The smell of the meat was spreading, rank and sweet.

I remembered Abbe’s hands, his pocketknife, the deepviolet meat, the same angle, the blade slipping through and pressing lightly against the fingerpad. 119

‘Did you speak Faroese when you were a child?’

Ma tipped her chin away. Chewed.

I shook my head apologetically at Uncle Laurus and the meat on the outstretched knife.

The shank was beautiful in colour. The fatty edge looked like foam. I really wanted to be able to get it down.

Skerp comes from skerpa, to dry in the wind, derived from sharp, pungent, marked, drawn (relating to parts of the body). The meat has a rancid odour, like carrion, like old suppurating cheese.

Ma swallowed. She smiled apologetically at Uncle Laurus and took the piece he’d cut for me.

‘In those days they had different ideas. People thought it would hold children back to be bilingual, that it restricted their capacity to learn.’

I helped myself to a canapé speared on a cocktail stick. Picked it apart.

‘So you didn’t speak Faroese at home at all?’

Her voice was cautious. Neutral.

‘My mother and father spoke Faroese with each other.’

First I ate the rye bread. Then I let the refrigerated whale fat rest on my tongue. I wanted to say something about assimilation, that assimilation is a methodical loss of memory. I wanted to ask about parties, Christmas dinners, birthdays, the moment, if she knew it, when an aunt, a cousin, turned towards her and switched into 120Danish, the moment of becoming a guest in one’s own family, a blood guest.

Foreignness is inherited, I wanted to say; it’s packed away for the next generation. Then I let it go.

The blubber was like glue in my mouth, the taste juicy, a little milky. Pink and salted.

121

THE HULDER STONE

It was the morning we left Vágur. We edged out between the houses with a whole leg of mutton in our luggage, vacuum-packed. ‘Pah,’ Aunt Ása had said, ‘nothing is too much.’

I blinked goodbye to the hulder stone on the patch of grass behind Ragnar and Beate’s old house.

We were taking the ferry and spending a night at Aunt Anna’s in Tórshavn before our flight the next day.

Abbe often spoke about moving home. At one time he’d meant it. As a young man. He applied for various positions, eventually even in Greenland. But then something always popped up, things didn’t quite work out, something got in the way; or so he told it. When he got the village job, school administrators throughout the North Atlantic were finally left in peace.

In time the talk of moving back home lost its substance, became something else, a spasm of longing.

It could strike abruptly, out of the blue.