Just before death by old age, the face assumes its final form. Something happens to the nose: the cartilage subsides a little, or the bone is sharper. I thought of Omma’s face at the nursing home. The unabashed mouth. The sliver of eye beneath the lid and her bare nose. I wanted to ask if he missed her, if he was thinking of moving back now. Home. Then I didn’t dare.

At the fjord’s end the fog was dense. Stretching out an arm, I saw my hand vanish into grey air. Abbe didn’t look ahead, he walked by memory. I held onto his coat.

Now the corner of a house came into view, then a peeling wall. A blue metal roundness, the bonnet of a car. A cold sense of space between the houses, out towards the quay.

Abbe spoke in an undertone, constantly. A kind of sonar. Now we were passing the stone woman on her pedestal outside the church.

‘You remember who she is?’ 111

I nodded and squinted, seeing only the grey. Then I remembered he couldn’t see me. ‘Yes.’

The memorial was for those lost and drowned at sea, as I recalled. Drowning their sorrows, I thought, and immediately felt guilty. Meanwhile Abbe talked on.

There was the memorial to Nólsoyar Páll.

He stopped now and pointed. His sleeve brushed my shoulder. Páll was a prosperous farmer and poet and visionary; he’d built the first Faroe-owned ship since the Middle Ages. Royndin Fríða she was called. I asked whether Abbe had sailed on the ship, if he’d sailed with Páll?

Abbe was quiet for a while. Then he said Nólsoyar Páll had died at sea, or so the story went. He was last seen on the Thames in 1808, then never again. Perhaps I remembered him from the fifty, the bank note? Abbe’s voice came out of the fog. It sounded sad.

‘Oh right,’ I hurried to say. ‘Yeah.’

He went on for a while about the trade monopoly, which Nólsoyar Páll had opposed, and about something called the Ballad of the Birds. I thought of the old twenty-krone note with the house sparrows. We walked.

Royndin Fríða means The Bid for Freedom.

I asked if it had succeeded.

‘In time, it will,’ he replied.

The path sloped upwards. The harbour’s salt and tar disappeared into new-mown hay. Home trembled around us out of the grey.

112

MA

Vordingborg, denmark, 1945.

The child doesn’t want to come out where there’s war. It has to be removed with forceps.

The metal squeezes holes into the soft face, pressing it crooked. The child comes blood-slippery into the world and nearly takes its mother’s life.