Headache. Like the fall of the Roman Empire. I lay out to dry on deck, gazing at a leaden sky. The boat was rocking on the water and Palli stood beside me on cautious sea legs, stacking crates of food that Anna was taking below decks, while Carl secured the lifeboat astern and Havstein talked on his cell phone, fast, excitedly, I only caught fragments, because of the birds, I think, making such a racket, no manners at all. Far above, the clouds made zigzags across the sky, braiding themselves into each other, and at the other end of the harbor lay the Smyril Lines Ferry, filling its car decks, allowing its passengers aboard. Perhaps it was sunny or raining, I’d given up guessing. Then a face leaned over me, blocking my view.
“Are you awake?” asked Ey∂is. “We’re ready in a minute.”
“What happened?”
“You ruined everything for the band, Mattias. You lashed out. They had to throw you out. But we came and got you. I don’t think you should go back there for a while. But you’re a great singer. I never heard anything so beautiful.”
I gave an answer, wasn’t easy to hear what I said. I was given a kiss and nothing more was said.
“Here,” she said, throwing a green poncho in my lap. “Havstein wants us all to be wearing these when we leave.” Then she left and the gulls flew away. I lifted myself to a half-seated position, turned around to look for Havstein, but couldn’t see him any more, must have gone below decks to organize something or other, which was when it suddenly occurred to me that none of this would have happened in the last year if I hadn’t turned up on the Faroes that day. Gjógv wouldn’t have been discovered, the authorities wouldn’t have figured out that Havstein was taking in literally anyone just to fill the empty rooms in the Factory, or the empty space within himself, and so found a reason to close the whole shebang down, Carl would have perished at sea as he was destined, Sofia would have survived, she might even have gone to Copenhagen one day, Jørn wouldn’t have lost a friend, I wouldn’t have lost my footing so completely, we wouldn’t have built the boat, Ey∂is wouldn’t have been dragged into all sorts of things I couldn’t grasp the significance of, and we’d never have been seen, never discovered. It was as simple as that. So long as I was involved, it would go on like that. It wouldn’t change.
There was nothing I could do about it.
I weighed my possibilities.
Weighed them this way and that, at lightning speed.
And then I watched it happen. I saw myself get up. Stand on deck. Take my rain jacket off.
I saw myself running.
I watched it in that moment, I ran, ran off the boat, down onto the quay, past Sofus who didn’t understand what was happening, but who looked upset, I ran across the quay and I heard Havstein shouting and I heard Carl shouting and I heard Ey∂is shouting, but I didn’t hear a word, I just ran, ran faster than ever before, the Smyril Line ferry sounded its horn and the crew were about to cast off their moorings and I ran toward the ferry, I had no bags, I just ran as hard as I could without turning back, gaze fixed straight ahead, and I ran past the unloaded containers along the quay, ran through the parking lot, and with every step I took, I was more certain I knew what I was doing, and I was cutting it close, I raced up the passenger bridge, the steward had already gone, the doors were already closed and I banged on them hard, a face stared back at me uncomprehendingly from inside the porthole, opened the door carefully and I disappeared inside, past the face, and I came on deck as the ferry left the quay, started its motor and began stealing out of the harbor, pointed in the direction of the Shetlands and Bergen, and down there in the harbor our sailboat already looked tiny, but I could still distinguish them from each other: Havstein at the rudder, Carl in the bow, Ey∂is, Palli, Anna, and they’d cast off their moorings too, were moving out of the harbor, I watched them raise their sail, catch the wind, pick up speed westward as I turned, went down to the bar, sat in a chair and waited for the band to start playing or for nothing in the world to happen.
But that wasn’t what happened.
That wasn’t what I did, of course.
Not this time.
For once I wasn’t about to go off.
No way.
From now on I’d take responsibility for those around me.
I got to my feet, put my magnolia overalls on and zipped myself in, put the green poncho on so we looked completely alike, all of us, like sea grasses, appropriate, since when it came to sailing the seas we were all green, with no idea about sailing, apart from Carl, who again thought it best to find the Gulf Stream so we’d turn up where we wanted sooner or later, it was, in his opinion, no more complicated than that, though to be on the safe side he’d gotten us some good navigational maps, compasses, gyroscopes, VHF, GPS, and God knows what else, as well as a stack of manuals so we could read how to use all of these on the way, there’d be time enough for that, just us and the wind, an unbalanced relationship of dependency.
And then they came. Just minutes before we left, Sofus, Óli, and Selma. They came to check that everything was okay, and that we had everything we needed. And we did. Nothing was missing, everything was in place, and as Havstein and Palli cast off our moorings and let the boat slip past the enormous passenger ferry Norröna and through the harbor and as I clung to Ey∂is at the back of the boat and waved, Óli and his family followed us out in their new wooden sailboat, until we were well past the breakers and had reached that line in the water where the waves grow higher and the open sea begins, then they turned, went back to the harbor with Sofus pounding on the ship’s bell so it rang out over the whole town and for a moment, everybody stopped, dropped what they were doing and tried to locate the sound, turning their heads to work out where it came from, but that was only something I imagined, since in truth hardly anyone saw us leave and we disappeared as soundlessly, as undramatically as we had turned up, and a couple of hours later, when I’d crept over the deck, terrified, and helped Palli and Carl hoist the sails, the Faroe Islands were reduced to a parenthesis in the sea and we were gone.
LONG GONE BEFORE DAYLIGHT
The moon is moving away from the earth and there’s nothing you can do about it. It is distancing itself soundlessly, four centimeters per year. It is said that the moon once orbited the earth at a distance of only forty thousand kilometers. Now it is an average of 384,000 kilometers from us. And the days are longer. It’s true. The moon is responsible for the tides, and the friction of the tide holds the rotation of the earth back. By around 0.023 milliseconds a year. In billions of years the moon’s orbit will almost be the same as the earth’s, the days will be 11,000 hours long and it will look as though the moon is still in the sky over one part of the world, but much farther away, until one day it can no longer be seen. And we disappear like this too, I look at old photographs of myself that Mother took, but they aren’t me, I have gone long ago. Cells have died and renewed themselves, hair has been cut, teeth have fallen out and been replaced with new ones. I am not the person you knew. I sleep eight hours each night. I blink 17,000 times. I live large parts of my life behind closed eyes.
People didn’t arrive on the moon first. That’s just something you believe. Sound arrived first, in January 1946, American defense set up a three kilowatt transmitter, sent radio signals up to the moon and took readings of the echoes. And ten years before Buzz Aldrin became a name fleetingly remembered, the Soviet Union’s Luna 2 landed beside the Mare Imbrium, close to the Archimedes crater. With nobody on board. The probe had two small balls containing the insignia of the Soviet military. The intention was to spread these across the moon’s surface, leaving behind an indelible sign of life, of intelligence, of raw power, Lord knows. But all that was left behind was a little crater, almost impossible to spot amongst the others. Luna 2 hit the moon’s surface at ten thousand kilometers per hour. No brakes can cope with that. But it was, I think, an attempt at least, and it worked, in its way, and if nothing else it forced the USSR and the USA to abandon plans to send nuclear rockets to the moon’s surface so the explo
sion could be watched from earth, indisputable proof of who’d got there first, in the days when that mattered.
But the moon is still hanging there. Only 380,000 km from here. Nobody goes there anymore, after the Apollo Program they forgot about the whole place. By the time the twelfth person returned to the Landing Module on December 19, 1972, people were already looking for new worlds, new planets, preparing to go to Mars.
The moon itself says nothing. It never asked to be visited anyway.
The moon holds its tongue.
I won’t tell you much about Grenada. Just the most important things, things that come to me now, that haven’t merged into other memories, as practically everything that happened to us in those years did, I lost track in the end, unable to point to any particular moment and say, it happened then, that’s when it happened, the years knitted into one another and days, events or their absence grew indistinguishable. When I think of Grenada, I do so with a rare lightness. During those years as far as I remember the problems were never bigger than we could tackle, they didn’t gather momentum, didn’t assault us and dump us helpless on the ground.
It’s said that when Christopher Columbus discovered Grenada on August 15, 1498, he merely threw a disgruntled glance at it and named it Conception before sailing on, not even bothering to go ashore, in his eyes it was probably just another island in an endless string of islands that spread southward, a fistful of rocks in the Caribbean. A little island barely twenty-two miles long and eleven miles wide, at most, a quarter of the size of the Faroe Islands together, but with double the population. And like the Faroes, this is both a rainy and autonomous land under a protective hand, the Queen of England is Granada’s monarch, I’m not sure if she’s even been there, whether she ever sat hunched over a map looking for the minuscule island that barely anybody can place on a map let alone goes to, transported unknowingly there by some cruise ship, Norwegian owned perhaps, the Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines perhaps, swimming on the beautiful beaches by the Grand Anse or in St. George’s, or embarking on a three or four hour hike in the jungle, at the foot of the mountains, the Grand Etang forest, then swiftly back to the boat, getting back on board and rushing to the cabin, washing off the dirt, changing into a smoking jacket before the anchor is raised, the ship sails on and dinner is served in the mirrored dining hall to the accompaniment of easily digested lobby music served up by the ship’s pianist, Luther, who’s from the Ukraine, not that anybody cares, but he has his paperwork in order, does as he’s told, never goes ashore, stays on deck and stares at the wall, disinterested, like Columbus, until the passengers are back on board and the only trace they leave behind is the wake in the ocean.
It took us over three weeks to get here, and I was seasick and soaked every nautical mile, every inch of water we passed through, I hung hopeless, useless over the railings, lay clinging to the very deck, but we crossed the ocean in a homemade sailboat, and when, early one morning, we’d anchored in St. George’s harbor, moored the boat and come in to land at the quay, sleep still in our eyes, as we set our first footprints in the sand, a new era began, and these were the loveliest times, years you’d want to frame and send to friends if you could, and it would be nine years, almost to the day, before we left the islands again, for good, before we left the country, before I, Ey∂is, and our son Jákup boarded the last evening bus to the airport at Point Salines, fastened our seat belts, and listened attentively to the safety instructions. And minutes later the plane lifted over the islands, over the Caribbean and flew us to Venezuela, and further south to Rio, and from there to Amsterdam, Oslo and finally Stavanger, where we put down our luggage for good, and bought an apartment before the month was out, slid into the town again, slid into the rooms, into the bad weather and average days, as though I’d never been away.
Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? Page 45
