Хьелль Аскильдсен - The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

It would also happen that if he thought he heard rustling in the bed on the other side of the boards, he would poke his finger under the mirror so that chance provided him with a vision of how—when least expected—unaccountable impulses could get the better of reason and sense.

Each time this vision was equally clear.

Thalia knelt by the side of the bed, unbuttoned the front of her nightdress and performed carnal sacrament on whatever frustrated soul had sought her out, with a firm hand and an air of compassionate wonder.

Each time the procedure was the same.

But the men were as different as they were endowed.

Knút Hermansen stood gaping, pressing and panting against the boards, his heart aflame and his eyes watering with guilt-ridden pleasure.

The knowledge that providence gave the shopkeeper through the knothole was credited in his accounts alongside his other earnings.

One mild Sunday night around the feast of St Lawrence, this chapter of his book-keeping, however, came to a quick and dreadful end.

The causes were twofold.

The first was a watchful eye, and the second the point of a lancet, which reduced his sight by half.

The watchful eye belonged to the undergraduate in economics and law. The lancet came from the desk drawer of Paul Fobian.

Word got around. For several weeks Knút Hermansen was in agony, even though physician Smertz, seeing the state his patient was in, had been quick to remove the eye from the socket.

The incident had no immediate consequence other than that, on the following morning, Rybert moved from his rented lodgings into a half-constructed house at Ryggi, owned by the provincial authorities.

A week later, on a Tuesday, Thalia left the shopkeeper’s annex and moved in at Ryggi.

Shortly before Christmas she and the young Dane married.

For many years relations between Knút Hermansen and Jens Erich Rybert were strained, to say the least.

It was nevertheless a comfort to the shopkeeper that even with his semi-vision, he couldn’t help noticing that Thalia continued to perform her sacraments, despite her marital status. Neither her power nor her will to atone for her inherent sin showed any sign of abating.

That Rybert’s mood darkened as the years passed, and his devilish rages became ever more frequent, was no less of a comfort.

Then came the children.

First Rybert’s daughter.

Then the shopkeeper’s son, Mats Kristian Hermansen.

Miss Rybert was unlike both her parents in appearance, but as she grew up, it came to light that in certain undeniable ways she was clearly her mother’s daughter.

Finally, her father decided the only recourse was to send her away to Denmark.

This settled the score for Knút Hermansen, who felt no shame about his own offspring.

For a long time nothing much happened.

But then Rybert was appointed as postmaster. [2] Postmaster J.L. Rybert came to the Faroes, as the author says, to take up a temporary position at the Governor’s office. This was in 1879, the same year that Jens Davidsen retired. H.C. St Finsen was Governor at the time. The author is correct in stating that Rybert studied law, but he did not study economics, and he had recently taken the first part of his exams when he came here. He was supposed to fill in a clerical position until the autumn, when he had a passage reserved back to Denmark on the state-owned steamer Diana . But he ended up staying on at the Governor’s office until 1901, when he was appointed as postmaster. There are no sources to confirm that Rybert fought in the war in 1865, and this would hardly have been possible, as he was twenty-five when he came to the Faroes and could not have been more than eleven years old in 1865. He was said to have an effeminate demeanour and always dressed as if he was on his way to a social festivity. He was also known to be long-winded, short-tempered and high-handed. The people of Tórshavn called him “Queen Arsehole”. Rybert married, as the author says, and his wife was quite rightly from Elduvík, but her name was not Thalia and she never worked for Knút Hermansen, nor was she a slattern as Thalia is depicted in the story. Rybert’s wife was Marin Kristina Frederiksen. She was the seventh daughter of the farmer Fríðrik á Flatumørk, who died in 1889. She did keep house for Rybert for many years but they were both well advanced in age when they married, which was, according to the church records for South Streymoy, in the summer of 1917, and therefore they had no children together.

Hermansen was shocked, but adjusted to this development sooner than might have been expected.

Madam Thalia had taken to the bottle in her later years. Rybert’s advancement in professional standing was outweighed by his wife’s deteriorating reputation, as she became ever more brazen in her shamelessness.

And when one morning word had it in the shop that the postmaster’s wife had let the missionary and quack Brond pull out all her teeth, the shopkeeper decided that the time had now come to settle the accounts for good. The knothole, the lancet and his missing eye were written off forever.

The shopkeeper and the postmaster took to greeting each other in the street. Sometimes they could even be seen attending the same funerals.

Years passed.

Jens Erich Rybert became ill. Having managed to recover from a stroke, he suddenly died.

One Good Friday morning as he sat in the church loft listening to the vicar recounting the works for which rewards are reckoned not by grace, but by debt, the postmaster felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his side and chest and left the church earlier than was his wont. He arrived home to find his wife on her knees on the parlour floor in front of the sofa, dressed only in her undergarments, with bodice unbuttoned. The devil took hold of Rybert. As he kicked and thrashed Thalia in a blind rage, his wife cringing and grovelling around on the floor in search of her dentures, he suddenly clutched his chest with both hands, jerked his head to the right, then to the left, and with ashen face and upturned eyes fell dead onto the sofa, his head landing in the lap of a tender, downy-cheeked young man who had not had the presence of mind to pull up his trousers.

The young man was Mats Kristian Hermansen.

A year later, embittered, the shopkeeper settled his own mortal accounts and soon afterwards the shop was shut up for good.

The following year, in the autumn, Miss Rybert returned home, spirited and voluble, despite her waning youth. She moved in with her mother at Ryggi.

By this time, though, Thalia was entering her second childhood. Before long, darkness and dementia had engulfed her so firmly that her power was finally extinguished.

Nothing now prevented Miss Rybert and Mats Kristian from forming a union, which they did nine years later, shortly after he took his teacher’s diploma.

It began one uneasy day in June.

Flies were buzzing.

The sun beat down and everything was still, trembling.

Then a sudden breeze picked up.

In the parlour of the shopkeeper’s house, an infusion of smells swirled in the air. The tang of wood shavings, varnish and ethanol that lingered after Gisela, Mats Kristian’s mother, had been borne out earlier that day, mixed with a whiff of mould, eau de Cologne and sweat. Into this concoction the scent of angelica wafted in on the breeze from the garden.

Miss Rybert stood with her back to the parlour door, her eyes half closed, head tilted, and nostrils blazing.

Her arms around Mats Kristian’s neck.

He kissed her throat hungrily.

My dove, my Shulamite, he muttered, fumbling with her clothes, aroused and ardent. It was, however, with an inkling of the misery and regret which would become his steadfast companions that he finally managed to grope his way to her Zion’s gate.