“So, what do you think of the others, Mattias?” asked Ennen one evening in her room, with First Band on the Moon droning on in the background.
“The others?”
“Yes, Anna and Palli, for example. Do you like them?”
“Sure, what can I say? It seems like Anna takes good care of you. And Palli? I think they’re good people. Really good people.”
“Yeah, they are. Did you know they’re together?”
“I had my suspicions,” I answered. “Has it been going on for long, or?”
“About a year, longer perhaps. Do you think you and I’ll end up together?”
“You and I? How do you mean? I haven’t really thought about it.”
She scrunched her eyes and squinted at me, God alone knew what that might mean.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “The first thing anybody thinks about when they meet a new person, is whether it’s possible to fall in love with him. Or her. That’s the way it is.”
“Really? So, what do you figure? Would you describe my odds as good or catastrophic?”
“I’ve no idea. But I think you might be the best thing that’ll ever happen to me.”
“Can you really know that so soon?” I asked.
“Mm.”
“Goodness.”
“But we’re both working on this, huh?” she said, rotating a finger at her temple.
“On getting better?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure.”
“I don’t think I’ll get a lot better, by the way,” she said.
“But that’s good enough, isn’t it?”
“Not really.”
We fell silent for a minute as we searched for something else to talk about.
“Have you ever thought how human beings are made of almost nothing but water?” asked Ennen.
“No. How much water?”
“72.8 percent. About the same as the quantity of sea in the world.”
“Have you ever thought how if you stretch your arms out to the side, the length is the same as your height?” I suggested.
“Sometimes. Not often. But now and again, yes.”
“Right.”
Music on loop. Or the evenings. The hours. The minutes.
Let’s come together, me and you.
La-la-la-la-la-la, your new cuckoo.
And then, one day toward the end of October. I woke to the noise of my own breathing, my own pulse, and a sudden sense of panic coursed through me telling me I’d overslept, and I sat quickly up in bed, began putting my clothes on with my eyes still half-closed, and I was already fully dressed and standing in the hallway dazed when I remembered I didn’t have any job to do, and that the day was mine to use as I wanted. Quietly in the Factory. It reminded me of that first afternoon, when Havstein went to Tórshavn to talk with Jørn, but I wasn’t frightened anymore. And I didn’t have the desire in me to go off into thin air.
I padded down the stairs and into the kitchen, ate breakfast as I counted raindrops on the windowpane, drank orange juice, coffee. Did the dishes from everybody else’s breakfasts and looked at the clock over the kitchen table. Half past twelve. I’d slept for almost twelve hours, much longer than usual. Since starting work I generally only slept for six or seven hours each night, was up and around at about seven in the morning, getting stuff done.
I poured an extra cup of coffee and carried both cups through the living room and over to the door to the workshop, opened it and went in. But Ennen wasn’t in there. Piles of wool and naked wooden sheep lay on the tables, it didn’t seem like she’d been at work today. Since I’d begun as a gardener, Ennen had taken over responsibility for the souvenir production on her own again, she had to run the whole shop, get the materials delivered to the door twice monthly, she worked hard, long hours, rarely saw her before supper, and on some days she’d disappear back in for a couple of hours in the evening. But it took longer when she had to do everything herself, a lot fewer sheep were finished per week, although more than enough still to satisfy Havstein, the local council, and the few tourists who, according to the airport shop, asked for the sheep they’d heard were made on the Faroes somewhere, by old prisoners or patients or whomever. It was an enterprise to make futility itself blush.
Had two cups of coffee in my hands and only one mouth, so I sat down on her chair, put the cups on the table, drank both, and fiddled with one of the sheep, out of habit. Filed and polished. It didn’t turn out quite right, I was out of practice, and I’d never glued the wool on before, but it kind of worked, it stuck firmly and was almost sheep-like, if you looked hard enough. I put it aside on her table, and taking the cups I went back into the kitchen and stood there. I pondered what I might do, but couldn’t think of anything, somehow. I remembered I didn’t have the car that day either, which reminded me that Ennen had told me she wouldn’t be working today, she had to go down to the council offices to fill out some forms, and to visit her mother, to help her with something, I’d forgotten what. So there was only me here. Me and my inestimable boredom that rarely led to anything good.
Which was probably the moment I decided to pay Havstein a visit. Even though I knew he wasn’t home.
It wasn’t so much that I was looking for something, so much as needing something to fill my time with, and a map-less treasure hunt was the best I could come up with.
He who seeks, finds.
I went in Havstein’s bedroom. Through the office.
Yes, I know, and I do apologize, I didn’t mean anything by it, it’s just the sort of thing I do when I’m bored, I open doors, peep in cupboards. When nobody’s looking, I’ll snoop through everybody’s stuff, rummage through your cupboards, putting everything back in place with photographic precision. So you’d never notice. Never know. At all. I’ve always been smart at it, remembering how things looked. I could have been a spy.
The bedroom was dark. The roller blinds were down. A queen-sized bed placed on the far side of the room. A floral sheet and the same closed in smell as in Ennen’s room. Havstein had carpet on the floor, old, brown, deep-pile, wall-to-wall, wow! Shaggy! A big poster on one of the long walls, a map of an island whose location I didn’t know but that looked a bit like the one in my room.
A bedside table next to the bed.
I’ve always liked bedside tables.
The FBI should have a special bedside table division for profiling criminals.
Show me your bedside table and I’ll show you who you are.
Havstein’s bedside table had a drawer. Without a lock. I sat on the edge of the bed. Felt myself grow curious. As though I was about to be introduced to a new person. My hands ran along the outside of the drawer, found their way to the handle in the semi-dark, pulled the drawer gingerly out so as not to disturb whatever might lie within, thus revealing to the world that I’d been snooping in other people’s things. This was, as I’ve said, not the first time I’d done this. I opened the drawer. But it wasn’t full of the thousand little things people usually tuck away. The drawer was totally empty. Or rather, that isn’t true. There was a book in the drawer. I took it out, held it in my hands. A travel guide.
Fielding’s Guide to the Caribbean plus the Bahamas 1975.
Fielding Publications.
Madison Avenue.
New York.
I don’t know what I’d expected to find. Probably just the usual things. Old receipts, small change. Exotic travel guides hadn’t featured on my list. I looked at the book again. It was thick, over a hundred pages long, an orange and green cover, with horizontal white stripes and written by the Harmans, who’d met in Haiti in 1949 and married a month later and who, according to the opening of their foreword, had not only researched the islands thoroughly, but actually lived there for over twenty years, with a base on the Cayman Islands. You couldn’t ask for more. They had their own slogan: “Don’t ask the man who’s been there. Ask the man who’s lived there.” They weren’t messing around. The book itself was worn ragged,
read to a thread. Havstein had folded the corners of almost every other page, had made loads of notes in the margins, in pen and pencil, had circled extracts, underlined words and sentences. He’d researched. Reread. So that was what he did when he went up to his room early in the evenings, while I sat with Ennen until one of us grew tired and suggested we go to bed. Bahamas Bermuda baluba, it made no sense. Totally hula hula. Nobody went to the Caribbean anymore, did they? Not as far as I knew. Not since the mid-eighties. Perhaps with the exception of American retirees from Tampa, Florida with blue rinses, who did, after all, have the money and opportunity and more free time than they could fill at home in their huge living rooms.
I took the book with me out into Havstein’s office, sat on the floor, read my way across the Caribbean Sea, from island to island. I waded through shallow lagoons, wandered through Rastafarian markets in Kingston, Jamaica, took the sea route to the Virgin Isles, visited Montserrat as Christopher Columbus had done in 1493, walked through the center of Plymouth twenty-two years before the volcanic eruption that devastated the south end of the island making it uninhabitable in ’97, flew from Barbados to Antigua and was met with the biggest smile ever, took a taxi ($9.50) from the airport to Half Moon Bay by the beach, sat beneath an expensive parasol next to the S-shaped swimming pool behind the reception, played tennis with the proprietor Hipson late into the evening, drank a couple of beers, crept up to my room, lay between clammy sheets in a room without air conditioning in the knowledge I could go exactly where I pleased the next day.
So this was Havstein’s plan B. It looked like he’d spent months, years perhaps, reading these pages, over and over again, and every time he’d reread the same pages his notes multiplied. And when there was no space left in the margins, he’d continued on slips of paper, on newspaper cuttings and envelopes that he shoved between pages, his scribblings covering every spare inch of almost every page. I attempted to work out what he’d written but it was largely indecipherable, either because he wrote in Faroese, or simply because his writing was so small, so tight and scrappy that the letters slid into one another, turning into long lines that wanted to leave the pages and go over to a new island, on the other side of the ocean.
I drank my last imaginary Hawaii Surprise with its parasol at six that evening, sitting in Havstein’s office chair with the book in my hands, a heavy head and yawning mouth. I looked at the clock. Then I crept quietly back into his bedroom, as though I was frightened of being discovered by someone who might come home as I sat there engrossed. I opened the bedside drawer carefully with my right hand and was about to put the book back where I’d found it, when one of his notes fell out, landing soundlessly on the floor. I snatched it up quickly, looked at it, but it was impossible to read what was written on it. Couldn’t remember seeing it before, and had no idea where it should go. I leafed carefully through the book looking for a place that looked as though it had something missing, but it was impossible, there were several pages without any notes in the margins or on paper slips. Shit! Finally I flicked to a random page, hesitated for a second, then shoved the sheet of paper in, put the book back in the drawer, shut it and went out.
The brain is a strange contraption. A library with a messy librarian. And in the floors below, in the cellar, there are vaults, filled to the ceiling with books and journals, dissertations and papers that are scarcely ever asked for. I stood in the bathroom brushing my teeth (another therapy when bored), when I suddenly got a tooth-brushing-thought. I remembered the poster on the wall of my room. I’d never given it much thought, but now I realized that it didn’t hang there by chance. With a mouthful of toothpaste I left the bathroom and went into my room, switched the light on and looked at the poster of the Caribbean Islands on my wall, an enormous map in gray and white.
Montserrat. The island that almost vanished in the volcanic eruption.
That was when I got the inspiration, the librarian straightened up his archives. I went into Ennen’s room. There was a map of Grenada on the wall. The poster was exactly the same size, and in the same gray and white print. I crossed the landing to Anna’s room, opened the door and went in. Saw the poster on the wall. Trinidad. Continued to Palli’s. Poster there too. Map of Antigua. And then I went back into Havstein’s bedroom one last time, switched on the light, looked at the poster on the wall. St. Lucia.
I understood nothing. Or everything.
I went back and finished brushing my teeth, as I tried to make sense of Havstein’s big project. I couldn’t figure it out.
Anna and Palli slammed the car doors shut outside the Factory at twenty-five to seven and Havstein arrived half an hour later with Ennen, by which time I was already standing in the kitchen with Anna cooking pasta. I gave Ennen a hug and asked if everything had gone okay.
“Yes,” she answered. “No hitches.”
“And your mother?”
“She’s really well. I think she’s found herself a new guy. At last.”
We talked for a while on the subject of this new man and the mother who I’d never met, before Havstein came over to me wanting to know if I’d had an okay Friday.
“One of the best,” I answered.
“And what have you been doing?”
“Not much. Watched a little TV. Drank coffee. Counted raindrops.
Read.”
“What have you read, then?”
“Oh, just magazines, newspapers. Garden Flowers in Color. Stuff like that.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“What?”
“That you haven’t been bored.”
“Oh no. I’ve been fine. A real summer holiday.”
That night I slept as never before, my dreams were hot and sun-kissed, I wandered along the water’s edge of an island where there were no other people. I was lighthouse keeper on an island where the waves continually crashed hard against the rocks, preventing the inhabitants of any neighboring islands from rowing over, and I’d only go out in my boat once a week, knew precisely where I had to set out from to get past the breakers, the corals, to row over to one of the other islands for provisions, a cup of coffee in a restaurant, or a beer. And the other customers didn’t talk to me, didn’t see me. Although when I looked the other way, I could feel their gazes all around me, hear their voices. They talked about the boat that had only just managed to come into harbor yesterday, in the terrible storm that crept toward becoming a hurricane. This large boat had finally managed to maneuver between the jagged rocks, by the light of the lighthouse.
It had begun to get colder, windier, hurricane gusts, and I was sitting up in Ennen’s room one evening early in November. I hadn’t got around to sending a card to my parents, and nobody had sent me any mail, either: Nobody had called. Nobody had written to say Helle had thought better of things, or that I should go back home, that flower sales were on the rise. I still knew nothing about what Havstein had said to Jørn that evening, and to Mother on the phone the next day. I assumed he’d tell me, when the time was right; I was outside the coverage area and that was fine by me. I was sitting on Ennen’s sofa as she stood over by the window with a roll of tape in her hands, pulling long strips out and laying them along the edges of the windows, blocking the cracks and insulating her room. We’d done this in our rooms over the last few days, because the windows were old and drafty, and frost had begun to form on the inside of the glass, making it impossible to see out, impossible to see anything at all. Ennen was playing First Band on the Moon. It was still the only thing she ever listened to, even though she didn’t do it every day, and slowly but surely I’d begun to like the Cardigans too, didn’t have that many alternatives really, and it was fine to listen like that, Nina Persson’s voice singing its way from Stockholm and over the sea, soft and clear, in through our frozen windows on the Faroes, and around and around in the room where we sat and Ennen standing with the tape in her hand, humming the melodies as they came out, tapping the beat with her foot, Never Recover. I sat with the white CD cover in my hands, g
azing at the blurry concert photo on the front, looked as if it had been taken with a water-damaged single-use camera, indistinct figures under strong spotlights, and as far as we were concerned the Cardigans were the first band who really could have made it on the moon, Nina Persson could have popped out of one of the craters with the band, I told Ennen, had they existed when they sent men up there, and the astronauts from Apollo 17 could have seen them as they got out of their landing vessel, sat down in the moon rover. Wouldn’t that have been great? A band who played with no sound in a zero atmosphere, and who didn’t mind playing an encore. Lovefool. And Ennen said she was sure Nina would have slung her microphone out into space after the concert and that it would have just traveled farther and farther, inward, outward, with the final notes of their finishing number. And so we talked on. It would have been a wonderful moment, unscheduled broadcasts from all over the world, fuzzy pictures from the earth’s telescopes that stood pointed toward the front side of the moon, percussion, guitarists, a vocalist singing and singing in a soundless vacuum.