The instant I’m underwater, the brakes go on, all the clocks in the world stop, the sound is turned off. I glide patiently on through the water, dragged on by the current through a mass of water and it isn’t black here, as I’d imagined, not black, but a blue darkness, colors of blue, and there are fish swimming toward me, they stop half a foot before me, part to the sides and allow me to glide past, and I look up and see the rain as it explodes in rings on the surface, watery craters, and I have to get up there, because that’s where I’m needed, for the first time in my life somebody actually needs me, I’m the only person in the world in motion now, and I remember it all, crystal clear pictures projected in the water, I am four years old, standing on a chair blowing the candles out on my cake / Father comes home with a new used car and I’m allowed to go with him for a test drive / I am twenty, drinking beer on the balcony of a stone building that overlooks a large swimming pool / I am at the movies watching Back to the Future / I sit on the bus on my way home and a girl at the front looks at me, I look back and she turns away / I throw a snowball onto a roof / I learn to dive in Østlandet and I am nine years old / I sit in front of the television watching an episode of Colargol / I come home from school, stand outside in the rain, I’ve lost my keys, my bag on my back / Mother reads from Mio, My Son and I’m ill / Mother is pregnant, I look forward to having a baby brother, or a baby sister, but the birth never happens, Mother cries in the bedroom / there’s a TV series about space, and I’ve been bad, so I’m not allowed to see the last episode, but Father comes to get me from my room, just after it’s begun, I sit on his lap and watch Buzz Aldrin emerge from the Eagle / I’m underwater, for a long time / I lie in the middle of a road waiting to be run over / I think of NN, she’s standing back on the shore where she can barely see us through the rain and dark, and I think of how NN lived on Mykines and dreamed of somebody coming over the sea to her, and now it’s happening, somebody’s coming, somebody has found us here, discovered us and sent up a signal, but we don’t know who it is yet, and maybe that’s another reason for my pushing my way through the water to get there so fast, maybe I finally want more people around me again, and I kick out as hard as I can and break the surface, come up into the pouring rain, and in those first seconds it still feels as though I’m underwater, see the dinghy that’s filling with water, sinking, and I swim the last lap over to the huge person who sits motionless in what remains of the worn-out rubber, he sits totally motionless and lets himself sink, water up to his neck as I grab his arm, and for a split second he looks at me, the bearded face looks at me, with surprised eyes, before he turns toward the remains of his baggage, that floats from us and sinks, and Havstein has the oars, guides the rowboat toward me and the man whose arms I grip and whose head I hold above water, and we bob on the waves, the millennium’s first flotsam and I’m tired, exhausted, and barely notice as we are dragged on board, and as life’s tempo returns to normal again, 720 km/hr, and the beach grows larger with each stroke of Havstein’s oars.
That was how he came to us. The man from the sea. The last survivor from the past.
Long Distance Man.
He said nothing.
Although, that isn’t quite true. We’d gotten back to the beach, we carried him up to the Factory, wrapped him in warm blankets in the kitchen, sat around the table looking at him, he stared into the tabletop, blindly before him, as Havstein asked him questions using every language in which he could form a sentence. That was when the man finally said something. In English. He said: “Happy New Year. I’m Carl.”
It’s strange how we can get used to almost anything, and how normality and routine demand their place in every existence. Only a week later, Carl, the newcomer, had gone from being a shipwreck to a permanent fixture at the Factory, on an equal footing with the rest of us, and without us seeing anything dramatic about it. Havstein asked us early on what we thought he should do, and after some discussion none of us suggested we send him down to Tórshavn, away, or anywhere. So he stayed. He seemed happy enough with that. None of us knew where he’d actually been heading.
Like me, Carl was put into a spare room after a few hours in the kitchen on New Year’s Day, so as to rest, but unlike me he was up and in apparently good form by the fourth day. I was sitting in the living room with the others when he came wandering in, and for a split second I saw myself; he walked into the room hesitantly, just as I had on that first occasion, then he sat with us and began talking, in English again, and to judge by his accent he came from somewhere in America, and I remember he talked a lot, even if a little quietly, the only thing he didn’t want to talk about was why he’d ended up on a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic, just before the start of the new millennium. On that subject, he refused to say a single word.
“I don’t want to talk about that yet,” said Carl politely with a ruler-straight smile, and it would be another ten months before he told us anything, but by then it would be October, when the leaves had fallen from the non-existent trees, and somebody had died.
So in the meantime we learned to avoid the subject of the rescue, integrated him into our world, and he seemed happy with that, we spoke English to him and to each other when he was around, before like me, he learned a fair bit of Faroese, or a kind of Faroese, enough to keep a conversation going. Havstein gave him a job with NN in the Factory and they worked well together, Carl proved extremely clever with his hands, and after a short time working with the wooden sheep, the wool and peat baskets, he began to experiment, and develop new merchandise for the souvenir shop down at Vágar, Havstein got hold of a second-hand lathe, and soon bowls, plates, and candlesticks emerged from Carl’s hands. And he sawed off the legs from the wooden sheep, drilled holes and pulled steel wire and springs through them, making animals with movable limbs, achieving far more than we’d done before, and our sales rose, still not enough to earn huge sums, but enough to raise the level of enthusiasm, and NN seemed happy with her job again, she stopped talking about finding something else to do, entered into her work, sketched new ideas with Carl and me in the evenings. And I remember the days with Carl standing in the kitchen after dinner with rubber gloves on his hands as he did the dishes, nodding in time to the Swedish pop that NN had on in the living room, shuffling his feet from side to side as though he was dancing. Then he’d turn, nod at me and smile. He smiled a lot in fact. From the day he got up, which was probably why none of us suggested we report his entry into the country, nobody rang the police, the immigration authorities or the like. And it sounds strange now, maybe, but in the beginning I was convinced his mere presence might erase the last dregs of the sickness I’d dragged with me to the Factory, offer us all an alternative to the crises and mental breakdowns we all went around in fear of, but the truth was, he probably only put them on pause before we slipped imperceptibly back into our individual medicalization, the gently calming tablets, the talks up in Havstein’s room, and the perpetual roundelay of recovery and regression, until we almost began to think that feeling well was a symptom of the illness itself. But meanwhile we were pleased with our newly extended family and to have somebody else to concentrate on, like having a cat that padded gently about making the world harmonious in its wake, and we didn’t mention him to anyone, simply took him into our improvised world, and waited to see how things would turn out.
Although, that isn’t wholly true.
Particularly for Havstein. He grew increasingly uneasy that winter, as though he was on his guard all the time, he spent a lot of time on his own and became less good humored than he’d once been. And the backwash of this was, I think, that much of the security he’d given us melted away, without his realizing, and without our being able to put words to it.
Havstein did his best to ascertain that Carl didn’t need acute psychiatric help and to be sent down to town. They spent a lot of time together, Havstein sat behind his desk and tried to get him talking, took notes, something had to be done after all, no sane person would cross the Atlantic in De
cember in a rubber dinghy, that much was clear. But since Carl wouldn’t budge, the rest of us avoided pressuring him, even though we discussed it among ourselves when he and Havstein weren’t around, coming up with our own diagnoses or bills of health, that changed from week to week, not that we had much to go on, apart from the fact that he complained of nightmares, and was happiest by day, when it was light. He was neither more nor less sociable than the rest of us, and he beat us all at chess and Scrabble, so in the end we couldn’t be bothered to play against him. Later that winter, Havstein got hold of one those computerized chess sets from the eighties, but our new family member didn’t prove a genius after all. As far as I know, he never beat the computer on the highest level. Maybe the rest of us were just bad at chess and had problems concentrating for any length of time.
Whatever the case, none of us knew what was wrong with this man.
Apart from the fact he’d come over the sea in a lifeboat.
On New Year’s Eve.
During those first days after his arrival, I took Carl with me to the memorial garden across the road from the church, the one Selma had recommended that I visit. It seemed appropriate somehow, now that I too had been a hair’s breadth away from becoming an engraved statistic, and I hoped he might open up as we sat there, that he might say something about why he’d been so close to going under on the coast here, why he’d turned up in the middle of the night in a single yellow lifeboat, exhausted and with several weeks’ growth of beard.
We put our rain jackets on and crossed the road, opened the gate and went up the path, crossed the little bridge to the asphalt square where seven plaques bore the names of people from Gjógv who’d perished at sea. We sat on the bench staring at the uncredited iron sculpture in the center of the square; a mother, with her daughter on her lap, her sons sitting by her side. The mother looked out to sea, as far as she could, of course, and her daughter looked blankly ahead while one of her sons cast a skeptical glance toward the harbor, just days maybe, weeks or months before he would go out too, picking up where his father had left off. It was, I thought, the most serene sculpture I’d ever seen, but if you looked long enough it was as if you could see tiny movements, hands shifting carefully, then coming to rest. We looked out, a choppy sea, waves torn against the sharp mountainside and the sea spray rising many feet high toward us, not weather to be out in, even if one of the country’s best fishing grounds was only a short distance away, I wouldn’t dream of setting foot on a boat today, under any circumstances, just the noise was enough to convince most people it would be a crazy thing to do. For every wave that came thundering in and climbed those last few feet there followed a rumbling sound, a slow boom that didn’t stop before the next wave came and overtook it, a continual thunder guaranteed to give you tinnitus if you stood there for long.
Carl looked at the plaques.
“Lots of names, eh?” I said.
“Way too many.” He got up and went over to the plaques laid in the grass behind the statue, he crouched down and squinted at words he couldn’t read. Dey∂ir av óhappi. Dey∂ir av vanlukku. Dey∂ir á veg til arbei∂is. Dey∂ir á veg úr arbei∂i. I stood behind him and tried my best to translate these tragic deaths. The dates stretched backward and forward in time. 1901. 1920. 1954. And on April 30, 1870, the day that sixteen men were lost: Fórust tann stóra ska∂adagin. The boats had gone down with every man and mouse in these parts. And children. There were several children, fifteen, sixteen years old. Some had been on their way to Iceland, others on their way home, some had barely made it beyond the headland before drowning. A crystal clear picture emerged here, that it was no laughing matter to settle in such a place, to keep going in a country like the Faroes, hundreds of miles from the mainland. Living in Gjógv, perhaps even snowed in and cut off in winter, romantic notions of a quiet and peaceful life of leisurely fishing trips with everybody singing on board, weren’t what it took; it was hardcore self-preservation that paid the bills here, you’d have to accept it or leave it. No wonder they left, those who could no longer take it, no wonder they gave up and found other ways of getting by, in town or in tranquil villages. But I thought I understood those who stayed as well, those for whom this was home despite it all, those who knew every turn in the mountains, who sat on the grassy slopes high above the harbor in summer, of an evening, on calmer days, when their work was done, when things were as they should be, wife, kids, all together, promo-brochure days, they happened too. You just had to look hard enough.
He didn’t say anything about what I’d hoped, instead we discussed the memorial garden, the names on the plaques, he talked about how it must feel to drown at sea, to realize your boat was capsizing and to end up in the icy water, to know you’d never get on board again, never get back to land, to feel your clothes dragging you down and the cold water stealing all sensation from your arms and legs, so you couldn’t swim, couldn’t stay afloat, yet he constantly talked as though none of it affected him, as though he’d never been out there himself and close to drowning. That moment of history had, it seemed, been completely blown away on the wind, and this doubtless had its reasons.
NN and I grew closer at the start of the New Year; I think we really found each other. Of course it wasn’t so much a case of her finding me, as the reverse, I’d been discovered long ago, but my head had been stuck in the sand and twisted around, with my feet stuck up like two useless signposts. But something had happened that night six weeks ago, the night of New Year’s Eve when I’d dived into the sea. The things that had come to me as I’d pushed my way through the sea were more than mere random thoughts. I think I’d finally fallen in love, there and then, as I was swimming. Because although there may be nothing new under the sun, it’s an entirely different ballgame underwater.
But I haven’t planned to tell you a story in which people finally come together and kiss under the trees and the camera moves up and disappears into the sky leaving lovers standing on a hill, locked in an embrace, united at last and all that. I’m not even sure that I’m using the words in love correctly anymore. Maybe I should use other words, I don’t know. Maybe it would be closer to the truth to say that we reached another point, that we reached the end of a long year, I don’t know. But I liked being with her. I think I fell in love with spending time with her, not necessarily with her, herself. Perhaps I was just so desperate for somebody, that I’d have stretched my arms out to anybody, sooner or later. Or worse, perhaps I thought I was.
Anyway, we grew closer and everything changed. We talked more often, for longer, took trips together, in the afternoons when we had the car to ourselves. We often went to the woods. We’d drive down toward Tórshavn, to the end of Hvítansesvegur, where on one side of the bridge, in a big field, a cluster of trees had been planted, one of only four places with trees I ever found on the Faroes. The trees stood, randomly placed, to give the illusion of something accidental, natural, and we used to park the car and walk down to them, then putter around in circles to get the feeling we’d been for a long walk, in the woods in a treeless land.
And on one of these afternoons, after we’d spent an hour in our woodland and were practically dizzy, we sat in Café Natúr, just the two of us. And NN said:
“I don’t know how long I want to live here.”
“What do you mean?”
“The truth is, I’m getting fucking bored of this place.”
I hadn’t expected to hear this. Of all of us she was the one person I assumed would never move away, unless pushed to it, her enthusiasm for the Faroes was generally exemplary.
“So what are you thinking of doing?”
“Don’t know. I’ll move, I suppose.”
“But where to?”
“Sweden, perhaps. Stockholm. Copenhagen.”
I didn’t want her to move. Not at all. Change was the last thing in the world I wanted.
“But do you know of a better place to live?” I asked, half joking, half serious. I flung my arms wide and looked at the café aro
und us, but still wasn’t offered a job in the travel agency.
“You’ve lived here for six months, Mattias, of course you still think it’s fantastic here. Or maybe you’ve just begun to think it? Try fourteen years. Then you’ll probably want to leave too. Then you’ll probably want to walk in the woods for more than twenty feet before you have to turn around and go back.”
“But,” I began, and was relieved when she interrupted, I couldn’t think of any good arguments.
“I want to do something, don’t you see? It sometimes feels as though I’m just going around killing time, it’s running between my fingers and all I do is sit and watch. I want to do something too, don’t you understand? I had plans too, you’re not the only one who fell down at the fork in the road.” She was almost angry now, or desperate, and it was so sudden I was completely unprepared. “I’m doing fuck all here.”
“You’ve got a job,” I said.
“Making wooden sheep? What the fuck do you mean? Seriously. You think I’m meant to be satisfied with that? That’s what I should do, go on doing that?”
“No.”
“I want to do something I enjoy, something meaningful to me, for once. I’m shit tired of waiting to get better, when it’s never going to happen. And even if I did get better one day, I wouldn’t even notice, because there’s no difference anymore.”
I didn’t know what to say, what to suggest. It was awful to realize I’d never thought of her doing anything apart from what she did now: keeping up the production in the Factory. Did I really believe she couldn’t do anything else? Or did I just want things to be predictable?