by John Bancroft
Knut waits for her in a late-winter squall that sputters cold rain, as usual. Twice a week he comes to the ferry landing in Torshavn to see if she is on the ferry from Denmark.
This is March 1972, when Marie said she would arrive. They have not seen each other in six months, since the day she married his uncle in Newport. He will wait until the last passenger disembarks, as he has for every ferry, and if she is not among them, he will go back to his job on a fishing boat and tell himself the next time will be different.
A man, a stranger, is also waiting for the ferry. Knut doesn’t like to linger at the harbor, so close to the government buildings. He has been traveling on his cousin’s passport since he was expelled from Iceland. So far, Knut is getting away with it. There’s a family resemblance, he is eighteen, and the photo is a few years old. Immigration people aren’t surprised if adolescents don’t look exactly as they did a few years before.
The wind throws a bucket of rain at him.
At first, he doesn’t recognize Marie. She is bundled in foul-weather gear. It was summer when he saw her last, and she was only two months pregnant.
Marie studies the clouds that malinger dark and low over the little city. Knut hurries across the concrete pier before she changes her mind, or the stranger turns out to be a border-patrol officer.
She drops her bags and leaps into his arms, laughing and crying at the same time. “I missed you so much.” She hugs him fiercely. There’s a whiff of diesel fuel in her coat.
“I miss also,” is all he can manage to say, partly because his English is still raw, but mostly because he is overwhelmed. She’s come to meet him on this foggy outpost in the North Atlantic to give birth to their child. Then, in time, she will leave the baby with him and return to her new married life in America because that is what practical, college-educated women of twenty-four can be expected to do.
Knut wedges one bag under his arm and grips the other with the same hand. It’s stupidly unbalanced, but it frees the other arm for her shoulder.
They climb narrow streets under dripping eaves to his one-bedroom flat with a view over the grassy rooftops of Torshavn.
Inside, Marie unbuttons her coat and twirls out of it. She adores everything about their humble home. He has never seen her aglow like this, even in their trysts aboard his uncle’s sailboat on the Narragansett. Enchanted by her arrival at last, he dares to dream they can stay together despite his undocumented status and the promise they made to Oskar.
* * *
A month or so passes. They have come to cherish their quiet evenings together. Knut studies a hard-ridden edition of Shane, a gift from Marie. Western novels are his gateway to learning English, to becoming American, with help from a much-thumbed Icelandic-English dictionary. At the moment, he’s frustrated by the dictionary, which doesn’t recognize “cultivator.”
Marie keeps her eyes on her knitting. “Geyser.” Her pet name for him. “You’re doing so well.” She purses her lips as the red cap inches slowly from her knitting.
Knut knows he is not a quick study, that she is being generous. “You are making more sense of that knitting than me of this damned book.”
“Oooo.” Marie catches her breath.
“He kicks again?”
“She wants my attention.”
They have a friendly wager on the child’s gender: the winner gets to choose the name. Knut tries to picture the child he will raise on his own, but no image comes to mind. He moseys back to Shane’s rocky uphill trail to English.
“I am happy,” she says, counting stitches aloud, “that you are working so hard to be a good father for our little girl.”
Knut reads aloud from the book: “But you don’t see far enough.” It pleases him when he understands a trickle of English without need of translation.
“Where are we in the story?”
“This is the wife telling her husband that he needs courage and do not run away from the trouble.”
“He wants to avoid bringing trouble on his family.”
“Yes. It is his wife who wants him to stand up and fight.” Knut believes this child will need his mother more than Oskar will. He has known his uncle a long time. He is too old, too full of himself to love her. Yet she chose him.
“I know this will work out some way,” he reads. “I don’t know how. But it will, if we face it and stand up to it and have faith in each other.” Now that he and Marie are together, Knut wrestles with the notion that they haven’t been brave enough.
Marie puts down her knitting, holds her abdomen. “Let’s not upset baby Baby with this talk.” A deep breath. She wobbles to her feet and her water breaks.
* * *
It is evening in the maternity ward. A yellowish light frames the mother, child and father in astonished grace. Outside, rain hammers holy hell against the windows. Oskar is for now an ocean beyond their cares.
The child is two hours old. Relief and profound joy reside in Marie. When she looks from the gangly sleeping baby to his father, Knut is lifted in a way he could not comprehend until it happened to him. Love makes everything clear, his grandfather used to say.
Knut claims his naming rights. “He will be called Dagur Knutson.”
Marie smiles. “Dagur? That’s a name for a deranged person.” She leans close to the baby. “You will be a blessing, won’t you, my little psychopath?”
“We can call him Dag.”
“Hmmm.” She murmurs into the baby’s forehead. “I will love you forever, no matter what Papa calls you.” She lifts the baby toward his father.
Knut sways, cradling the infant in his arms. “You name him,” he says.
“No,” she shakes her head. “A deal is a deal where I come from.”
The child’s foot exerts a prehensile grip in Knut’s palm. Dag will be good at climbing trees. Visions unfurl in Knut’s imagination: father and son conquering the shrinking wilderness of America, sending little Dag up the mast to look for whales, telling sagas by the hearth.
“I can’t leave him.” She wipes tears away with hands that are useless without the child. “He has to know his true mother.”
Wary of his translation skills, Knut ventures: “You are the true mother.”
“But when I leave … this Dag of yours will forget me.”
“I can make little Dag to love his mother, even if he doesn’t know her. I have more worries about Oskar.”
“I’ll be alright, Geyser.” In the costly arrangement she has with her husband, Marie can’t afford doubt. It will work out, she tells herself, Oskar will be a kind husband, and they will all keep the secret of the baby’s mother. She will be a good wife to him, knowing Knut and the child are safe.
Knut has agreed to settle with the child in Newport because that is what Marie wants. But he is certain that Oskar, despite his promises, will make trouble for them.
Dag is a good baby. In the spring, he learns to laugh, to mash together a few vowels and consonants, and soon he can lift his head as well as anyone. He listens to his father wrestle with cowboy stories, and by summer he discovers his legs can bear his own weight for a bit. He is remarkably good at peek-a-boo, at least according to his mother’s rules, and his parents believe he knows his name. His days are spent mostly with the soft one who feeds him until the other one comes in smelling of fish and the sea.
* * *
It’s October, which might as well be winter in the Faroes. Knut is later than usual getting home from work; the engine of the fishing boat needed attention. Marie is trying to cook one-handed as she balances a howling Dag on her hip.
“Should I finish the cooking or take him?” he asks. Marie holds Dag at arm’s length for his father. He coaxes the boy to relax.
“I need five minutes to myself,” she announces, turning down the flame under the pot of salted cod and potatoes. “It’s ready now if you want.” Marie puts on her coat, steps into her boots and leaves the apartment. It’s dark outside, chilly and blustery.
“What have you been up to?” he asks Dag, who sits in his lap at the dining table. The boy lunges across the table, reaching for an envelope.
Knut can see it’s a letter from his uncle addressed to Marie. She has not said anything to him about corresponding with her husband. He sighs heavily. Dag turns to his father and inserts two fingers into the fisherman’s mouth.
“Okay, we ask Mama about this.” The baby knows that word and tries to figure out what it is doing in this particular slurry of sounds.
Knut lowers the kid onto the floor and tends to supper. He has set the table and put the fish and potatoes out when she comes home. “Thanks,” she says. “I needed some air.”
Sitting at the table, Knut bounces Dag gently on his thigh. “I see this letter from Oskar.”
Marie avoids looking at him. “I thought he should know where I am.”
This makes sense, Knut nods. “He knows we are in Faroe Islands.”
“Yes. I wanted him to know all is well, with the baby and everything.”
“I will not ask how is Oskar.” Knut pulls the pot closer, uses the ladle to poke around inside, still clutching Dag close. He wants to ask why she didn’t tell him she was writing to his uncle but then realizes she may have left the letter on the table for him to find.
He looks up, catching her eyes full of sadness. She will tell him if there is anything he needs to know.
“Dag wants to know when does he get some salted cod like other men,” he says.
“Now is a good time for a wee taste,” Marie says.
* * *
By December, Dag is working on rudimentary crawl moves. He enjoys picture books in Faroese, which reads a lot like Icelandic, and the pictures ignore these language problems.
The baby is asleep in the bassinet beside their bed while his parents sit in the main room. Marie reads a new letter from Oskar. “He wants me to come home early, in time for Christmas.”
“You plan to go home in March, one year after you arrive.”
“I know. Oskar says … he says it has been a long time.”
Knut slowly crunches a cracker. He doesn’t blame his uncle for wanting Marie in his bed; a cuckold has no reason to trust the man who took his wife. Still, this may be the only Christmas they ever have together, and Knut knows he doesn’t deserve it, even if he loves Marie more than Oskar ever will. Scared of the answer he’ll get, he asks Marie what she’ll do.
“I want to get off on the right foot with Oskar,” she gently confesses. “It’s important in the long run. Like you said, we have to see far enough ahead.”
“You are looking past this place, what we have. There is no need to try for the next island.”
Marie no longer gets upset when he suggests they can stay together. Nor does she ever take the idea seriously enough to discuss.
Snow sprinkles lazily outside the window. “Will we have a Christmas tree?” she asks.
The fisherman Knut works with thinks he’s insane when he asks where he can buy such an extravagance on an essentially treeless archipelago. It is a small price to pay.
* * *
It’s the heart of winter when Knut invites the nanny to meet the little boy she will care for after his mother returns to America. Marie is too wigged-out to witness the arrival of Gaeta, the fisherman’s daughter. As much as she wants to be sure her son will be safe, she can’t stay home.
Dag’s face turns red and crumbles as his mother puts on her coat to leave without him. He pulls himself up by the seat of her empty chair, turns to look at Knut and howls when the door closes.
Marie doesn’t know where to hide while her replacement is being interviewed. She waits down the street with a view of the door to their building, chastising herself.
A young woman, robust and pretty, finds the number of their building and carefully goes inside. Marie knows instinctively she is the nanny. Her imagination rises to dance mercilessly in her mind. Her son will smile and disarm this girl, and they will play peek-a-boo on the floor, and the boy will take his first steps for her, beaming with pride. The nanny will smother him with praise and even embrace his father, drawing him into her family of Faroese fishermen, and Dag will grow up speaking a language she can’t comprehend in a place where sunshine is rare.
When Marie can’t flagellate herself anymore, she trudges to her front door. In the downstairs vestibule, she nearly gives up before mustering courage to climb to the second floor. She freezes and then knocks, timidly, uncertain whether she will be permitted inside, in their home that still smells faintly of the expensive imported Christmas tree.
All three sets of eyes turn on her when she opens the door. Gaeta is sitting at her dining table chair. She has been trying to engage the little boy, who stands beside his father. Marie can tell that Knut is relieved she is back.
Dag calls her “Mama” for the first time, which makes everybody cry, even the cast-out Icelandic fisherman who wants to be a cowboy
* * *
In March it is time for Marie to go back to America. Dag has learned to say “bye-bye” and does so constantly. They will all go to Copenhagen to get U.S. citizenship papers for Dag, then Marie will fly to Boston. She girds herself in the faith that by never revealing she is Dag’s mother, Oskar will not make trouble that forces Knut and the boy to leave Newport.
The ferry departs on a cold, rainy night, the kind that makes it easy to leave the Faroes, which regularly rank among the happiest places on earth. It will take two nights to reach the northwest corner of Denmark. They have a small berth with a porthole onto the dark sea. If they breathe deep, they smell diesel.
Baby Dag is uncommonly cranky and restless on his first night away from home. He’s seasick, his mother says.
“It is a big ship and the sea is upset only a little,” Knut tells the ten-month-old. This doesn’t help.
* * *
The next morning is calmer. Knut has time to himself on the observation deck, riding the graceful, rocking movement of the ship as they steam past the Shetlands. A steward happens by.
“It is a good day for sailing,” Knut says cheerfully in Icelandic.
“Rarely is there only one wave,” answers the man, a fellow Icelander. “What waits for you in Denmark?”
“My wife and me are taking our son to get papers for American citizenship,” Knut says. Speaking Icelandic frees him to say things that are only true in his mind.
“You will someday go home to Iceland?”
“No.” Knut does not explain that he could be arrested if he tried to go back, or that he is in the kingdom of Denmark illegally. “We will all be together in America.”
“America is a big country with lots of opportunity.”
“As a boy, I always wanted to live and work on the sea.” Knut grabs the railing with both hands, filling his lungs. “But duty to my wife and child will keep me close to home.”
“It’s easier to tend a hundred sheep than one woman,” the steward says, moving on.
* * *
Around midday, Marie sits under blankets on the prow deck, leaning her back against the bulwarks in an intoxicating cocktail of warm sun and bracing air.
Dag has gotten used to life at sea. He crawls around the deck, never getting far away before he returns to her, tumbling between her legs, curling in her lap. Marie believes he was conceived on the sailboat Oskar bought for her as a wedding gift.
Knut joins them, sitting on the deck a few feet away, his back against a capstan. Dag crawls to his father, who offers two fingers to steady his son as he stands. Knut slowly turns the boy one step at a time to face his mother.
Knut lets go, and Dag finds balance. “He reaches for his sea-going foot.”
The boy extends his arms, stepping bravely into his first free-standing walk, crossing the two yards to his mother, where he grabs her waiting hands. She helps him turn around, pointing him to Knut. Off he goes, staggering confidently across the gently rocking deck.
The spectacle draws the attention of other passengers and the steward passing by with a teapot, cups and biscuits on a tray. Dag shyly receives hearty accolades from the safety of his father’s embrace.
“Your husband was telling me this morning how proud he is of his family,” the steward says to Marie in English.
She pauses over the wording and catches Knut’s glance.
Marie would enjoy some tea but politely declines it. She vetoes a cookie for her daring young man on the sailing trapeze even though crackers can help with his teething. She doesn’t need to be reminded that she has a husband who is not the fellow over there with her son.
Knut notices the sudden wind shift in Marie’s demeanor. He cordially accepts a cookie and puts it in his shirt pocket. He rises to his knees and shuffles behind Dag to join her on the bulwark. The steward and other passengers resume their lives.
The boy plops into her lap and Marie straightens his red-knit cap. “Why did he call you my husband?”
Then Knut remembers calling Marie his wife in the conversation with the steward that morning. One mistake layered on an earlier one. He should have tried harder to convince her to choose him, back in the Newport summer when they discovered she was pregnant.
“It is my fault. I am sorry for speaking my heart to him.” A rogue cloud skips do-si-do overhead, kicking up bits of shadow.
“Geyser, I made a commitment to Oskar before you came along. We all agreed on this arrangement.” She straightens her legs flat, her boots posed like wings.
“We are not the same now,” he says quietly. “In Torshavn, we are a family.”
“I have to make a life with him.” Her voice is raised. “He is my husband for God’s sake.”
Pained and frustrated, Knut accepts that he is incapable or unworthy of convincing her otherwise. He thuds the back of his skull against the bulwark and pounds the deck with the heels of his hands. Hard and steady until the unyielding steel blesses him with numbness.
* * *
A stiff wind welcomes them to Denmark. The ferry terminal is an industrial area, sheltered from the North Sea by a manmade shoreline. As they descend the gangway, a gust whisks from Dag’s head the charming cap that Marie has knitted and casts it into the harbor.
Knut searches along the narrow gap that separates the ship from the wharf. “It’s gone,” Marie says, staring into the sullen deep.
“Bye-bye,” says Dag, standing beside her.
It’s not. Knut spots a bit of red in the flotsam trapped between the massive hull and unforgiving wharf. He kicks off his shoes and peels away his coat.
“What are you doing?” Her voice is anxious, but she doesn’t try to stop him. He swings onto the nearest ladder and descends rapidly. One rung above sea level, he dives, surfaces and calmly strokes toward the prow of the ship. As a boy growing up in Iceland, he’d done his share of cold-water swimming.
The cap is pinned fortuitously against the hull. Knut grabs it, slaps the ship twice with his palm and swims back to the ladder.
He emerges dripping on the pier, cap in hand. A small crowd has formed around the rescue effort. They applaud as he hands the prize to Marie, sobbing happily.
Knut sits on the dock to put his shoes on.
“You didn’t have to,” she says, struggling with anguish, remorse, affection.
Knut rises to his feet and lifts the boy high to proclaim: “Dag must have his hat.”
“I can’t protect him anymore,” she whimpers, convulsed in tears. When he plants Dag in her arms, the lad starts to cry at his mother’s distress.
Knut holds the red cap above his own head, showing it to his son, and wrings water from it. “Is only a little wet, Dag,” he deadpans.
The child guffaws at the delicious humor of a hat raining on his father’s head.
* * *
After a long train ride, they arrive at an inexpensive hotel in the Norrebro district of Copenhagen where there is a small room with one bed and shared bath.
“This is really happening,” she thinks aloud.
“Your airplane is tomorrow and a day.” Knut hoists their luggage and starts up the stairs.
On the desk counter, Marie places the baby buddha, who watches her intently as she uses the hotel phone to call the U.S. embassy to confirm her appointment to obtain a consular report of birth abroad. She won’t have much to give this child, but she can give him American citizenship.
That evening, they go to a corner take-out and sit with their cartons and chopsticks in a chilly park. She tells Knut that she worries how he will take care of the baby.
They’ve gone over this before, and Knut understands that she needs reassurance. He will save all the fishing wages that he can. In Newport, he will find a job and a place to live. It will work out.
When they turn in, she makes a little bed for Dag near them on the floor. “There is not much time left for me and your father,” she whispers to the child.
* * *
The next day, Knut is petrified at the entrance to the U.S. embassy. He must go in to sign a document in the presence of a government official. Something will go wrong; he will be apprehended and deported to Iceland. But he cannot succumb to this fear. It would be worse to wait outside and watch her take Dag into the embassy.
Inside, they wait in a narrow, brutalist corridor. Knut tries to decode the paperwork, but its vocabulary can’t be learned from cowboy stories. His right knee bounces involuntarily. He puts aside the documents.
“You must do the talking,” he says.
“I will, Knut. Don’t worry. It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t like it here.”
“Let’s talk about something else.” Dag snuggles in her bosom. “Tell me how much you love me,” she says demurely.
“I love you more than anything.”
“You love me more than you love our son?”
He takes a moment. “I don’t like this game you play.”
“What game?”
“It is how you were in Newport, when I did say that I love, but you would not tell it back to me. Instead, you make a joke. Then you and Oskar decide without me what to do.”
Marie strokes the boy’s hair. “What do you want, Geyser?”
Knut squeezes his thighs. “I asked you then to marry me. You did not answer.”
She takes a moment. “Pride made you propose to me. You know I love you. But Geyser, you are just eighteen and things do not come easily in the states.”
“We can go together back to Faroes. I have work on the fishing boat. Dag can still be an American like you.”
She shakes her head sadly. “Then what? Oskar would come for us and make our lives hell.” She kisses the top of the baby’s head. “When you see me in Newport, you will see the love I can’t express. I will be so proud to watch you raise our son. It won’t be so bad.”
Knut looks away. “You are wrong about that. Oskar is not a good man.” Knut’s heart beats so loud that he wants to scream. “You will never love him.”
She is about to say she will try to love her husband when the door to the office opens. Beyond it, there is a room with a view of the outdoors. A world lies beyond, stretching all the way to the harbor where he waited in the rain for her to arrive, and further still to the summer night they met at an oceanfront mansion in Newport.
A button-downed middle-aged man looks at them dispassionately, slightly annoyed by the infant. “I can see you now,” the consulate officer says, holding the door open. Marie rises to her feet holding Dag in her arms. Knut is immobile.
In the threshold, she turns. “He’s ready for us.”
Knut stands. “You are leaving me. Leaving us.”
“It’s what I have to do. Please don’t make it harder for me.”
“I will take Dag.” Knut steps forward, handing the paperwork to her. He sets Dag’s feet on the floor and holds his hand. They follow Marie into the office, where she takes a chair in front of the bureaucrat’s desk. Knut lifts Dag onto his forearm and keeps his distance.
Marie does all the talking, going through the forms with the official. Knut watches from the periphery, sifting the conversation for grains he can understand. There aren’t many; she and the diplomat are Americans with the shared heritage of home-grown neighbors.
When it is time for Knut to sign the certificate, Marie gestures that she will hold Dag while he does so. Instead, Knut puts the red cap in his coat pocket and does not relinquish the child. He holds Dag carefully while he squats to sign on one of the many dotted lines of the U.S. Department of State.
Then he and Dag return to their outpost by the door.
* * *
It is a somber walk to the hotel. Marie offers twice to take the child, but he smiles grimly and says he will take good care of Dag. She stops offering.
At the hotel, Knut announces that he will take the boy to Tivoli Gardens that evening.
“He’s too young,” Marie counters. “He won’t remember anything.”
“There is much that Dag will not remember,” Knut says.
She looks to the ground, falls a half step behind.
On this, their last night together, he knows he doesn’t need to remind her how much she will miss. Knut stops, turns to her. “Please come with us,” he says, setting Dag on his feet.
* * *
They are on a gentle ride at the amusement park. Seated in something akin to a front-porch swing, they glide around a pole tugged outward by the insights of Sir Isaac Newton.
Knut beams; there are no amusement parks in Iceland. His compass has led him light years from home. He has an obligation to raise this boy on his own and be ready when Marie needs him. His grandfather used to say the generous and the bold have the best lives.
Marie leans close against him, one hand on his leg, the other on the back of Dag’s head, as their small galaxy spins its orbit, praying that it won’t be as bad as her gut tells her it will be.
That night, Dag sleeps again on the floor beside his parents. It’s the last time he will eavesdrop on their intimacy.
* * *
The next day, Knut takes every opportunity to put the baby in Marie’s arms. She tries to tell him that they don’t need to accompany her to the airport, but of course they are going to go with her. They stop in a photo booth in the terminal, snuggle inside and feed kroners to the machine. In the mirror, they practice how they want to look. It’s harder than it seems and takes them a little while. Or maybe it’s not so hard and they are only trying to forestall the inevitable.
It’s Marie who pushes the button to start the camera. The flash surprises the two adults, but not Dag, who at this point in his worldly life has danced on the deck of a ship crossing the North Sea and ridden the Swing Carousel at Tivoli Gardens. It’s the only photo ever taken of the three of them: of the mother’s sorrowed courage, the father’s hopeful determination, the child’s trusting confidence.
When Marie disappears into the jetway, Dag cries for her. “If you cry because the sun has gone out of your life,” his father says, “your tears will prevent you from seeing the sky.”
© 2026 John Bancroft All rights reserved.
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