The second time Speedy Arni lit the fuse, it was the same thing. Just as Arni set off running, and the other men crouched at a safe distance, a voice far away across the Atlantic hissed in Kalle’s guts that now was the time, now, if he wanted to save his life, that he had to get on deck!

Third time’s a charm, Arni apparently yelled before he turned on his heel for the last time and ran to safety. 128

Last call! thundered the blood in Kalle’s ears, driving him eventually half-crawling, half-skittering up onto the salt-slippery deck.

In Vágur the silence echoed among the low houses. A gull swept across the roofs, blinking white above the fjord.

On deck outside Færingehavn, a breaker roared in over Kalle, snatching him and hammering his limp body against the gunwale so hard the wood screeched and Kalle’s leg split open like a pea pod.

When the boat moored at Vágur many days later, Kalle came ashore without his leg. The captain himself had amputated the pod above the knee. Ever since Kalle was fitted with a wooden one he’d been called nothing but Kalle Leg, and he became probably the first and hitherto only one-legged cobbler in village history.

Beate never did get her garden. The stone that would not be moved stayed where it stood.

When Abbe repeated his verse about moving home, I thought sometimes of the stone. I could be sitting in the sun with my knees bare and fingers prowling across the soft skin of a tulip while Abbe weeded among the perennials, while he worked a snail out of a pale pink peony, put it down on the soil, picked up the trowel and in the same cycle recited his if-it-wasn’t-for-your-omma.

We could be in the middle of everything he’d sown and cultivated and fertilized and pinched off and sprayed and spritzed with water from a bottle, the garden that was his 129gift to my omma, grown around her like briar roses in a fairy tale, so that she wouldn’t long for home.

Or we could be in the middle of reading about Odysseus together, about the feast at Circe’s house, after the men had stopped being pigs. He would interrupt himself, lower his free hand onto the paper, shielding it, almost, cover the book’s ears and then: if-it-wasn’t-for-your-omma. This continued into old age. Omma, she never said a word. The bottle sees more than the ship: it holds onto the ship like something I can’t quite put into words, like a duty, at any rate, by nature and necessity, probably; and like a home, perhaps, like the home that it is.

130

BORÐOY

Køge, denmark, 1955.

Fritz is cycling to the greengrocer’s for cigarettes.

This is the bright post-war period. The afternoon is warm. They want for nothing.