The Tricking of Freya (19 page)

"What a marvelous poem!" someone remarked.

"And the only one he wrote, was it not, about the early life of the
colony?"

"Interesting you should say that." It was Birdie speaking. "Actually, there
are others. But they seem to be lost."

"Lost? What do you mean lost?"

Birdie had the attention of the entire table now. She paused a moment,
looking carefully around the room, then began speaking in an urgent, almost
conspiratorial tone. "After Olafur left Iceland as a child, he wrote a series of
letters to his uncle Pall, during the first ten years he was in Canada. In the
letters he enclosed poems, mostly juvenilia, of course, but some may have
been better than that, composed in his early twenties, when his talent was
truly flourishing."

"You have seen these letters, these poems?" The man who asked this
question I remember clearly. He had a full beard, a loud voice, and he was
head of the largest publishing house in Iceland. His name was Sveinn.

"Me? No. But my mother has. She heard them read out loud when she
was a child on Pall's farm. Pall had died by then, but his son treasured the
letters, and the poems."

"But where are they now?" Sveinn demanded.

"My question exactly!" Birdie paused, dramatically, then looked over at
Ulfur. Ulfur pushed his glasses up to the top of his nose.

"I always thought they were here," Ulfur explained. "In my father's collection."

"Are they not listed in Lara's catalog?" Sveinn was growing increasingly
alarmed.

"No, they're not published. Not in book form. I was sure I'd seen them,
in a homemade binding, somewhere ..."

Sveinn turned now to Ulfur's elderly father. "Johann, what do you say to
this?"

"I say I've never seen them. Anyone claiming these were in my possession, that is nonsense."

A silence fell over the table. "I have come to Iceland," Birdie began, to
find these lost letters and early poems of my father. Ulfur has kindly promised to help."

"Where will you start?" someone asked.

"In the East. Some of Pall's people still live there."

Ulfur brightened. "Yes, yes, I think there is a good chance the letters will
be found in a trunk in an old farmhouse. Mystery solved!"

"And then you will need a publisher," Sveinn suggested, more calmly.

"Oh, absolutely," Birdie said. "And I'll translate them into English myself. A double volume, of letters and poems."

"And what of your own work, Ingibjorg?" Sveinn again.

Birdie hesitated. "It is nearing completion. Whether it is worthy of your
attention ... well, I'll leave that to Ulfur to decide. He has promised to
read it." She winked at me, acknowledgment of her false modesty. To me
she'd confided her belief that it might be the greatest poem ever written in
Icelandic. Perhaps the greatest poem ever!

"Yes," Ulfur said, recovering from his embarrassment over the letters. "We
are taking a bit of a vacation, now that the weather is clearing. Tomorrow we
leave for the summerhouse at Thingvellir Lake. And from there we will show
our young Freya the sights, and I will read Ingibjorg's manuscript the manuscript of the daughter of Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands!"

"And then we'll head east," Birdie added. "To look for the letters."

This was all news to me. I could scarcely take it in. My cheeks were still
burning with shame. Worse things had happened to me than forgetting the
line of a poem, but at that moment I couldn't remember what they were.
How stupid I must have looked standing there with my mouth open in front
of all the guests! In front of Saemundur Sly Ghost.

While the guests drank coffee I slipped away from the table, but instead
of heading up the stairs to the guest room on the third floor, I took the back
stairway down to the basement. There were two doors: one led to the outside, the other to Saemundur's room. I stood for I don't know how long in darkness outside Saemundur's door. I was afraid to switch on the light. I listened. My heart beat. I tried not to breathe. Then I heard a sound in his
room, and I bolted out the back door and into the garden.

Ulfur was right: things were clearing up. For the first time since my arrival I could see sky. It was nearly midnight but there was no darkness, only
clear sky and dim sun. I stared out at the lake, imagining Saemundur crossing it like a tightrope walker. I thought about his moonish eyes. Searched
the sky for moon and saw none. Where did the moon go on these sunstruck nights?

Back in my bedroom it was too bright to sleep, and I lay awake for hours
envisioning Saemundur's face in my mind. Like a mime, with his wide expressive mouth, his high cheekbones. A mime, a clown, a tightrope walker.
Haunting me like a ghost. Eye-moon-lure, I whispered. Eye-moon-lure.

Nothing, not even Birdie's magical spiel on the airplane, could have prepared
me for what lay beyond Reykjavik. Iceland is land alive, the earth split open,
forming and re-forming before your eyes. Vast vistas of swirling black and
neon green moss-drenched lavascapes. Volcanoes in all directions and at
every stage of existence: smoldering, dormant, extinct. Glaciers on the move,
their hoary tongues licking the edges of meadows. Water falling everywhere,
trickling spilling clamoring rumbling down rocky crevices and canyons. And
spitting up boiling hot from holes in the ground. Meandering through this
riot of lava and ice and emerald slopes as if it were the most ordinary scenery
in the world: wild horses, stout-bellied and thick-maned, peering out from
behind fringed bangs. And the ubiquitous sheep, with their spiraling horns
and shaggy dreadlocked coats. "We're outnumbered," Birdie would say when
we'd round a bend and confront six sheep napping in the roadway. By this she
meant the fact that there are more sheep than people in Iceland. Far more.
Everywhere you go it's sheep agraze: munching grass on top of turf-roofed ruins, nipping at odd bits of growth in barren lava fields, hoofing it up the rocky
bank of a waterfall. "We let them roam free," Ulfur explained. "And this is
why they taste so good. The lava moss gives them a particular flavor. So we
give our sheep the run of the island."

I wanted the run of the island. I'd never seen nature so wild. I was used to the timid rolling hills of Connecticut, the flat scrubby shore of Lake
Winnipeg. Forests. In Iceland there are no trees to speak of.

"Trees get in the way," Ulfur explained. "They block the view."

Trees can't grow in Iceland. That's the truth of it. Little does.

But I could grow there. I felt myself expanding. For the first time since
Mama's accident, I had no dutiful routines, no canes to keep track of, no
Mama to tend. It freed and it terrified. I began wearing my hair pulled
back. The wind made me do it in Iceland it never stops blowing-and at
first I felt bare-faced. Then Birdie touched her fingertips to my cheekbones.

You're a beauty, she told me.

Me a beauty? I shook my head laughing, but during those days at Ulfur's
summerhouse, I allowed myself to believe it. Or at least to consider the possibility. The landscape itself emboldened me. I spoke up more, dropped my
shield of shyness and silence. I began to speak only Icelandic, then to think
and even dream in it.

The Summerhouse Days. That's how I came to think of them later. As
much as I tried not to. Some memories refuse oblivion. In the Summerhouse Days, Birdie was in high spirits. Too high. The kind of free-spiraling
high from which you can only free-fall crash and burn. I should have recognized the signs: the rapid speech, the frenetic flow of ideas. Birdie's getting
talky, my mother would have said, if she'd been there. Birdie's going over.
But Mama wasn't there, Birdie had made sure of that. And to my mind
Birdie seemed nothing less than magnificent in the Summerhouse Days.
Cheeks apple bright, eyes sparkling like sun on lake. Everything was about
to happen for Birdie: she was about to recover her father's long-lost letters.
Ulfur was about to read her years-long manuscript and declare it brilliant
and pass it along to the loud bearded publisher Sveinn. Word Meadow,
Birdie confided to me, was on the verge of great acclaim on both sides of
the ocean. Even the weather was splendid in the Summerhouse Days. By
Icelandic standards, anyway. Which means it rained daily but never all day
long. And at least once each day (or night) we glimpsed bare and unclouded sun, sometimes for hours at a time. Weather is Iceland's only true god, and truly fickle in the way of all gods. In the Summerhouse Days the
weather god was merciful.

How many days? I can't say exactly. A week or more. Sure, I could figure
it out by checking the daily postcards I wrote to Gimli. But they're buried
deep in a storage locker in Queens, along with the rest of my mother's belongings, which I packed up after she died and never looked at again.

Yes, I pay a monthly rent to store my dead mother's things. In case I
should want.

I don't.

So, we'll estimate here. And really, what does day mean when you're
talking about an Icelandic summer? Every day was like two in one. More
happened to me in those Summerhouse Days than in a whole Gimli summer or an entire humdrum year of school in Connecticut.

I may share your mother's penchant for exaggeration, but I hope you'll
believe me when I say those Summerhouse Days were the happiest of my
life. Yet the beginning of that trip was inauspicious. The morning of departure, the morning after the dinner party and my faulty recital, Birdie and I
rose early. Out our third-floor window I saw for the first time since our arrival in Iceland blue sky. The colored rooftops of Reykjavik were set against
white-capped Mount Esja, the lake shimmered in sunlight. Leaving Birdie
upstairs to do her makeup, I raced down to breakfast, then came to a halt
outside the kitchen door. Ulfur and Saemundur were arguing.

"All summer you've been complaining that we don't go to the summerhouse. And now we are finally going and you don't want to come?"

"Exactly." Saemundur's tone was calm and defiant.

"Explain that!"

"For me you're too busy to go. But now the American Princess arrives,
the American Princess and the Canadian Queen, now you have time to go
to the summerhouse. Anything for the daughter and granddaughter of the
great Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands! For me, for Mama you have no time. Only
for consorting with the descendants of dead poets. And recovering precious
manuscripts. It won't be so easy, will it, recovering your wife? Your son?"

Long silence.

Then Saemundur, again: "You don't trust me to stay here without you?"

"Trust you? How can I trust you after-"

Then a hand on my shoulder: Ulfur's mother, Lara. "Come, elslean," she
said, loudly enough to interrupt the argument. Silence fell in the kitchen and
we entered the room. Lara led me to the table and to my horror seated me
next to Saemundur. The table was laid with sliced brown bread, boiled eggs,
cheese, cured lamb. Delicious skyr, a bit like yogurt, a bit like sour cream. But
I wasn't hungry. The American Princess: Saemundur meant me. Was that how
he thought of me? As a spoiled goody-goody who recites for company? Ulfur
greeted me with a gruff good morning, but Saemundur didn't say a word,
didn't even glance at me. I tried not to look directly at him either, though I
couldn't help notice his wiry tightrope walker arms reaching rudely past me
for bread, meat, cheese, coffee. I stared at my empty white plate, let my hair
fall in my face. Even when Birdie came to the table I didn't look up. I allowed
her to fill up my plate like I was a child who couldn't choose for herself.

Unlike Stefan's roomy Rambler, Ulfur's car was European and compact.
Saemundur and I sat in back leaning against opposite doors, faces pressed
out opposite windows. Yet our long legs cramped at odd angles verged perilously close. We'd each adopted a similar strategy: by pretending to sleep,
we wouldn't have to talk, not to each other or to Ulfur and Birdie up front.
I missed the scenery that morning, for the sake of that huddled silence.
Birdie leaned over the front seat and stared at us, then turned back to Ulfur.

"They're sleeping. Both of them." She used the word krakkanar, which
means something like kids.

"Saemundur's no kid, but he acts like one. Rejects any kind of responsibility or authority."

"How Icelandic of him!"

"What do you mean?" Ulfur sounded defensive.

"I only meant ... you're a fiercely independent people."

Was she referring to the famous book by Halldor Laxness, Independent
People? I was supposed to be sleeping so I couldn't ask.

"Independent, yes," Ulfur agreed, "but on the other hand, we are a very
responsible society."

"Oh yes, so duglegur!" That favorite word for hardworking.

"I'd like to see more of that trait in Saemundur. He is barely passing in school. I tell you, he is a boy who is refusing to grow up. Reckless. Like that
incident I told you about last summer."

I sensed Saemundur stiffen beside me. I hoped Ulfur would say more,
but he fell silent and Saemundur relaxed again.