It was the year after liberation that they voted on secession back home. Fritz wishes he could have done so too. He would like to know how he would have voted. One evening he even asked Marita what she thought about the matter.

She’d risen from the table and gone to stand behind the child’s high chair. She let her fingers slip between the child’s ribs and podgy upper arms, tightened her grip gently, tensing, and lifted the socked feet out of the chair.

Now the child was standing on the floor; now Marita stood up.

‘You know better than I do,’ she said. ‘Come on,’ she said, softening her knees so she could reach the child’s hand.

But when the votes had been counted, when the news declaring secession was broadcast on the radio, and they heard it, she said, ‘Good.’

The armchair clutches Fritz; he sinks back. Freedom had turned out to be short-lived. He doesn’t remember 137exactly how many days it was till the king dissolved the local parliament, sent a warship and imposed a second vote.

Musical chairs, thinks Fritz.

He glances round the living room. He sees his daughter munching on the pencil. Her soft red-and-white cheek. Outside, the apple tree is humming in the garden. A longing rises up inside him, an unease that resembles grief, a restlessness. He doesn’t recognize it, but he interprets it like this: how dearly he’d love, right now, to be standing in the damp air on the quay in Klaksvík, keeping watch by the harbour among men.

Marita’s hands lay a stack of plates on the table, and the child sweeps the books to her chest.

It’s dinner time.

138

MR SINKLAR

Abbe’s seventieth birthday was celebrated with a big party. The House Among the Fields was sold. Abbe and Omma now lived on two small floors with a garden, the last stop before retirement housing. They lived on a street in a new-built neighbourhood with low, identikit houses, one of those streets named after some arbitrary plant and suffixed with ‘Close’.

The party was held in the community centre at the end of the road. A detached single-storey building. Aerated concrete. The whole Denmark-based family had gathered. Some of the guests had come by plane from the north. I wore my nice sandals with the heels. The dining hall at the community centre had climbing bars on the wall. A smell of building supplies and brown sauce, and something else, indefinable—aftershave, red wine, linoleum.

The room next door reminded me of an aquarium. Big, slightly greasy windows. Outside stood the autumn dark.

On the chairs along the wall sat thickset aunts in dark or jewel-toned skirt suits and shiny wedding rings, ladies 139with beautiful, meaty upper arms and styled hair, whose handshakes hid crumpled twenty-krone notes.

They patted cheeks and bickered demonstratively in Danish over which of us second cousins had grown up the prettiest.