The Dark Blue Winter Overcoat and Other Stories from the North

MAY YOUR UNION BE BLESSED ^{CARL JÓHAN JENSEN}

THE HEAD-TEACHER’S WIFE, Mrs Rybert-Hermansen, was quite unlike her husband. A tall, angular woman five years his senior, sometimes prone to kindness but mostly brusque and bossy, she spoke Danish when she spoke at all, and allowed no one to address her in Faroese with impunity, although she rarely cared to make a fuss.

She was the daughter of a stern postmaster, Jens Erich Rybert. He had become known across the land for having fought at the battle of Dybbøl in the 1865 Dano-Prussian war, when an explosion had left him with a limp. His dark disposition could sometimes transform him through fits of demonic rage.

In Tórshavn his thin, high-pitched voice earned him the nickname “Bleater”. Having completed his military service, Rybert, who was from a well-bred but not equally well-to-do family, studied economics and law in Copenhagen, but delayed taking his final examinations.

He came to the Faroes one spring in the early 1870s to work at the Governor’s office as a temporary replacement, but ended up staying on.

For the first few months he rented lodgings together with the surgeon Paul Fobian in the house at Bakka owned by the shopkeeper Knút Hermansen.

As fate would have it, there were two housemaids working for the newly married shopkeeper. The housemaids took turns tending to the lodgers in the house at Bakka—one day to clean for them, the next day to prepare their dinner.

One of these housemaids was called Thalia, originally from Elduvík.

Her age was uncertain.

Thalia was more plain than beautiful. She was short with narrow shoulders, a small, full bosom and a dark complexion with black slanted eyes, a flat nose and a wide mouth.

She had, however, one particular attribute that distinguished her, more than any external feature, from other women. She was possessed of an internal, almost supernatural power to command any man’s desire with the same cool glow of innocence and oblivion as the moon commands the tides.

But Thalia was a gentle soul.

She considered her power a sin for which she must atone every day.

But she accepted whomever it drew to her.

She satisfied, soothed and satiated, all with the same humble diligence.

Soon after taking up employment with Knút Hermansen she had been given a room of her own in an annex which had originally been used for storage. The entrance was from an alley at the back of the house.

The shopkeeper would certainly not allow himself to be diverted by any special powers. He kept an accurate account of everything he saw, heard or thought. He was a prudent man with a strong sense of honour. After the household had retired for the evening, it was his habit to keep an ear on all the goings-on in the annex.

And sometimes also an eye.

A row of old deck boards formed a wall separating Thalia’s room from a passageway that followed the length of the house from the shop to the annex. There was a knothole in one of the boards that was situated at a height particularly convenient for peeping, when the small mirror covering it was pushed aside.

Not infrequently, the shopkeeper had trouble sleeping. Despite her young age, his wife Gisela could snore like a bull. Thus any movement in the alleyway would easily compel him from the marital bed, and he would eventually find himself standing in front of the little mirror.

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]

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.

Thick, coarse hair grazed his fingertips.[3]