Far Afield Read online

  Books by Susanna Kaysen

  Asa, As I Knew Him

  Far Afield

  Girl, Interrupted

  Susanna Kaysen

  Far Afield

  Susanna Kaysen is also the author of the novel

  Asa, As I Knew Him, and Girl, Interrupted, a memoir.

  She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  I am grateful to the MacDowell Colony, Inc., and the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts for their generosity, and to Jay Wylie for starting me on this long journey.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JUNE 1994

  Copyright © 1990 by Susanna Kaysen

  Map copyright © 1990 by Maura Fadden Rosenthal

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kaysen, Susanna, 1948–

  Far afield / Susanna Kaysen.—1st ed.

  p. cm.—(A Vintage contemporaries original)

  eISBN: 978-0-8041-5107-8

  I. Title.

  PS3561.A893F37 1990 89-21538

  813′.54—dc20

  Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

  v3.1

  For Annette and Carl

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Transit

  Admission

  Early Warning

  Home

  Ornithology

  Labors, Herculean and Other

  A Girl

  Blood

  Wooley, and Rough Weather

  The Herald

  Red Sky at Morning

  The Cat King

  A Visit

  Past Perfect

  Transit

  Jonathan was in the Reykjavik Airport with his passport and travelers’ checks in his jacket pocket, his Icelandair ticket with baggage claim checks attached in his shirt pocket, and no baggage at all.

  “It’s in Copenhagen, sir,” the ticket clerk assured him. “We apologize, but in fact it happens quite normally.”

  “Do you know it’s there?”

  “Most certainly it is.” When Jonathan did not move away from the desk, the clerk said, “You wish it to be forwarded to your hotel?”

  “When will it arrive?”

  “Within a few days. Yes, certainly. By the end of the week.”

  Jonathan’s shirt, which smelled of airplane, took on the tang of fresh sweat at this. “It won’t do,” he said. The clerk pretended not to understand. “I’m only staying overnight.”

  “You are going to London? We can also forward to London.”

  “No, to the Faroes.”

  In the months before his departure from Cambridge, Jonathan had grown accustomed to the glaze that followed this announcement and had learned to be ready with latitude and longitude, brief history, population statistics, justifications—particularly these, which had been worn thin, to his ears, in conversations with the professors of the anthropology department. He did not expect that here, in the closest thing the archipelago had to a neighbor. And he was definitely unprepared for derision.

  The clerk widened his ice-blue eyes. “The Faroes! People do not go there.” He issued a strange smile. “You are an ornithologist?” Jonathan shook his head. “There is nothing there,” said the clerk. To prove his point he turned his back on Jonathan.

  “But you will forward there?” Jonathan noticed he was taking on the clerk’s lilting cadence. “Will you?”

  “There is only one plane a week.”

  “No, there are two.” This information had cost Jonathan forty dollars in transatlantic phone calls, and he was proud of it.

  But Scandinavians do not like to be contradicted. “The next plane is on the following Tuesday,” the clerk said. “We can forward on that.”

  It was Wednesday. His plane to the Faroes left Thursday afternoon from this airport; he had a ticket inside his passport. “Well, do that,” he said. “Forward on the plane next week.” He wrote his hotel in block letters on a paper from the spiral-bound notebook kept at the ready in his jacket pocket. “Here. The Seaman’s Home, in Tórshavn. Jonathan Brand.”

  “You should consider changing your reservation to the Hafnia.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Jonathan.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. Where do I get the bus into town?”

  The clerk leaned over his desk and pointed to the left. Then he said, “Excuse me, sir, but how long are you planning to stay in the Faroes, in the event that your luggage arrives after the following Tuesday and we cannot forward until the week succeeding?”

  “Don’t worry.” Jonathan had the small pleasure of turning his back on the clerk. Over his shoulder he said, “I’ll be there for a year.”

  In the bus he stayed awake only long enough to determine that Iceland looked like the moon, or maybe Mars. The terrain—he couldn’t call it earth because it seemed to be lava—was red and rippled as if frozen in mid-flow. Deposited at his hotel, he trudged down a clean bare corridor to a clean bare room where a white eiderdown puff occupied his bed. Jonathan got underneath it and slept for twelve hours.

  He woke shortly before midnight, hungry and hot. A sulfurous atmosphere pervaded the room, along with a weak but insistent streetlight. Was someone banging on the door? He sat up to sort all this out. None of it was as it seemed: the banging and the sulfur were both emanations of the radiator. Sulfur springs, he remembered, provided heat to Iceland. He put his hand on the white iron and got a burn and a bang for a reprimand. As for the streetlight, it was everybody’s favorite northern fantasy, the midnight sun. A tired-looking item, it perched above a corrugated tin roof across the street, pale pink, flat, smaller than a moon.

  Food, he decided—although he also wanted, with equal fervor, a shower, clean clothes, darkness, and the rustling of leaves at night in warm, moist Cambridge.

  Nobody was at the front desk. A teenager was sleeping in a chair beside the hotel entrance, though, so Jonathan approached him and coughed. He didn’t wake. “Ahem,” said Jonathan. “Hey.” He touched the boy’s arm.

  “Rrrrn,” said the boy. Then he said some irritated things in Icelandic, which Jonathan hadn’t learned because it had been difficult enough to learn Faroese. But the gist was clear.

  “Food.” Jonathan pointed to his mouth. “Hungry.” He tried the Faroese word for hungry, and the boy laughed.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “English? You English?” Then: “No eating now here.”

  “But I must.”

  “I brother he fishing in Liverpool.”

  Jonathan nodded. “Bread,” he said, chewing his finger. He ran through his entire repertoire of food in Faroese: potatoes, soup, cheese, fish, and meat. Fruit and vegetables were not available there.

  “I Lars. I brother he fishing in Newfoundland.”

  “You said Liverpool.”

  “I Lars.”

  “Johan.” This was Jonathan’s first opportunity to use his new name.

  “Johan.” Lars put out his clean Icelandic hand. “Be.” He indicated the floor a few times with his forefinger, and Jonathan decided he was being told to wait. Lars went away, behind the front desk. For the few minutes he was gone, Jonathan stared out the hotel’s glass door at the lurid light on the street. The shadows of the bui
ldings were long and faint, like the light of the sun. A group of boys about Lars’s age tumbled into view around a corner, drunk, silent with concentration on staying upright, all with their eyes closed. They were wearing Nike running shoes. Jonathan thought of the stories he’d heard around the anthropology department of Bushmen in Bermuda shorts, Sarawak chieftains with transistors pressed to their bone-bedecked ears; Nikes on white men were less jarring, maybe, but still he felt cheated.

  Lars came back with his hands full: a beer, half a loaf of bread, a hunk of cheese, a pyramidal cardboard container. He shook this last in front of Jonathan’s nose and said, “Excellent.”

  “Hvat?” What? But why ask, as the answer would be incomprehensible. It was.

  “Skyr.” Lars summoned from his depths an English equivalent: “Yaaoort.” He tugged rhythmically on an invisible object. Jonathan’s mouth was full of saliva. He grabbed the bread. Lars held on to the beer and resumed his seat by the door.

  Jonathan alternated bites of bread with bites of cheese. He didn’t understand how to open the “excellent” container, so left it alone. Lars gurgled his beer slowly. The sunlight changed color, taking on a twilight blueness that comforted Jonathan because it reminded him of the earth, whereas the true midnight sun had been extraterrestrial in aspect. Lars opened the container for him by revealing a little hole hidden under a tab near one of the points. It was yogurt—a delicate, sweet yogurt as different from American yogurt as the Icelandic sun was from the sun that shone on Boston. Jonathan leaned against the wall drinking yogurt, entirely happy.

  “Thank you, Lars,” he said, and repeated “Manga tak,” which was perceived as the native language in Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Faroes. “I’m going to sleep now.”

  “No sleep,” said Lars, smiling and shaking his head.

  Too tired to argue or pursue it—was this a warning, an order, a prediction?—Jonathan went off down the corridor and got back under his puff.

  It was a prediction, and accurate. The problem was the sun. Jonathan had reset his watch when he landed in Iceland, while waiting for his baggage to arrive, so one-thirty in the morning was correct. Nine-thirty at night in the U.S.A. The sun, now a normal sunlike yellow, had nothing to do with either of these times. And there were no curtains. Unbelievable, unbelievable. Jonathan shook his head and poked in drawers for a blanket to drape over the window, but no, there was no need for a blanket because of the eiderdown, which was much too hot to get under, what with the sun and the sulfurous energy of the unstoppable radiator—he was ready to cry. He sat on the bed and cried. He cried for his lost baggage, his mind, which he would also lose if he didn’t get more sleep, and his home, which already was but a speck across the ocean and whose balmy, tree-lined, predictable shore he would not see again for a year.

  When he woke up, it was dark. His watch, resting on the pillow next to him, said ten-thirty. The room was gray and cool, the radiator quiet. His head was clear. He sat up in bed, wrapped in the puff, and made a list in his notebook.

  Shirt, pants, socks. A sweater? He made his way to the window, somewhat hampered by his wrapping. The day was chilled by a mist that had put out the sun. A sweater would be wise. There were many sweaters in his suitcase. And his vitamins, his paprika, his framed photograph of the pine woods on Mount Desert, which he’d taken along as a savage would bundle up his wooden ancestors when setting out on a journey. And his Mallory, his late Dickens, his thermal underwear, his dehydrated vegetable soup: everything he’d considered necessary for a year in the bush.

  You can get through a week, he said to himself. But the idea had been that he could not, that these things were essential to life. If this turned out not to be true, perhaps they would never show up, knowing themselves to be extraneous. Do not anthropomorphize, Jonathan told himself. He loved to tell himself this (it was an order he needed to give often), because the next thought, that he was the anthropomorphizing anthropologist, inevitably followed and made him laugh.

  However, he didn’t laugh. He added sweater to his list and put himself into the shower, which smelled exactly like Hell. Fragrant with brimstone, swatting at his thighs with a tiny towel, he scribbled soap, shampoo, toothbrush on his list.

  Two hours later, congratulating himself on his intelligence in adding a small bag to his purchases, Jonathan stood at the untended front desk of the hotel listing to the left with his bundles and hoping for Lars. He did this for five minutes before he noticed a bell near the ledger. He was about to ring it when a woman who looked to be Lars’s mother came out from behind a chintz curtain.

  “Please?” she said.

  “Good day,” said Jonathan, to gain time and to explore her English.

  “Is it you the American who is traveling to the Faroes?”

  “I am.” News traveled faster than he did, apparently. He had told only the ticket clerk at the airport.

  “Please. The weather. You will not go today.”

  Language difficulties again obscured the mood of this sentence: was he being threatened, informed, or pleaded with? Rain had started while he’d been shopping, but rain didn’t deter planes in America. “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “Please. My husband speaks better.” She went behind the curtain and was replaced shortly by Lars in thirty years, or herself as a man.

  He was a man to inspire confidence. The blondness, the icy eyes, the chiseled features that on a woman or a boy were eerie and a little blank, on this man combined to create an ideal type. Miles of sea and years of horizons were in his eyes, untold yards of nets had passed through his hands, and every wind on earth had burnished his skin to a fine gold hue. Carved in wood, he could have been the figurehead on the first ship of the Viking fleet; in bronze, the statue in the city square.

  “You can’t go today, lad,” he said. He sounded exactly like Paul McCartney. “You see, they haven’t any radar, and it’s a rough landing there, rough winds over there, so you’ll have to wait till it lifts up. The weather.” He gestured at the ceiling. “It’ll lift, in a day or two.”

  “No radar,” said Jonathan, but more to keep him talking than to comment.

  “You’d do better on a boat,” he conceded. “Do you like the sea?” He looked Jonathan up and down. “There’s many as can’t be on it.”

  “Oh, I like it,” said Jonathan. He thought of the ferry out to the Cranberry Isles, with the black-backed gulls screaming at the cormorants, the comforting chug of the engine in the effervescence of July waves.

  “Well, now, I could find you a boat.”

  “I have my plane ticket.” Jonathan felt courage ebbing. After all, the Faroes lay hundreds of miles away over empty, open Atlantic. “How will I know, though, when I can leave?”

  “I’ll tell you.” The hotelkeeper smiled, which brought brown wrinkles to his gilded face.

  And how, Jonathan wondered, would he know? And what was he to do with himself in the meantime? He’d seen all of Reykjavik in his shopping spree; he couldn’t imagine occupying himself there for two days. Some of this must have shown in his face, because the modern Viking put a large hand on his arm and said, “Come into the dining room and have some lunch, lad. There’ll be the time to make your plans after you eat.”

  As Jonathan followed his host into the dining room, he wondered how to make him stay and talk; his voice was soothing, and Jonathan felt the lack of company. But was it proper for a guest to invite a hotelkeeper to lunch? And who would pay? The etiquette of this situation would have been daunting in America; here it was impenetrable. Jonathan resigned himself to ordering something awful out of ignorance and eating it alone. But the Viking drew up a chair for himself and spoke quickly to Lars, who had come to the table to take their order. Seeing them together, Jonathan was sure they were father and son.

  “Herring in brine, herring in cream, herring with salt only. Salt cod—you may not like this. White bread for you. Americans eat only white bread, isn’t it so? Russian salad”—this was a bowl of chopped c
arrots and potatoes, swimming in what looked like mayonnaise—“soup of cod. Here’s a sausage from the butcher next door, skyr—you had that last night, excellent—and here’s some jam, lingonberry, very nice, from Sweden.”

  Under his host’s benevolent ice gaze, Jonathan tried everything. Most of it was palatable, though the salt cod was indeed not to his liking: tough, more like an old piece of rope than food. The herrings in their various dressings were wonderful. He alternated between bread with herring and bread with jam, moistening himself with cod soup now and then. There was nothing to drink. Toward the end of the meal Lars carried two cups of tea, black as night in America, to the table.

  And through all this the innkeeper talked.

  “I shipped out of Liverpool fifteen years. That’s where I learned your language. We went all the way round the Cape of Good Hope, but I spent most of my life in these waters. The fishing’s best here, in the north. Up by Spitzbergen it’s fine. Up there’s it’s sun all the time. You’d see it high and full all hours of the summer, not like it is here. It’s a brave sun up there. And you’re an ornithologist going to the Faroes.”

  Jonathan shook his head, but his mouth was too full to contradict.

  “You’ll find plenty of birds up there. Why, it’s a sportsman’s paradise. My mother was from there. Klaksvík. My father shipped over there and he got caught in a storm. Lots of bad storms off Klaksvík. He had to put up for weeks. He was in her house waiting for the weather to shift off. So he sent for her, when he got home. That was nearly a year later. And she came. Never saw the Faroes again. But she thought of it, I could see. She’d stand on the dock of a time and look out. She never went back, even when her mother died. I’ve been there.” He stopped and looked intently at Jonathan. “It’s a drear place, you know. But there’s something in it. Makes it hard to forget. Bad weather. All the time!” He laughed and wiped his mouth.

  “But it’s a hard life, fishing,” he went on. Jonathan, mouth open, had been about to clear up the ornithology confusion. “Hard life for a boy, harder for a man. You work all the time. Where there’s always sun, there’s no sleep. Fifteen years was enough for one man’s life. I’m on the land now, in my home.” He surveyed his dining room. “But Lars, he wants to see the world. I’ve told him, you’ll see only ocean. You’ll see waves and more of them. But the young don’t listen to the old—or else, where would we be? If they listened to us, time would have stopped long ago.”