After the flat stretch of Millum Fjarða his speed reached 130 kph. The steering column trembled and the Fiat’s horsepower whinnied beneath the hood.
The dark blue sky was visible above the high mountains, and when he caught sight of the full moon, hanging like a yellow evening flower, he felt his car skid off the road to the right.
He immediately took his foot off the gas, but was careful to avoid hard braking. He heard gravel hit the wheel arches and the undercarriage.
For a few seconds he fought to get the wheels back on the asphalt. He shifted the car into third and then down into second, and as his speed decreased to around 50 kph, he was able to make it back onto the road.
Devil take the moon, Eigil thought, as he pulled over at the first available spot. His hands shook on the wheel, but the tension eased as he opened the door and climbed out.
The evening air was cooler on his skin, and he wiped away some tears with the arm of his jacket, thinking that Ray Davis’s nasal voice was not necessarily good for nerves of porcelain. For half a second he considered the possibility of returning to Havn and leaving Jens Julian and his fucking key ring in peace.
He stripped off his jacket and tossed it into the backseat.
Among the tapes in the glove compartment, he found Dusty Springfield’s Greatest Hits. Already in the 70s, pop music publications were writing that Dusty was more attracted to women than men. Who knows if there was a connection between the prying into her private life and the downturn she experienced around the same time.
Eigil, however, considered her to be one of the great pop voices of the 60s. Dusty was one of his heroes, and she had the courage to suffuse her voice with pathos.
Eigil slowly drove toward Skálabotnur, and when he heard “You Don’t Have to Say You Love me,” he felt the tears flow freely down his cheeks.
Although she could sound affectionate, Dusty was never ingratiating, at least not in the 60s. She was free, thankfully, of the sentimental tone that characterized her contemporaries, Tom Jones, the Everly Brothers, and the worst cream puff of all, Kenny Rogers.
Eigil burst into laughter. Purely unexpected, roaring laughter.
When Kenny Rogers really let go, he sounded like he was shitting. A pathetic idiot, that was what he was. He strained his vocal chords, tilted his head, and with those big hangdog eyes looked like he was begging for a pat. Eigil was convinced that Rogers was exactly the type who needed his plump country rump powdered at least once a week.
He saw the party chairman’s house a hundred meters in front of him; two windows on the second floor were lit. He stopped his car on the south side of the house, put on the handbrake, ejected the Dusty cassette, but forgot to turn of the motor, and did not even notice the sound of it as he ran up the steps.
Jens Julian við Berbisá’s front door was locked. But that did not prevent Eigil from getting inside. He simply lifted his right leg and kicked through the woodwork around the lock.
Stepping into the large, dark hallway, he spied a light beneath a door and heard a key being turned. He glimpsed a wide staircase leading up to the second floor, and where the stairs ended there were two arcades, one to the right and the other to the left. There were probably doors leading off them, but he could not see them.
Eigil headed toward the strip of light, and suddenly it was like someone had yanked his feet out from under him, and he landed with a heavy thud on the floor. He had tripped over some equipment and a stool, and he rose like a tidal wave. He threw himself at the door, and it crashed to the floor, frame and hinges and all.
Jens Julian stood behind a desk, fumbling with the telephone. He was shaking so much he dropped the receiver.
Eigil grabbed him by the neck with one hand and by the belt where the key ring hung with the other. The man was docile as a sheep, and Eigil threw him against the room’s radiator with terrible force.
Jens Julian’s back and neck crashed against the radiator, and the skin behind his ear was sliced open. Jens Julian vomited and remained lying there with wide, startled eyes. It was as if he was listening to the sound being transmitted to the radiator in the room above, and spreading via the pipes to every room in the house.
“I want an explanation,” Eigil said.
“Go to Hell,” Jens Julian groaned.
“Tell me why you wrote that article.”
“Better someone like me than a psychopath from Sumba in the chairman’s seat.”
“Was it for mental health reasons then that you hung me out to dry as a gravepisser?”
“I was right. You are out of you mind.”
Jens Julian’s cheekbone must have fractured when his head hit the edge of the desk. A spray of blood splashed onto the small Olivetti typewriter, but the blow did not kill him. His throat still moved and gurgled.
“I don’t want control of any party!” Eigil shouted, as he dragged Jens Julian toward the window. “Maybe you think I’m a cream puff, but to that I say, Fuck you! Vengeance’s Corporal says, Fuck you! The only thing I’ve ever wanted is to make words grow in beautiful beds.”
He opened the window and heaved Jens Julian onto the sill.
That was when he noticed how poorly the jutting lower jaw suited the party chair. His head looked like a manufacturing error. The workers at the Corpus Christi factory must have phoned it in, or perhaps they were on strike, when they saw Jens Julian’s body come slowly gliding along the assembly line, and had neglected to set the lower jaw fast.
Eigil took the matter into his own hands. With his fingers beneath Jens Julian’s chin and his thumbs between his teeth, Eigil tried to push the jaw back into place, but the man’s jaw broke instead. In fact, his jawbone now appeared broken in several places; it was completely smashed.
The molars with their moist silver fillings resembled the Great Wall of China, the way it curved from Liaodong Peninsula west through mountainous country toward Gansu.
Eigil laughed abruptly.
Jens Julian had so often talked about protecting Faroese industry by building a protective wall around their limited Faroese production, and now that wall had collapsed.
It reminded him of how his mother had looked after her stroke. But she had not bled from the mouth, no, that she had not. It was saliva that came streaming from the corners of her mouth. And it had stunk. It was like froth. Yes. Like the froth on water violently churned up. Tears infected by rot.
Eigil suddenly remembered he had promised his mother he would tidy Pole’s grave.
Several weeks ago he had bought a can of silver enamel and a small paintbrush to retouch the letters on the gravestone.
He had told Arnfinn Viðstein about his mother’s advice and the psychologist thought it was a terrific idea. Such ideas were wonderfully unacademic and healthy, having grown out of ancient folkish wisdom. He had held a small informal lecture on the soul-cleansing effects of ritual, and had said that, in his opinion, the old Catholic confessional was an instrument of pure crime prevention.
Eigil heard a scraping out in the hallway, and when he turned around, he saw a tall man bending his head under the doorframe to enter the office. The man was dressed in an undershirt, and his long arms were not unlike the feelers of some large insect. He straightened up, the top of his head nearly brushing the ceiling, and then Eigil saw his face was that of a child’s. He had unusually beautiful, dreaming eyes, and his chin and cheeks were covered with a light down.
It was undoubtedly an illusion, but it looked like there were berries growing amid the down.
His pants were kept up by suspenders that barely clung to his thin shoulders.
Eigil released Jens Julian.
The man with the child’s face came closer, bringing with him the noticeable odor of various milk products.
For a split second Eigil considered jumping him, but then he remembered that Jens Julian had a sick boy.
The young man had reached his father and squatted beside him, and his long fingers stroked the distorted face.
Ei
gil crept along the wall and out into the hallway. He heard the sound of a motor outside. Could Jens Julian have called the police? Relieved, he discovered it was only the Fiat.
Halfway down the steps he turned around.
He went back into the office.
It was as if the short pause had cleared his mind.
Suddenly, he was aware that he had entered the criminal arena. In the light coming from the office, he saw that one of the doors off the corridor to the right was higher than the others, and now he noticed how the floorboards creaked.
The young man was still crouched over his father, but whether it was sobs or some other strange noise emanating from him, Eigil could not say. Even when Eigil stood right before him, the young man did not seem to notice his presence.
Eigil acted quickly. He gave the long beanpole a hard blow, and it so surprised the man that his arms and upper body jerked into the air. It was probably the first time he had ever been struck. Eigil was going to kick him, but suddenly stopped.
The young man was lying in the fetal position, and the chalk-white skin on his side and back looked so fragile.
Still, Eigil lifted him from the floor and was about to toss him against the wall, but could not bring himself to do it.
Carefully, he set the young man down and left.
The Arrest
EIGIL ROSE WHEN he saw both policemen start toward the grave. Carefully, he placed his left foot on the grave’s edge, and as he shifted his weight to the other foot and was preparing to run, he saw two more policemen approaching from the Dalavegur gate. The pebbles crunched beneath their shoes, their faces were serious, and their watchfulness was betrayed by their relaxed hands, though their fingers were slightly splayed.
Kristensa had told them that her son was strong as a bear; she stood next to the gate. Apparently, the closest person to him in the world had led the police right to the graveyard.
Eigil had the insane notion of lifting the can of cleaning solvent to his mouth, two, three swallows, it would not take more to eat away his throat and intestines. And if the cops tried spraying water into his mouth, he would still be man enough to keep them away for the short time it took him to die, or at least to lose consciousness.
But Eigil did nothing.
On Napoleon Nolsøe’s 185th birthday, he was docile as a lamb.
He placed his arms behind his back, felt the handcuffs close around his wrists, and the policemen led him toward the gate.
As he passed her, he smiled at his mother. He considered telling her the grave was now tidy, but it was not the right moment for words.
Before Eigil was interviewed the following day, he consulted his lawyer, Heðin Poulsen. The Writers’ Association used him as an adviser, and earlier he had also advised P/F Rógv. He and Kjartan á Rógvi had both studied in Copenhagen in the 60s, and they had both been a part of the Faroese Communist movement Oyggjaframi.
This political orientation was no longer so obvious. The remains of Heðin Poulsen’s old sense of proletarian solidarity was limited to the rolled cigar hanging from a corner of his mouth. His tweed jacket had seen better days, and his voice was characterized by a dry smoker’s cough.
Heðin Poulsen told Eigil that, around midnight, people in the town of Morskranes had seen Jens Julian’s son walking north along the road and waving his arms. He was wearing only an undershirt and jogging pants, and his face and hands were bloody. Heðin Poulsen repeated what a policeman said: that the Berbisá boy looked like someone who had escaped a horror film.
It turned out that Jens Julian’s wife had been at a knitting club in Morskranes that evening and that her son had known that. He also knew the way there because it was the path he took with his mother and father on their pleasant evening strolls.
She ran out to meet her son and, along with another woman from the knitting club, was the first on the scene. They found Jens Julian unconscious and immediately called for an ambulance.
Heðin Poulsen said the matter was very serious indeed. A Faroese parliamentarian had been attacked and gravely wounded, and if he were going to take the case, he wanted Eigil to tell him the whole truth. There was no room for excuses.
Eigil said it all started during the 1992 city council election when an anonymous article in the Sosialurin had branded him a gravepisser.
“I remember it well,” Heðin interrupted him. “And I wondered why you never responded.”
“What could I say?” Eigil said. “On New Year’s Eve in 1980, I pissed on Napoleon Nolsøe’s grave, and I was stupid enough to brag about it. If I’d just kept quiet, that article would never have been written and everything would be completely fine.”
“And you might be the chairman of the Self-Governance Party today.”
“That was never my intention.”
“I was just joking,” Heðin coughed.
“The article was printed on Thursday evening, and that same evening I started to experience the mental breakdown that ruined me as a politician, and that is also the indirect reason I’m no longer employed at P/F Rógv.”
Eigil mentioned his car being vandalized. He also said that people had anonymously called and insulted him. Or maybe he had just gotten paranoid, he was not sure.
He also explained why he had bought the Mosque, and said that he believed the house was haunted. For this reason and others, he had sought psychiatric treatment. What had helped the most, however, was that he was writing a novel, and much of what had been plaguing him could be hung in the wardrobe that was the novel.
The day before yesterday, August 25th, he learned that the hand that had composed the damning article belonged to Jens Julian við Berbisá. What took place north in Kolbeinagjógv last evening was the reckoning for that fact.
Heðin Poulsen sat and nodded. He said that he needed to know who Eigil’s source was. Not that he was thinking of using the information in a potential trial, but he needed to verify all that Eigil had told him was true.
“You mustn’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that you’re being untruthful or lying, but you might have forgotten something. This matter is serious enough that there is no room for half-truths.”
Eigil said that Elspa Tóra Lamhauge was the source, and that her son had worked at the Sosialurin during the time the newspaper printed the article.
Heðin wanted to know exactly what happened in Jens Julian’s house.
Eigil said it was eleven o’clock at night when he knocked at the front door. Perhaps Jens Julian had seen his car outside, but he refused to open up, said that everyone had turned in, and that Eigil could call him in the morning. Eigil said he wanted to talk to him about the article Jens Julian had written for the Sosialurin, which had destroyed so much for him. The least he could do was open the door. Jens Julian told him to go away and that was when Eigil kicked in the door. Jens Julian fled to his office and locked the door, and Eigil said that he had also broken that door down.
During the conversation, Jens Julian admitted that he had written the article. He said that a political party had to maintain a certain ethical standard, and that a gravepisser was the least worthy representative imaginable. And that was when I attacked, Eigil said.
He said that he had thrown Jens Julian against the radiator, and that the blow was a hard one, but that was all. He had tried to help the chairman to his feet, and he had also apologized, but Jens Julian told him to go to Hell.
And that was exactly what he did. He drove back to Tórshavn.
Heðin Poulsen sat stroking his chin a good while.
“In other words, you’re saying that the boy from the horror film was sort of an Oedipus from Kolbeinagjóv? Is a retard even capable of that?”
“What I know is exactly what I’ve told you.”
O, Jesus, Friend to the Melancholy
ON JANUARY 27th, 1995, Eystari Landsrættur announced its verdict.
Eigil was not present at the time.
Neither was Jens Julian við Berbisá.
The man h
ad not spoken since the attack on August 25th of the previous year. Not even when his jaw had refused could anyone get a word out of him.
On her husband’s behalf, Jens Julian’s wife sent the Self-Governance Party’s leadership a letter, which Jens Julian himself signed, stating that Jens Julian was resigning as chair and removing himself from all committees.
One could clearly read Jens Julian in the signature, but it was difficult to distinguish við Berbisá. And that did not bode well. The man had always been Jens Julian, but it was only as an adult that he had taken the name við Berbisá.
In one of the many telephone conversations Eigil had with his mother, she said that in truth Jens Julian had become his son’s little brother. The man could not walk and it was unclear whether he would ever be able to walk again.
Eigil’s mother seemed to know quite a bit about what was going on, and that included various small details. Yet Eigil could not bring himself to ask if she was in contact with Jens Julian’s wife.
For three months, Eigil had been living in different hotels and pensions around Hordaland, Norway: in Bergen, Haugesund, Skudeneshavn, and also in the tiny town of Sveio, which lay on the peninsula of the same name.
He liked liquid comfort and he drank alone. At the hotel in Skudeneshavn, he was tossed out for being a bum and a drunk.
He was only present during the trial itself because the letter of the law required it: The accused shall, unless under lawful exception, be personally present for the entire trial, so long as he can speak; though the presiding judge, after the hearing is finished, may give him permission to withdraw.
That was exactly what Eigil did. He traveled to the Faroes on January 22nd, the trial took place on the 23rd, and by the next morning Eigil had already left the country.
He was worried that the Sosialurin or maybe Útvarpið, the radio station, would try to get their hands on him, but there seemed to be no interest.
Among the few present at the courthouse was the Writers’ Association’s treasurer, but it was not clear whether this was from solidarity or curiosity.
The Brahmadells Page 29
