by Sjón
In the year 1974 my father started attacking his own family. In 1974 I waited for phone calls from a crazy girl who I knew was going to drop me the minute she got tired of me. But that’s how it is, that’s how you lose a city, and it’s only afterwards that you can write the story. When you’re in the middle of it, you think everything will stay the same, everything will remain the way it is, just a little bit different.
Then you’re standing there one day on the empty street when you’ve come home after having been away for a long time, and you meet people you don’t know, or people you don’t recognize. The grey factory buildings and the grey mountains are the same as they have always been. But everything has changed and the workers don’t walk through the gate to punch the clock any more. That’s how it happens: first your best friend moves, then you move, then they shut down the smelting works, then there’s a whole gang of men nobody needs, and then the radio stations don’t play the records you like any longer. Then they ship the entrails of the factory to Poland, China and Argentina, and then they start arguing about what’s going to happen to the shells of the buildings that have started falling down. The benches are empty, there’s no longer water in the fountain outside city hall, and the neon lights on the cinema have stopped working.
There used to be something here, something beautiful and disturbing all at once, and it seemed important, a sparkling future that perhaps nobody fully believed in, but which was ingrained in you—this is your city, this is your time, this is what you are. And look now: I can’t even remember everybody’s names. That’s why I decided to create this little booklet with a list of all the people who used to be at the cabins in Skånevik for those weeks of the summer every year. I have written short biographies of people, made copies of photographs of them and tried to piece together what has happened to everyone.
After that summer I was sure that I would never go up to the director’s residence again. We weren’t going to sleep together any more. It was best to avoid one another or not speak to one another ever again. But I longed for her, I dreamed about her, how she took my hand and stuck it in between her legs. How she took my foot and put it between her thighs and then started moving on top of me until she came. How she shoved my head down towards her crotch and whispered for me to show her what she had taught me. My parents were like children that summer, consumed with trying to find one another anew. My mother had come crawling back and asked for forgiveness. They spoke in soft, secretive voices and I tried to interpret everything they said, but pretty soon they were yelling at one another again, loudly and without consideration. They had disappointed one another too much; neither of them managed to live up to what they had been when they’d first fallen in love. I wanted to get away, I wanted to be free. I slipped up the path to the director’s residence every time she called. As soon as I was inside, she fumbled with my belt, then she pulled off my trousers. I wondered whether there was a name for this. And if it didn’t have a name, was there a way out of it?
This was the worst thing I could know about myself—that I was just like her, that we were two of a kind. I wanted to get out of there; I wanted to stay. I gave in to her hard hands every single time. Afterwards I lay with her back against my stomach, like an accident victim. We lay in the dirty afternoon light and I saw that her skin was young and smooth, without wrinkles, free of all the scars that were waiting somewhere in the years to come. I wanted her to start talking, for her to explain to me what had happened. Or that one day she would cry or crack, say that she wanted to be with me or at least that she needed me. I lay as close to her as I could. On some afternoons I could hear her breathing change and I realized she’d fallen asleep. Their house was so different from ours. They had, for example, a pool table and a huge fireplace in the living room. On the stairs and on the second floor, there were bookshelves filled with novels and reference books. The rooms were dark and solid. The dead stared down at me from up on the walls, oil-painted ancestors who’d perhaps been real bastards when they were alive, for all I knew. The carpet was thick and soft; walking on it was like walking across a lawn. I thought that one day I would live in a house like this, a house as huge and as expensive. At the time I didn’t have any idea just how badly all this was going to end.
TRANSLATED BY DIANE OATLEY
MAY YOUR UNION BE BLESSED
CARL JÓHAN JENSEN
THE HEAD-TEACHER’S WIFE, Mrs Rybert-Hermansen, was quite unlike her husband. A tall, angular woman five years his senior, sometimes prone to kindness but mostly brusque and bossy, she spoke Danish when she spoke at all, and allowed no one to address her in Faroese with impunity, although she rarely cared to make a fuss.
She was the daughter of a stern postmaster, Jens Erich Rybert. He had become known across the land for having fought at the battle of Dybbøl in the 1865 Dano-Prussian war, when an explosion had left him with a limp. His dark disposition could sometimes transform him through fits of demonic rage.
In Tórshavn his thin, high-pitched voice earned him the nickname “Bleater”. Having completed his military service, Rybert, who was from a well-bred but not equally well-to-do family, studied economics and law in Copenhagen, but delayed taking his final examinations.
He came to the Faroes one spring in the early 1870s to work at the Governor’s office as a temporary replacement, but ended up staying on.
For the first few months he rented lodgings together with the surgeon Paul Fobian in the house at Bakka owned by the shopkeeper Knút Hermansen.
As fate would have it, there were two housemaids working for the newly married shopkeeper. The housemaids took turns tending to the lodgers in the house at Bakka—one day to clean for them, the next day to prepare their dinner.
One of these housemaids was called Thalia, originally from Elduvík.
Her age was uncertain.
Thalia was more plain than beautiful. She was short with narrow shoulders, a small, full bosom and a dark complexion with black slanted eyes, a flat nose and a wide mouth.
She had, however, one particular attribute that distinguished her, more than any external feature, from other women. She was possessed of an internal, almost supernatural power to command any man’s desire with the same cool glow of innocence and oblivion as the moon commands the tides.
But Thalia was a gentle soul.
She considered her power a sin for which she must atone every day.
But she accepted whomever it drew to her.
She satisfied, soothed and satiated, all with the same humble diligence.
Soon after taking up employment with Knút Hermansen she had been given a room of her own in an annex which had originally been used for storage. The entrance was from an alley at the back of the house.
The shopkeeper would certainly not allow himself to be diverted by any special powers. He kept an accurate account of everything he saw, heard or thought. He was a prudent man with a strong sense of honour. After the household had retired for the evening, it was his habit to keep an ear on all the goings-on in the annex.
And sometimes also an eye.
A row of old deck boards formed a wall separating Thalia’s room from a passageway that followed the length of the house from the shop to the annex. There was a knothole in one of the boards that was situated at a height particularly convenient for peeping, when the small mirror covering it was pushed aside.
Not infrequently, the shopkeeper had trouble sleeping. Despite her young age, his wife Gisela could snore like a bull. Thus any movement in the alleyway would easily compel him from the marital bed, and he would eventually find himself standing in front of the little mirror.
It would also happen that if he thought he heard rustling in the bed on the other side of the boards, he would poke his finger under the mirror so that chance provided him with a vision of how—when least expected—unaccountable impulses could get the better of reason and sense.
Each time this vision was equally clear.
Thalia knelt by the side of the be
d, unbuttoned the front of her nightdress and performed carnal sacrament on whatever frustrated soul had sought her out, with a firm hand and an air of compassionate wonder.
Each time the procedure was the same.
But the men were as different as they were endowed.
Knút Hermansen stood gaping, pressing and panting against the boards, his heart aflame and his eyes watering with guilt-ridden pleasure.
The knowledge that providence gave the shopkeeper through the knothole was credited in his accounts alongside his other earnings.
One mild Sunday night around the feast of St Lawrence, this chapter of his book-keeping, however, came to a quick and dreadful end.
The causes were twofold.
The first was a watchful eye, and the second the point of a lancet, which reduced his sight by half.
The watchful eye belonged to the undergraduate in economics and law. The lancet came from the desk drawer of Paul Fobian.
Word got around. For several weeks Knút Hermansen was in agony, even though physician Smertz, seeing the state his patient was in, had been quick to remove the eye from the socket.
The incident had no immediate consequence other than that, on the following morning, Rybert moved from his rented lodgings into a half-constructed house at Ryggi, owned by the provincial authorities.
A week later, on a Tuesday, Thalia left the shopkeeper’s annex and moved in at Ryggi.
Shortly before Christmas she and the young Dane married.
For many years relations between Knút Hermansen and Jens Erich Rybert were strained, to say the least.
It was nevertheless a comfort to the shopkeeper that even with his semi-vision, he couldn’t help noticing that Thalia continued to perform her sacraments, despite her marital status. Neither her power nor her will to atone for her inherent sin showed any sign of abating.
That Rybert’s mood darkened as the years passed, and his devilish rages became ever more frequent, was no less of a comfort.
Then came the children.
First Rybert’s daughter.
Then the shopkeeper’s son, Mats Kristian Hermansen.
Miss Rybert was unlike both her parents in appearance, but as she grew up, it came to light that in certain undeniable ways she was clearly her mother’s daughter.
Finally, her father decided the only recourse was to send her away to Denmark.
This settled the score for Knút Hermansen, who felt no shame about his own offspring.
For a long time nothing much happened.
But then Rybert was appointed as postmaster.*
Hermansen was shocked, but adjusted to this development sooner than might have been expected.
Madam Thalia had taken to the bottle in her later years. Rybert’s advancement in professional standing was outweighed by his wife’s deteriorating reputation, as she became ever more brazen in her shamelessness.
And when one morning word had it in the shop that the postmaster’s wife had let the missionary and quack Brond pull out all her teeth, the shopkeeper decided that the time had now come to settle the accounts for good. The knothole, the lancet and his missing eye were written off forever.
The shopkeeper and the postmaster took to greeting each other in the street. Sometimes they could even be seen attending the same funerals.
Years passed.
Jens Erich Rybert became ill. Having managed to recover from a stroke, he suddenly died.
One Good Friday morning as he sat in the church loft listening to the vicar recounting the works for which rewards are reckoned not by grace, but by debt, the postmaster felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his side and chest and left the church earlier than was his wont. He arrived home to find his wife on her knees on the parlour floor in front of the sofa, dressed only in her undergarments, with bodice unbuttoned. The devil took hold of Rybert. As he kicked and thrashed Thalia in a blind rage, his wife cringing and grovelling around on the floor in search of her dentures, he suddenly clutched his chest with both hands, jerked his head to the right, then to the left, and with ashen face and upturned eyes fell dead onto the sofa, his head landing in the lap of a tender, downy-cheeked young man who had not had the presence of mind to pull up his trousers.
The young man was Mats Kristian Hermansen.
A year later, embittered, the shopkeeper settled his own mortal accounts and soon afterwards the shop was shut up for good.
The following year, in the autumn, Miss Rybert returned home, spirited and voluble, despite her waning youth. She moved in with her mother at Ryggi.
By this time, though, Thalia was entering her second childhood. Before long, darkness and dementia had engulfed her so firmly that her power was finally extinguished.
Nothing now prevented Miss Rybert and Mats Kristian from forming a union, which they did nine years later, shortly after he took his teacher’s diploma.
It began one uneasy day in June.
Flies were buzzing.
The sun beat down and everything was still, trembling.
Then a sudden breeze picked up.
In the parlour of the shopkeeper’s house, an infusion of smells swirled in the air. The tang of wood shavings, varnish and ethanol that lingered after Gisela, Mats Kristian’s mother, had been borne out earlier that day, mixed with a whiff of mould, eau de Cologne and sweat. Into this concoction the scent of angelica wafted in on the breeze from the garden.
Miss Rybert stood with her back to the parlour door, her eyes half closed, head tilted, and nostrils blazing.
Her arms around Mats Kristian’s neck.
He kissed her throat hungrily.
My dove, my Shulamite, he muttered, fumbling with her clothes, aroused and ardent. It was, however, with an inkling of the misery and regret which would become his steadfast companions that he finally managed to grope his way to her Zion’s gate.
Thick, coarse hair grazed his fingertips.†
* Postmaster J.L. Rybert came to the Faroes, as the author says, to take up a temporary position at the Governor’s office. This was in 1879, the same year that Jens Davidsen retired. H.C. St Finsen was Governor at the time.
The author is correct in stating that Rybert studied law, but he did not study economics, and he had recently taken the first part of his exams when he came here. He was supposed to fill in a clerical position until the autumn, when he had a passage reserved back to Denmark on the state-owned steamer Diana. But he ended up staying on at the Governor’s office until 1901, when he was appointed as postmaster.
There are no sources to confirm that Rybert fought in the war in 1865, and this would hardly have been possible, as he was twenty-five when he came to the Faroes and could not have been more than eleven years old in 1865. He was said to have an effeminate demeanour and always dressed as if he was on his way to a social festivity. He was also known to be long-winded, short-tempered and high-handed. The people of Tórshavn called him “Queen Arsehole”.
Rybert married, as the author says, and his wife was quite rightly from Elduvík, but her name was not Thalia and she never worked for Knút Hermansen, nor was she a slattern as Thalia is depicted in the story. Rybert’s wife was Marin Kristina Frederiksen. She was the seventh daughter of the farmer Fríðrik á Flatumørk, who died in 1889. She did keep house for Rybert for many years but they were both well advanced in age when they married, which was, according to the church records for South Streymoy, in the summer of 1917, and therefore they had no children together.
† The reader should be extremely careful not to take anything the author says about the head teacher too seriously. It is at best unreliable and at worst malicious fantasy.
First, his name was Kristin, not Mats Kristian. He took his diploma at the Faroese Teacher’s College in 1915. That same year he married Elisabeth Magdalene Huber. She was the daughter of the postal assistant J.M. Huber, who came to the Faroes in 1909, and not postmaster Rybert, as the author maintains. This assistant Huber was said to have been a small, frail man easily given to chills. The
people of Tórshavn called him “Draughty”.
Kristin Hermansen was a temperate man, scrupulous and efficient in his work, see Føroysk Lærarafólk (Bókadeild Føroya Lærarafelag, 1995, p. 57). After qualifying as a teacher, he was appointed to a position in Tvøroyri where he became head teacher in 1921. In 1933 he returned to Tórshavn and worked at the Intermediary School until he retired in 1965.
Kristin Hermansen began early on to make a name for himself in the cultural life of the Faroes. While he was in Tvøroyri, he founded the Tvøroyri Theatrical Society and was its chairman until he moved back north. During his years in Tvøroyri, he also published a collection of poems, Yrkingar (1923), and produced the weekly paper Tímin.
Above all else he was known for the provocative articles he published about Charles Darwin and evolutionary theory in the journal Varðin (see no. 2, pp. 29–31; no. 5, pp. 53–5; and no. 9, pp. 81–3). He left behind various unpublished short stories and plays, and also tried his hand as a translator. Among this work was a translation of The Pelican by August Strindberg, which the Tvøroyri Theatrical Society staged in the winter of 1925 and Tímin published the same year.
In the literary history Úr bókmentasøgu okkara, published by Varðin in 1935 (p. 151), the late Professor Christian Matras briefly discusses Hermansen’s translations, but has not a single word to say about his poems, plays or articles. Of his translation of The Pelican, Christian Matras says that while bearing the marks of a rare enthusiasm, the divergence between interest and competence is unfortunately often very great. The translator is no great stylist, writes the Professor, and his translation never manages to capture the vitality and intensity that gives Strindberg’s text its brilliance.
