The Tricking of Freya (18 page)

The collection was impressive, even I could see that. And it was pure Icelandica: mythology, history, literature, science, art, folktales, ghost stories,
sagas, travelogues, family histories, novels, and poetry. Poetry and more
poetry. One whole shelf devoted to our grandfather Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands; another to his uncle Pall, who was Ulfur's great-great-grandfather. A
copy of the first Icelandic Bible. A nineteenth-century Icelandic translation
of Hamlet. A seventeenth-century copy of Saemundur's Edda. One whole
room with four walls of Icelandic Sagas. Ones I knew of, like Laxdaela Saga,
Njal's Saga, Egil's Saga. And dozens more I'd never heard of. I remember
Birdie at midnight, perched in a window seat reading a vellum manuscript
by the light of the midnight sun.

Myself, I was drawn to Johann's collection of old and rare maps that
hung on the wall of the front entrance to the house. Maps of Iceland
through the ages, more lively and colorful than the map now folded open in
front of me, with its geologically correct gradations of blue, white, green.
My favorite was a sixteenth-century map that showed Mount Hekla with
red flames leaping from its cone; underneath, in Latin, the words Entrance
to Hell. A giant sea monster lurked offshore, men in boats harpooned
whales. The maps were displayed in chronological order. If you compared
the first with the last, you could see that in the beginning the Icelanders
had not yet discerned the shape of their own island, its jagged fjord-addled
circumference.

Books and rain, books and rain: those were our first two days in Iceland.
And visitors. Nearly as many as the books. They dropped by for morning
coffee and for lunch and for afternoon coffee and for dinner and for evening
coffee. Always beginning with a discussion of who was related to whom and
how. Birdie had brought Sigga's Blue Book with us, and of course Ulfur's
parents had genealogy books and charts. Once the establishment of kinship
was complete-discussions I quickly abandoned trying to follow-the relatives would turn their attention to me.

"And what do you think of Iceland?" they'd ask, in perfect English.

If I forgot myself and responded in English, Birdie elbowed me. Unlike
at home, where Sigga and Birdie were always quick to correct me, these strangers seemed awed that I spoke even a word of their language. My accent, they exclaimed, was flawless. My vocabulary impressive. The grammar, yes, that is difficult. That will come.

At the time I was bewildered by the attention; now I understand how
few people in the world attempt to learn Icelandic. It made me something
of a star, and I was happy, for once, to let myself shine. A Frey-Star.

On the evening of our second day in Reykjavik, Ulfur and his parents held
a dinner party in our honor. Yes, the occasion made me nervous, with its
echoes of our welcome-to-Gimli disaster party six years earlier. But I was a
different person now. The girl who turned the cartwheel was Before Freya.
Now I was After Freya, a restrained, contained shadow of my former self.
Expect no fateful gymnastics, Cousin. No ambulances, no mothers in comas.

Not to say that nothing happened. Much did. One thing in particular. A
thing by the name of Saemundur. Rhymes with eye-moon-lure. Saemundur
was Ulfur's sixteen-year-old son, who was living with his father while his
mother was finding herself in Spain. (At the time it seemed strange to me,
this idea of locating your lost self in another country. A place where you'd
never been. It no longer seems so odd.) Ulfur's other children were in their
twenties, both in graduate school in the States, but Saemundur was like
me, a late-in-life child. If he existed at all-something I was beginning to
doubt. Two days we'd been at the house of books and still no sign of Saemundur. "Out with his friends," Ulfur would explain apologetically. "Or so
he says. He has not adjusted well to this divorce of ours. He blames it on
me. He'd rather be in Spain with his mother. He'd rather be anywhere, he
says, except here with me.

Saemundur's room was in the basement and had its own entrance. And exit. Only once had I caught a glimpse of him, from a third-floor window as
he headed out through the front garden, across the street, and over the bridge
in a rainstorm. Saemundur from the back at a distance in the rain: Lanky.
Long black hair blowing in the wind. Wearing a blue jeans jacket decorated
with brightly colored patches. It gave him a clownish air, as if he were an escapee from the circus. I watched him lope across the bridge like a tightrope
walker, long arms swaying for balance against gusts of wind and slanting rain.
And then he vanished on the other side, and I hadn't seen him since.

For this special dinner Saemundur was expected, Ulfur announced.
And he'd better show up. I was hoping he would. I wanted to see his face.

Two long tables were set with sparkling china and gleaming silver and tall
candlesticks. "It's fancy," I said to Birdie. "Are they rich?"

"They are indeed. Not Ulfur but his father. Johann was a Shell executive. Big money."

A shell executive. Maybe in Iceland you could get rich trading precious
shells? I didn't have a chance to ask because the guests began arriving,
nearly twenty of them. Some were relatives I'd met already, or not; others
were people with an interest in Olaf ur's work: the chair of the Icelandic Literature Department at the university; a number of contemporary poets; the
head of the National Library. Ulfur's mother, Lara, and a few other women
had control of the kitchen; as usual, Birdie took no interest in that. I remember cream of lobster soup served in large white tureens, a platter with
the largest whole salmon I'd ever seen, lamb that tasted like an entirely different breed of meat. Toasts were made, to me and Birdie, to Olafur, to Iceland, to Canada. Steal! the guests would cry, then lock eyes before drinking.
Only one seat at the table remained empty: Saemundur's. Ulfur would
glance over at it and shake his head angrily. I too stared-would I never
meet the mysterious Saemundur?

The dinner party conversation was fast-paced and often heated; I followed it only in fragments. What I do remember is Ulfur dominating the
discussion.

No sooner were we rid of the Danes then along carne the Americans.

-They've never owned us.

-But theyve got their army base here.

We're in NATO, what do you expect?

Exactly. And I'm not alone. Remember the anti-NATO riots of fortynine?

-Without NATO who would protect us?

An Icelandic army?

We could be neutral ...

-And who do we need to be protected from? We kicked the British out of
our waters for good just two years ago. We didn't need the U. S. army for that.

-Cod Wars are different from Cold Wars, Ulfur minn.

And another argument, equally heated, about the Canadian immigrants.
One of the guests had flown to Canada to attend the hundredth anniversary celebration of the Icelandic settlement in Gimli.

-You should see this festival they have Islendingadagurinn, they call it.
Much honor paid to their pioneers.

I don't see what's to honor them for, Ulfur said.

I agree-abandoning our country in its time of need!

-They had no choice. They were starving.

-And there was the eruption, the terrible ashfall.

And besides, they made more room for everyone else. That region in the
East was overpopulated. It couldn't sustain all those people. After the immigrants left, conditions improved.

-They didn't know that at the time!

Who knows anything at the time?

-It's easy enough to look back and call them traitors.

-And I say call them adventurers in the old Viking style. This was not the
first time our people voyaged to North America. Remember when the Norse
settled Vinland one thousand years ago?

Really, can the emigration have been so terrible, if it produced the great
poet Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands?

Canada didn't produce him! Ulfur had become red in the face. Iceland
produced him. As you well know, he was mentored here in Iceland by his uncle Pall. Olafur is an Icelandic poet through and through.

I disagree. He was only a child when he left.

-But he wrote all his poetry in Icelandic. Using Icelandic verse forms.
And traditions.

Poetry about the life in Canada.

-And his childhood in Iceland, don't forget.

Birdie, who'd been oddly quiet during these discussions, stepped in.
"My father was a man of two lands. He saw himself as straddling the ocean,
one foot in Iceland, the other in Canada. And speaking of Olafur, Freya
would like to recite for you one of his greatest works."

I felt Birdie nudge me with her foot from across the table. Luckily, she
had warned me in advance of her plans. I'd tried to object, but Birdie had
insisted. "How else are you to repay their hospitality?"

How else indeed? I got up from the table and stood in front of the fireplace with my hands behind my back, as Birdie had instructed me to do.
Everyone was watching me: the dinner guests, the gallery of ancestor photos behind me on the mantel. And Saemundur's empty chair. I set my eyes
on it and was about to open my mouth when out of the corner of my eye I
saw Birdie gesturing wildly with her hair-the signal that I was to push my
own long hair off my face. "You hide behind that hair like a veil," Birdie
would say. I tucked my hair behind my ears and began. It was Olafur's signature "New Iceland Song," a poem of eighteen stanzas that I'd worked on
memorizing all summer. (I wonder now if Birdie had been preparing me for
just this occasion. In fact I'm sure of it, as sure as I can be of anything related to that trip.)

Olafur's "New Iceland Song" was the most difficult piece I'd memorized
yet, but I'd been grateful for the challenge. In the past year I'd begun to tire
of Old Gisli's funny verses and lying rhymes. I did not refer to them as apa-
mensskubragur (baboonish nonsense) or arnaleir (eagle muck), no. But I
was coming to appreciate Olafur's complex phrasing, the subtle musicality
of his lines, his command of the Icelandic language, which seemed in his
hand a different order of language altogether.

"New Iceland Song" recounted the immigrants' saga, from their beginnings as impoverished but literate peasants on their remote island, then the
sun-obliterating fall of ash, Askja's terrible eruption, which as a child Olafur had mistaken for the onslaught of the mythic Ragnarok, destruction of
the world. How haunting was the fourth stanza, echoing the words of the
ancient poem Voluspa: The sun turns black, fumes reek, cast down from
heaven are the hot stars ... And then the journey, these once-accomplished seafarers no longer at the prow of a Viking ship but stuck deep in the hold,
seasick and bereft and clinging frantically to the feeble dream of a new life
in a new land. And that first year in Canada-one child after another
buried from the smallpox, the entire colony quarantined, struggling to build
clumsy log shelters before the first storms of winter-storms more bitter
and freezing than any they had known in Iceland. Then in the midst of
hardship the settlers scraping together funds for nothing other than a printing press! To outsiders perhaps a strange act by a strange people, for words
are not food on the table. Unless you're an Icelander-then the words, the
stories, the poems in your language are what sustains you. Oh, how beautifully phrased was the last line of that stanza, and I paused there, dared to
lift my eyes from Saemundur's empty chair and pass them over the tables
where the guests were listening, rapt. A few even had tears running down
their cheeks. How thrilled I was in that moment. I thought of Mama and
Sigga and Stefan, and Olafur, Skald Nyja islands, how proud they'd be to
see me here in Iceland, reciting the poet's greatest work! I opened my
mouth to begin the next stanza.

And then I saw him. He stood in the doorway that led from the back
stairs to the living room, leaning against the threshold in his jeans jacket,
arms folded across his chest, head cocked to one side. His hair was so black
and his skin so white he seemed nothing more or less than a ghost. From
across the room I could see his eyes, the color of moon. The strange green
moon of some other planet. Not ours.

Across his wide full lips was something like a smile. A smile with a
twist. A smirk? I imagined suddenly that I looked like a fool. A foolish girlchild reciting for the grown-ups. I heard Birdie prompt me with the first
words of the next stanza, and somehow I stumbled through the rest of it.
My concentration was broken. I let my hair fall across my face. I squinted
my eyes and stared at my feet. And when it was over and I finally looked up,
the first thing I saw was the empty doorway. And Saemundur's empty chair.
No one else had seen him, I realized. Not the guests or Birdie or his father,
who certainly would have had something to say. Sly Saemundur and his
vanishing act!

Birdie was staring at me quizzically: What went wrong? I looked away,
hurried back to my seat. I had failed, I had stumbled. My cheeks burned. But the guests were clapping and murmuring and smiling at me. Luckily my
performance was quickly overshadowed by the conversation that followed.
A conversation, I understand now, that was no accident but entirely orchestrated by Birdie to bolster her cause with Ulfur. That she chose that
particular poem for me to recite-that too was part of her plan. Unless I am
becoming as paranoid as Birdie herself. But no, that poem would easily lead
the dinner table conversation exactly where she wanted it to go, and it did.