Aunt Ása raised her voice slightly as she neared the end. I looked at her face. Saw her eyes were sparkling blue. She finished with Heinesen’s epitaph and sang without singing.

Ever shall we see amid the surf

Your strong, departed face.

Afterwards we took the ferry, alongside the rowers and the students queasy with booze. Some were still raucous. Others were asleep with their bobbles in their mouths. Outside, the islands’ grey-streaked faces glided by.

60

GÁSADALUR

That weekend i told myself I’d been born on Vágar, in Gásadalur, one morning with the rain. I wanted some germ in me to have arisen here and to belong, part of the stone, the green air.

Around the little cluster of houses that make up the village are the mountains. The clouds. Further out the valley ends abruptly. It hovers, balancing above the sea on a thunderous waterfall. Sheer steps lead from the edge of the valley to the breakers far beneath. We saw no tourists. The valley was ours, the birds’. Deep and silent. The residents came and disappeared through the tunnel in their cars.

Until the tunnel was finished, the only road into the valley over the mountain took a steep path. I remembered the construction work one summer, the blasts. Another summer I remembered the trip over the mountain ridge. The Tarantula sat down on the steepest stretch. The descent, where you can see the whole thing. He was too tall and dangly to walk so close to the edge, the drop. He sat and shuffled crabwise down the path. 61

Ma and a cousin danced off ahead. I felt an itch in my legs, but then I sat down too. We shuffled down together.

Beyond the mountain wall, some way outside the valley, was Omma’s home village. It was from there she’d gone for walks in her childhood, before the tunnel, along the mountain track. Low, sod-roofed houses, wooden huts, the red on a rusty wheelbarrow, the shallow walls and their big stones. She had touched these things.

I walked around the village, thinking of the Midsummer’s Eve guests at Aunt Ása’s, their stops-on-the-floor, their pecks and hugs. In my pocket I carried a note of the most important names, the closest ones. Bára popped into my head, that time I’d tried to explain something about one of my relatives. The term had disappeared in Danish too. ‘My mother’s cousin’s daughter; oh, no, the daughter of my mother’s first cousin, once removed, I think.’

‘I see,’ said Bára. ‘Close family, then.’

I’d laughed into my beer. Bára had looked at me, then glanced out of the corner of her eye at the side table. ‘But it is a shame for Danes, isn’t it, that they have such small families?’