Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

“Boston.” Jonathan had an inspiration. “It’s a fishing village like Skopun, but it’s bigger.”

  “And your father and mother live there?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “They must be sad that you have gone so far away from home.”

  Jonathan conjured parents who might be sad about such a thing and nodded. Then he decided to meet his language problem head on. “I did not learn how to say you in the polite way—” he began. Everyone in the store laughed.

  “That’s very good,” Sigurd said. “Then you will be a real Faroese. We don’t ever use that you.”

  “But you used it,” Jonathan said to the girl.

  “We use it with Danes,” she said.

  “Danes like it,” Sigurd said.

  “I’m not a Dane,” said Jonathan. Being a Dane was bad. Danes were colonial overlords. Better to be a Martian.

  “Jo-Na-Than Swift,” said Sigurd. “But he was Irish, wasn’t he? He wasn’t from your country.”

  Jonathan was struck by Sigurd’s making a fine distinction not usually important to outsiders, between Irish and English; did the Faroese consider themselves the Irish of the Arctic, oppressed and misunderstood? This was a trail worth following.

  “Well, what about the Danes?” he asked, liking the open-endedness of the question. “Nondirective” and “open-ended” were terms heard often in the anthropology department. Woe to the anthropologist who determined the outcome of his research by witlessly asking questions that led straight to answers.

  Nobody wanted to talk about the Danes. “Danes,” said Sigurd, making it sound like a curse. And Jón Hendrik gargled in agreement.

  “In America, are there trees?” One of the little boys had ventured out from his pal’s arm and come a few steps toward Jonathan. Everybody turned expectantly, waiting for his answer. They didn’t want to talk about Danes, he realized, because they wanted to hear about America, his native planet.

  “Yes,” he said, “there are trees everywhere.”

  “In America,” said Sigurd, “there is everything. Am I right?” He cocked his head at Jonathan.

  “There aren’t any Faroese people in America,” said Jonathan, pleased with his own diplomacy.

  But Jón Hendrik had something to say to this. “There are hundreds of Faroese in America. You just don’t know them, because you don’t know anything about the Faroes.” He shot a nearly black stream expertly into the corner behind him.

  “Where are they?” Jonathan was skeptical.

  “In Dorchester,” said Jón Hendrik, “and in New York City.”

  “What do they do there?” Jonathan couldn’t imagine a Faroese in New York City, or Dorchester, for that matter.

  “They fish,” said Jón Hendrik. Then he shut his eyes to indicate he wasn’t giving out any more information.

  “Can you eat trees?” asked the little boy.

  “No. They’re pretty to look at, that’s all.” Jonathan reconsidered. “You can climb up them. Sometimes you can make a little house in the branches and sit up there.”

  The boy’s mouth opened at this idea, urging Jonathan to greater heights. “You can make things out of them. Like this counter.” He touched it. “This is made from a tree.” He looked around the store for more examples, but the floor was concrete and the walls were cement block. A broom hanging on the wall behind him offered itself. “This handle is made from a tree.” He thought for a second. “Trees are good to stand under when the sun is too hot.”

  “Too hot?” This was the girl.

  “Sometimes in America in the summer, the sun is very hot.”

  “Are you closer to the sun than we are?” asked Sigurd. “You can’t be. We have more sun than you do. We have daytime all night here.”

  Jonathan couldn’t explain why this was so, though he had a vague notion that it had to do with the shape of the earth. Instead, he produced information he was sure of: “There used to be trees all over the Faroes too.”

  “When?” This was from the other little boy.

  “A very long time ago.”

  “Did you see them, Jón Hendrik?” asked the boy, peering over the counter.

  “He thinks he knows Faroese history,” was all Jón Hendrik said.

  “If you wouldn’t be so unfriendly, he could learn Faroese history from you,” said Sigurd. He leaned over the counter again. “He’ll come around when he knows you better. It’s just his way.”

  Jonathan nodded. He didn’t care if Jón Hendrik never “came around,” though he knew he would be the perfect informant. Sigurd, with his blue overalls and his literary references and his hardware-grocery-stationery-ship’s-chandler emporium, appealed to Jonathan much more. But he wasn’t here to make friends.

  With that sobering thought, a desire to get out of the store arose in Jonathan. Surely he had overstayed his welcome, if he’d ever had one. On the dock and in the post office, Jonathan had watched people taking leave of each other, so he had an idea of how to do it. First, take hands out of pockets; second, say “So, so, so”; third, look at the floor—or ground; then, another “So, so, so,” accompanied by reinsertion of hands in pockets. The point of no return was signaled by the phrase “I reckon so,” addressed to the clouds and, if the other person were older or in some way venerable, repeated with nods and, rarely, a smile. But this was only one side of a streamlined version; when you got two people going, it could take up to twenty minutes, what with comments on the weather and the trading of “So, so, so,” until both parties were satisfied. Still, there was nothing for it but to launch in.

  “So, so, so,” he ventured.

  To which Sigurd in instinctive response said, “So, so, so.”

  Jonathan took his hands out of his pockets (which he had omitted to do at the start) and put forth another “So, so, so.”

  Going for the long version, Sigurd said, “Good weather.”

  “Today,” said Jonathan. An inspired response, he was sure. He was still waiting for Faroese weather to turn on him; so far, soggy weeks in Tórshavn notwithstanding, he’d seen none of the fabled storm or drear.

  “Today,” repeated Sigurd. He laughed. He turned to Jón Hendrik and shouted, “He says the weather’s good today.”

  “He’ll see,” growled Jón Hendrik.

  “He sees plenty,” Sigurd stated.

  A balm of triumph suffused Jonathan; one person, at least, did not think him a boob.

  “So,” said Sigurd.

  A single so wasn’t in the script. And to confuse things further, the girl, pulling the child in her charge closer, chimed in with “I reckon so.”

  Jonathan really did want to go. “I reckon so,” he said, hoping he could ride out on the girl’s coattails.

  But, as he had suspected from his research, women’s scripts were different, and with a quick “So, so, so,” she was out the door, leaving him to thread his own way through the maze of farewell. And between his incompetence and Sigurd’s boredom (Jonathan could see no other explanation for Sigurd’s embarking on the epic version of goodbye), this might have taken the rest of the afternoon. They were rescued by the arrival of two fishermen in yellow outfits who needed tobacco and lubricating oil. Jonathan scuttled out into the street with a “Good day” and an all-American wave. This gesture evidently struck Sigurd as mysterious, for in Jonathan’s last glimpse of him, through the window beside Jón Hendrik’s head, he was open-mouthed and inattentive to his customers.

  Pleased with his productive afternoon, Jonathan went down to the dock to watch the mail boat load for Tórshavn, which took ten minutes, then went to the post office. Improbably, Jón Hendrik had in those ten minutes transported himself to his major headquarters and was chewing in the corner when Jonathan arrived. “Good day the American!” he said. He tendered this greeting as if they had not been at loggerheads only fifteen minutes before.

  Devilish, Jonathan said, “Fine weather.” But Jón Hendrik did not reply. There was mail: a letter from Professor Olsen and a bank state
ment from the Cambridge Trust Company, with Gerda’s tidy script forwarding it to the Faroes.

  Feeling a little tired, Jonathan decided to go home and read his letters (a bank statement qualified, in these circumstances, as a letter) and then make himself corn muffins for dinner. And take notes on the day.

  Jonathan’s preferred spot for letter reading was the toilet, so there he repaired. A pleasant twenty minutes passed during which he learned that his balance was $2,500 and that Olsen was thinking of coming to the Faroes at the beginning of September. (Jonathan doubted he would. Olsen had, in his two previous letters, announced that he was thinking of coming to the Faroes at the beginning of July and the beginning of August; Jonathan figured it was his way of assuring emotional support.) Gerda had enclosed a hurried note on the order of We miss you, weather’s been lovely, off to Maine in twenty minutes, do write. What was puzzling was that she had gone to the trouble of carefully opening the bank statement, tucking in her note, and sealing up the whole in such a way as to be nearly unnoticeable: was it meant to be a surprise? Or was she somehow apologizing for opening his mail?

  Jonathan hitched his pants up and looked out the window at his view. It was magnificent. Never, in all the world, had there been such a well-situated toilet. The house was on the higher of the two village roads and in addition stood on a little rise of its own, so from this second-floor window Jonathan saw miles across the broad fjord to Streymoy, the main island, and up to the Troll’s Head where the birds’ kingdom lay. His daily twenty minutes in the bathroom were dependably enjoyable—he had even considered making the bathroom into his office. It was big enough; clearly, before indoor plumbing, it had been a bedroom. Even now, since it lacked a bathtub, there was room for a desk. But: Don’t shit where you work. Or something along those lines. He leaned over to flush.

  The toilet, a new Danish model, had a roaring cataract of a flush that could sweep his shit to Tórshavn. But now it did not flush. The handle that usually sprang at his touch, unleashing a tremendous whoosh, refused to move. Jonathan scowled and tried again. Nothing. He jiggled the handle this way and that, ran some water in the sink to make sure there was water (there was), opened the back of the toilet looking for obvious problems, tried again. This time a thin trickle made him hopeful. Several tries later, though, he had succeeded only in filling the bowl to the danger point, contents still afloat.

  He shut the door on the situation and went downstairs to make muffins. Like many unmechanically minded people, Jonathan believed that if you gave the machine time to recover it would perform properly. He would let the toilet rest. He could piss in the sink, and probably by morning the toilet would somehow have healed itself.

  In the morning, his production of yesterday greeted him when he stumbled into the bathroom. Tentatively, he tried the toilet handle; it was as rigid as it had been the day before. Pissing into the sink, Jonathan considered his options: wait for the miraculous self-healing process to begin; ask for advice; ask for somebody to fix it. The first seemed foolish; the second pointless (Jonathan knew his limits, and he doubted his ability to fix a toilet in English, never mind Faroese); and the third involved getting rid of the current contents of the toilet. Breakfast first, he decided.

  Breakfast, with its accompanying internal rumbles, only brought home to Jonathan the fact that much of what humans eat is returned to the world as shit and confirmed his initial sense that option three was the way to go. But where was he to put this all-too-obvious evidence of his humanity? In a plastic bag, and then in the trash barrel outside the house. But the bread came naked from the bakery on the other side of the island; the cheese, cut from a big slab, was wrapped in brown paper; the fish was fresh out of the sea. All the traditional American locations for plastic were here so reduced to their origins that there was no need for Baggies. Then he remembered that salt cod, of which the Faroes produced most of the world supply, came in a thick plastic bag stapled shut at the top. He would go to the “other” grocery store and purchase some, throw out the contents, and use the bag. Then he would find himself a toilet fixer.

  Within an hour Jonathan was ready to find help. He had made a new friend in the proprietor of the second grocery store, a red-faced woman who was delighted that Americans ate salt cod—as Jonathan assured her they did, in order to cover his tracks. And he had for the first time sensed the life of the village: she and everyone in her store (the usual assortment of lounging kids, bored young mothers, and hurried fishermen) knew he was the American who had come to live with them. Everybody in town knew him. Of course: in a village of four hundred people, a visitor from outer space would not go unnoticed. He found a certain comfort in this, for it relieved him of the burden of self-explanation. A deeper comfort lay in this evidence that the tree falling in the forest made a noise. Life was not restricted to what went on in his head; life surged along on a tide of gossip and common interests, one of which was his unaccountable but real presence.

  So, he had a verifiable existence. Cheered, Jonathan went over to Sigurd’s store to get help.

  Sigurd diagnosed the problem immediately. “Full septic tank,” he said. But septic tank in Faroese wasn’t within Jonathan’s ken, so there was an interlude of diagram drawing on a scrap of brown paper. Particularly explicit was the overflowing heap of turds Sigurd inked into his cross-section of Jonathan’s front yard, stopping occasionally to hold his nose so there would be no doubt what he was representing. Pleased with his drawing, Sigurd beamed at Jonathan and said, “Full, completely full of shit.” Shit, an Anglo-Saxon word, was easy to recognize.

  “What shall I do?”

  “Empty it.” Sigurd nodded. “With a wheelbarrow.” Wheelbarrow necessitated another sketch.

  This must be a joke, thought Jonathan. “That would take forever,” he objected. “Also, I don’t have a wheelbarrow.”

  “I’ll send my brother Jens Símun.”

  “He’ll help?”

  “He has a wheelbarrow.”

  “Where am I going to put it?”

  “In the sea,” said Sigurd.

  Jonathan went home in a downcast mood.

  Jens Símun had one blue eye and one brown eye, and he was in Jonathan’s kitchen before the water for tea—which Jonathan had put on as soon as he got home—had come to a boil. He was bigger and rougher-looking than Sigurd, but these seemed to Jonathan good qualities in a person who was going to demonstrate shoveling shit.

  “So, so, so,” said Jens Símun, shutting his blue eye. He sat down at the kitchen table. “A temun,” he said.

  Jonathan produced a bachelor’s temun: bread, butter, plum jam, tea with plenty of milk. Jens Símun ate three pieces of bread with condiments, then asked for cake. Cake was the real point of a temun, Jonathan knew. What was it about island living that nourished a sweet tooth? He thought of the English and their treacle, the ranks of bad eclairs in the bakery on Mount Desert.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t have any cake.”

  “So, so, so.” Jens Símun took another slab of bread.

  “What am I going to do with that?” Jonathan asked, leaning in the direction of his front yard.

  “I have to look at it, to see how bad it is.” He chewed his bread slowly. “Sometimes you have to stir.”

  “Stir?”

  “Sometimes it’s too hard to get it out.”

  Jonathan shut his eyes and hoped he wouldn’t have to stir.

  But, of course, he did have to stir, Jens Símun proclaimed after lifting what looked like a big manhole cover at the edge of the lawn. He shook his head: this was a very bad case indeed. As they stood looking into the dark depths, Jonathan’s next-door neighbor, with whom he had never exchanged a word, came out and joined them. He and Jens Símun flanked Jonathan, both shaking their heads. Then the neighbor disappeared behind his house and returned a minute later with a hose, dripping water, and a long pole. He handed these to Jonathan.

  The idea was to run the water into the tank while stirring with the pole. This would
“soften things up,” Jens Símun explained, and make it easier to remove the contents with the shovel that the neighbor, Petur, had brought after a second trip behind his house. Then, fill the wheelbarrow and take it down to the sea.

  “Where?” Jonathan didn’t think he was supposed to dump it right into the harbor alongside the boats.

  “Oh, to the west,” said Jens Símun airily, waving his hand toward the Troll’s Head.

  Petur was more specific. “You see where the breakwater ends?” He pointed to a concrete wall jutting out from one of the arms of the natural harbor. “You go down there and dump over the wall, into the sea.” He turned back to his house. “Dump to the west,” he added, “because the current runs to the west.”

  So Jonathan began his labors. Hercules, he remembered from Gods and Heroes, had diverted two rivers to wash away his piles of manure; Jonathan had only his hose and his hands. After the first trip to the breakwater with a full wheelbarrow, he decided that Sisyphus was a more appropriate role model; after the second trip, he stopped thinking.

  For the early part of the afternoon, Jonathan worked steadily, achieving a rhythm: stirring was hard, but not as hard as excavation and loading the barrow; his recovery period was his walk to the sea. Though in the beginning he’d feared the wheelbarrow would tip over, he soon realized that it had an implacable stability, and he was able to look at the scenery as he walked instead of peering anxiously at the front wheel. It was the dead time of day before the second mail boat arrived, when all the men were working and all the women were washing the lunch dishes. Jonathan and his noxious cargo were unobserved on their rounds.

  He returned from his eighth or ninth trip to find his septic tank surrounded by visitors: Jens Símun, Petur the neighbor, a man he didn’t know, and the two little boys who had likened his head to a potato. The opportunity for a pause was welcome. Jonathan smiled, but nobody smiled back. He let the wheelbarrow drop to the ground with a thump and sighed. Jens Símun and Petur moved aside to allow him access to his hole.

  Jonathan’s will failed him. This was not a task he could perform under observation, and clearly these people were here to watch. Didn’t they have anything better to do? No, they didn’t, Jonathan realized; there was not much to do in Skopun on a long summer’s evening. Whatever Jens Símun, Petur, and the third man worked at, they were probably finished by now, four-thirty. And boys of eight are famous the world over for having nothing to do. His septic tank was the newest movie in town.