Then he added in a faltering voice: “I’m an old man.”
“We’re both middle-aged.”
He smiled and quoted the nightingale poem’s final words: Do I wake or sleep?
“I don’t know what you’ve been doing these last years,” Henrietta answered. “But I’ve been sleeping, and I don’t want to do that anymore.”
Henrietta marked a new chapter in Napoleon’s life. When he left Tvøroyri in 1858, and up until 1865, he held the post of Landkirurg. In 1865 the parliament members succeeded in driving Dahlerup out of the country, and since everyone believed Pole owed his position to Dahlerup, who had vacated the Faroes, Pole also felt the changing of the tide.
After his stint as Landkirurg, he resumed seeing patients in his old consultation room at Nólsoyarstova. He had become a solitary man who liked to wet his throat with gin.
Yet in the summer of 1869, the same year he turned sixty, he and Henrietta traveled south through Europe and stayed three weeks in Rome. Frú Løbner died in 1872, and although they followed old tradition and did not marry until the year of mourning was up, that year was the happiest of their coexistence.
They lived in their separate houses, but still ate dinner together, enjoying each other’s company, and sometimes they spent the night.
Henrietta was an accomplished pianist and had taught herself to read music. Beyond the usual études, she had also tackled more complicated works, for example, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, and she could play some of Bach’s simpler Goldberg Variations. Nonetheless, her favorite composer was Mozart and she owned all his operatic overtures transcribed for piano. Together with Traber, the violin teacher, and the young Dia við Stein, she occasionally held musical evenings at Quillinsgarður, small gatherings that Pole called a mild entry into the evening of his life.
When Henrietta sold the Quillinsgarður house to Sigrid and Poul Niclasen and moved to Nólsoyarstova, she took the Quillinsgarður piano with her, and so generous was Pole that he gave Nólsoyarstova’s old piano to the talented Dia við Stein.
The House Altar
ACCORDING TO FIÓLA Kjelnes, Henrietta and Pole’s relationship lost some of its warmth after they married and moved into the same house. For years they had been lovers beneath a narrow crescent moon, as she put it, and now that they had the full moon, not to mention the sun, it was as if the strong lightwaves washed away the shadows of mystery.
The first time Henrietta experienced Pole’s terrible rage was on one of the first days of their cohabitation. Among the kitchen items and other things she had brought with her from her childhood home was a pastel drawing of her father. Of course, she thought the drawing might create some tension. She knew full well Pole had no use for “Hr. Amtmađur and Commandant Emilius Marius Georgius von Løbner,” as he tended to call her father. But Henrietta and Pole were both adults, yes they were, and they could talk things through together.
Generally speaking, Løbner was held in exceptionally low esteem on the Faroes, and in the second volume of Tórshavn’s History, Jens Pauli Nolsøe and Kári Jespersen offer a theory on why, historically speaking, he was so poorly regarded.
The year that Løbner took office was otherwise the year of an event that would prove exceptionally significant for the Faroes. For eighty years the Danish king had not been involved in a true war, and that made it easy to become Commandant of the Faroes, but in 1800 everything changed completely.
As mentioned, Løbner came to the Faroes in 1801, and the animosity toward him, or perhaps one could say, the animosity toward Løbner harbored by Faroese nationalists, was essentially tied to 1808, the war year, when the British warship Clio came to Tórshavn and destroyed all of Skansin’s defenses.
Everyone expected that there would be a general call to duty in order to resist the enemy with force, and people heard that lead bullets were being cast in Kaldbak for this purpose, but what was the Commandant doing while all this was happening? He was at Skansin, true, along with his regimentals, though these he had buried in a sack. Instead, he was wearing a rough, gray overcoat—which prompted the English Captain Baugh and his people to call him The Monkey. His command was: “Children, lay down.” The enemy, who marched into Skansin without the least resistance, immediately hoisted the English flag, destroyed and nailed up the cannons, robbed the inventory of everything useful, distributed the goods to whoever wanted them, and finally blew up the powder chamber.
That, at least, was how Jákup Nolsøe told it. But Henrietta did not put much stock in her father-in-law’s words. They seemed too frivolous and did not suit the solemn dignity that otherwise characterized the director.
Perhaps the Skansinmen could have damaged the Clio, perhaps they even could have sunk the 380-ton ship and killed the 200 soldiers on board; she had no way of knowing. Yet of this she was certain: No one who challenged the British fleet escaped unpunished. And the director knew that as well. In 1807, the British bombarded and burned Copenhagen. Why should Tórshavn not have suffered a similar fate?
Such thoughts passed through Henrietta’s head as she held the pastel drawing. As long as she could remember, the drawing had hung in Quillinsgarður’s parlor. In truth, the word drawing was something of a misnomer. Instead, it was the case of a small house altar, something to which she and her mother had turned throughout the years.
She had been very young when she learned who the man in the picture was, and she could not understand why her father did not just step out of the drawing. Other fathers talked to their children, and some told them stories or sung to them. One time she had cut a ladder from paper and glued it to the frame’s rim, and with a child’s hope, she thought her father could use the ladder to climb down. But it did not help. She repeatedly tempted the drawing with something sweet, but the same thing always happened. Her father remained enclosed in the frame, and every time she looked at him, she saw the same indulgent smile.
Finally, she accepted that hers was one of Tórshavn’s silent fathers, a particular type of man who was only there when you remembered or dreamed about them. She knew there were other children in the city who had silent fathers. One had gone out to fish and never returned, and another was útideyður, that is, someone who had perished while journeying between one village and another, particularly due to the weather.
Sometimes she did dream about her father, and after such a dream she had all sorts of new things to tell the picture.
In short, daily life would lack something if her father’s picture were not hanging up, and a man like Pole ought to understand that.
She hung the picture over the small sideboard in the living room and hoped for the best.
Yet hope became shame.
When it came to Emilius Marius Georgius von Løbner, Pole was just as viscious as her mother had been when denigrating those Nolsøe poets.
The devil seized Pole. He refused to have a portrait in his living room of the worst official to date the Danes had ever sent to govern the Faroes. The Commandant was a military and civilian zero. Did Henrietta know where zero came from? That right there was the Indian Brahmin’s contribution to world culture. And we should thank them for it. Tórshavn had its own kind of Brahmin, the socalled Brahmadells, and when it came to morality and dignity, even the most witless of them was lightyears beyond the Commandant.
Henrietta struggled to pipe up with the fact that it was her father and, if nothing else, Pole ought to respect her feelings. Yet he refused to listen.
Pole called Løbner an ignoramus and asked, rhetorically, if she knew the distinguishing characteristic of an ignoramus who was both commandant and amtmand. It was that he lowered other Tórshavnars—yes, in principle the rest of humanity—to the absolute lowest possible moral state, namely, where the ignoramus himself existed.
There was only one hero during the Faroes’ famine years, and that was his own uncle, Páll. And who made it hot as hell for him? Why, that genetically retarded whorehound, Commandant Emilius von Løbner.
In that contex
t, he would like to remind Henrietta that she had a half-brother in Skopen. Of course she knew, it was Jens Winningsted, the shoemaker. Pole added, however, that she should be grateful that her family was dying out, because her grandfather, the king, was a psychopath.
“The king? What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Christian the Seventh, Europe’s greatest psychopath. The woman you’re named after let that monstrosity penetrate her at Augustenborg in 1765, and the result was the bastard, your honorable father. You’re a carrier of royal insanity, that’s what you are, and be thankful you never sent any children into the world. The result would’ve been a genetic, cerebral catastrophe.”
For a while longer, he showered curses onto the unfortunate Løbner’s head, until finally he pointed to the pastel drawing and ordered his wife to remove that shameful blight.
Henrietta heard his voice and saw his waving arms and his bright red face, but she had lost her nerve. She reached for her Italian handbag and clasped it to her breast.
Oh, Satan in blackest Hell, Pole thought, as finally he realized how severely he had lost control and how deeply he had wounded his wife.
He had seen her like this only one time before, on the day her mother was buried. She had sat in the parlor at Quillinsgarður and clutched the bag as if it were a life preserver.
Now she opened it up and began to take out the contents. She handled each object as if it were a precious artifact worthy of being examined and classified and perhaps put on public display.
Pole bought her the handbag when they were in Rome. The bottom and both end pieces were made of light brown leather, the sides were made of a woven black cloth, and the top could be closed with a long, handsome brass lock.
Carefully, she took out the coin purse and laid it on the table, but then she picked it up again, pressed it to her cheek, and tilted her head. In size the purse was no bigger than the back of her hand, and when it was opened, it divided into two compartments; the silk-covered divider had a thin leather strip on top. She kept a few coins in one compartment, the other held the white milktooth Fióla had given her and the ring her father sent as a confirmation gift in 1839. The tooth was a lucky charm, a Faroese scarab, and in church she often held the tooth and stroked it with her fingers. Now she kissed the ring and put it back in the compartment with the tooth. There were some hair clips and two silk ribbons in one pocket of the handbag, and the other had a comb, a powder compact with a mirror in the lid, and a nail file. When the nail file’s old shaft had splintered, Henrietta had asked Ludda-Kristjan to make a new one. The new shaft was made from a whale’s tooth and was kept in place by two riveted copper nails. She also kept a candy tin in her purse, and Pole liked to tease her about it, saying the tin was the typical handbag inventory of an aging, aristocratic spinster. Still, he was always glad when she offered him a piece, particularly when she placed the brown, glinting candy on his tongue and said that Pole and his father were the sweetest men north of the Elben.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, women tended to bring handwork along when they visited each other. Henrietta was no exception to this rule. Yet whereas most women knitted sweaters and stockings for their husbands and children, she kept a crochet hook and some fine thread in her handbag.
However, the handbag’s most valuable item was an address book. She did not really use it for addresses, however; in fact, addresses took up very little space. Instead, Henrietta collected proverbs, and her collection became the foundation for A. C. Evensen’s A Reader for Young Children that was printed in 1906, the same year that Henrietta died.
When Pole returned home late that evening, he saw that the pastel had been taken down, and a vase of flowers set before the empty space.
At least once a week the vase received new flowers. Early in the spring it was meadow daisies, purple saxifrage, and soft lady fern. In May and June, buttercups, fireweed, and mayweed stood in the vase, and sometimes also dandelions, whose white, sensitive wigs only barely tolerated her breath. As summer wore on, there were violets, geraniums, ragged robins, and forget-me-nots. The flowers brightened up the place and gave an almost supernatural glance to her father’s memory.
Løbner in the air, she whispered. Løbner in the vase, she smiled. Life is Løbner, she said, shaking with laughter, as she decorated the vase.
Pole never mentioned the pastel again, and he had to accept that the vase had become Nólsoyarstova’s new house altar.
When the hawkweed died in August and fall was at the door, Henrietta put heather clusters in the vase. From the reddish-green brush she hung small cutouts of animals and mythical creatures and of amusing flowers that bloomed only in her mind. The cutouts hanging from sewing thread were reminiscent of what people would later call Christmas decorations.
Torshavn’s Workers Union
IN 1882, JUST before Easter, Obram úr Oyndarfjørði’s schooner Haabet docked at Tórshavn.
Aside from cargo transport, Obram also ran a business in Tórshavn that had additional branches north in Oyndarfjørður and west in Sørgvágur. In his younger days, the man had learned housebuilding from Ludda-Kristjan, and he put in a bid to build the new Amtmand’s House only after many long conversations with his old master. Obram got the job, but the work team now lacked building material: the thick, internal beams, as well as boards for floors, walls, and ceilings, not to mention the roof tiles, were all left aboard the Haabet.
Havnarfolk had long since baptized the half-finished residence on Glaðsheyggjur “Amtmansborg,” or Amtmand’s Castle. The building’s high stone walls and gables, its various additions, and the square tower from which you could view the entire city, made it a true castle, at least by Faroese standards.
The window apertures in the tower and living room were appreciably larger than those in the church, and each one terminated in a point at a beautiful capstone and was surrounded by finely worked stone ornamentation.
The Danish architect Hans Christian Amberg had designed the castle and an Icelandic stonecutter was overseeing the construction. Otherwise, the work crew was Faroese.
The building stones had been excavated from Glaðsheyggjur. Holes were drilled and wedges placed, and hammer strikes sung throughout the city. Occasionally, large cliffs were blown up using black gunpowder, and a tipper wagon ran between the expanding quarry and the construction site carrying the finely hewn stone.
The children of Tórshavn had never seen a tipper wagon, and when the driver, Sámal á Kák, sometimes allowed two or three or them to ride the fifty fathoms between the quarry and the construction site—oh!, a technological journey of the rarest kind.
Most of the rocks could be carried by hand, but they were still too heavy to be lifted overhead. As a result, the construction site had a hoist system, and two men usually operated the pulley, heaving the blocks and rock fragments and other building material up to the men on the platforms.
Easter was only six days away, and Obram ordered the work crew to help get the Haabet unloaded before the holiday. The agreement was that the men would work Sunday and would receive a bonus in addition to their hourly wage, on the condition, however, that they emptied the ship before the holiday.
And the men threw themselves to work. Two old, refitted, and reinforced ten-men boats, as well as a thirty-eight-foot lighter, which they called the Omba, and which Obram had acquired in Norway, sailed back and forth between the ship and the unloading dock at Bryggjubakka. Whereas the ten-men boats were rowed, the Omba had sails and a rudder. She carried the planks and beams, and the majority of the items were unloaded by hand. The thirty-foot-long beams were heavy and unwieldy, but the ship’s gunwale was equipped with rollers that could be used to roll the beams. The ship also had a capstan, and they used it to lift the lime tubs and barrels of petroleum, syrup, and brandy. The Omba transported the heavy materials, while the ten-mans took everything that could be carried by hand: flour and sugar sacks, birch bark for the roof, window glass, and other small items.
The unloading dock at Bryggjubakka had a tripod with a crane, and the boom could lift around two skippunds.
Sleep was scarce during the unloading. From the time the sun rose at six o’clock in the morning until it set six days later, there was perpetual traffic back and forth, and it was only after midnight that the items first stacked at the unloading dock were carried to the warehouse basement or up to the shop. The beams were simply stacked outside, though tarpaulins were spread over the better wood.
Despite everything, the men failed to unload the ship on time. The Easter holiday began on Holy Thursday, so on Wednesday night the Haabet’s hatches were battened down and its storm lamps extinguished.
Obram was in a good mood that evening. He hung his silver-shafted cane on a nail in the warehouse basement and went around with a jug of gin and a glass, serving each man and also offering each tobacco. Two lamps gleamed from beneath the ceiling beams. Washtubs and a scale stood in one corner, and an enclosure held several skippunds of carved and salted winter cod ready to be spread on the rocks to dry.
Obram was now over fifty, and although he rarely took part in the actual stonework, he had a hand in all the preparations. Work was his life, and if everything was going well, then he was a satisfied man.
Even if they had not been able to empty the ship, the offer of a bonus still stood, Obram said. The bonus, however, would not be paid in money, but in goods. Most of the men understood this, and even if they did not understand, it was not common to object once Obram úr Oyndarfirði had spoken.
This evening that tradition was broken.
Sámal á Kák, who had been sitting on a lime tub smoking, suddenly spoke. He said that it was not right, after everyone had struggled through Friday, Saturday, they had even broken the Holy Sabbath, and then had continued Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday, and now that they had worked their asses off, they find out that they could expect their bonus in goddamned goods. That was no way to treat someone.
The Brahmadells Page 16
