A boy in short trousers hops into the air, triggering a blast wave of anticipation through the crowd—‘Pa!’ Fritz feels something clench around his Adam’s apple. Now he too can make out the bodies on deck. He stares until his cheeks hurt. Rain falls in long, glimmering threads. As though on cue a cloud of moisture-heavy flags are raised into the air, umbrellas pump up and down, and—there! Now he sees her.

Fritz forgets all about tipping his hat. He tears it off and waves like a man possessed.

The rhythmic tonk tonk tonk of the boat fills Marita’s belly and makes her chest vibrate. It’s her body’s own victory song, deep and sustained. She listens as the boat moors alongside the quay with a groaning crash. 86

The bundle is gone, the woodlouse dropped into the sea. She feels it now only as a secret weight, which crouches sometimes into an exhausted pang. Her muscles are quivering as though after a long day’s walk up steep terrain.

She feels it: her living, hardy musculature.

On deck, high above the quay, she has a view over nearly the whole city. It’s spread like a white-sheened tablecloth covered with enormous cakes, the glazing dribbling down over the roofs.

What she is now has no name. It stretches with her, into the fingertips she reaches towards the railing, as though wanting to tear it up and step straight out into the air, over the harbour streets and the warehouses, into the world.

The merry activity on the quay briefly snags her eye. She looks down. The people seem oddly small down there. Rain is falling onto waving hats and flags. Most of all they look like a troop of ants pausing in front of the boat, laden with flies’ wings and red berries.

Then a flash of light catches her attention. Her eye pulls free of the crowd. A landslide in the clouds pours sun onto the city and spotlights a large, soft dome.

Never in her life has Marita seen anything so hilarious!

The dome, floating on the rooftops, washed golden by the rain, reveals itself and offers the wide-open sky its nipple of glistening butter.

87

THE PLANT

The days in Tórshavn passed like a kind of tremor.

I listened to Aunt Anna. The light wandered across the kitchen curtains. The stones in the yard outside grew wet with rain, then dry again. I drank black coffee while the mittens took shape between her hands, and she told me about Omma and Abbe.

How they would come travelling in the post-war summers, when travel was possible once more, laden with gifts.

‘You always had to be so grand,’ she said to Ma.

Omma, they called her the Queen.