The chapter we read was about the island of the Wind King, where Odysseus drifted ashore and stayed a whole month. The island—Abbe lowered the book and raised his hands, showing me the wide expanse of blue and then the wall of bronze that rose from the water and thundered redly upward—the island was tethered behind this wall. It had to be, he explained, or it would float away and disappear across the sea.

Where did it come from, I asked.

I didn’t sleep in Tórshavn’s heart, I couldn’t.

The night was shining and still. The house pressed, like the shell of a chestnut, against my arms and legs. I had betrayed it.

I walked through the slanting streets. The town, as on weekday nights in the provinces, was a backdrop for what I had in my head, pasted up and two-dimensional, a canvas I spattered myself across.

In Viðarlundin, the city park by the art museum, I sat down by the statue of the fallen sailor on his stone anchor. He gazed straight over my head. Sparrows stared down 80from the gaunt trees. The notion I could reach my own beginning, my home in the blood, seemed idiotic.

During our stay in Tórshavn, I underwent small but noticeable physical changes. My hair changed structure, softening and smoothing out. The air washed the grains of melanin in my skin, making them glow. Lack of sleep played a part, too. I staggered through the colourless night like a faintly luminous amateur genealogist.

Early one morning I made my way down from the park to the old sod-roofed houses at Tinganes, lozenge-red, out on the spit of land. First you think it’s a North Atlantic branch of the open-air museum back in Copenhagen. Then maybe you remember these are ministries, the local parliament.

I felt an unrest in my body, a grief. I curled up on a bench with my back to parliament and faced the sea. Now Aeolia appeared again, the island of the Wind King.

It was Abbe who had taught me to collect floating islands. The Wind King’s, which Homer describes, was my first. There are no earlier depictions of a floating island in European literature, I don’t think, but there have been plenty since. My collection swelled.