The Brahmadells

by Jóanes Nielsen

  THE 1992 CITY council elections fell on Tuesday, December 8th, and in the Friday edition of Sosialurin the lead story prior to the election had discussed the election with the term “Nepotism.”

  For most of its existence, the newspaper had long been oriented toward the pro-Danish community with an interest for “Things Near,” as Arne Paasche Aasen’s popular social-democratic poem expressed it. In the last few years the newspaper had tried to give its rather serious reputation a lighter bent.

  This was reflected in its pronounced interest in trout and salmon breeding, and also in its preoccupation with billiards, that sport of happy drunks. The newspaper also had a skillful graphic artist: the former go-go dancer Hilda Poulsen. Aside from hating Faroese nationalism, she was said to be the editor’s mistress.

  Obituaries in the style of “has now rowed across the fjord” or “a noble candle has been blown out” had long filled the newspaper. The obituary writer was rarely named, and most of the newspaper’s letters to the editor were also unsigned. The author of the lead story also remained anonymous.

  In the famous Christmas Letter that the aging H. P. Hølund wrote to William Heinesen, he called the newspaper “opportunism’s shithouse.”

  A significant portion of its news coverage was devoted to printing speeches or portions of speeches given by the Social Democratic Party’s representatives both inside and outside the country.

  The few times its columns grew somewhat louder was when the author Hanus Andreassen reminisced about dead Social Democratic heroes.

  Eigil did not know if the editor himself was a social democrat. However, for his faithful role as the social democrats’ unofficial propaganda minister, the party had voted him onto the board of the Landstrygd public insurance company. Unsurprisingly, Jens Julian við Berbisá represented the Self-Governance Party on that same board.

  The author of the lead story wrote that the word nepos in Latin signified grandchildren or descendent, and in a tiny society like the Faroes it could hardly go unnoticed that one sometimes favored relatives and friends. Common decency, however, demanded that there be a limit. Yet the city council’s finance committee chair, Eigil Tvibur, was by no means common, and the word decency was foreign to his vocabulary. Ten months ago he had purchased a house that was colloquially known as the Mosque, and he himself had set the sale price of 100,00 kroner.

  The conclusion of the lead story was that such blatant nepotism was a threat to democracy.

  Late Thursday evening Kristensa called and told her son to read Sosialurin.

  Eigil asked if something had happened.

  “Why do you think I’m calling?” his mother shouted. “Who else besides you have I worried about and prayed for since the glass-eye beast raped me?”

  Eigil could hear her spit frothing as it half-forced its way out between her teeth, a flood of white foam. But he also heard anxiety.

  “Dear child, I didn’t know that you had desecrated a grave. As God is my witness, I didn’t know. The dead own the graveyard. Don’t forget that.”

  “What did you say?” Eigil asked.

  “I said the dead own the graveyard. Go get a newspaper, and God be with you.”

  Eigil hurried to the little kiosk at the corner of Jóannes Paturssonargøta and Grønlandsvegur. There were some paper Christmas elves sitting between the packages of candy and cream cake in the little display window, and inside the old man who ran the kiosk was about to close up shop.

  They had never exchanged any words beyond the few it took to ask for a newspaper or a package of coffee. Eigil did not know the man at all, just as he did not know the other people in the neighborhood. The man had a friendly and trustworthy face. As he handed Eigil the newspaper, he quietly remarked that everything had its time. The words were neither accusatory nor judgmental, he was simply stating an old truth, after which he said good night.

  When the voting results were reported just before midnight on Tuesday, Eigil was among the toppled politicians. During the vote in ’88, he had received three hundred thirty-seven votes. Four years later that number had sunk to fifty-eight.

  And like the scorned candidate he was, Eigil stayed home the day after the election. For the entire weekend after, for that matter. He asked his sister Tórharda to go to the Rúsuna and buy him some whiskey bottles, and then he sat behind closed doors, unplugged his telephone, and drank.

  Four or five times someone knocked on the door, and twice it was sharp, urgent raps, but he ignored it.

  Only once did he plug in his telephone, and that was around midnight on Tuesday evening when he dialed the one Fuglafjørður number that mattered.

  It had been over three months since he and Karin had last spoken, that is, not since she had learned he had had an affair.

  The other woman was Marianne Bøge, a lecturer on Nordic literature at the University of the Faroe Islands. That relationship was also over. Marianne had said that he was one of those writers who too much resembled his disturbing characters, and that frightened her.

  Karin’s voice was friendly, if not partly anxious. She said she had called several times because both the Dimmalætting and Sosialurin, and also someone from the Self-Governance Party, were trying to contact him.

  Eigil said he had not set foot out of the door since reading the Sosialurin last Thursday evening, and he hoped that his political downfall would not impact the novel he was writing.

  Karin asked how his mother was getting along.

  Eigil said that she could take walks alone now, and that Ingvald and Tórharda were both back in her good graces.

  Karin asked if that grace also extended to Svanhild.

  Eigil laughed at that. He said that his mother had mellowed since the stroke. Or maybe she was just thinking things through more. One day she had asked him what he thought about inviting Svanhild and her secretary home for Christmas, or perhaps next summer. Eigil thought that summer was definitely the best time to have guests, and that answer pleased his mother.

  Mostly out of politeness, Karin asked how it was going with the new novel.

  Eigil was not satisfied. He said that the best passages so far were his descriptions of Henrietta Nolsøe and Betta. And the reason for that was simple. He had had a living model on which to base both women. The intelligence that blossomed from Henrietta’s mouth and the eros he had instilled in the Brahmadella woman were both inspired by one woman from Fuglafjørður, whom he knew very well.

  Hmm, Karin responded.

  She did not want to criticize him for the fact, but his literary characters had always been closer to him than any living person, that was just the nature of things, and if that had not been the case, he would not have been much of a writer.

  Nonetheless, their love had cooled. In May of ’91 they had spent two weeks in New York and there it cooled even more. That was when Karin first experienced the rage Eigil had so often spoken about, and which he called his genetic flaw from Sumba. The violent episode happened in their hotel room. He had thrown her across the room, and it had cost her two broken ribs and a sprained wrist.

  Of course, it had happened while he was drunk and he had also begged for forgiveness and promised that it would never happen again, that he would rather tear himself to pieces. But Karin did not believe him. Eigil was far too ruthless. Even what he wrote lacked a trace of human warmth or empathy. It was the exact opposite: his characters shattered from internal coldness.

  It was not until after they returned home that she discovered she was pregnant. She had already suspected it at the beginning of June, and she called the following months the most wonderful and beautiful of her life.

  Finally, she was pregnant, and all the small changes happening to her body filled her daily life with a quiet satisfaction. The incessant bouts of morning sickness were simply part of it; afterward, she brushed her teeth and drank a sip of cool tap water.

  She was usually a quiet and thoughtful woman, and these were the traits that unfolded, so to speak, for every gram
the fetus grew. When she realized that her clothes were becoming tight around the hips, it was a pleasure to take up her sewing basket, pull everything apart, and let out the waistline on her dresses and pants.

  Her breasts also grew, she changed from a C to an E cup, and she was delighted to feel the maternal heaviness of her breasts. The veins lining her stomach became more visible; the skin of her stomach resembled a map, it was like blue rivers ran down from her breasts, spread out over her midsection, and collected into an estuary well below her navel.

  She knew that her little treasure, as she called the fetus, had already developed his own digestive system, his own heart, and his own eyelashes. She had a little dreamer in her stomach, and whenever he declared his presence, either with a kick or a movement of his head, she stroked her stomach in response.

  Sometimes, when her mother brought her tea in bed, she had complained that Eigil so seldom came north to Fuglafjørður. At that point, Karin replied that both she and Eigil were creating life. He through his fictional books, while she was carrying the real thing.

  On October 17th her water broke unexpectedly, and she miscarried in bed.

  Karin asked her mother to photograph what she termed the little failed family. They dressed up and sat on the living room sofa, or rather, they perched on the sofa’s very edge, she and Eigil and their dead baby boy. She had dressed the baby in rompers and a little hat that she had knitted.

  The photograph was black and white, and since then it had hung in a glass frame over her headboard.

  A carpenter in Gøta made the tiny coffin, and the baby boy was buried in the same grave as his grandfather.

  Eigil did not want to tell Karin that the little boy had proven a strange inspiration. The coffin, which Eigil himself carried, and which he lowered on top of the grandfather’s rotting coffin lid, had prompted him to rewrite the fifth section of his manuscript, a chapter he called “The Little Wandering Church.”

  They had been talking for half an hour when Karin said it was time for her to go to sleep since she had to work tomorrow.

  Eigil thanked her for the conversation, but added that the choice of love versus writing was an artificial one. That mentality was rooted in the Romantic when authors were brilliant creatures who holed up in ivory towers.

  Karin interrupted him, saying that she knew what he wanted to say, and that she did not want to hear it.

  “Well, it’s the truth,” Eigil said.

  “I can’t take your truths,” she replied.

  “I would much rather have a woman than the world of words.”

  “Good night, Eigil. Sleep well.”

  The Gold-Rimmed Entrance to Death

  WHEN EIGIL CLIMBED inside his old Fiat Uno on Wednesday morning, he did not immediately notice that the vehicle had been vandalized. It was only after the heater had been running a moment that he noticed the yellow spraypainted letters spelling “PISS” across the windshield. Both Ss in the word were reminiscent of the runes the Nazis used on their posters and banners.

  Egil was deeply horrified. He sat shaking, his hands locked around the steering wheel, and before he knew it, he had ripped it off the steering column in a fit of rage. The large nut was all that remained on the column; he had torn off the iron plate at the wheel’s base.

  He was about to smash the wheel into the lit dashboard panel when he suddenly caught sight of his eyes in the rear view mirror. Or what he thought were his eyes.

  They were red-rimmed, the whites yellowish, the pupils glinting with pure insanity.

  He breathed through his nose for a moment and then carefully set the steering wheel aside.

  Enough was enough! He had not bought the Mosque for personal gain, but because he was afraid of losing his mother. And even if he had bought the house for personal gain himself, what the hell did that have to do with anyone else? And the fact that a twenty-sevenyear-old man on New Year’s Day, 1980, pissed on the grave of a man whom the very next year he came to admire and respect—that just showed a capacity for strong emotions. And that was the kind of emotion that the Sosialurin needed more articles about!

  Tucking his bag under his arm, Eigil began to walk with long strides home along Jóannes Paturssonargøta. He did not look right or left, and whatever thoughts the pedestrians and drivers entertained about him, or if they had any such thoughts at all, that was their business.

  One thing was clear: If he began to view himself through the eyes of others, it meant he had already put himself in the defendant’s seat, and then all Hell was loose.

  A small sigh escaped his lips, and he was forced to smile; the last few days he had been doing nothing but viewing himself with what he imagined were the accusing looks of others, so Hell was already loose. Hell had ripped open; any minute now smoke would begin leaking from people’s ears, and cloven hooves would be galloping through the streets!

  He unbuttoned the top two buttons on his coat and walked along, slightly more relaxed. Traffic also seemed calmer, if not to say outright slowed. It was as if the drivers in their various vehicles did not care that this dark morning was the 343rd day of the year, that it was almost 9:30 in the evening, and that time itself just ran and ran without ever pausing to take a rest.

  He heard the sleepy horn of a ship out by the pier, and what Tórharda said was right, that the city’s pulse was significantly weaker since both the large banks had gone bankrupt.

  But the full moon with its gold ring was lovely. The moon calmed the mind, just like pictures of the moon have always set people at ease, and just then Eigil noticed Kirkjubøreyn’s snowcap.

  When he had reached the old churchyard, he glanced out of habit down the graveyard’s middle aisle. The maple and rowan trees were bare. If it had not been so dark, he could have made out Pole’s grave.

  On New Year’s Eve 1980, the entire city had been covered in snow. He had had to force the churchyard gate open, and at some points he was knee deep in snow as he waded toward Napoleon Nolsøe’s grave. He opened his zipper and a yellow stream sank into the white blanket of snow. And Eigil pissed and pissed. It was as if he had been storing up urine all Christmas for this one infamy, or as if his bladder was connected in fellowship to all those who had despised the loudmouthed Nolsøe clan. When Eigil finally shook off the last drops, Pole’s was the only black grave in the entire graveyard.

  And in truth the image of that black grave had never left him. Not that he was plagued by nightmares. Not at all. But a gold-rimmed entrance into death, that image stuck fast in his mind.

  The aversion he had felt against Pole had later been transformed, or rather it had been transferred eventually to Ole Jacobsen, the man responsible for the whole damned situation in which he found himself.

  Eigil had not known Ole Jacobsen, not personally or professionally, and the fact that a complete stranger could cast such a dark pall over his life was rather uncanny.

  Eigil only knew that the man was from Vágur, and that during the war he had gotten a doctorate in comparative literature. That information was in the preface to volume IX-X of From the Faroes – Úr Føroyum, which was published in 1983: This final volume of Úr Føroyum was largely assembled by Ole Jacobsen, who unfortunately was unable to see its completion.

  So wrote the head of the Dansk-Færøsk Samfund, Aage H. Kampp.

  An odd misprint in the preface indicated that Ole Jacobsen truly was deceased. Føroyum was spelled Fóroyum, an error that never would have escaped Jacobsen’s observant eye.

  Ole Jacobsen might be called a tragic figure, since it would be difficult to otherwise describe a man whose wife went insane and took her own life—and if that was not enough, whose daughter did the same, following her mother into death.

  Eigil had learned those facts from Marianne Bøge. While studying in the Faroese department at the university, she had attended some lectures that Ole Jacobsen held in the 70s. She said the man was an amazing lecturer. Clear, sharp-minded, and with his big white Andy Warhol hair, also charming and seductive
.

  One of Jacobsen’s lectures was on Christian Matras’s poetry, and the story of Matras roaming old Tórshavn’s narrow streets in order to find the correct rhythm for his masterful translation of “Fare World, Farewell” was also something Eigil heard from Marianne Bøge.

  Jacobsen had also given a lecture on Karsten Hoydal’s last two published poems. He thought that enough had been said about the poetry collections The Red Dark, The Singing Stone, and Water and Light. Jacobsen wanted to highlight “Bridges” and “Bamboo’s Song,” two great poems that demonstrated that the aging writer had attained new poetic ground. For strange reasons, “Bridges” and “Bamboo’s Song” would prove to be Karsten Hoydal’s last works. He died at the height of his craft, which guaranteed his remains would not be hauled out some literary back door and buried at the foot of a sickly tree.

  However, Eigil was certain that Ole Jacobsen also had a hidden agenda when he published his eighty-seven page long essay in 1972 on the measles epidemic in the journal From the Faroes – Úr Føroyum. The man had sown hatred on Napoleon Nolsøe’s remembrance, and had the hatred been just, there would have been a kind of brutal rationale about it. But Ole Jacobsen’s hatred was irrational, and what sprouted from irrational soil was always unpredictable and most often abominable.

  The professor could go to Hell, and that was probably where he went when he had died.

  Laughter bubbled in Eigil’s chest as he looked down into the churchyard. He pictured the professor strolling among the coffins in death’s realm. Only a few strands were left of his Andy Warhol hair, and his burial shroud fluttered around his dry, rattling bones. Eigil also heard the coffin lids creak when the professor broke them open, and whenever he gazed into the gaping skull of a Faroese nationalist, curse words filled the halls beneath the piss hole.

  True, Ole Jacobsen had succeeded in casting a light over a forgotten period in Faroese history, and he also correctly criticized the nationalistic approach that all too often colored regional history writing.

  Yet the man did not just write about the measles epidemic. The essay could also be interpreted as a personal statement about the entire nationalistic elite from the 1840s until his own day, or at least up until the Klaksvík Rebellion in the 1950s, where the citizens of Klaksvík took an armed stand against the forced removal of a Danish doctor, thereby underscoring Faroese independence.