Being Known

On the phone one afternoon, when my time on the Faroe Islands is nearing its end, my mom asks me if I’ve become known to all the locals. I tell her that I’m not going to the same places often enough to be known. After all, I’ve come for the landscape, the isolation, and my hikes have taken me to wonderful, but mostly non-repeated locations. Though I recognize many of the bus drivers and they shift their routes, I don’t know that they recognize me. But then the snow moves in, delaying some of my hiking plans, and I find myself spending a series of afternoons at a local café where one of the baristas soon enough knows my order and tells me, “I keep forgetting not to bring the sugar.” The sugar comes in a narrow little packet that is placed on the saucer next to the spoon. And I’ve wondered if they have to throw it away or if they can use it for another customer. With or without sugar packets, becoming known happens eventually, belonging to a place happens even when I am only passing through. I hadn’t thought it would happen, with only a few weeks left here, but I find myself connecting to people and taking tentative, temporary root.

For instance, one morning at breakfast, the Airbnb owner’s son asks me if I’d be willing to make the breakfasts for the other guests while he and his parents go on holiday. The job is mainly a matter of setting out bread and deli cuts and making coffee. The guest list will be light for those two weeks. And I’ll be here. I’ll be eating breakfast. So I say, “Sure, why not?”

Later, the owner and I square away the details; who will come when, which rooms they’ll get, where the extra food is stored, and where to find a bit of cash in case I need to run to the store for anything

They leave and I’m in charge. More or less. Somewhat. Anyway, I’m the only guest for the weekend. The Palestinian who lives on my floor rents his room as a worker not as a tourist so he doesn’t come to the breakfasts. He and I have become friends and we have our conversations in the evenings as we take shifts making our dinners or in passing on the weekends as we’re doing laundry or coming in or going out. There’s also a Faroese woman named Astrid staying temporarily on the third level of the Airbnb but she has never been down to the breakfasts. I’ve only seen her once and only know she’s staying here because the German man who had stayed for three weeks and with whom, along with the owner’s son, I’d gone on a hike up Sornfelli to where the radar station is, played Friday night TV bingo (with the owner’s wife as well), and attended the Faroe Music Awards with, had told me that she had expressed worry to him about leaving the house unlocked while the owner and his family were away. The house is always unlocked. Everyone says, “It’s the Faroe Islands.” Which means it’s safe because everybody knows everybody and if someone did something bad they’d be quickly found out. The island isn’t big enough for a life of crime. And it feels safe. It is safe. There’s no need to lock things up. But there is a difference in having a house full of people and one that is sparsely inhabited. The emptiness rings out a little.  

That first morning, as I’m prepping my own breakfast, Astrid comes into the kitchen and asks me about myself, who else is here now, who will arrive. “It’s just you, me, and the Palestinian boy in this whole big house?” she asks.

“For now,” I say. “The musicians arrive on Monday. I’m going to come upstairs in a bit to clean the rooms for them.”

She comes along behind me as I work, rearranging things I’ve set up, and I have to tell her kindly that the way I’m doing it is the way it’s done for guests. Her help slows me down, but it is, in fact, helpful in the end.

Monday afternoon, the two musicians from Denmark arrive. They’ve come to put on a workshop at the Music School along with a few little concerts. I prepare their breakfasts which they take late. Brunch late. This works fine by me. I don’t have to get up by 6:30 to have things ready by 7:00 with those hours. The guitarist who is staying on my floor, tells me about his travels to Greenland and about the mystical, spiritual experience of seeing the Northern Lights. “It’s like a hallucination going on inside the head, but outside as well.” He tells me, that at first, it’s like seeing a cloud and that he’d stand there asking himself, “Is that moving? Is it changing colors?” He tells me that the Greenlanders believe the Lights are the spirits of the dead who are able to hear the living singing or chanting and move in response. He tells me that he’d sung or chanted. “They,” he says, meaning the Lights, “would maybe move anyway, but you just don’t know.” He says something along the lines of: it depends on your belief, what you feel, how you sing, what you bring with you. He touches his chest in that place where belief might reside. I feel a little of what he must have felt; a sense of awe, a sense of wonder. That’s the power of story. I’ve yet to see the Northern Lights for myself. The days when there is a possibility of them being where I am, the sky is overcast. One day.

Another time, the guitarist tells me of his mountain climbing in Tibet and Nepal. Of the sheer slow, exertion of taking one step after another in high altitude, low-oxygen environments. As he’s demonstrating each agonizing step, breathe in lift up the leg, breathe out put the leg down, I think that I’d still like to go to Nepal and Tibet on day, but that I don’t need to climb that high.

On Thursday afternoon, after a hasty hike to Kirkjubour because the weather is clear and I’ve become antsy to move, I go to Tutl Record Store for one of their concerts. The qanun player (the qanun is an Arabian stringed instrument that is the ancestor of the piano) asks me if I’ll record the concert for them on his phone. So I do. Because I’m the only one who doesn’t speak Danish, they conduct the concert in English and I’m appreciative. It’s nice to be able to understand. It's very nice. They blend the music around poetry; ancient Chinese poems and poems by the 13^th century poet and Sufi mystic Rumi (translated into English, of course).

“It was really nice of you to do the concert in English,” I tell the qanun player when I give him back his phone after the concert is over.

“It’s actually better for us,” he says. “It can reach a broader audience that way when we post it online.”

After the concert, I go next door to the library to wait for the ferry to arrive. The woman from the Czech Republic who’d gone with me by ferry to the southern island Suđuroy for a hike to an ice-age lake, is returning from three weeks in Iceland and has a brief stopover in Tórshavn before she and the ferry head back to Denmark (and then to Switzerland where she lives).

The ferry is late. I browse the English books at the library while I wait. Eventually, I see her come hurrying down the street. She tells me they have a shorter stopover because of the delays, and so I walk back with her to the ferry. We stand outside of the ferry terminal and as quickly as we can catch up on the last several weeks. She tells me of nearly being snowed in in Iceland and how she’d managed to get a ride to the port with, of all things, a couple also from the Czech Republic.

“Best of luck,” we tell each other as she joins the throng of people going back inside.

I don’t know if I’ll see her again, I’m not even sure we’ll stay in touch, but it was nice to have a friend to meet up with in a town that I’ve become familiar enough with to know what places will be open in the evening and where we can meet. 

When the musicians’ departure day arrives, the guitarist gives me a hug goodbye and three CDs. (“Do you have a CD player?”) I’m surprised by the hug. That indication of friend. Shared stories had done it. Breakfasts left out on the table had helped. “Safe travels,” I say. “Best of luck.” He says similar things and then they’re gone. I ready the rooms for the next guests.  

A day or two later, I pass the owner of Tutl Record Store on the street. His face lights up with recognition. “Hej,” he says.

“Hey, hey,” I say, recognizing in return. I think about my mother asking me if I’m becoming known and how that now I could say yes.

Another morning when she’s lingering in the kitchen, a coffee cup in her hand, Astrid shows me a video of her daughter who is studying singing in Denmark. She talks to me of artists she knows and has known. I’m not sure how art has come up in the first place. But it has. Maybe because of the musicians. Maybe because of the concert I’d gone to and told her about. She tells me she visits one of the most known Faroese artists. One of his prints hangs in the room next to the breakfast room. An abstract piece in blue and green and burnished gold. He’s in a home now with the onset of dementia. She says I should come with her to visit him. I say why not. She says, “Saturday, 1:30?”

On Friday morning, at the table with a new guest from Germany but who’s been working in Iceland the past six months, Astrid asks if I could go to see the artist that day instead of Saturday. I say sure even as I tell her that I’d planned to go to Eiđi, a place I’ve been wanting to visit and had been putting off because of the snow and the slightly complicated bus schedule, and that the bus doesn’t run there on the weekends.

“The bus has to run there,” she says. “It’s a village.”

I don’t argue. A few moments later, she calls the bus number to verify my claim.

“You were right,” she says. “You should go to Eiđi. Then you will have gone.”

There’s a chance of snow, but it’s now or never, I’m running out of time. I invite the German girl to come along with me and we go to Eiđi where the sun comes out between light snow showers and I’m filled with joy as we explore.

Saturday, first thing in the morning, as I’m making up the coffee, Astrid appears to say that she’s forgotten that she has to go to Klaksvík with her ex-husband to see their autistic son. She asks if Monday is good. My plans are flexible, so we arrange to go on Monday at 1:30. But I’m beginning to think that this visit will never happen, that it’s one of those plans that never bears fruit (and, to be honest, I’m okay with that)

Monday, as I’m putting my shoes on to go upstairs to meet up with Astrid, she opens the door. I half expect her to cancel our plans. “I thought you might have forgotten,” she says. It’s still five minutes early. I go up and we wait ten or so minutes for her taxi driver friend to pick us up. She moves around the house, unable to stay still, repositioning things. Then we go out and start walking down the road. The car meets us half way. We climb in and I say hi. The driver says hi. Astrid talks with him in Faroese and, from the backseat, I half listen. Not understanding, but partially tuned in.

“You like to climb mountains?” the taxi drivers asks at a break in their conversation, turning to stare at me with what looks like astonishment in his eyes. I guess Astrid was telling him all about me. It sounds grand when he says it like that.

“I like to hike,” I clarify. Mountain climber might be too official a title for what I do. After all, I haven’t been oxygen deprived while hiking the Nepalese or Tibetan mountains, taking one slow step at a time to move forward and upward.

Our first stop is the Effo gas station to get milkshakes. The artist likes chocolate milkshakes and Astrid is a thoughtful person. She offers to get me one (I graciously decline) and leaves the taxi. While she’s inside, the taxi driver who has known Astrid for years – everyone in town knows each other or has family connections somewhere – talks to me about Covid, vaccines, and travel. Then he pauses, looks at me, and asks, “She told you about his condition? About the dementia? He doesn’t talk much.” I nod. He’s being kind to make sure I know what I’m getting into. 

Astrid comes back with two milkshakes and the taxi driver takes us to the home. She pays him 100DKK (roughly $15.00) for the ride and we go inside. Greeting the residents and staff as we make our way through the hall, Astrid goes into his room and begins rearranging things. I see that is a strong aspect to her personality. She has some need to set things in order, to place them in a particular way, to control something of her environment. I recognize this because sometimes I feel it in myself. Then she asks a nurse where the artist is while they exchange words in Faroese, I glance around the room at the pictures on the wall, family, I assume, at the hospital like bed on the one side, at the couch, table, and chair on the other. She tells me to sit on the couch. So I sit. A bit later, the artist comes shuffling in. Astrid introduces us and offers him his milkshake. Tells him to sit in his chair. He shakes his head. He wants to sit next to me on the couch.

 His eyes are a startling blue. He smiles when our eyes meet or when I smile at him.

This is Olivur viđ Neyst.

Born in 1953. He’s a postwar and contemporary artist according to mutualart.com. He’s from Klaksvík and is a Faroese painter and graphical artist according to commons.m.wikipedia.org.

His work has been offered at auction multiple times with realized prices between 450 USD to 6530 USD also according to mutualart.com.

Astrid says he is known as the biggest colorist of the North.

She’s known him for twenty years. Knows his brother and sister. In fact, she texts them while we’re there to tell them she’s brought him a visitor. From Texas. She calls someone and they talk. It sounds like an old friend. “How old are you?” she asks me suddenly breaking from Faroese to English. I tell her, wondering who is asking and why. As she winds down her end of the conversation, she gets up and hands the phone to Olivur. She tells me that it’s Olivur’s brother and that he’d said to tell me hi and thanks for visiting. I smile to myself. The brother had wanted to know the details of the person visiting. Age, nationality, personal interests all paint a picture and he’d wanted to see the color. He’d wanted to know who would visit his fading brother.

I think about what it is to be human. To have been a known artist and then to be forgotten. To be me, an unknown, who is visiting someone who won’t remember me. And how that doesn’t matter. Sometimes it’s the moment itself that matters and that’s all. The act of interacting. I’d come because I’d been invited. But I’d also come because he was a local artist. So that I could say, I met this famous person. It was that and it wasn’t that at the same time. It’s likely that I would have gone along no matter who Astrid had been going to visit. It’s good to take the opportunities put in front of me.

After she has her phone back, she texts both the brother and sister pictures of me sitting next to Olivur. The brother had wanted to see this person who had come to visit. Proof of an afternoon.

<She looks kind> the sister texts back.

Knowing that someone is visiting helps with the pressure, perhaps, and with the guilt of not being able to visit themselves.

Conversation with Olivur is limited. Astrid tells me he speaks and understands English. And he does. So I tell him a little about myself to fill the silence. I ask some questions. He answers with yes or no or occasionally with a muttered sentence. Or he repeats something that Astrid says.

When Astrid goes out to smoke, she sets us up at the table for him to sketch my portrait. She puts a pad in front of him, hands him a pencil. Then she leaves.

Olivur gazes at me. I stare off at the wall, find a stain on the paint to focus on, I’ve sat as a model before; having a focal point helps with staying still. Then he begins to sketch, scratching at the paper. “Hmmm. Hmm. Yeah, yeah,” he mutters as he stares from me to the page. From the page to me. “Hm. Yeah, yeah.” He mutters the whole time.

Occasionally, when I think he’s looking down, I steal a glance at him. I wonder if it’ll be a farce, this sitting. He scribbles and I wonder.

“Hmm. Hm. Yeah, yeah.”

Olivur’s motions pick up speed, he drags the lead across the paper like a child with a crayon coloring outside the lines. Faster and faster. “Hm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

Then he’s finished. He puts the pad down, a machine wound down and now coming to a standstill, and I look at the picture – there’s a hint of me in the lines, a hint in the eyes, but he’s made my face too young, my face round as if I were Faroese.

“It’s good,” I say. “Thank you.”

He meets my gaze, those eyes so blue, so bright blue, and smiles at me.  

Hoping Astrid will come back soon, I ask him some questions and find out he went to art school in Denmark, studied also in Italy, but has always lived in the Faroe Islands.  

Striding in, her smoke break over, Astrid comes straight over to the table and looks at the sketch. She seems disappointed. “It’s not so good,” she says. “Because of the situation.” Meaning that the dementia is robbing him of his artistic vision and of his ability. She shows me the memory book his brother had put together for him. Shows me a sampling of the portraits he has done. She wants him to still be able to showcase his skill, but age, dementia, and a history of alcoholism is stealing bits of who he was, who he is, who he has been from him. At least that how I think she feels.  

She’s disappointed on my behalf. I assure her I like the sketch. I do see a bit of resemblance. It was kind of her to have him do it. It was kind of him to do it. She rearranges the things on the table in front of us then she sits in the chair looking at a book of quotes that have been translated into Faroese. She’s looking for a quote she’d seen in there before by C.S. Lewis.

I tell myself to be in the moment, to be here, but I’m getting a little worn around the edges, my face stretched at exchanging smiles with Olivur. Out the window, giant snow flurries filter down and then the sun comes out. I need to walk. I want to move. If I’m honest, I’m becoming bored. Be here, be now, I think. Still, I ask her, “Will we stay a long time?”

“Not a long time,” she says.

After she finds the quote, she gets up to go get coffee. “Do you want coffee?” she asks me. But I decline. I’d be up all night if I drank caffeine this late in the afternoon. She brings back two coffees and a plate of crackers with cheese and pâté for him. I pick up the book of quotes and scan through it wondering how the compiler settled on these people and these quotes. I don’t know what the theme is. It’s a strange assortment of people; Ghandi, JFK, Churchhill, Yogi Bera, Joel Olsteen, Joyce Meyers, Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain, Socrates, Mae West, Thomas Edison. There’s JFK’s “Ask not,” quote. I can recognize it even in Faroese. Across from me, Olivur sits at the table and eats like a kid having an afterschool snack. I finish paging through the book and set it down. I pick up the memory book and leaf through it too.

When Astrid goes to smoke again, I, on a whim, ask if I can sketch Olivur. It’s that or sit staring at each other in silence. Olivur gives a kind of consent. Astrid looks at me a bit dubiously and then she leaves. I take up the sketchpad and the pencil. I look at the blank page. I look at Olivur. I start with the top of his forehead where the hair makes a kind of frame. Olivur doesn’t sit as still as I had. He’s an artist not a model. I lose momentum after I have the outline done. I’m afraid if I darken the edges I’ll lose the resemblance. It’s been a long time since I sketched a live person rather than a photograph. And I often have to mess a picture up before I can get the lines right and the shadows put in. Erase, erase, start over again. I don’t want to take the time to mess this one up and then fix it. It’s been too long and I don’t know if I can do it. And Olivur keeps moving. I put the pencil down. It’s a sketch, but it lacks dynamism. It has a faint resemblance to him, at least as much as his of me had. But it’s not good and it’s not anything more than a faint attempt. The start to something that will never get finished.

“Yours is better than mine,” I say, showing him the result. Telling the truth. Knowing he’s leagues better than I am even with dementia. Knowing that the mind is a fragile thing and that what it is to be alive, to live is different for us at different times in our lives. 

To my relief, Astrid returns. Glancing at my sketch, a faint envelope of smoke around her, Astrid isn’t impressed. But she takes a picture of it and sends it off to the brother and sister. Then she gets a plastic bag for me to put the sketch Olivur did of me inside so it won’t get damaged by the rain (or snow). “You’ll have to frame it,” she tells me. She puts my sketch of Olivur up on the shelf next to the pictures of his family after she has me print my name under my signature. I write For Olivur from Amanda. He’d written, at Astrid’s instruction, For Amanda from Olivur. It gets a place of honor after all.

It’s a strange afternoon. A bit of novelty and a bit of boredom. He won’t remember me. But it’s something to have spent a few hours giving him a reason to smile. Being a face to smile at.

We stay a little over two hours and, after Astrid calls him, the taxi friend returns to collect us. In the car, Astrid tells him about our time. He turns to me and asks, astonished, “You’re an artist?”

“I used to be,” I say. Kind of. Not really. Not really not. Not professional. Not like Olivur.

I show him the sketch of me by Olivur. And the driver shakes his head, “Still he can do it. Even with the dementia. The training is still there.” 

Back at the Airbnb, Astrid and I part ways at the outside stairwell.

I say, “Thank you for taking me.”

“It was a good afternoon?” she asks.

“It was a good afternoon,” I say.

And it was. I put my plastic covered sketch in a flat spot where it won’t get bent. I will frame it. One day, when I have my own place again, I’ll hang it on the wall and remember the blue of Olivur’s eyes, the snowflakes falling in between the bursts of sunshine outside his window, the strange boredom of being somewhere and not being in control of when to leave, and the time when the North’s most famous colorist made me look like a Faroese local. 

I’ll hang it on the wall and when I look at it, I’ll remember being part of the Faroe Islands, and being known, if not by Olivur then by the barista at my café who tells me the next time I go, “I haven’t see you for awhile!” Or by the taxi driver who’d driven me to Saksun so that I could do the hike from Saksun to Tjørnuvík on a day that was quickly turning foul in weather, who spots me stepping off a bus and says, surprising me with English and with recognition, “It’s nice to see you again!” And after I explain how that hike had gone (I’d turned back 1/3 of the way through because of a steep wall of snow and then by luck happened to catch a ride to the best bus stop with a tourist who to my fortune happened to be there saving me a ten kilometer trek) he says, “It’s nice to see you safe and sound,” and I know he means it. Our brief exchange over, we part ways. Me glowing, my steps light with the joy of having been recognized, of having been known, of being remembered.