Far Afield

by Susanna Kaysen

  “Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” he asked. He didn’t really want to.

  “I can’t, thank you.” She looked into his eyes for a moment. “I could have a temun with you after work.”

  Much better. But why couldn’t she have dinner? Jonathan scolded himself; it didn’t matter anymore. “Fine,” he said, “I’ll see you at the Hafnia.”

  She was prompt, appearing in the dining room precisely at five. Eager to get it over with, Jonathan shoved the watercolor set onto her plate immediately. “This is for you,” he said. “A goodbye present.”

  Daniela smiled and reached into her pocketbook. “I have something for you too.” She pushed a soft little package toward him.

  He was taken aback, and saddened to know that if he hadn’t found the watercolors, he wouldn’t have thought to give her anything. “You’re so sweet,” he said wonderingly.

  “Open it.”

  It was a pair of mittens, in intricate patterns of black and brown.

  “I made them,” she said. “I know it’s cold in Boston.”

  “Oh, Daniela.” Jonathan felt himself choking up.

  She was busy admiring her present and didn’t notice. “This is perfect, Jonathan. You don’t know how nice this is. I can go out to paint in the evenings. It’s so easy with watercolors. And I’ve been silly, I wouldn’t get myself any.”

  So they’d finally managed to make each other happy, he thought. It seemed pretty simple. And she rounded out his happiness by saying, “I don’t think I’ll come tomorrow night. You would like to say goodbye to Eyvindur alone, wouldn’t you?”

  To which he nodded. And had the good grace to add, “I like saying goodbye to you alone also.”

  “Jonathan—”

  Whatever she was going to say, he didn’t want to hear it; he could already hear it anyhow: Do you think you’ll come back? He stood up abruptly, shaking the cups in their saucers. She followed his lead, and in the small, empty lobby they embraced for the last time, a polite hug without the slightest undertone of desire. He felt ashamed for his coolness, and as soon as she slipped out of his arms he wanted her back to do it right. She was opening the door; he grabbed her around the waist.

  “Let’s have a better goodbye,” he said, and kissed her till they both were out of breath.

  “I must go,” she said, disentangling herself, straightening her hair.

  “Yes.”

  “I really must.” She stood looking at him. “Oh—” she stepped toward the door again, “Farewell, Jonathan.”

  * * *

  A free evening: as always in Tórshavn, Jonathan fretted at the lack of bars. A bar would be the perfect place to spend his last night alone, getting sentimental with a bunch of tipsy strangers. But there would be bars aplenty soon enough, and forty kinds of shampoo and too many people—he pushed all that out of his mind. He would go buy himself a murder mystery for the plane and then take a stroll around the harbor.

  He was in luck. The stationery store had received a new shipment, and there were two Agatha Christies he hadn’t read. He bought them both; after all, he had a long trip ahead. As he put them in his pocket he thought how odd it was that by Friday he would be back in Cambridge, where there was a bookstore on every corner, stacked to the ceiling with things he hadn’t read. He felt queasy imagining it. Was it all necessary, the shampoo, the books, the six varieties of oranges—more than that, was it even true? Were his memories of lavish choice accurate?

  Jonathan walked in a daze down to the harbor. He wished now he’d booked a passage alongside his box. Two weeks at sea seemed like a good way to adjust to the change he was about to undergo. The fact that Boston was barely twenty-four hours away from this—the wooden boats with their Viking prows, the sod-roofed shacks along the shore, and all the wild enormous landscape of sky and sea—was unbelievable. Maybe it wasn’t true either. He sat down with his legs dangling off the pier and looked across the fjord to the shadowy mass of Sandoy, his island home.

  He waited there for a swell of emotion that never came. He expected to feel regret, to indulge finally the tears he’d had to hide in front of Heðin and Daniela, while the gulls keened a requiem for his loss. Instead he watched the light change over the water and smelled the fishy, oily, sea weedy air, content to sit swinging his feet until he was tired enough to go back to the hotel.

  In the dining room the next morning, making his way through a stale piece of Danish pastry, Jonathan saw a tall fellow dressed in khaki and with Hush Puppies on his feet ambling along the self-service breakfast line. Something about him was familiar—with a shock he realized it was Bart, his old pal from the Army, the Air Force, the CIA, or wherever he was from. He jumped up to greet him.

  “Hey, Bart!”

  The man turned around. He wasn’t Bart. Jonathan backed away.

  “Sorry,” Jonathan said, in Faroese. “I thought you were someone else.”

  The man squinted. “You speak English?”

  Jonathan laughed. “I’m American. Are you?”

  A nod. “I would never have picked you for an American.”

  “I’ve been here for a while.” Jonathan wondered if that explained anything. “Well, my name’s Jonathan.” He extended his hand.

  The man squinted at his hand for a moment, then took it. “Ridgely,” he said.

  “Is that your first name or your last name?”

  Ridgely stacked a couple of pastries on his plate and didn’t answer.

  Undeterred, Jonathan asked, “Are you here to look at the system?”

  Ridgely shot him a black look and shook his head.

  “Oh, come on. Everybody knows about it.”

  “Sloppy,” said Ridgely. “Bad security.”

  “So, anyhow,” Jonathan floundered, “do you know Bart? Who was here last year.”

  “He’s moved on.” Ridgely bobbed his head at the ceiling.

  “Fired?”

  “Permanently laid off.” A mean smile flitted across Ridgely’s face. “Dead, you might say.”

  Jonathan was confused, as he suspected he was meant to be. “Is he actually dead?”

  Ridgely wasn’t telling.

  Poor old Bart, with his terrible cough and his lax sense of security. Jonathan tried one more time, in honor of Bart’s memory. “He looked pretty sick when he was here.”

  “Should’ve,” said Ridgely. “Godforsaken place.”

  Jonathan couldn’t tell if these two comments were connected, or if Bart had deserved to look sick on his own account. He remembered how free Bart had been with information and hoped he’d managed to die without help from the Company.

  “Why are you here?” Ridgely asked.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “You said you’ve been here a while. How long?”

  Jonathan giggled nervously; he was being interrogated. “About a year.” He felt himself grinning, trying to make friends with Ridgely.

  “What are you doing here?” He was as persistent as a fly.

  “I’m an anthropologist. I’m doing research.”

  “Hunh?” Ridgely squinted again. “What’s that? An anthro-whazzis.”

  “It’s nothing, Ridgely,” Jonathan said, suddenly released from the spell of Ridgely’s interest. “It’s just someone who lives in foreign countries. I’ve been living in a cement house with no hot water and no vegetables for a year and now I’m going home. It’s got nothing to do with anything you care about.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” said Ridgely. Then he ambled off on his long legs to a table in the corner and began gnawing on his breakfast.

  Jonathan had to laugh. If there was one thing he was sure of, it was the irrelevance of his hard-won knowledge to anybody in America, and the notion of the military taking an interest in the recipe for blood sausage or the length of rope needed to haul in a struggling whale was particularly ridiculous. As he resumed his attack on his half-eaten pastry, he doubted that his expertise would seem any more exciting to the anthropology dep
artment. Pummeling it into a shape that would make sense to them was going to be a difficult task. He shook his head, thinking of Ridgely, of Harvard, of the whole revved-up modern world that fed on facts, that moved ever forward, constantly kicking over the traces of the past. Those who couldn’t keep the pace just fell behind. Whereas here, where life was circular, anybody could get the hang of things after a little while.

  As he had the night before, Jonathan waited for misery to wash over him at this thought and was again surprised when it didn’t. He couldn’t seem to work himself up about anything. The comfort he’d found in the repetitiveness of Faroese life, his inevitable return to God-knows-what in Cambridge: these were simply the conditions of his life. No point getting into a stew over it.

  He glanced at Ridgely in the corner, still bent over breakfast. Jonathan scooted out of the dining room. He wanted to get Eyvindur a wonderful present, and he knew that could take most of the day.

  In the end, he spent the entire day on it with no success. The options were limited: a sweater, a picture book about the Faroes, various kinds of frozen birds—in short, stuff that, if Eyvindur didn’t have, he’d never wanted in the first place. It would be better to send him something from America anyhow, Jonathan had decided, and mulling over exotic American offerings as he walked, he tramped for the last time up the hill to Eyvindur’s house.

  Eyvindur had shaved his beard.

  “It was a disguise,” he told Jonathan, who preferred him with it and must have shown this by his expression. “I was proposing myself as the artist, you see. It had to go.”

  “What does Anna think?”

  “She misses the tickles.” Eyvindur winked, grinned, writhed his naked face into a leer. “And the babies! They didn’t know who I was. They hid from me.”

  “I wouldn’t have recognized you,” Jonathan said.

  “Yes. Now I have a new disguise—the real me.”

  Jonathan laughed. “Eyvindur, you say the damnedest things.”

  “What are damnedests?” Without waiting for Jonathan to answer, he said, “You don’t look like yourself either.”

  “Who do I look like?”

  “Me!” Eyvindur slapped him on the back several times. “Jonathan, I missed having our important conversations. I’m glad to see you.”

  “Me too.”

  “Now for dinner we have the most specially peculiar Faroese thing—even more entirely typical than whale. Well, maybe not. First you have to burn off the hair with a candle, but you missed that part, because it’s been boiling at least two hours already.” He leaned close to Jonathan. “Do you want to try?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No.” He took Jonathan by the arm and led him into the kitchen, where Anna was enveloped in clouds of steam smelling of boiled shoe. “Look,” said Eyvindur, lifting the lid of the huge pot on the stove.

  Jonathan looked. Bobbing around in the pot was the head of a sheep, complete with eyes, ears, and teeth, though its color was a pinkened gray unseen on any known species of animal. Jonathan’s gorge rose; he hastily backed away from his dinner.

  “I don’t know about this, Eyvindur.”

  Anna said, “I told you he wouldn’t like it.”

  “The point isn’t to like it.” Eyvindur dropped the lid back with a clatter. “The point is to experience it.”

  “I can make you a little bread and herring,” Anna whispered. “I’ve got a nice fresh herring in there.” She pointed at the refrigerator.

  “Jonathan,” Eyvindur cajoled, “your last chance to eat real Faroese food.”

  “I’ll try,” said Jonathan.

  But when the head arrived at the table on a platter, an ovine John the Baptist martyred for the greed of the world, Jonathan thought perhaps he would not try. This, finally, made him truly sad. Life was just eating and dying, eating and dying, and he felt the burden of instinct, from which none could break free. The futility of all earthly effort—in the end you ate or were eaten, and that was all there was to say.

  Eyvindur stuck a spoon into the sheep’s eye and gouged out the orb. “There’s a good piece of fat back here,” he said.

  Jonathan burst into tears.

  Eyvindur let go of his spoon with its piece of fat and scrambled out of his chair to Jonathan’s side. “You are unhappy because you are sorry for the sheep?” Jonathan shook his head. “Ah,” said Eyvindur. “I understand. You are unhappy because in America you will never eat real food like this.”

  And although he didn’t think he would miss boiled sheep’s head in America, Jonathan knew that essentially Eyvindur was right. “Yes,” he said, and he stopped needing to cry. “That’s it, Eyvindur.”

  “Well, eat it now. Here, eat this piece of fat, eat some brain, eat up everything you can of the Faroes.”

  Banked back into the wind, winding in and out of clouds, the plane was struggling to break the tug of earth, churning its propellers in thinner and thinner air. First the landing strip, then the island, filled Jonathan’s window. Soon, he knew, the entire archipelago would be a map briefly displayed on that small screen. But poised in the moment before it all was reduced to an illustration, a topography only hinted at by light and shadow, he felt the hills, bays, and fjords with their wave-embroidered outlines, the very rise and fall of the fields, in the rise and fall of his pulse. And his footsteps on that country—though they went round and round in circles—were each precious, each tread known to him and, annealed by memory, visible at this and greater distances.