The Tricking of Freya (32 page)

All three kings nodded in satisfaction, then stared down in royal condescension to await Gylfi's next question. Oh, they were a pack of know-italls, this royal trinity. Whatever question Gylfi asked, they had an answer,
however bizarre and improbable. The questioning went on for hours, and
Gylfi began to fear for his life. He could not stump them. They knew how
Bor's sons killed the frost giant Ymir and out of Ymir's carcass made the earth, from his blood the sea, rocks from his bones, trees from his hair,
from his skull the sky, and out of his brains nothing less than the cruelest
clouds.

Of course the three kings knew all about the End-Time, too, how the
wolf would swallow the sun, the earth sink in the sea, brothers slay brothers, and gods fight giants in Ragnarok, the greatest battle of all.

"And then?" Gylfi asked. He was sweating now, fearing his own endtime drawing near. It seemed there was not a single question he could ask
that they could not answer.

"And then," proclaimed High, "the earth rises again fair and green, and
the gods who survive build their new gold-roofed palace called Gimli!"

And with that the three kings crossed their arms across their chests and
glared down at Gylfi in triumph. Clearly they considered themselves the
winners. But Gylfi had nothing to lose, nothing but his life. "And then?" he
asked softly.

Ahem. And a royal silence. Finally High spoke. "Beyond that we do not
know," he conceded. "But who does? I've never heard anyone tell further
into the future of the world than that." The other two nodded in agreement.

Be that as it may, Gylfi had stumped them, and spared his own life in the
process. As soon as High conceded his lack of knowledge, poof! With a big
bang the whole thing vanished: the triple kings on their triple throne, the
shield-shingled hall. Gylfi found himself standing alone, on open ground,
having won the contest, perhaps was he not still standing? but tricked yet
again by the magic of those clever Aesir!

And so this tale has come to be known as Gylfaginning, which means
The Tricking of Gylfi, though despite having been tricked Gylfi made out
just fine in the end. He returned home, as all good heroes eventually do,
and presented to his own people everything he had learned from the three
kings, who were none other than Odin himself in disguise. And these same
stories were then passed along, generation to generation, and became in
time that marvelously overwrought cosmology known these days though it
is hardly known at all-as Norse mythology (of which I've provided only a
mere and cursory summary, for if I stopped to tell every tale those three
kings told the strange characteristics of each of the nine worlds, not to mention the name of practically every last dwarf and giant-we'd never get
on with our own story).

And what of our story, yours and mine? What does Gylfi have to do with
us? I drove into Gimli in my rental hearse not with a pack of questions but
with a bundle of fears. Yet I would have questions soon enough, and plenty.
Face trickery and deceit. Still, maybe in the end, Cousin, you'll decide Gylfi
has nothing to do with us. Or that there is no "us," and you want nothing to
do with me. So be it.

The next time I woke it was high noon. As I crossed the motel room to the
window I felt something coarse underfoot: sand tracked by the room's previous occupants, gritting the bare soles of my feet. But I was lakeside, that's
what mattered. I'd arrived too late the night before to discern anything
more than the lake's dark presence, though walking from my car to the motel I'd heard its soft lap, inhaled the familiar lake-water smell. Now in the
daylight I gazed at it out the window, lazing large and blue to the horizon.
There it was. There I was. I'd expected to feel something, something big, but
instead ... a watery nothing. Nothing I could put a name to. The far shore
wasn't visible and never was, I remembered, even on the clearest days. Lakes
in this part of the continent get big as small seas. But on this morning it
seemed most unsea-like, dull and pond-still.

I sat on the sagging edge of the bed and smoked a cigarette. If the lake
was disappointing, the motel room was outright depressing. The lingering
stink of wet swimsuits, the sand on the floor. The Viking, I realized, was a
dive. As if I'd rented a bed at the bottom of a grimy, empty aquarium tank.
I took a last deep drag on the cigarette, then tossed the butt in the toilet.
Gloom be gone. It was time to begin my first day back in Gimli. I left the
hearse parked in front of my room at the Viking and set off along Gimli's
sandy beach toward town.

My plan had been to spend the morning getting acclimated, then the afternoon visiting with Sigga. But now the morning was spent, and I found myself not lingering as I'd intended but striding down the beach, which was
utterly empty. The early morning sun had disappeared lake weather shifts
fast-replaced by dense banks of cloud. Everything seemed diffuse: the gray
expanse of cloud cover, the gray expanse of lake. Against this backdrop like a film played my beach memories: there I was in my blue checkered swimsuit,
burning lobster bright. There was Birdie lounging majestically and tossing me
mandarin orange bits. I blinked my eyes, the visions vanished.

I walked on. In the distance to the south I could see Willow Point,
where the Icelanders had first landed. Stefan and Birdie had taken me
there, recounted that well-told story of our origins. How hard Birdie had
worked to edify me, imbue me with a vanishing culture. I took off my
shoes, waded the shore like I used to. What had she called me then? An
egret, with my fringe of white-blond hair, my long gawky legs. An egret and
a poet. What would she call me now? If she made a ghostly appearanceand I wouldn't have put it past her to suddenly surface in the water, shaking
her head like a wet dog and laughing raucously as a seal-she would see
that all her effort on me had been wasted. My life a deliberate erasure of all
that history, lore, and myth. I lived by what could be seen and photographed, in black and white, here and now.

Each step I took produced an icy, satisfying splash. Too bad, dear dead
Birdie. People emigrate, they assimilate. The Vikings weren't the only
roamers. The earth's people are always moving on, swarming the planet in
endless migratory trails, losing great chunks of their histories in the process. Who stays put anymore? Who can lay claim to anywhere? Not me,
certainly, and not to Gimli. My grandfather may have been one of the original settlers and a great poet to boot, my grandmother a fixture of the community, cataloging its books and family lines, but I myself had never been
more than a summer visitor. And the bland Connecticut suburb where I'd
spent the balance of my childhood-I have no ties to that anymore either. I
haven't been back since my mother died and I fled to Manhattan. And the
city? I'm a transient among transients, my roots phantom. In a year, I could
be anywhere. Unlikely, but possible.

I turned from the waterline and headed across the beach toward town. At
the curb I sat down to brush the sand off my feet and re-shoe. Whatever
membership I'd had in Gimli was long expired. I expected no great welcome,
prayed, in fact, not to run into anyone I knew. Not yet, anyway. I gave the
lake one last glance before heading up Centre Street into town. Yes, Centre
Street. Compared with all the Icelandic place names that abound in the region, names like Arborg and Hnausa and Geysir and Hecla, the street names of Gimli seem almost comically plain. Centre Street runs through ... the
center of town. Where it meets ... Main Street. The rest is a grid, numbered avenues running north-south, numbered streets east-west. In New
York City it makes sense, but there in Gimli it struck me as ludicrous, to
bother numbering such a simple grid. As if it were possible to get lost in a
town with only five streets running in any one direction.

I stood for a few minutes at the juncture of Centre and Main, citing the
old landmarks that still remained: Golko's Hardware, Tergesen's General
Store, the Esso station, the Gimli Theatre. A few new establishments, but
not many. It was the same little Gimli, and yet I began to sense that things
were entirely different. An eeriness begging capture. I took out my camera
and began wandering around snapping photographs: the tiny cement shack
still bearing the chipper OLSON FISH sign with its smiling fish mascot and a
chalkboard announcing PICKEREL. The cluttered windows of Tergesen's,
est. 1899, with the staid blue VELKOMIN sign. And then it dawned on me,
the source of the strangeness: I was the only pedestrian in sight.

In the old days, my old days anyway, the streets were mobbed with visitors, licking ice cream cones, buying postcards and fishing lures. Maybe
Gimli had become a ghost town after all? Then the breeze picked up and I
remembered it was late September, the high season long past. I'd never visited Gimli in the fall, though it was not quite autumn yet. The elms were
still green, a toughened dusky end-of-summer shade. A few maples were
starting to tip yellow. The sun was shining again, the clouds had scattered.
I began to feel as if I were dream walking. I had spoken a word to no one.
There was a curtain, a barrier between me and Gimli, as real and invisible
as the air itself. I might have been looking at a postcard, strolling a movie
set. I couldn't make it feel real. And I wanted to. I'd come all this way, traveled miles and decades, and I wanted to feel something. Of course, I had to
consider the possibility that I had nothing left to feel, that I'd rendered myself incapable of true feeling.

Or maybe I just hadn't had my morning coffee yet.

The bakery had moved itself across the street sometime in the last sixteen years, but it was the same establishment with the same Icelandic
breads and pastries, thick with doughy-cinnamon smells. I stood in line behind a silver-haired woman who was having trouble making up her mind. "What do you call this?" she would ask the teenage girl behind the counter.
"And this?" Each answer produced a short chuckle. Then she turned to
point to something in the glass display case to our right and her face revealed itself in profile. My heart leapt-Sigga!

Not Sigga. My first ghost. There was a resemblance though: this woman
could have been Sigga thirty or forty years ago, in her sixties perhaps. And
she spoke English with an accent similar to Sigga's. The woman was an Icelander, and what she was doing in Gimli in late September I couldn't imagine. When Icelanders came it was usually in the summer, especially in early
August, so they could attend the Icelandic festival and consort with distant
cousins.

"This you call vinarterta?" the old woman asked the girl.

"It's an Icelandic pastry," the girl explained, tucking her lank brown hair
behind her ear impatiently. I was beginning to feel a bit impatient myself.

"An Icelandic pastry indeed!" The woman laughed. "In Iceland I think
we don't have so many layers as this one! How many layers is that?"

The girl leaned over and counted. "Seven," she reported, in her flat Manitoba accent.

"Seven! No wonder I do not recognize this. In Iceland, it is made only
with three. Maybe four."

"My grandmother always makes it with seven," I said, surprised at myself for jumping in. Doubting if at one hundred Sigga baked much of anything anymore. Could she still read? Walk? Had she finished the Blue
Book, traced us all the way back to Egil Skallagrimsson?

"Lucky for you." The woman was facing me now, smiling, and I couldn't
help but feel she looked familiar, aside from her resemblance to Sigga. Yet
she wasn't from Gimli, I was sure of that. She turned back to the lankhaired girl. "I'll take one piece of the vinarterta, please."

Then she was gone. And although I hadn't planned to I ordered two
pieces of vinarterta myself, along with a large black coffee. As I walked
back down Centre Street, sipping the dark stuff from my cup and nibbling
the vinarterta, I thought of Sigga teaching me to make ponnukokur my first
morning at Oddi. What's ponnukokur? I'd so innocently asked, provoking
Birdie's horror that Mama had taught me nothing of Our People. Did it
matter, Birdie, was it worth it, in the end, to rake Mama over the coals like that? To force Icelandic grammar into a seven-year-old's lazy summer
brain? True enough, I was willing. I savored my time with Birdie, adored
her, mostly. And there was no harm in it, not in the Icelandic lessons or the
telling of Olafur's stories, the obscure Norse myths. The harm was something else. The way Birdie had flown me to distant lands, real and imagined, her wing tips grazing heaven, then dragged me graveward when she
plunged back down.

The vinarterta took a too-sweet turn in my stomach and I dropped the last
bite into the gutter for a lucky gull. The second piece I was saving for Sigga,
whom I was on my way to see. Even though I hadn't called ahead to arrange
anything, had in fact had no contact with Sigga at all either prior to or since
my arrival, I had my heart set on a private visit before the birthday party that
night. No public reunions, please. I was nervous enough without subjecting
myself to the inevitable small-town scrutiny. I found myself wondering who
would be at the party, who would remember me and, worse, remember my
part in that final summer with Birdie. Who would shake their heads disapprovingly behind my back, as if they understood something, when I myself
never had and I was at the tangled center of the thing?

To hell with all of it! Betel was gone. I was standing on the comer exactly
where Betel once stood, and there u'as no Betel. I turned around in bewilderment; across the street rose a new, L-shaped building. I crossed over and
was staring at the building hesitantly when an old woman nearly knocked
me over. A thin, tiny person, but not frail, no. Despite her cane she was making good time, nearly brisked me right off the path.

"Excuse me," I called after her. "Can you tell me where Betel is?"

The old woman turned and gave me a perplexed and toothy smile. "Why,
this is Betel. You're standing in front of it."