The Brahmadells

by Jóanes Nielsen

  The Self-Governance Party’s new chairman also showed up, and it took Eigil by surprise when the man thanked him for doing his part to get the loser from Kolbeinagjógv out of the chairman’s seat.

  Before Eigil left for Norway, he called his mother. He said she would be doing him a great service if she did not appear for the trial. And she fulfilled his wish.

  His sisters and Ingvald were also absent.

  Even though Eigil drank heavily, he was still able to write, if sometimes only for twenty minutes a day. For some strange reason, he was able to concentrate even with the pounding in his head. When his hand found its rhythm, the scratch of the fountain pen seemed to calm his mind, and sometimes he wrote an entire page that was useable.

  Besides writing his novel, which was partly composed on a typewriter with large spaces between the lines, and partly handwritten in spiral notebooks, he had Tóvó’s letters to Napoleon Nolsøe with him. There were twenty-nine pages, which he had photocopied. The originals he had left to the state archives. On the folder he had written: “Tórálvur (Tóvó) í Geil. Letters from 1862 to 1876.”

  Each letter began with the words: Dear Pole. Then Tóvó might write that he was sitting aboard the Thin Lizzy, that the weather was far too good, and that for a number of days they had been waiting on wind.

  He also wrote some short descriptions of the docks in Newcastle or Hamburg. Regarding Manhattan he wrote: On this little Island, not even as large as my birthplace Strømø, there are people of all sorts. Blacks, Chinese, Arabs, Indians, and Whites. I have no idea if they have anything to do with each other, but, in any case, they are as beautiful to see as the variety of trees in the forest.

  Even though he was a sailor, Tóvó did not write much about life at sea. Maybe it was simply too prosaic. Office workers tend not to describe office life in their letters, and letter-writing farmers do not serve up details from the stable.

  Nonetheless, Tóvó did relate one occasion where he pulled a tooth from a German cook’s mouth. The procedure went well and he had Pole to thank for that.

  One of the letters was written in English. It filled three pages and was written in ink that once was red but had faded with time.

  In the letter Tóvó cited parts of a poem by Walt Whitman.

  Eigil was not too familiar with the famous American’s poetry. Poetry as a literary genre had never excited him. He knew that Whitman was one of the most important modernists, but that alone was not saying much. The novel, on the other hand, was a great achievement: stylistic, intellectual, and emotive. In Eigil’s opinion, dramas and essays were also a step above poetry. People who flocked to poetry reeked of the church or of secret lodges. It did not surprise him that Tóvó was one of those people who had swooned for lofty poetic words.

  Eigil had flipped through Walt Whitman’s collection, and it quickly became apparent that the lines Tóvó had sent to Pole were taken from several different poems:

  Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,

  Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

  Done with indoors complaints

  Strong and content I travel the open road.

  I am the poet of the woman the same as the man,

  And I say, it is as great to be a woman as to be a man,

  And I say there is nothing greater than the mother of men.

  I am larger, better than I thought,

  I did not know I held so much goodness.

  All seems beautiful to me,

  I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to me, I would do the same to you.

  Allons! the inducements shall be greater,

  We will sail pathless and wild seas,

  We will go where winds blow, waves dash, and the Yankee clipper speeds by under full sails.

  (I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes, We convince by our presence.)

  The most interesting letters were those in which Tóvó remembered the youthful years he spent on Tvøroyri.

  Twice Tóvó visited Sumba, and the only written description of Nils Tvibur that still exists was formulated by Tóvó: I have only seen one giant shed tears, and that was my friend Nils. The words struck Eigil’s heart.

  On the way back from Sumba, Tóvó visited the poet Pól Johannis á Øgrum. He knew Pól Johannis from Tvøroyri, when the man came north for boat wood or had other errands at the Royal Danish Trade Monopoly and stopped at Pole’s to buy morphine for his wife.

  However, Pole, the great collector of folksongs did not value the Akrarman as a poet. Napoleon did not record a single of Pól Johannis’s verses. To him, the Akrar poet was one of those Suðuroy folk who were always chuckling, hehehe, and who slandered respectable people.

  And that was not entirely untrue. Pól Johannis was quite the comedian, a trait that emerged in his many sharp and mocking satires.

  His wife suffered from melancholia and insomnia, and the only thing that calmed her down and let her sleep was morphine. In his letters to Pole, Tóvó described the woman’s bed. Pól Johannis had outfitted the bed with rockers, and on the nights that nightmares and hopelessness particularly plagued his wife, he would rock her and sing to her.

  Trust me, when that satirical poet’s wife dies, he will make a lid for her cradle, and she will be the only woman in the world to be buried exactly the same way she slept. And I am certain that on the last day, when the earth opens up, and we are all called to Judgment, that cradle will fly up to Heaven, and on its sails will be written: Oh, Jesus, Friend of the Melancholy.

  Eigil tried to find the Norwegian farm his great-great-grandfather left in 1827, and he succeeded. Or rather, he coincidentally happened upon a camping ground named Selleg’s Camping. A young couple from Oslo ran the tourist business there, but he was unable to meet them because they spent the winter months in the capital.

  On the other hand, he went several times to the local municipal office and police station, and here he succeeded in finding some information about his Norwegian origin.

  As it turned out, by 1910 the Selleg farm was already abandoned, and the last tenant was named Gregor Selleg. That had been the name of Nils’s father, and the twin brother who inherited the farm was also named Gregor. Nils’s son, the patricide of Sumba, had, in other words, been named after his Norwegian grandfather.

  That surprised Eigil.

  Nils Tvibur had not only imported Norwegian heifer names to his new homestead, but also his father’s name. Gregor had apparently been the name of the family’s tenant farmers, indeed, over many generations.

  The clerk at the municipal office told him that from 1825 to 1925, about a third of the Norwegian population emigrated west across the ocean, and that group contained many from Sveio. It could be that some of his relatives were among the emigrants. Another possibility was that the Selleg folk had relocated to Hordaland’s larger cities. Whatever the case, today there were no Sellegs left in Sveio. One family had Selleg as a middle name, but that was it.

  The woman kindly gave Eigil two addresses in town. He could contact people there who could give him more historical information.

  Eigil thanked her for her advice and help.

  Deep down, however, he was no longer interested in finding more information about his Norwegian origin; rather, he did not want to know any more about his violent make-up. He had ended up in Hordaland because he had avenged himself. He was a refugee on account of his psychic constitution. No matter what information he uncovered, it would not change his miserable life.

  One Friday, January 27th, Eigil spent the entire day, and also well into the evening, sitting in his room at Rønnaugs Pensjonat in Sveio waiting for the phone to ring.

  He had washed and shaved, and although an unopened Jameson stood on the desk, he had not tasted a drop.

  He hoped and expected that he would win the case. After the successful trial on Monday, Heðin Poulsen, for one, believed the vagueness that characterized the events in this case was
to Eigil’s advantage. If he could escape being branded a ruthless villain, he would get his legs under him again somehow.

  It was just past eight when Heðin Poulsen called, and Eigil could immediately tell by his voice that the man was moved. It could be he was also drunk, but Eigil did not dare to ask.

  Heðin said that they had won the trial, but that it had been an exceptionally shitty battle. The helpless father and son, the older an invalid, the younger born an idiot—they were the real losers.

  Jens Julian’s son was going to be sent to an institution in Denmark for dangerous imbeciles, and Eigil was to pay Jens Julian a fine of 38,000 kroner. There were other details, but Eigil could read about them in the letter.

  A coughing fit interrupted Poulsen, but when he could talk again, his voice was both hard and ruthless. He accused Eigil of being a combination of berserker and cultured villain, and he hoped that he drowned in the fucking pension’s bathtub.

  He said that he had known some cold devils in his day, and he himself was no ray of sunshine, but Eigil was in a class all by himself.

  The lawyer took a breath. His dry cough sounded almost friendly, like he was giving Eigil a chance to ask questions.

  Problem was, Eigil did not have any questions.

  Three or four long seconds passed, and when Heðin Poulsen finally said goodbye, the tiny click in the receiver sounded far too loud.

  Jóanes Nielsen is the author of four novels, a collection of stories, three volumes of essays, and eight poetry collections. He’s been nominated on five occasions for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize.

  Kerri A. Pierce has published translations from seven different languages, including Justine by Iben Mondrup and The Faster I Walk, The Smaller I Am by Kjersti A. Skomsvold, which was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

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