While Ragnar is passing the lake, Marita joins the thicket of people softly murmuring outside the church. She likes Ragnar’s deep-set eyes, overshadowed by shining black brows. She knows something of the strong mind within. The churning thoughts. His curiosity. His skin is open, his pores small funnels through which all the world is channelled and deposited. He carries it around with him. By now he must be walking the final stretch down the path to the tip of the land, where the terrain rises up a jot 7and the wind softens the grass. He has his own opinion—of course he does—but he doesn’t judge her.

The last Sunday service before Marita is due to leave smells faintly of fresh concrete. The church was consecrated that winter, the cold and damp becoming embedded in the foundations. The pews creak. Once everybody is seated, piety descends.

Now she’s listening to the pulse behind her temples.

The piece of steel wire has cut the opening of her uterus. Sharp little lesions. The pew is hard. The feeling like the stabbing of nails expands, creeping up into her spine and down into her thighs and calves. It penetrates her blood. She needs a piss. Now she wants to shake her feet, slam her shinbone into the pew in front, kick the feeling away.

It won’t be expelled immediately; it takes time. The inflammation does the work. Copenhagen is three days away by boat. Back home her suitcase is packed.

The priest unrolls his heavy blanket of flat, Danish sound across the rows of pews. His voice is a monotone, a solemn dakadakadak.

Before this building and before the one before, the village had a fabled church. Marita has heard it said that a rich widow gifted it to the village folk, that it came drifting on a barge all the way from Norway. You should have 8seen it. The house of the Lord on the sea. Gulls whiten the spire with their wings, and the bell whinnies metallically far and wide as the church bobs over the waves like a cork. Directionless. Free.

There’s nothing very sensational about the new concrete church.

It echoes a little, weighty as a dead cow. Marita keeps a watch on her breath. She smooths her restless legs. Above the bared heads sails the church’s model ship on its two cords. The voices of the congregation, their scarves and woollen shawls drawn around drowsy shoulders, blur into a grey-black dough. The ship is pitching and heaving now, on a shallow, slate-grey hum. ‘In your death is, like a portent,’ sings the congregation, ‘my resurrection nigh,’ Marita mimes along, standing on her raft of nails on the grey sea.

9

THE ARRIVAL

We landed at Vágar airport in the morning.