The Brahmadells

by Jóanes Nielsen

  His departure, however, was not without a price. Frú Løbner was forced to surrender the privileges that came with being the country’s Frúa. She moved out of the Amtmand’s House and she lost her dignified seat at church. But most painful of all was that Emilius took little Ludda with him to Copenhagen.

  That sorrow followed her her entire life.

  Frú and Frúgvin Løbner

  FRÚ AND FRÚGVIN Løbner, the mother-daughter pair, were a permanent city feature and every afternoon they could be seen walking down Laðabrekka and crossing the bridge toward Tórshavn. Sometimes they also made their way down to the old Nevtolsbrúgv, disappeared into Sandskot Alley, and then from Gongin they headed up Klokkaragøta and emerged onto Bringsnagøta.

  Most often, though, their path followed the Havnará, and Henrietta had often remarked to her mother—in truth, she had repeated it hundreds of times over, sometimes while wagging a finger—that a city without a real river was worthless. London had the Thames, the Donau flowed through both Vienna and Budapest, and every morning ferries loaded with vegetables, fruits, and meat docked along the riverbanks in the French capital. The Havnará, of course, was smaller and in every way insignificant on the great world map. Nonetheless, the stream was useful for cooking and washing, and it fulfilled its civic duty with the same dignity as the much larger rivers.

  Every day the women walked to Stóradamm to fetch water for their households, and in good weather they washed their clothes on the scoured rocks below the pool. Frú Løbner always bid them good morning and her daughter often said: “Good Lord, Mother, you can hardly walk you’re so busy greeting people. One day you’re going to trip and then who will roast fricadelles at Quillinsgarður?” The mother patted her daughter’s hand, saying that they were both among the luckiest inhabitants in the Danish kingdom.

  Along the Havnerá, whose clear water ripples through the city, are gardens. These gardens are unusually attractive and well-kept. You especially notice the slender willows and golden chains, which during the summer and sometimes into the fall bow over the river, so that the large, yellow flower bunches brush and float on the water’s surface.

  This agreeable description is owed to the nostalgic Hanus Andreassen, and it was this very sight that met the Løbner pair every summer morning. Frú Løbner had planted some of those gold chains herself during her years as Amtmand’s wife, and each tree had some small history, which Henrietta of course knew inside and out.

  Emilius loved pot-roasted chicken, or coq au vin, as he delightedly called the dish. They planted their first gold chain the same year they got their hen house.

  Of course, most people tended to dislike chicken; the meat was white and not unlike human flesh. Were it not for their eggs, none of these strange birds, which God has punished with flightlessness, would have made their way to the country.

  The reference to human flesh had to do with the Dutch frigate Edvin van der Sar, which had been dashed against the cliffs by Mjóvanes on Suðuroy in 1743. Frú Løbner lamented that she was related to the Syðrugøtu Cannibal, as she called Líggja’s farmer. He made cut halibut bait from the washed-up Dutch sailors, and it was rumored he had skinned one or two bodies and kept the salted meat in barrels. In any case, apparently the meat was both unusually white and just as dark as chicken.

  Every time her mother brought up chickens, Henrietta asked why God was so cruel as to deny them flight. And her mother answered, as she had so often before, that maybe it was not a matter of punishment. Maybe when God created man on the sixth day, there was a little bit of white material left over, and from that clump he made a chicken and a rooster. Unfortunately, though, there was only enough material for two incomplete hopp-hopp birds.

  Frú Løbner also knew that people on Mykines considered chickens to be foul-weather birds. In 1761 the Stovu farmer got a few hens from the cook aboard the French warship Fleurs de Lys. The ship had participated in the great American war and on the way home to France they bought a couple of oxen and some mutton from the Mykiners. And weather that summer and fall was the worst, since the Katla volcano had rained black ash over the islands. Once a northeaster brought a tornado roaring through town, and the Gallic poultry were swept up into the whirlwind, the hens left to live out their short and cheerless lives on Víkini.

  When they reached the old secondary school, Frú and Frúgvin Løbner followed the river down toward Vágsbotnur, where they sat and rested on a piece of driftwood beneath Toku-Sigvald’s boathouse before heading home.

  Frú Løbner, who had once been a large and stately woman, had grown hunched over the years, and had lost most of her hair. The bones of her forehead and skull jutted out, and her aged skin hung in bags beneath her chin and cheekbones. Sharp eyes glinted beneath her red-rimmed and lashless eyelids. Her teeth, however, were intact, and she thanked God for that. At home she always wore a headscarf, but when she walked through the city with her daughter, she usually wore a bonnet, which she decorated with a cotton rose or perhaps with a fine feather.

  Courtly Love

  THEN CAME THE day when Frú Løbner realized that her beloved child and the director’s son were more than friends.

  The old woman tried to hinder the relationship, but her time as sole authority over her daughter had passed. Henrietta placed a forefinger against her mother’s lips and, with a smile, said: shhh, Mama.

  It was also what she did at Føroya Amts Bókasavni, Tórshavn’s library, when half-drunk, foreign fishermen tumbled through the door, or when that sly sneak Skeggin Pól said that he had come to Tórshavn to woo so fair a bride to his rich farmland. Then she also said shhh, and she did it with such sweetness that the dwarf from Leynar sighed audibly.

  Henrietta and Napoleon first met at the library, but the better part of a year passed before the acquaintanceship took a more serious turn. It also felt a little strange to be addressed as Frúgvin Løbner. It sounded so formal, almost ludicrous, but nonetheless it suited Henrietta. She admired the courtly form of address, which she recognized from literature, mostly from Walter Scott’s historical novels, but also from the heart-gripping stories about the knight Don Quixote.

  Of course, after they had gotten to know each other better, Henrietta recognized the few drops of sarcasm that pervaded Pole’s courtly form of address. Pole, for example, thought that youth and the first years of manhood were romance’s rehearsal years. Not before a man or woman was over 35 or 40 could one speak of real love. Only then did they realize that bodily fluids were the waters on which love’s hopeful ships sailed their rough seas, struck bottom, and more often than not, smashed apart and sank. Mature love’s job was to seek more mild, sun-warmed waters, and that task could only be accomplished by adults.

  The Officer, the Godfather, and More on Courtly Love

  HENRIETTA HAD ONLY been with one man besides Pole, and that was many years ago. It was the evening of Amtmand Pløyen’s farewell feast. Henrietta was twenty-two years old and had danced with an officer from one of the warships anchored in the bay. Candles shone from the small glass containers hanging throughout the Amtmand’s garden; they had danced several dances, and when her mother left for home, Henrietta agreed to take a stroll with the courteous gentleman.

  They kissed and she enjoyed his warm caresses. She allowed him to touch her breasts, and she shivered with pleasure when he kissed and nibbled along the curve of her neck. He said he was a hot bull-seal and longed to swim into her cave. Henrietta was charmed by the beautiful words. The only problem was, she dared not open the cave.

  When he unbuttoned his pants, she did as he asked, she took his hard erection between her fingers. His member was large and warm as newly baked bread. She took him in both hands and felt the veins pulsing against her fingertips. It smelled rather like shellfish, and she felt the urge to touch it with her tongue, but did not dare. Soon the blue veins began to pulse, she saw a hole open in the red head, and semen shot out onto her wrist and embroidered sleeves. The discharge was thick as cream, and in the cream
there was a faint bluish stripe. But the officer was not finished, the semen kept welling out of him. He rode her hands like a dog, his knees buckled more and more, and his neck sank deep between his shoulders.

  Afterward he begged her shamefaced to excuse his importunate desire. He dried her wrist and sleeve with a pocket handkerchief, saying that all the months at sea were simply unbearable.

  With a polite nod, Henrietta accepted his apology, but the magic of the stroll had disappeared, and she simply wanted to go home.

  No man had touched her body since that time. She had touched herself of course, during some periods quite a bit. But she liked walking barefoot in the garden, and when possible letting the wind touch her bare skin, and if having the wind caress her breasts qualified as a sex life, then her great lover had been the garden wind. She enjoyed washing the dirt from her toes and toenails at the river’s edge, and she could sit for long periods of time watching her feet in the clear water. Foam pearls gathered on her calves, her light hair glistened, and her veins looked like thin blue lines beneath the skin. In the pool beneath Svartifossur, and also out on Sandá, she had ventured a couple of times to lift her skirts up around her waist and let the cool water embrace her underside, but only after she was sure no one was around.

  No, that was not true. One other man had touched her.

  Almost two years after her stroll with the officer, her mother sent her to Michael Müller’s house on Undir Kjallara with two broiled guillemots. He had grown old and feeble, and when his goddaughter knocked, he was looking across the bay through the porthole he had built in the gable.

  Michael was an exceptionally ugly man, and one time Jákup Nolsøe told about a ship he had seized, about how the sailers immediately surrendered because they thought it was the Devil himself come aboard.

  Henrietta was convinced that his ugliness lay in the incongruity between his eyes and his mouth. His unusually large, brown eyes came down to his cheeks, and if his mouth had been equally large, people would probably have assumed he was of negro or Jewish origin. That was not so uncommon, at least not abroad. However, Michael’s mouth was tiny, no bigger than a bunghole on a small barrel, and his lips were also narrow.

  Now he talked exclusively about dying, said he probably would not last the year, and that he had already spoken to Ludda-Kristjan about building him a coffin. He had always loved life. His childhood in Hvalba and certainly his life at sea. He shrugged, and said Henrietta should recall he had sailed as far away as China for silk and tea, and that in the great city of Canton it was foretold to him he would see a marvelous sight before he died.

  He cocked his head. His huge eyes glinted heatedly as he asked his goddaughter if she would be benevolent enough to fulfill his last wish.

  Henrietta sensed immediately it concerned something special, and she asked what his last wish was.

  Michael answered he would like to see her rosebud. He had no other wish on this earth than to be allowed to see the petals of her glory.

  And the words were direct. It was as if the old skipper had readied himself for his final journey and so had no reason to mince his words. If luck were with him, he would be gratified; were his wish denied, then the hell with it.

  For a split second Henrietta was profoundly confused and wanted only to toss the broiled guillemots to the floor and run. But as she looked at the old man, she was forced to shake her head, and with a smile she simply said: oh, gubbi, gubbi.

  She sat on the bench before the fire, bent over, grabbed her skirt hems and pulled them, one after the other, over her shapely thighs. Like other Faroese women in the 1840s, she had no undergarments, and when she had hiked the last skirt up to her stomach, she realized her hands were trembling slightly.

  Michael slowly crossed the floor. Rheumatism plagued him so that he could hardly walk, and he more or less skidded to the bench. He braced his elbows against her knees and polished his glasses on one of her skirts.

  Oh, how divine, oh how divine! he kept repeating while he enjoyed the sight. He was allowed to graze it with his hand. At that he closed his eyes and his whole body shook. He crept closer to the bench, pressed his bearded cheek against her tuft and inhaled, as if trying to fathom in which gardens she had walked.

  That was all he could take. The old man began to cry. He said that the Chinese seer had been right, now he had seen everything he had to see in this life, and he was ready to depart.

  When his goddaughter felt tears running down into her bushy crevice, she patted him on the head and said, that was enough, now he should go ahead and eat his guillemots.

  Yet ever since she and Pole had started talking, she had begun looking at herself in the mirror. It was not something she had often done before.

  Her forehead and cheekbones came from the Kjelnes folk, but her narrow chin and nose were her father’s. Her lips were also narrow, and the corners of her mouth ended in a small smile. Or was she deceiving herself? Maybe it was just the first lines of spinsterhood that received the dubious honor of being dubbed a smile?

  Some nights, when she heard her mother rummaging about in her own room, Henrietta took off her nightgown. And the peculiar thing that sometimes happened was that when she looked at her breasts in the mirror it was like looking at herself through a strange woman’s eyes. She desired her reflection, that was what was so odd, and what set her blood aflame. The bristling nipple looked like the firm stamen of the mayweed growing in the gravel by the beach, and the thought of suckling the captivating nipples on herself or another woman made her dizzy.

  She also explored the dark and dense growth of hair around her sex, and she liked the way she smelled. She imagined a lighter-skinned woman would have a milder scent, whereas dark-haired women had the powerful, sharp scent of the Valkyries as they tended to Valhalla’s fallen warriors.

  She also loved to coat herself in her own scent and lick her fingers afterward, just like when eating blubber or fermented cod head. She dreamed about being able to taste herself, or doing the same to another woman.

  Desire terrified her. Her hunger was every bit as cannibalistic as her relative’s had been when he ate that salted Dutch flesh. She spread her buttocks toward the curtains, shamelessly begging the underwordly to creep in from the great dark and ride her. If they wanted, they could also chew on her intestines, chew them like burdock leaves dipped in cream and sugar.

  These attacks overwhelmed her after she and Pole started talking.

  Clandestine Love. Continuation of Courtly Love

  ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON Pole came into the library and asked if Frúgvin Løbner would be so good as to find him Ode to a Nightingale by Keats.

  It was librarian Jens Davidsen who had asked Henrietta to keep the library open and to run it on Saturdays. She was one of the children whom he had taught to read and write in the thirties, and since he was so overburdened with other work he asked her to take on the responsibility. The library job was an unpaid volunteer position. Henrietta lit the stove, emptied the spittoons and ash trays, and kept the reading room clean and tidy. It was her mother who in 1928 had donated the plot of land upon which Farøya Amts Bóksavn was built, and so it naturally fell to her to mind the collection.

  In the 1860s the number of books reached over 5,000. Most of them were donations from libraries in neighboring countries, but also from private sources, both in the Faroes and abroad. Due to the limited space, several hundred books were stacked in boxes up in the attic, while the rest were arranged on shelves according to subject: world history, literary history, theology, astronomy, and so on. Literature took up the most space; Henrietta knew this section by heart.

  She told Pole that the library did not own a copy of Ode to a Nightingale, which was the truth, but she had a book of Keats’s poetry and he could borrow her copy. However—she added this softly—if Pole liked she would copy the poem out for him. He thanked her. He could not imagine a more beautiful gift than Ode to a Nightingale written in her own hand.

  Next Saturday Pole
was again at the library. He smelled freshly of shaving lotion, and his near exuberance revealed he had been looking forward to this moment.

  He said that one evening this last week he had passed by Quillinsgarður and had seen a lovely nymph seated next to a petroleum lamp and writing. Rather teasingly, Henrietta asked why he had not simply come inside, and Pole sighed, saying that had he not been Nólsoyar-Páll’s nephew and his father’s son, he could not have resisted knocking on the window.

  “The dead have too much power,” Henrietta replied, and as she said it, she felt the blood rising to her cheeks.

  “That’s poetry,” Pole whispered. Suddenly, he found himself admitting that he had stopped outside of Quillinsgarður many times; in fact, long before he left for Tvøroyri in ’52, he had stopped on Laðabrekka and listened while she played piano in the living room.

  And Pole was not the only one who paused on Laðabrekka to listen while she played. Other Tórshavnars stopped too, and for a time Laðabrekka was known Music Hill. Sometimes vicious youths played along by banging dried cod heads against the windows or eaves. However, Henrietta was not one to chase children down the street.

  Suddenly, she seemed vexed, and Pole, rather confused, asked if he had perhaps said anything wrong.

  “No,” she answered. “Not at all. But remember, life is a gift, and fifteen years after you listened to me playing the piano in the living room, finally you tell me you enjoyed the music. I mean, why have you never said anything before? Why did it have to be so confounded, that a fifty-year-old quarrel between my father and your uncle prevented you from knocking on my window?”

  She smiled and handed him the sheets of paper on which she had written Ode to a Nightingale. Their fingers met and two or three long seconds passed before she removed her hand. For the first time they gazed at each other with the rather forlorn eyes that characterize mature love, and when Pole saw that the verses had essentially been calligraphied, he again took her hand, carefully pressed his lips to her fingers, and thanked her.