The British dusted off many things that had been mouldering too long. They mingled with the girls from the filleting factory and the villagers’ grander offspring, who held their heads high and smoothed their dresses but were just as desolate whenever a handsome soldier took his kilt and sidestepped the altar at the last moment. They too were left standing.

True, there were nightly crashes and booms. Fire lighting the sea. 96

The plant felt a tremor now and then.

The village sons went aboard their boats. They vanished singing over the fjord and came home in boxes or merely as telegrams. The plant saw.

But the bustle! The harbour! The Vágbingar salted and dried, packed and settled accounts. Vágur blossomed from village into town beneath bunches of filleted herring and dried cod and roe in tins.

‘What do you reckon Abbe thought about the plant?’ I asked, grabbing the Tarantula’s sleeve to help me clamber onto a steep rock jutting out of the ground. He was somewhere else. He said something about the pressure in the pipes, the water’s route up over the ridge.

Perhaps the plant had seen a compact little man walking down there amid the bustle: Ragnar, followed by gulls, or maybe in the company of a tall, fair-haired woman whose long legs carried her gliding over the soil.

The Tarantula paused in the middle of the stuff about the pipes. Said, ‘What?’

It was too hard to explain. Instead I asked, ‘What did you mean about the plant being a church?’

‘Well. It just looks like one.’

‘Maybe the plant was Abbe’s Ithaca, always retreating before him. The building where he put his dreams.’

Heat in the floor, water in the tap and light above the land—the place where he worshipped his longing. 97

The Tarantula chewed it over for a minute.

‘He did live in the future, right up until he began to live in the past. When you think of it that way, he was a migrant through and through.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Just feel that air,’ said my mother.

We slanted down towards the car.

In time, the plant came to understand the engine that drove the village people away to the church, where they sang to their telegrams. The body they buried wasn’t in the coffin. It still stood on the bridge and waved, or it hunched away as the boat glided out to sea.

And so it remained.

Standing in Tórshavn, in the park, on the stone anchor, is the fallen sailor. He holds in his hands the rope that tethers him to the seabed, him and all the rest, a third of the entire fleet. But the plant, why should it grieve? It knew that when the people streamed into the drowsy concrete they would sing.

98

THE DOG KING

Vordingborg, denmark, 1942.

Evening has the house surrounded.