This was his third term as mayor, and aside from being clever, the man had an uncommon work ethic. And that was a trait Eigil respected.
One time when the two of them were alone after a city council meeting, Eigil said that it was unfortunate that an independent man like the mayor—in truth, he was a civil anarchist—did not break with his party and its organ, the Dagblaðið. The milieu in which the People’s Party moved had become coarse and primitive. Eigil said he would go so far as to maintain that the lack of humanity had helped create a new breed of Faroese who feared culture and modernity, and who shamelessly pandered to the ultimate one-eyed brand of Christian sectarianism. Any problems the Faroes had were not religion-based; if anything was wrong there, it was that Faroese were too devout. What the people needed was an enlightened elite, both on economic and cultural planes.
Poul Michelsen listened until Eigil was finished. Then he asked who Eigil’s political role models were.
Eigil’s answer was short and sweet. The industrial miracle of California’s Silicon Valley, and Japan.
“And how do you propose to unite Silicon Valley and Japan with the Self-Governance Party?” the mayor asked him.
“I have no idea,” Eigil said.
“I won’t hold it against you,” the mayor responded. “The party has been a coffin since Jóannes Patursson left the Self-Governance Party in 1936. To be a member, you either have to be infatuated with political decadence or you have to be a sly devil with a hidden agenda.”
After Eigil had sat on the council for about half his term, he decided to tell Kjartan á Rógvi, the manager of the accounting firm where he worked, that he would like to reduce his work week to twenty-five or thirty hours.
Eigil was quite certain that Kjartan would have no objection to this request. Most of the city’s accounting firms had less to do now, and his time as number two in the organization was over. Since the firm’s twentieth anniversary celebration, the air between them had cooled.
Amalia, Kjartan’s wife, had come onto him. And Eigil viewed that with distaste. He considered it vulgar to become involved with the boss’s wife. Indeed, Amalia had been so forward that Eigil had seen no other choice but to insult her. He said he did not have much interest in old vacuum cleaners, and besides, her bag was just about full.
For two or three seconds Amelia stood and chewed over his remark. When she could finally speak again, she whispered that this humiliation had been duly accounted for, and would not be forgotten.
The Rattling Keyring
ACTUALLY, IT WAS by complete chance that Eigil was chosen to be the Self-Governance Party’s candidate. He no had previous ties to the party whatsoever. Neither his mother nor Ingvald were self-governance people, nor did he have any other acquaintances who voted for them. At least not that he was aware of. Karin was a social democrat and his few friends in the Writer’s Association, or rather, the literary colleagues with whom he occasionally spoke on the phone, were far to the left.
During his university years in Copenhagen he had always voted for the Radical Left. Twice he had supported them. They were an elite group led by academics and old high school and college folk, and although the party was a little dusty, it was reminiscent of the Self-Governance Party, at least as the party had been back in its heyday in the 1910s and 20s.
When Eigil analyzed the results of the 1992 election, he nonetheless realized that perhaps the apparent coincidence was not all that coincidental. He was a politician at heart, as most authors were. His critical faculty sometimes prompted him to make harsh judgments, and as a writer he desired to be seen and heard. It was the exhibitionist impulse of his poetic soul.
As a result, when the Self-Governance Party’s chair, Jens Julian við Berbisá, rattled his keyring, Eigil was, so to speak, ready to enter into politics.
It began with a long interview the Dimmalætting conducted with him following the release of his San Francisco book. In that interview Eigil called himself a cultural Faroese. He said that culture stood for humanism and for art, but also for the awareness of tradition. To be Faroese primarily meant that you were born here, and you should certainly tend the ground upon which your crib had stood. Yet to build an idolatry around said ground, which he believed to be the Republican Party’s political slogan, was pure intellectual nonsense.
The Social Democrats and the Unionists preached fear, cultivating it among the retirees, who scarcely had the means to fill their gas tanks, and also among the church-goers, who were afraid of what would happen to the church if Faroese authorities took over.
The Social Democrats in particular were composed of double-dealing unionists. They wanted the Danes to support everything, even while they deluded people into thinking it was their political skill that brought public funds into the country.
The Unionists had no objection to being governed directly from Copenhagen. Lack of principle had always been their most notable feature. In truth, the party was a party of imbeciles. None of the unionist politicians wrote books, and you would certainly never turn to the party to find representatives of art and culture.
The People’s Party worshipped Moloch, and although they seemed more honest than your average unionist man, they were also more malicious.
The Self-Governance Party was nothing to shout about, but it was still Kristin í Geil’s old party, and they were still extremely open.
Immediately after the interview, Jens Julian við Berbisá called and said that he was impressed with the argument surrounding a “cultural Faroese.” He said that the Self-Governance Party’s current chairman was an ex-skipper, and even though he knew how to set and navigate a course, now more than ever the party needed cultural representatives.
He encouraged Eigil to run for city council in Havn. That would let them strengthen their weakened Sydstreymoy constituency and to more closely measure their metropolitan potential.
Jens Julian við Berbisá was one of those who had read most of the historical books from the time of Lucas Debes and Thomas Tarnovius, and up until Poul Petersen, the lawyer from Funningur. He had worked through Varðin, that excellent cultural journal, which contained a significant portion of the Faroese intellectual output from 1921 and until the present. The seventeenth-century Parliament books, which Einar Joensen had transcribed and printed, lined his bathroom shelves. When Jens Julian sat on the toilet, he often spent more than half an hour scrutinizing the three-volume work concerning old Faroese transgressions.
Jens Julian repeatedly said that he was proud to represent the same constituency as Niels Winther once had, and he reminded people that, even though the unionists were strong now in the towns surrounding Skálafjørður, it was nonetheless the people of Eysturoy who had once elected the first Faroese self-governance man into parliament. And what once was will be again.
Jens Julian was audible wherever he went. Not that he liked to loudly proclaim, Look, here I am! Not at all. He had a gentle demeanor and like many middle-aged men walked with a slight hunch. He shuffled more than walked, and his white nylon shirt was always buttoned to his throat.
What made him audible was the substantial keyring attached to his belt. Keys to his Opel Kadett, the cellar door, and the outer door. Keys to the sheep shed and the storehouse, to the home office and the office closet. Keys to the postbox on Strendur and to the party’s postbox in Havn. Keys to the boathouse and, most of all, keys to the parliament house. All that jingling iron advertised the fact that the Self-Governance Party chairman was nearby.
Periodically, he dropped by the shops and the various wharf areas around Skálafjørður. And he did not just talk about politics—in fact, politics was what he talked about least of all.
In Hilmar’s bakery in Skála the conversation might turn to the talented women on Strendur’s StÍF handball team. He said the sociocultural significance they represented for the town’s prosperity and growth was immeasurable. Slipping strange foreign words into a conversation gave him particular pleasure, and as the conversation continu
ed, he would drink a Hawaii Dream soda and might eat a Twix as well.
To the school superintendent in Toftir he floated the creative idea about introducing chess as a school sport. The Russians had been doing it for years, and they showed the best results in chess tournaments throughout the world.
In the baiting sheds, Jens Julian could bait one or sometimes even two whole longlines, and he would often tell a dirty story. He referred to an old Tórshavnar who supposedly said that there were two things a married man should fear: The first was petty debts, and the second was an additional cunt in the house. And when the words left his mouth, he would often cross himself, and that in itself he found mighty amusing and folksy.
The Berbisás lived with their mentally challenged son in a three-story concrete house in Kolbeinagjógv. The house was built during the years Jens Julian had sailed with the Norwegian shipping company Lange, and its size showed that here lived a man with high social ambitions.
The Berbisá flowed through Strendur, and Jens Julian was also born and raised in that town. In 1973 he moved to Kolbeinagjógv with his wife, his son, and their new surname. Jens Julian reached the rank of chief mate and skipper, but still he came ashore because it was too hard on his wife alone with their son. And Jens Julian adored his child. The fact the boy was retarded did not stop Jens Julian from loving him unconditionally.
Once ashore, he began covering his house with yellow plastic siding, and soon finished the side of the house facing the main road. The other three sides remained bare. One comedian remarked the house reflected the Self-Governance Party under his leadership, and the description was not entirely without merit. The party was in many ways like a half-finished plastic project.
What made the house truly remarkable was the twelve-foot-wide steps leading up to it. The afternoon sun warmed the stoop, and the son liked to sit there and watch clouds and play with crane flies and sunbeams. At thirteen years old the boy was around six feet tall, and when the Berbisá family took their evening stroll north toward Morskranes, it was quite an unusual sight. First came the amplebossomed mother, at her heels her ever day-dreaming son, and finally Jens Julian with his keyring.
At a meeting of the party’s Sydstremoy chapter, Eigil let fall the malicious remark that their chairman was actually the custodian of a mausoleum where the country’s best men were kept behind glass.
And the image was entirely fitting. First, Jens Julian við Berbisá had neither the courage nor the vision to set a new course for the party, and second, the most prominent feature of a custodian’s uniform truly was a jingling keyring. It surprised Eigil, though, that the remark went further, and that such a small party would have even people who took it upon themselves to play the role of informant.
Judging by everything, the chair of the Parliament’s smallest party felt threatened, and up until the 1992 election Eigil would continue to feel the discord that had arisen between himself and the party chairman.
The Eye in the Jewelry Box
WHEN INGVALD ARRIVED home for lunch on February 2, 1992, he found his wife lying on the kitchen floor. He immediately called for an ambulance, and the drivers had arrived and left with Kristensa before the 12:20 radio news had begun.
During the next week she hovered between life and death, and the family took turns watching over her, but when she had recovered enough to communicate, she wanted nothing to do with Tórharda, and when Svanhild returned from Denmark, she also sent her eldest daughter away. Only Ingvald and Eigil sat with her, and eventually she also wanted nothing to do with her husband.
The doctor explained to Ingvald that one very common result of a stroke was what psychiatrists called acute psychosis. The psychosis might last for three, maybe four months, and during that period his wife would suffer from all sorts of delusions.
Kristensa did not want to be alone, however, and constantly pulled the bell string and told the nurse to find her son.
Her left side was more or less paralyzed, which meant that she could not articulate all her words, and she was also not aware of the saliva gathering at the back of her throat. Words containing f and l sounds were particularly problematic, and when she could not pronounce them, she became irate, and a disgusting spray spurted from her mouth.
It was on one of the first days following the stroke, while his mother was still unconscious, that Eigil bought the Mosque. He offered 100,000 kroner for it and explained to Poul Michelsen that his great-great-grandfather had built the cottage in the 1830s, that it was in terrible condition, and that no one else was interested in the property.
Poul Michelsen maintained that 100,000 kroner was too low an offer and suggested they raise the price to 150,000 kroner. People would form opinions on such a low price, after all, and as a politician Eigil was bound to take people’s opinions into account.
“The demon with the glass eyes, that’s your father.”
Eigil sat dozing by the sickbed and did not immediately comprehend what his mother was saying. He grasped the word father, though, and woke abruptly.
His mother said Hjartvard had raped her one evening as she was milking Stjernu, and when she said the name Stjernu, her eyes filled with tears.
She had often told Eigil about the Norwegian names given to Ergisstova’s cows, as well as the fact that it was Nils Tvibur who had brought the names with them to the Faroes. Besides Stjernu, there was also Staslin, Dagros, and Litagod. Only one heifer bore the Faroese name Reyðflekka; Hjartvard had bought her off a Porkeri boatsmith, and Reyðflekka died that same year from milk fever.
Unfortunately, the luck the Norwegian names brought did not extend to the eighteen-year-old milkmaid. The milk pail and the stool toppled over, and Hjartvard defiled his niece in the gleam of the petroleum lamp. They lay half in the stall and half in the manure. That was what was so revolting: Her first child was a manure baby, and all her life she had been trying to overcome that shame. Eigil was her bitter love. He had also became her pride, but there was an ever-present fear that his life and work would somehow become polluted, or that he would somehow disgrace himself.
Even though she could not fend off her uncle, she managed to scratch his eye, and afterward the wound became infected.
Hjartvard was not the type to go pounding down a doctor’s door, but he could not exactly look for help elsewhere either.
An old home remedy suggested rinsing the eye with stagnant puddle water, and that is what he did. He also sliced a hard-boiled egg in two, removed the yoke, and covered his eye with the egg’s hollow side turned in.
None of it did any good. The infection throbbing beneath the scab steadily worsened. His left cheek turned black, but it was not before the area began to stink of rot that he capitulated and sought medical help.
But there was nothing to be done.
Hjartvard returned home from the hospital in Tvøroyri with a single eye remaining, and sometime later he got what the doctor called a prosthetic eye.
Eigil never saw his biological father, and they never visited Sumba while the man was still alive. But during the years when the infirmities of age began to make themselves known, Hjartvard tried to atone for his misdeed. Or rather, he tried to atone for a long line of misdeeds that he had accumulated from his years living and working south on Sumba.
Kristensa and Ingvald’s house stood on Landavegur, not far from Kinabrekka, and in 1962 the roof suffered substantial fire damage.
One stormy autumn day that same year, the old man traveled north to Havn with 13,000 kroner for his niece. He hoped that she would be generous enough to accept the money. As it turns out, he had underestimated the power of her resentment. He did not get so much as a foot in the door, and had to shout his errand through the mail slot.
Kristensa told him to get lost, she wanted nothing from him, least of all money. Ergisstova’s top psychopath could go to hell.
Hjartvard shoved the money through the mail slot and set off down the road.
At that point, Kristensa opened the door and shouted
to him that if he did not come and take his money back, the wind would have it.
But he just shrugged his shoulders.
Kristensa grabbed the stack of hundred-kroner bills in her right hand and violently threw it after him.
Oh, that she-devil! Hjartvard sighed, as he saw the wind scatter his hard-earned money. Behind every bill stood lambs, ewes, and rams that he had tended and slaughtered, and whose bodies he had hung to dry in the storehouse. He felt a pain in his chest and leaned against a pole while he watched his riches flit away. Some bills stuck to neighboring roofs and houses, others ended in the brush out on Kinabrekka, and some flew over the Rættará River on toward the west harbor.
In 1964, Eigil went to Sumba for the first time and saw his father’s glass eye—or rather, his great-uncle’s, since in 1964 he was still ignorant of his biological origin.
His cousin Margit showed him the eye. She was two years older than Eigil, and she enjoyed showing her younger and rather awkward cousin from Tórshavn everything possible, including her budding womanhood.
The eye was kept in a small jewelry box in the sideboard. She unfastened the lid, lifted the light-red cotton square covering the eye, and told Eigil to smell it. He held back. She whispered in his ear that it smelled a lot like her pussy, and he turned away, feeling queasy.
He did not want to see an eye that had neither brows nor lashes. It was as if the eye could see through everything, even straight into the realm of death. This was what was so strange: his deceased great-uncle Hjartvard’s glass eye in its jewelry box, surveying the living.
The Brahmadells Page 23
