Faroe Islands

Three nights in a country that will not be scheduled, a man who lives to the minute, and the cliff where the fog tears open and takes what the cities never could.

The Country That Will Not Be Scheduled

I had brought her to a country that does not keep time.

The plane out of Copenhagen had been delayed by an hour and a half because the cloud at Vágar had not lifted, and then by another forty minutes because the cloud had lifted and closed again, and finally it had taken off because a window had opened and the pilots had used it. We landed in a small clean airport on the western island in a wind that was already moving fog across the runway in fast low sheets, and the man at passport control stamped us in without looking at the stamps, because the stamps were the part of the work that did not matter.

Her Highness walked beside me through the small terminal in a navy oiled jacket the weight of a fisherman’s coat and a cream wool sweater under it and jeans worn soft at the knee, her hair loose under a knit cap of the same dark grey wool she had worn in Banff. She had read the brief on the plane. She knew what this trip was. She had packed for a country where the only thing on the schedule was the weather.

The rental car was a small dark Volvo with all-season tires and a half tank of fuel, and the woman at the counter handed me the key with two sentences. The first was the password to the Vágatunnilin toll account. The second was the number to call if the helicopter ran. I thanked her. I did not write the number down. It was already in my notebook.

We drove east out of the airport in low cloud, and the road went under the sea for six kilometers, the lights set in the wall at intervals the way lights are set in any long tunnel, the only difference being that this one ran beneath the floor of the Atlantic and the floor of the Atlantic was a hundred meters above us as we drove. She did not comment. She watched the lights pass.

When we came up out of the tunnel onto Streymoy the cloud had broken. The sun was on a green slope above us and a rainbow stood from one inlet to another across a stretch of black rock, and a half mile further the cloud closed again and the rain hit the windshield, and three minutes after that the cloud opened a second time and the sun was on the road in front of us. She turned her head from the window to me.

“It does this all week,” she said. “All day.”

It does, I told her. She nodded once and turned back to the window and did not say anything else for the rest of the drive into Tórshavn.

We came around the last bend of the road from the airport and the harbor opened below us, the city small and clean against the slope of the hill, the fishing boats tied along the quay and the old town of Tinganes on its dark peninsula in the middle of the water, the black-tarred wood of the parliament houses with the red trim around the doors and the turf roofs gone green with the rain of a hundred years. The hotel was higher up, on the ridge above the city, a long low building under its own turf roof, designed by a Danish firm in another decade to look like the old houses of the village it overlooked, the grass on the roof the same grass that ran down the slope toward the harbor.

I pulled in. A young man came out for the bags. The wind at the door of the hotel was a clean cold wind off the North Atlantic and it had salt in it and the faint sweet smell of cut grass from the roof, and she stood at the door a moment letting the wind work on her face before she went inside.

The Room with the Window onto the Harbor

The room was on the upper floor on the harbor side.

It was a long room with a low pitched ceiling and a single wide window framing the city and the harbor and the line of the slope across the water. The window had been set deliberately at the height it had been set. A man sitting on the bed at the back of the room could see the whole of Tórshavn through it. A woman standing at the glass could see the boats. The window was the room. The rest was a bed, a desk, two chairs, a wardrobe of pale wood, a small lamp, a wool throw at the foot of the bed in the colors of a sheep that had not been bred for white.

Her Highness put her case down. She crossed to the window.

The cloud over the harbor moved as she crossed. The sun came through. The water in the inner harbor went from the slate grey it had been when we walked in to a sudden clear green, the green of glass held against a lamp, the same green a lake takes when the wind drops off it for a second. Then the cloud closed and the green was gone and the water was slate again.

She did not turn.

“There it is,” she said.

It did that every fifteen minutes, I told her. Some days every five. She set her palm flat against the glass at the height of her shoulder, left it there a moment, and took it down.

“I have not been somewhere I could not plan,” she said, “in a long while.”

She crossed back across the room and put both hands inside the open front of the navy jacket and rested them against my chest under the sweater, the way she had done in another cabin in another country, and the cool of her fingers met the warmth I had been holding, and the cool went into me and stayed for a moment and was gone.

“You did this on purpose. You brought me to a country where the minute does not exist.”

I had. She stepped back and unzipped the navy jacket and hung it in the wardrobe, turned the wool cap once in her hands and set it on the shelf above, and took off the boots and lined them up by the door the way she has lined them up in every room we have entered together.

I unpacked the small bag. I had brought one thing for one dinner and the rest was wool. A navy sport coat my tailor had cut for nothing in particular, the kind of jacket a man takes to a country where the weather is the calendar and brings out only on the last night. Two cashmere sweaters in different greys. A wool waistcoat for the days outside. Heavy moleskin trousers. The oiled jacket I had worn off the plane, hung now over the back of the chair to let the salt out. A pair of boots that had broken in some years ago in Scotland and had not lost the trick of it since.

I had brought a single bottle in a leather sleeve from home. William Larue Weller, the uncut wheated, the kind of bourbon you do not find on a shelf in the North Atlantic. I set it on the desk with two heavy glasses I had also carried up, because I had not trusted the hotel to keep the right tumbler for what I had brought.

She watched me set the bottle down and did not comment. The corner of her mouth gave the small private lift.

I crossed to the window beside her. A patch of sun ran along the green of the hill, lit it for thirty seconds, and was gone.

“Tonight we eat in the hotel,” I said. “Tomorrow, if the weather lets us, the helicopter to Mykines. The day after, Saksun and Gjógv. The last day, Trælanípan, if the cliff is clear.”

“And if it is not.”

Then we would do whatever the weather let us do that day. She nodded.

“I will dress for the dinner now,” she said.

“There is no rush.”

“I know there is no rush. I am dressing now because I want to.”

I let her go to the wardrobe. I poured an inch of the Weller into one of the heavy glasses and took it to the window and stood there and watched the cloud work on the harbor below, the boats appearing and disappearing under it in the slow patient alternation a country has when it has given up trying to be on time and decided to be itself.

The Restaurant Above the Cove

The car came at seven.

We drove a short way through Tórshavn in the long evening light, the sun still up at that hour at that latitude in the first week of June, the road climbing from the harbor and crossing the ridge above the old town and dropping down a quiet lane on the seaward side of the city where the restaurant had set itself into a low stone building above a small cove. A pair of fulmars rode the air above the cove in the slow level way that bird rides air. A handful of sheep grazed on a slope so steep no fence would have held them and no fence had been built.

Her Highness watched the cove from the back seat. She had put on a long charcoal wool dress that fell to mid-calf, fine and dense, the kind of garment a woman owns because she travels and has been cold in restaurants in cities further north than this one, a fine cream cashmere layered underneath it at the collar. She wore the navy oiled jacket over all of it because the country was the country and the dress was beneath it. Her hair was loose. She wore no jewelry. The fragrance she had brought to the trip met the wool and the salt and the cold mineral smell of the country and made something that did not belong to any other room we had been in.

I wore the sport coat under the oiled jacket, the moleskin trousers, the Scotland boots. I had not packed a tie. There was no occasion in the country for one.

The restaurant sat low against the slope at the edge of the city, a long building of pale wood and dark stone, a turf roof above it, two long walls of glass on the seaward side, the cove below opening out to the harbor mouth and beyond it the line of the open Atlantic where the late sun was making gold across the water. There was no signage on the lane. The driver knew the turn. He let us out at the door and drove back down the slope to wait.

Inside, the room was small. Sixteen seats. A long table at the kitchen pass where two cooks worked without speaking. The walls were pale pine. The light was the light coming in off the cove through the long glass, the room oriented so the diners faced the water and the sky and the slow weather working over both.

The hostess was a woman in her thirties in a fine wool apron over a charcoal sweater. She took our jackets and seated us at a table by the glass. She did not run through a script. She set a small ceramic plate of dried fish on the table and a small glass of buttermilk beside it and stepped back.

“Begin with these,” she said. “The kitchen will come to you.”

The dried fish was the wind-cured cod the country has been making for as long as the country has had wind, a thin pale strip the color of old paper, salt-driven and bright on the tongue, the kind of thing that asks for a sip of something cold to follow it. The buttermilk was the cold something. We ate the fish. We drank the buttermilk. The first course had been a sentence the kitchen had spoken in two ingredients.

A young man from the kitchen poured a Sancerre with the first cooked course, a small bowl of mussels from Kaldbak fjord in a broth of their own liquor and a single sprig of fresh dill. The dill grew somewhere on the property. He told us where without making a production of it and withdrew. The mussels were the first thing she tasted hot. She said nothing. She lifted her glass, tilted it a fraction of a degree at me, and drank.

The skerpikjøt came at the third course. The kitchen had hung the mutton in a wooden hjallur shed on the cliff above the cove for nine months in the wind off the Atlantic, and it had cured the way nothing else on earth cures, and the kitchen had sliced it thin and laid it across a black plate with a single line of mustard the color of old gold. It was hers. The kitchen had read my face when I declined the mutton course earlier in the menu and had brought me, in its place, a small piece of monkfish poached in butter that did not require any kind of speech to enjoy. I ate my monkfish. She closed her eyes on the first bite of the skerpikjøt and did not close them again on any bite after it.

“This is older than any food I have eaten,” she said.

Nine months in the wind, I said. She took a second slice and ate it without hurry and said nothing else. She had said what she had needed to say.

The fish courses came in a careful order, lighter to heavier, the cod and the halibut and the langoustine from the cold water around the Faroe Bank. The chef came out at the main and introduced himself without ceremony, a man in his forties with a face that had been in the wind. He spoke about the langoustine for a minute, about the boat that had caught it and the hour it had come into the kitchen, and then he stopped and bowed once and went back to the pass.

Dessert was rhubarb grown in a walled garden at the back of the property, the only ground on that side of the city where the wind would let the stalks come up tall, stewed down to a soft pink syrup and folded with a sheep-milk cream the dairy in Suðuroy made for the restaurant in small batches. She ate it in three bites and set the spoon down.

“I do not want coffee,” she said. “I want to walk.”

We would walk. The hostess brought our jackets at a small motion of my hand. I paid the bill in Danish kroner the woman at the front desk had given me earlier that day, and rounded it, and we went out. The driver was waiting on the lane. I waved him off for half an hour. He turned the engine off.

We walked down the lane toward the water in the long slow gold of the late evening, the sun still above the western ridge at almost nine, the cove below holding the gold across its small length, the gold breaking against the rocks at the mouth where the open water began. The wind had dropped. It would come back inside an hour. For now the air was nearly still, and the only sound was the slow break of the water at the foot of the slope and the occasional cry of a fulmar from the rookery above.

She walked with her hand in the inside crook of my elbow. The wool of her dress moved against the moleskin of my trousers. The oiled jackets made a soft small sound against each other when our arms shifted. We did not speak. There was nothing the cove wanted to be told.

A cloud came in from the north over the ridge and crossed the cove quickly and was gone, and the gold returned, and a second cloud came behind the first and stayed for two minutes, and the cove went grey, and then the cloud lifted and the gold was back on the water at a different angle.

Her Highness stopped on the lane.

“Look at it,” she said. It was doing it again.

She did not move. We stood on the lane in the slow alternation of the country’s light, and I felt for the first time in longer than I wanted to count something I had not been able to find in any of the cities I had been moving through.

The driver came back up the lane at the half hour. We rode down to the harbor under a sky that had cleared and clouded twice in the short ride.