! What’s so important about these papers? I’d like to know if I’m going to go down with them.”
“They’re not that heavy,” Havstein objected. “I’ve calculated it in.”
“Why can’t you answer my question?”
“It’s not anybody’s business.”
“Everything that goes on board is everybody’s business!”
“We all have our reasons.”
“Sure. And what are your reasons?”
“Let me ask you a question, Matti
as. Why did you really become a gardener?”
“No, let me ask, why did you really become a psychiatrist, Havstein? Why can’t you just tell it as it is?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Was it because it’s such a great career? So respectable? Didn’t turn out that way, did it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“What went wrong? Something went wrong, didn’t it? Did things go wrong in Denmark? It all went to hell by FedEx, didn’t it? Did you beat up your patients, steal their money, trick them into coming for appointments for years for no good reason? Did you break patient confidentiality? Or was it just that the times you were sober got shorter and shorter? Because that’s what happened, isn’t it? You started drinking, and once you’d started you didn’t stop until the bottle was empty, but of course it was never empty, because there’s always a store, isn’t there, always a bar, always somewhere to go—”
“What are you talking about?”
“It wasn’t actually your idea to turn the old factory into the Factory was it? Your father didn’t throw the money in, did he? The idea came from somewhere else, directly from the state, you were put up here, out of sight, out of mind, in a place where you could do minimum harm, because you were already damaged goods before you moved back to the Faroes, they couldn’t have you in town any longer, couldn’t have you in the office down there with you being so unstable. But why didn’t they just fire you? Why didn’t they just leave you to it, instead of putting you up here with your own institution to run? Why was it so dangerous to let you go? Was it something you’d done? Something you said?”
“My grandfather—”
“Okay. So you stop drinking, you clean up your act and move here like a man in exile, and patients come, patients go, but nobody notices anything, nobody notices that you’ve lost control, that you run your practice and treatment by whim instead of by the textbook, before you finally stop treating anybody at all, for fear they might actually recover and leave you, because that’s what it boils down to, isn’t it? You’re frightened of being alone. But nobody knows that, not the people who live here, not the people who finance your life, and most of all, not the people who pay for the archive that just grows and grows in volume, because they don’t even know about it, do they, we’re the only ones who know you have these files, and we don’t even know anything really, because it’s all so fucking secret, and that’s probably best. Since it’s illegal for you to keep them, isn’t it, you could be thrown in fucking jail for it, you’ve got confidential papers there, papers that have nothing to do with any patients you may or may not have, papers you have no good medical reason to have, papers you’ve collected or stolen or bought from God knows where, for God knows what reason! Don’t you understand, it’s you that’s lost control, Havstein, you put that control out to sea years ago.” I spat the words out at him, filled with the disappointment that he’d lied to us, or worse, he hadn’t even lied, he’d said nothing, all those little episodes that I’d thought he’d instigated because he had some insight, because they were part of a bigger plan, not just pure coincidence or impulse, and as I stood there, tears of rage rising, I thought how Sofia might have been alive if he hadn’t kept her there, if he’d sent her back to Tórshavn or Copenhagen, although I also knew that wasn’t really true, she’d wouldn’t have survived there either, and this thought shut me up, I stood there glaring at him, right at him, impossible to second-guess what he’d say.
“Are you finished?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then we can be done with this lunacy.”
“Only you can do that.”
“Who have you been talking to?”
“You know I’m not going to tell you that.”
Silence. Like after a bombing raid. My ears were whistling, I heard a discreet, embarrassed cough from Carl inside the office. Ignored it. I looked at Havstein. Waiting expectantly. The seconds passed.
“Okay. Grandfather was the reason for my becoming a psychiatrist,” he began. “He owned several factories here and was a member of the Faroese Parliament too. And he had several fishing boats with over a hundred fishermen on his payroll. He was one of the wealthiest men in Tórshavn toward the end of the 1930s. He was well liked, a fair-minded man, generous to his employees, he helped them with money to buy houses, held big parties for their families several times a year. But when the war came, he went into a panic, like so many. The British occupied the Faroes to secure the North Atlantic shipping routes and to stop the islands from falling into German hands like Denmark, and he was genuinely frightened for his fishermen, for his boats, he started to refuse to let them out, terrified they’d be fired at and sunk, or that they’d run into submarines or mines or whatever else he imagined lurked under the waves, in Grandfather’s opinion the best option was to stay on land, stay at home and not go out, and he didn’t want the German patrol boats getting ideas either about Faroese vessels and the need to take these little islands. So they stayed on land, making an entire country invisible, and Grandfather held a powerful and protective economic hand over his employees. But the money couldn’t last, not in the long run, he watched it dwindle, and it was then things went seriously downhill. That was when Grandfather had an idea.”
Havstein accompanied his story with careful gestures, as though he was frightened big movements might bring him out of it, that he’d forget the order of things. I think I concentrated more on his hands than on what he was saying. I looked down the hallway, the door to Sofia’s room, it was locked now. The key purposely broken in the lock. And Havstein went on.
“Grandfather got it into his head to invest in a railway instead, a railway was just what the country needed, according to him, it would make transportation easier, faster, it would turn the Faroe Islands into an industrial nation and replace the fishing industry. Imagine! A railway on the Faroes! A country of mountains and islands! With barely ten miles from North to South?”
This last statement hung in the air as a question, an invitation for me to comment on his grandfather’s idiocy or lack of common sense. But I couldn’t share Havstein’s passion, I held my tongue and wondered when it would be suitable to interrupt him and his life story.
“To begin with, nobody believed him, they just let him talk. But when they realized he was serious, they got worried. But Grandfather plowed on, had plans drawn up for where the tracks should go, applied for patents and was refused but remained undeterred, compared various types of sleeper cars and so on, and in the fall of 1942, when the first railway workers came ashore at Tórshavn and unloaded vast amounts of equipment, when the first four hundred feet of railway were laid near Bláberg and Grandfather paraded up and down the town in a train driver’s uniform, he was taken discreetly aside, they tried to talk sense into him, but it just made him furious, frustrated, there had to be a railway, surely everybody must understand that, but the problem was nobody did, and they took grandfather away, up to the hospital. And he wasn’t allowed out again until he died, twelve years later, and during all that time he didn’t once go beyond the exercise yard in the back. Grandfather became the most famous psychiatric patient on the Faroes, kids wanted to see him when they visited the hospital, they flocked under his window hoping to catch a glimpse of the madman, stories abounded, it was said he’d always been mad, that he’d never taken care of his factories, his boats, his fishermen, but that wasn’t true, they’d meant everything to Grandfather, before he’d come up with the railway idea at least. But it was too late to do anything by then, he grew more and more crazy in the hospital and his treatment got more and more heavy-handed. In embarrassed silence he was eased out of his position in Parliament that had, during its wartime separation from Denmark, acquired new legislative powers and grown in self-importance. Grandfather lay strapped to his bed when the war was over, lay strapped down on the spring day of 1948 when the Faroes were granted self-governance and recognized as an autonomous province of Denmark, he lay st
rapped down until the day he died and nothing but rumors were left. Problem was, nothing hangs around longer than a rumor, and life only got harder for my grandmother afterward, she and the children kept as low a profile as possible, Father took a job on a fishing boat, kept himself to himself, settled in Tórshavn without too much fuss, as did his sisters, got themselves modest jobs in filleting factories and as seamstresses. Unfortunately the whole family was marked now, and when Father went into a depression as an adult, the family packed him quietly off to Switzerland, where he stayed for three months so nobody would know. But nothing remains secret for long, somebody always reveals the password at the most inconvenient time, so when I was born Argus’s eye was upon me from the first, I was held under constant observation for fear I might have mental problems. But I didn’t. I was as healthy as a horse. And when I told my parents I intended to study psychiatry, they almost fell over with delight. Father saw it as the chance to bring an end to the rumors that still dogged our family, I’d show them, take the bull by the horns, by that time he’d managed to get himself elected as a representative of the government through sheer perseverance and back door politics, and had eventually acquired a few friends there who had his best interests at heart.”
I couldn’t hold back anymore. I interrupted:
“I asked you about the archive, didn’t I?”
Part of me was suddenly worried he might stop half way, offended. But he didn’t. His gestures grew larger, he was determined to get to the end.
“No, you didn’t just ask about the archive. You asked about everything, Mattias. But it’s coming, it’s coming. Be patient. It all hangs together. Anyway, I went to Copenhagen, studied psychiatry, got a job, and things went well, it was great. Father sent me tons of letters, asking me how things went, and my answers were always the same, things are fine, going well, and for ages things did go fine, in fact they went okay until one day in March 1979 when came into my office. That day my life changed. In just minutes my life, as I knew it, was over forever. And I knew it the moment it happened. I’d been on leave for a couple of days, a little break to regroup after getting news that one of my patients, with whom I’d become very involved, had taken her own life just days after I’d recommended she be discharged from the hospital, and I was sitting there in front of a pile of papers that had amassed while I’d been away, when he came in, unannounced. He didn’t have an appointment that day. He was forty-eight hours early. But there he was. I’d been seeing on a weekly basis for a couple of months, he was suffering increasingly from insomnia and panic attacks. I’d explained in depth what I felt his problem was and I’d asked him to keep a diary of his episodes, their duration, the symptoms and their strength. He’d had some pills. I was convinced we were making progress. So there he sat, in my office, without any appointment. He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want me to say anything. When I opened my mouth he held up his hand, asked me to be quiet. So we sat there. Ten minutes. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. I looked at the clock, I had other patients waiting outside, a line growing, I imagined them sitting there restless, nervous in the imitation leather seats out in the corridor, beneath optimistic pictures of landscapes in soft colors, wondering why I didn’t come to call them in. So in the end I gave up waiting for him to say anything, I got up slowly, went around the table and over to him, rested a hand on his shoulder, and that was when he did it, I didn’t have a chance to react. He was too fast. stuck a hand inside his jacket and in the next second he’d pulled a revolver out, stuck the barrel in his mouth, and pulled the trigger, right there in the chair where he sat, in my office. And I know it’s weird, but I don’t even remember the shot making any noise. All I remember is the wet sound of his head as he tumbled out of the chair and hit the floor in front of me, he lay on the floor and I stood at his side for the few seconds it took for a nurse to come storming in, mouth open and hands limp at her side. That’s how I remember it. Her hands hanging uselessly at her side. Then I walked calmly over to my desk, got my jacket, walked past her and through the waiting room without even looking at the other patients, without saying a word, I left the building, walked into town and then disappeared, for days. I didn’t call in sick, I told nobody anything. I wandered calmly around Copenhagen for days, and in the evenings I sat in a restaurant or bar trying to work out why he’d done it, just at the moment of my touching him. I thought how he’d still have been alive if I hadn’t stood up, if I’d just stayed in my chair, if I hadn’t rested a hand on his shoulder. After nearly a week I turned up at work again, nobody asked where I’d been, nobody reprimanded me for walking out, they were empathy personified, when they talked to me they folded their hands and tilted their heads, spoke gentle words of caring. I continued having a few beers or drinks after work, in the hope that it would stop me from mulling over what had caused two of my patients to take their own lives in such a short space of time, when, to my eyes at least, they’d been on the road to recovery, but it was no use, and I grew frightened of going into work, frightened it might happen again. I demanded my patients take off their jackets before sitting down, paid more attention to what they were doing with their hands than what they said. In the end I grew so fearful that I’d take a good, stiff drink for courage before I even walked into my office in the morning and saw my first patient. And it’s impossible to go on like that. In the long run. I took longer and longer periods of sick leave and stayed at home, behind closed doors, talking only to Maria, who I’ve already told you about. I was living with her at the time, she saw me getting worse, wanted me to see a psychiatrist myself, but I didn’t want to, how would it look to Father, a psychiatrist seeking help from a psychiatrist, it would have destroyed him utterly, just when he’d thought the family name was being restored. Anyway, by December, I was exhausted, there wasn’t a day my head felt clear, I waded about in a fog, even though I’d started working a little again, and it was on one of those days I stumbled into the bookstore where I bought Fielding’s Guide to the Caribbean, and it was shortly after that when Maria left, it was in early January 1981 that I called Father to tell him I had problems. Father came as quickly as he could to Copenhagen, stayed with me for a few months while I pulled myself together, stuffed the corks back into their bottles. It was Father who wanted me to come back home, when I got better, back to the Faroes, and so that’s what I did, I came back that summer, stayed in, mostly, took some auxiliary nights at the hospital until one day Father came home with an offer. The council had agreed to build two homes for psychiatric patients who were making the transition into ordinary life, or people so institutionalized that they’d never be able to live alone, would I like the job of leading the project? He thought it could be organized, that he could get the committee to agree, and surprisingly enough I had excellent references from Copenhagen. Father thought it would be good for me, to start small, taking it easy, working confidence up, in myself and my patients, I’m not quite sure which he was hinting at most. So I said yes. Took the job. And this is where the archives come in, the files. The idea came to me in 1983, I’d just finished a group session that morning when it dawned on me that there might be, hypothetically at least, connections we’d never made, a kind of psychiatric Rubik’s cube waiting to be solved, and that if we solved it, found the combination, we might be in a position to take better care of people. To help them.”
Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? Page 43
