Marita listens to the grass. It’s jingling. A subdued, blissful sound. She’s a girl, just twelve years old. Tórshavn is the furthest she’s ever been from home. In the crumpled hour before the morning she ran down to the shoreline, and now she stands among potato flowers, watching the red-legged oyster catchers, which are mirrored in the shallow water further out. The light is pealing in from the sea. Never has she seen it so delicate, like lace around a throat of violet porcelain. The sheep are sleeping, and behind her sleeps the village. From far at sea Mykines comes sailing inwards; it’s coming with the light, soundless and majestic, a gigantic bride casting off a white veil of breakers. Marita laughs. Delight, juicy as an apple’s flesh, is tingling in her legs, and now she has to run, she runs, and the oyster catchers’ wings unfold; her arms, they fly up in the glowing air—island, where have you been? She stops when the water reaches her ankles and laughs until she’s wheezing, while Mykines slots precisely into place, at the end of Sørvágur fjord. Now it’s living in the eye.

164

NOTE

My own omma and abbe were people, thankfully, and not characters in a novel. I honour their memory.

Thank you to everyone whose home gave me a home: Lis, Marjun, Ásgerð, Aunty Joan, Johanna and Liv. And thank you, Annika, Lene W. and Marianna.

165

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DAVID DIOP

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KARIN SMIRNOFF

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Original text © Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen
& Lindhardt og Ringhof Forlag A/S 2016
English translation © Caroline Waight 2021

Island was first published as Ø by Lindhart og Ringhof in Copenhagen, 2016

First published by Pushkin Press in 2021

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