The Americans did their best to gain a foothold on the Faroe Islands during the Cold War. Eventually Denmark gave them permission, but till then the CIA had to resort to more furtive methods. For a while the islands were swarming with informants. Or perhaps they weren’t exactly swarming, but they wrote reams of secret notes that were later released by the American embassy in Copenhagen. One of them had stuck in my mind. The soul of the Faroese is stubborn, it read. Moonsick and extremist.

I was laughing now at the informants and all those listening men, not just the ones at Skúvanes but at all the listening stations in the windswept North Atlantic chain, that mighty net for catching Russians, who simply never came.

‘How the hell,’ I spluttered, ‘did he get permission to go up there?’

The Tarantula clenched his teeth around his cigarette and grinned.

‘It was Arni—you know he was up there.’

I remembered now. I did know. Arni, red-cheeked Arni with the thin leg. When I was a child he could still walk with a cane, and I remembered his gait: the way his hip skidded a fraction ahead with every step, so it looked like he was wriggling as he lifted the whole stiff leg. 147

Arni was born as an afterthought, much younger than the other brothers. In his youth he’d apparently been one of Suðuroy’s best footballers. Kalle-Leg, especially after he’d earned himself the nickname, was his little brother’s biggest fan.

The Tarantula glanced sidelong at the kitchen window. We shifted a little closer to each other, then we whispered. We said Faroese football was similar to Australian football, in that tackling was valued more highly than scoring goals. That the reason was probably meteorological. The players had to do something to keep warm when the wind whipped the ball into the mountains, so they beat each other to a pulp, which—we agreed—might also explain why the Faroese national team performed relatively poorly on flat terrain. I giggled. The Tarantula giggled.

Arni had played for VB Vágur, which was later merged with the Sumba Athletic Association and renamed FC Suðuroy. The name gave the false impression that the club was the only one on the island, while also emphasizing that it was the best. Abbe talked to me about it once. The fact that FC Suðuroy had never won gold in the First Division was, according to him, because the referee was in the pocket of HB Tórshavn, and that this traitorous streak was passed down from referee to referee.