The sun zigzags, flashing and whirling chaotically on the surface of the water. He sees death in Marita’s belly, and now, in that death, he senses another, altogether greater. It strikes him like the reek of singed bone, of marrow. He blinks. Turns his face momentarily towards Tinganes and the red wooden houses. His eyes don’t see the wood, they see smoke, brown smoke out of the earth, a raging monument, the smoke sated—fat, sated smoke—and scrawny corpses loaf among piles of shoes. He thinks he hears a grinding boom, and now a laughing infant plants its riding-booted foot on a mountain of gilded teeth. Whether the vision can be blamed on too many pamphlets, or whether he caught a quick glimpse through a tear in the world’s undershirt, no one now can say for sure. But everyone knows that when the boat cast off that day in Tórshavn, Red Ragnar cried and cried.

16

THE HOUSE AMONG THE FIELDS

When omma made up her mind to die, the weather changed. On the winter’s night when she pursed her lips and blinked once for no to the spoonful of mashed potatoes, a cold haze crept across the fields from the north. White, secreting damp ate the stumps and chewed the branches of the trees while Omma starved. The lighter she got, the heavier became the weather.

We girded ourselves. There was nothing else to be done.

I moved into the spare room at my parents’ place. Skived off my geology course. We helped each other live while we waited for Omma to finish dying. The Tarantula worked from home so Ma could have the car. She shuttled between Copenhagen and the care home down by Køge.

Omma’s nails had to be cut and the dust rubbed from her small porcelain figurines: fat cherubs with the worn radiance of gold leaf, English cottages with miniature roses above the doorframe and green felt at the base. Omma’s punctilious world, squeezed into this square 17room with a hoist above the bed, incontinence diapers, a shelf where the hand sanitizer was kept, the odour of oldage sweat.

Outside, next to the door, was a little sliding sign of clear plastic. Someone had written her name on a slip of paper and shoved it askew into the frame.

MARITA, it said in pencil.

Diagonally opposite was the TV room. The old women lay on rolling beds or sat in wheelchairs. Everything was grease-ground into biscuit crumbs, a sweetish smell. Plastic jugs of red juice were left to stand and grow lukewarm, while the television blared and the light flickered blue, yellowish, over the silent furrowed faces.

On one of my last visits, a glass was knocked to the floor. It shattered. ‘No,’ wailed a lady. ‘No, no,’ repeated another. Omma was sitting in a wheelchair. She couldn’t turn towards the noise. She wanted to. Her eyes rolled round and round.