I got up from the sofa, put the CD back on Ennen’s shelf and helped her finish the last window, lay double tape over the gaps, the half-rotten timber. Then we sat there, on the sofa, on either side of the table, coffee cups between us. And Ennen looked up at her bookshelves.
“You’ve put it in the wrong place.”
“What?”
“First Band on the Moon. It should be farthest left.”
“Don’t Emmerdale and Life come first?” I asked, I’d started to learn.
“That’s not how it works,” she said. “They go in the order I bought them. It’s quite important to me.” She got up and adjusted the order on the shelves, First Band on the Moon, Life, Gran Turismo, Emmerdale. Better.
“Don’t you think it’s a better system for keeping your CDs, in the order of when you bought them? So you can see the path you’ve walked, what you’ve thought and how you’ve developed, chosen CDs according to mood.”
“Perhaps,” I said, thinking how she only had four albums, hardly difficult to keep track of. But it was a good idea. A CD for every chapter, every paragraph of your life. Or in her case, a CD for every volume.
It was mid-November before I’d heard Ennen’s whole life story, and how she’d ended up in Gjógv. She told me quite a bit herself, during those evenings spent sitting in her room, gave me lengthy explanations about where she came from and how things had evolved along the way. The rest of the information came from Havstein, and Havstein’s version was pretty different, or it filled in the colors that were missing in her picture, so that I was left with a more or less complete Polaroid of her, fuzzy at the edges.
It turned out that Ennen was born and brought up in Greenland. Her mother was a genuine Greenlander, born and bred in Nuuk. When she was eighteen, she’d moved to Narsarsuaq to work at the international airport. That was in 1970, when Narsarsuaq was no longer the buzzing place it had been during World War II and the Cold War years that followed. In April 1941 Denmark had signed an agreement with the USA allowing Greenland to be used as a supply base for the allies, and that July the Americans had, virtually overnight, established the base Bluie West One with an airport attached, and huge bomber planes had flapped out of the sky to refill their tanks before flying on to do their worst over Dresden, Berlin, Dortmund, or wherever. By the end of the war the base at Narsarsuaq had become the biggest settlement on the island, with over twelve thousand inhabitants whizzing about on the edge of the ice. The initial plan was for the base to be wound down after the war, but during those first Cold War years it grew instead, expanding proportionally to the fear of the Soviet Union, and it wasn’t until the early fifties that it closed, with surplus equipment being sold at knockdown prices to a miserly and needy Norway. The following year the Greenlanders built a civil airport there, and Narsarsuaq began filling up with people again, although in considerably smaller numbers. The odd American still passed through, pilots mainly, flying cargo planes over the Atlantic, and it’s one of these pilots that Ennen’s mother meets at the airport one evening, perhaps while she’s putting the paperwork away for the day, on her way home. The American flies from Pittsburgh to Paris three times a month, stopping off at Narsarsuaq. As the autumn progresses there are fewer and fewer flights, his stays in Greenland get longer and in the following spring, by which time Ennen’s mother is already pregnant, he takes a job as a commercial pilot instead, on the internal flights between Narsarsuaq and Nuuk, Kangerlussuaq, Ilulissat, Kulusuk and Qaarsut, and the like. The eighties bring a decline in population and the number of tourists, and Ennen’s father finally gets the sack in January 1984. Only months later he is offered a job on the Faroe Islands, so they have to move, they pack up the contents of their home in one weekend and transport them, and themselves, across the sea to Iceland and on to the Faroes. Ennen is thirteen, and they move into a house on the windblown island of Mykines on the west coast. Her father flies, shuttling to and from the island and Ennen tries to settle down to school again, to find new friends, to find herself a place in the storm. Mykines is one of the most beautiful of the Faroe Islands, and the increasingly famous sheer cliffs attract hoards of tourists with tents, camping stoves, and bags stuffed with Kodak film each year. But unfortunately Mykines is also barely inhabited by the eighties, and this isn’t improved by the fact that boat connections to the mainland are dire and dependent on good weather conditions, and that the island acts as a buffer to just about every storm and fogbank to roll in towards the Faroes, nor by the fact that Ennen only gets to school every other week, when the teacher comes by helicopter. Things aren’t made better either by there being only two other children on Mykenes, nor by the fact neither of them gets along with Ennen. She goes in circles at home, sits in her room, listens to music, dances around on the wooden floor, is thirteen, and during the autumn of 1984 she’s increasingly absent when the teacher comes over, she’s struck down by various illnesses, practically stops eating, disappears into herself, curls herself up and packs herself in brown paper. In the winter of 1984, just after Leonard Bailey transplants a baboon heart into a baby girl who only lives twenty-one days, as Arne Treholt is arrested for spying at Fornebu Airport on the way to Vienna, after Carl Lewis runs faster than anybody in Los Angeles and the DNA code is broken, as Bill Murray catches ghosts in New York and only months after Gallo and Montagnier isolate the HIV virus as the cause of AIDS, the year before the microchip is launched and Madonna releases her first album, as Prince makes girls’ hearts cry holes in the wallpaper of their rooms over the purple rain that falls that year, when Ennen hasn’t been to school for almost two months, without anyone being able to say quite why, after she’s lost forty-six pounds, she’s sent to Tórshavn, to a Danish psychiatrist who has his practice there. After some long conversations with her, he finds she is deeply depressed, has anxiety problems, and has developed severe anorexia. His somewhat vague conclusion is that Ennen is suffering from a sense of being completely forgotten, that apart from her parents there is nothing around her to confirm her existence. No friends. And not even the Dane can rescue her. Weeks later she’s transferred to the psychiatric ward for the first time, and over the coming years she becomes a regular there, for months at a time. She tries to go to school in between, sometimes it holds for a month, a year, or just weeks, but never for long. Eventually her parents move to Tórshavn, and she lives at home with them most of the time, but it doesn’t seem to help much. Toward the end of 1991 she’s spent so much time in institutions, either in Tórshavn or Copenhagen, that it’s difficult to get her out again. But they manage, with her parents’ consent, she drags herself away from the white corridors, out into the fresh air and on April 8, 1992, Ennen stands outside the psychiatric unit in Eirargar∂ur, more or less healthy, more or less back to her ideal weight, a suitcase in her hand, and no plans. She stands at the crossing for a moment, wondering what she will do. She has a check in her suitcase, the first of the monthly support payments she will get from the state, she has a key and an address for a flat in Bakkahella. She can do anything she wants. So she takes the bus.
She takes random buses. Whatever comes. Sits at the back. Looks straight ahead. She meets the gaze of people as they get on, young men and boys who can’t take their eyes off her and who sit alone on the bus dreaming of lovers they will never have, the occasional girl who notices how gorgeous she is as she sits there, with that little suitcase on her lap. And she meets every glance that comes her way, looks down, looks up again, waits, looks at the men who take a peep at her, the men who feel a sting in their groins when they see her. And then, just before they dare to come over, before some boy or other dares to get up and walk over to her, she gets off. Takes another bus. And so it goes on. She pops up all over the country, she’s the person everyone of us meets, sooner or later, on a bus, a train, a plane, the person you don’t notice until you’ve sat down, whose eyes you meet suddenly, so you blush, so you go hot, because it shouldn’t be possible to fall in love as quickly as this, that sort of thing shouldn’
t be possible, just on looks, in the flash of a gaze, but it is, and you sit on the bus and think how you should go over to her, you should say something, you think, you should get off at the same stop as her, because you’ll never meet a more wonderful person than this. And if only you dared, if only you said something, got off together with her, went over to her, hugged her, then you’d perhaps, perhaps or for certain, meet the one person in the universe who can make you the happiest person ever. But you don’t. You hardly ever get off at the same stop. You don’t get up from your seat. You don’t say anything to her, or to him. You both go on sitting there, looking at each other, or looking away, until one of you gets off and a few hours later you’ve forgotten anything ever happened, until one morning, ten, twenty years later, when you suddenly feel the same pang, you manage to see her before you, and you know that you should have pulled the bell that day, you should have said something. You didn’t do it, and the only thing you’re left with is the knowledge that you have, at least once, been loved, without reservation, unconditionally. For one single moment, a snap of the finger. Melodrama.
Ennen gets it into her head that she is, in fact, that person, that person from nowhere, the person who looks at you that way, on a bus, on a train, or catching a plane, the woman you never see again, she’s convinced that anybody who mentions such an experience, has in fact seen her, which is why she doesn’t exist, why she has to slink up and down the Faroe Islands, making herself into the person you meet on the bus, whom you’ll never get to know, letting herself be discovered over and over again, she seeks out the people she believes need it most, the people that sit with their heads against the bus window, the driver who now and then looks at her in his mirror, she always selects one person on the bus, and gives that person all her attention. Boys, men, girls, old women who miss husbands that met dramatic deaths at sea decades ago, and who sit in their mackintoshes and hats, holding ratty string shopping bags, galoshes on their feet. She looks at them, smiles, believing that her smile will lodge itself in somewhere in the spines of those who notice, a shudder, a shift of body weight in the seat, and everything is a little easier, on that particular day.
But the Faroe Islands is a small place, and sooner or later she’s doomed to end up on a bus with some of the same people, and in the end she sits on a bus and looks at the wrong person, one who interprets it all sexually, and things go disastrously wrong, he gets off at the same stop as her, and then she doesn’t know what to do, it’s never happened before, it pulls the carpet from under her, for one moment perhaps she thinks she’s been discovered at last, but she hasn’t, not in that way, because she’s beautiful and he’s too old for her, he starts pawing her, her clothes, it’s raining and they’re standing on a road without a bus shelter, and he wants to put his hands under her clothes and she doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know what she expected, so she puts her arms around him, hugs him close, and with all her strength drives her knee into his crotch, she hears the sound of testicles crunching against her kneecap, he sinks before her, pukes up, and she hitches a ride with the first car that drives past, goes home, packs, and the next day she’s on her way to Copenhagen, one year later, London, then Stockholm, Oslo, Berlin and Reykjavík, she takes casual jobs, as a postal worker, as a shop assistant, things do improve, but then she slips back for longer and longer periods, takes the U-bahn over the whole of Berlin, the T-bane in Oslo and Stockholm, so you never can be sure if you really are loved there and then, by the person who looks at you, or whether you’re being observed by a psychiatric patient on an outing without aim or purpose. Ennen sits right at the back of the bus from Reykjavík to Akranes, making herself into that person of your dreams, and it takes its toll, she grows iller, thinner again, eating almost nothing, returning finally of her own freewill to Tórshavn, stands on her mother’s doorstep, and her father has left, left last year, went to London to look for her, but never came back, sent her mother postcards next spring, Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids, I’m never coming back, forget it! (But that’s only what I imagine to be written on them.) And Ennen is admitted again, improves quickly, but this time they keep her in for a long time, extra long, on her mother’s request, and one day Havstein stands there, in her room with its yellow walls, and he has an offer for her, another place, in the North, Gjógv, both mother and the institution support this move and she says yes, okay, she says. Then takes the bus.
And so there we sat. Evenings with Ennen. Me and the person you’ve always wanted to meet. And she played the Cardigans ad nauseam. And I thought, I should have met you years ago.
All those evenings. Spent in the rooms of Ennen and Havstein, and sometimes Anna and Palli. For the first time I had several friends I could go to at any time, and they were always happy to see me. We spent the weekends together, went to Tórshavn, sat in Café Natúr. One afternoon when the weather was fine, we drove south to Vestmanna, Havstein had phoned ahead and made an appointment with Palli Lamhauge, who took tourists out in his boat in the summer on a two or three hour trip to the Vestmanna bird cliffs. Lamhauge took us with him outside season, early one afternoon in the biting cold, and I sat in his open wooden boat, Frí∂ger∂, plastic helmet on my head and hands tucked under my rear to keep warm, squeezed in with Ennen, Anna, Havstein, and our own Palli. They’d already undertaken this trip themselves long ago, but it seemed more or less part of the required curriculum for all residents.
Hajj.
Kaaba.
Frozen fingers and high waves.
Birds whizzing about, just inches over the water’s surface, skimming the waves and flying straight into the fog over the sea. I wasn’t keen on going. Not at all. I’ve never liked being at sea. I hated baths as a child. And here we sat in an open boat, with Palli Lamhauge pushing it as hard as it would go, it sounded as though an old bus engine was mounted right under the deck, and it took an hour to come far enough out, I could feel myself turn green inside, wanted to go home, to go back. But I didn’t dare say anything. I didn’t want to spoil things.
Then it happens.
We round the headland.
Head the boat straight toward the vertical cliff face.
And I have a near-nature experience.
Thousand-foot cliffs, sharp as awls.
And the birds. I’ve never paid them much attention before, filthy pigeons always waddling around the Breia Lake. But now the puffins swoop from the top of the cliffs, dive bombing us, as though they were in free fall, but they’re not. They’re in full control. Kamikaze-like. And this is no performance just for us, they do this even when nobody’s here, because you can have a good time even when nobody’s watching. Then Lamhauge looks upward, points to the cliff tops with a chubby finger.
“What?” I ask.
He lays a heavy hand on my helmet, tips my head backwards in the right direction.
“You see that white patch up there?”
I look. There’s an eighty-foot patch of snow on the top.
“Four sheep graze up there in the summer,” says Lamhauge excitedly.
“Up there?”
“Yup!”
On that precipitous slope, more than a thousand feet above us, four terror stricken sheep graze for months at a time.
“And another two go on that peak there,” he continues. “And there, up on the left, five more.” I look at Havstein. He shrugs his shoulders.
“Extreme sports.”
The others are leaning back in the boat too, staring up.
“Apparently the meat’s extra tasty at that height.”
“But how do they get the sheep up there? And down?” I ask.
He smiles.
“They hoist them up. And hoist them down again. They’re pretty hard to catch, they’re so shy. At least one person per sheep, attached by a rope so they don’t fall.”
“But don’t they ever fall?”
“Well yes, it happens. And the sheep too. But it’s a test of manhood of course. Want to try? You’ll be famous!”
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br /> “Some other time,” I say.
“Maybe. In the spring.”
Laughter in the boat. Waves. Rain. The car trip back. Sent a card home that day. A picture postcard of one of the bird mountains, the biggest. I don’t remember what I wrote, but I think it was about birds. And the sea.
The bombs fell a week later, I’d just gotten back from work, from spending four days in Funningur making a winter garden for an elderly widow, when Havstein shouted down to me from the first floor of the Factory to come up. Obediently, I kicked off my shoes and went up to his room, stood in the doorway, still in my overalls, compost on my hands.
“Yes?” I said.
“Sit down,” he said.
“Is something wrong?”
“Sit down, I said!”
I sat down. I didn’t sit at ease.
He didn’t take a dramatic pause, didn’t lean back in his chair and gaze momentarily out of the window. Instead he said: “Why have you been in my bedroom?”
“What do you mean? I haven’t been in your bedroom.”
“Do you like it here? Do you like living here?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you acting like a jerk, then?”
I didn’t like that one bit.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why have you been in my drawers, Mattias?”
I could think of nothing to say, except: “I was bored.”
“You were bored?”
“Yes.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out? Did you think I wouldn’t find out that you’d been rooting about in my things? Did you think I’d find it okay for you to sneak into my room?”
“No,” I said.
“That’s breaking and entering, you do know that?”