Far Afield Read Online Free Page B

long—“our Great-Aunt Moses. Yes?”
    “Grandma.”
    “Of course. She was that. She painted simple places, simple people, fishing, rain, just Faroese things. Very typical. Before, people tried to paint like Frenchmen—pink clouds all curled around. But we don’t have those in the Faroes. You can imagine how stupid it was.”
    Jonathan hadn’t an inkling. How exhausting he found these forays into alien culture. His mind would go flat and quiet. It didn’t matter whether he was trying to buy socks or order lunch or find his way around town: a moment came when his concentration gave out. Human beings took the highest toll. Just the landscape and the smells of fish and motor oil and cold, rough sea were enough to force him back to his room at the Seaman’s Home after a few hours. But here he was, and he’d been here only fifteen minutes, and Eyvindur was still talking. Jonathan pinched his thigh surreptitiously to restore sensation somewhere.
    “I’m going to be on a stamp,” Eyvindur was saying. “One like this.” He moved toward a particularly dark and mysterious painting. “I sold it to the Parliament. It’s there now. But it’s like this, except it’s bigger.” He moved close to one of his windows and stared out into the pale amber evening of early summer. “This country,” he said. “I have been to Italy. That’s the way in which I found out that I was Italian. I am speaking in similes, of course. I went there to study painting. Do you know how surprising it was for me to go from here to there? Have you been there?”
    Jonathan nodded. Hot, cramped, interminable trip from Paris to Rome in August, sharing his couchette with a self-confessed Fascist who missed the good old days; but the pots of oleander, the Alpine winds that cooled their passage, the gilded ceilings of churches and of noon—five days had been enough for him to know five years would not be enough. “How long were you there?” he asked.
    “Two years. How I missed the Faroes! I suffered without the ocean. I went once, swimming somewhere on the Riviera. I had never swimmed before. You say swimmed?”
    “Swum. Swim, swam, swum.”
    “I had never swam?”
    “No. I swam, I have swum.” Eyvindur scowled. “It’s irregular,” Jonathan said. “You just have to memorize it.”
    “Too many colors there, in Italy,” Eyvindur went on. “But I stayed. I learned about all the colors. I learned to eat things I did not want to eat. Hah!” He pointed at Jonathan. “You will have to do the same.”
    “I guess so.” Jonathan thought of the blocks of whale fat. Being forced to eat gnocchi didn’t seem an equal hardship.
    “There aren’t enough rocks there,” Eyvindur concluded, sitting down on his sofa beside a stuffed sheep.
    Jonathan decided to take a different approach to the evening. He leaned forward. “Tell me about your political activities. Professor Olsen says you are an important figure in nationalist politics.”
    “Oh, I am bored with all of that. And you could never make sensibility of it. It’s too complicated.”
    “But that’s why I’m here.”
    “No. It’s absurd. We are just pretending. I do it to make some trouble. In America you have baseball; we have politics. Who cares what we do here in this little country? You must study the old ways.” He too leaned forward. “Study the dancing, study the stories, find the old people who are dying and ask them about the old ways. This politics, it’s what we do to make ourselves feel real. You understand me?”
    “No.”
    “Why are we getting all jazzed up—you say that, all jazzed up?”
    “You can.”
    “All jazzied up about politics. We, the Faroese. Itdoesn’t matter what we decide. We teach Danish in the school, we don’t teach Danish in the school; we get out of NATO, we stay in NATO—nobody knows. Nobody in the world knows anything about us.”
    “Jazzed,” said Jonathan, “not jazzied.”
    “Okay. Jazzed. But you understand?”
    “But