The server is supposed to raise their eyes when offering the glass; it doesn’t do to stand there gaping at the floor. Every hand around the glass was connected to a dark sleeve, and above it hovered two commiserating eyes. Here and there a few pairs of eyes had begun to swim. ‘Here you are,’ I muttered, avoiding the eyes and counting sleeves.

On the other side of the aisle sat the pious, the ones drinking only coffee. Paper tablecloths rustled. The same acoustic as a sports hall. Then a small woman got to her feet. She belonged on the side of the blessed. On her round, densely wrinkled face were traces of Sørvágur, my omma’s relatives.

‘Marita was something special,’ she said. ‘I never doubted that, and nor did Marita.’

Several people grinned. Among the schnapps drinkers there were a few chuckles.

The old lady stared straight ahead and blinked, but her voice was firm. She spoke as though telling a saga, with the old-fashioned grammar some islanders use when they speak Faroese in Danish.

‘It was indeed a sorry time when Marita left us, and heavy was the long spell we were kept apart by the war. But it was good she lived long and happily with her beloved Fritz, and that together they were granted both children and grandchildren.’

A strange hand caught my wrist in a small, sweaty squeeze that made the glass slosh. I looked over at Abbe, 31Omma’s beloved Fritz. He was slumped. His hands had dropped to the table.

Once, when Abbe got drunk, Omma had an accident. While he lay unconscious on the sofa after many trips to the lean-to, she tripped at the top of the stairs, fell, and cracked her left hemisphere. When the alcohol wore off, he found her where she was lying. After that she had to go to a speech therapist.

It happened in the wintertime, during Christmas party season.

The night was silver-black and slippery. My mother sped the whole way to the hospital, muttering incantations against the traffic police. She hit the car park running and kept speeding down the hospital corridor, her bag clutched in her arms, now muttering the ward numbers, 112, 114, 116—here!

We hurtled inside.

On the ward, among trolleys and turquoise floral curtains, was Omma. She sat plumb straight in a chair, her pale nylon legs decorously folded beneath her housecoat, the waves in her hair newly permed and shiny. She’d made the bed.

Her face was lopsided. One cheek lay flat against her skull like a deflated tyre, while the other looked like a bluish-violet football. She smiled. ‘Goodness, is that you?’ she asked, grinning with her crooked blue mouth.

* * *