She went around in her most elegant clothes, starched and glossy, a postcard. Denmark’s finest, it read. She held the old country at arm’s length. I saw it in a photograph, the distance. In the picture you see women at a family party, dark hairdos, dark dresses and the heaviness of arms on the table. And there sits Omma, not in the middle yet in the middle nonetheless, a silk-screen print with her string of pearls flashing against a crimson neckline. Her dyed-blonde hair. 88

‘One summer,’ said Ma, ‘I had to wear white gloves.’

Aunt Anna told me about Great-Uncle Jegvan, that he went missing at sea during the war and was gone for several years. Nobody knew if he was dead or alive. His fiancée was left waiting in Klaksvík. And since Jegvan was missing, perhaps dead, he could hardly pay for Abbe’s engineering studies, could he? Indeed he could not, nodded Aunt Anna. By the time Jegvan came home, life had flowed on. Abbe had a steady job now, a family.

But Jegvan, where was he all those years? Had he worked on a ship during the war? For whom?

Aunt Anna reached the end of a skein and fished a new one out of the basket. She said she didn’t know much about all that business.

‘Are you sure?’

Aunt Anna knew everything.

Jegvan came home, that much she could add, married the girl from Klaksvík and drew a pension from the American navy. A token of some sort of honour. I would have liked to hear more, but every further question was answered with swift small tugs at the yarn.

‘Old people like me, we forget.’

Once Tórshavn’s heart had gone quiet I drifted from the park to the harbour, out to Skansin, Tinganes, up to the old hospital. On the street I met a few tourists, whose patent disappointment at the lack of nightlife I made up 89my mind to despise. The silence among the low houses pressed them together, added strength to their voices. As I passed I picked up speed, trudging purposefully and staring rigidly ahead towards an imaginary hallway where my coat and boots belonged. I told them with my eyes that we were sick of tourists here, wandering around and being noisy in our nights.

I dozed off on the bench outside a candy-red building.

When I awoke, a bright clear blue had erased the distinction between the elements. A quilt of blue lay across the cutters.

The cruise ship further out.

The blue was infinite and soft.

I floated in it.

I reached out a hand; it was blue. I shook.

When we got back to Vágur, I slept.

What did I know now?

Omma arrived at Copenhagen by boat the day before the Germans trudged into Poland.