The Tricking of Freya (50 page)

I thought that was strange, for the briefest second. "You met my mother?"
I asked. But I never gave her a chance to answer. "My mother never came to
Iceland, you know. She was afraid to fly. Birdie always made fun of her for
that. They didn't get along, Birdie and my mother." And I was off on a new
subject. I told Thorunn about how my mother never brought me to Gimli until I was seven years old, how Birdie never forgave her for that, how Birdie and my mother were always quarreling over whether I should learn Icelandic or
not, but I was certainly glad Birdie had taught me, even though as a child I'd
struggled mightily with malfraedi, the wicked grammar, but I wouldn't be
here talking to Thorunn now in Icelandic if Birdie hadn't-

Suddenly I stopped, aware that Thorunn was staring at me, a shocked
look on her lean face. A couple of times she started to speak, then clamped
her thin lips tight again. "Your mother?" she asked, finally.

"Yes, my mother. And Birdie. They fought terribly."

Thorunn continued staring at me. I began to feel miffed. Hadn't she
ever heard of siblings who didn't get along? Surely she wasn't on perfect
terms with every single one of her fourteen brothers and sisters?

"Your mother," she said again. "Birdie. Tell me about this."

I started talking about the rivalry between my mother and my aunt, how
my mother was practical and steady and plain, Birdie wild and charming
and beautiful. Thorunn studied me while I was talking.

"She was beautiful, yes," Thorunn said. Her voice trembled. "Such a
tragedy, what happened to your ... Birdie."

Then she stood up and left the room. I drank my coffee in silence while
I waited for her to come back, though coffee was the last thing I needed.
My mind was racing again. Oh, I would have to be careful, careful indeed.
The mere mention of Birdie seemed to have shaken Thorunn. Out the window I saw that the snow was now covering the grass completely, and the sky
itself was no longer visible. I vowed to myself not to mention Birdie again,
at least not on this first day of my visit. As it turned out, I didn't need to.

Thorunn returned with a shoe box, which she placed on the couch between us. On the lid of the box was written "Ingibjorg (Birdie)." Inside were
photographs from Birdie's various visits. "She always stayed with us, when
she came to Iceland. No matter how busy she was. Like when she came for
Olafur's centennial, and they were busy driving her around the country to
speak about her father. Still she insisted that they stop here at Gislastadir."
She handed me a photo that showed Birdie, Thorunn, Arni, and a darkhaired man who looked very familiar, all standing in front of the Gislastadir
farmhouse.

"Is that Ulfur Johansson?" I asked.

"Oh yes, that's Ulfur. He drove Birdie all over Iceland that summer. He's very important, you know. He was head of the Arni Magnusson Institute.
He got our manuscripts back from Denmark. Our Sagas!"

"I know Ulfur," I pointed out. "I've been staying with him in Reykjavik."

She looked embarrassed. "Yes, yes, of course. I'm sure you know him
much better than I do. I only met him the one time."

I studied the photograph. Birdie stood with her head close to Ulfur's, her
blond hair bright against his dark. I still hadn't ruled Ulfur out, and now my
suspicions were raised again.

"And here's Birdie at Brekka," Thorunn continued, "the farm where
Olafur, Skald Nyja islands, was born. Birdie always stopped at Brekka, whenever she came to the East. It's just down the river from here, you know. I
can take you there tomorrow." She glanced out the window. "If the weather
permits."

"I've seen Brekka," I said. "Birdie took me there, when she ... brought
me to Iceland."

"That was a terrible mix-up now, wasn't it? I remember being so surprised, when it came out in the papers that you two were missing, and neither Birdie nor Sigga had even told me you were coming, and then the two
of you were found at Askja.... Birdie never even called me! But I went to
see her anyway. At the hospital in Akureyri. I saw you there too. I stayed
with my cousin in Akureyri, so for two weeks I could visit Birdie at the hospital every day, until they flew her back to Winnipeg. I never saw her again."

"What was Birdie like, at the hospital?"

"Pretty terrible. Depressed. She didn't speak. They had her drugged, I
suppose. I wasn't surprised, I admit, to hear that she ... killed herself. Not
after I'd seen her like that. But so terrible for you, to have your ... your
Birdie ..."

"It was terrible all right. She killed herself on my fourteenth birthday.
She died hating me."

"Hating you? Oh no, certainly not that. Birdie loved you. She loved you
with all her heart."

"How would you know, Thorunn? Did she send you a suicide note? Because she certainly never left one for us. She used her suicide as revenge on
me, on everyone she believed betrayed her."

I could hear my voice, the sarcasm, the rage rising up, but I couldn't stop it. I was tired of people feeling sorry for Birdie. As if she were the sole victim of her illness.

"And did you know," I continued, "that Birdie had a child? That the
child was taken away from her at birth? And that no one seems to know
who or where this child is, or even believes that it exists? I came all the way
to Iceland to find Birdie's child, who is now an adult, because I owe that
much to Birdie." My voice was loud and excited. I was thinking of all the
pages I'd written for Birdie's child, pages that I'd have to burn, because
there was no one to read them.

I'd gone too far. Thorunn's thin lower lip was trembling and she brushed
her eyes with the heels of her hands. Then she composed herself, speaking
in a warm cheery voice again, a voice I no longer trusted. "I'm sorry, dear.
Surely this is not something we should be discussing! Not when I am sitting here having coffee with the very granddaughter of Olafur, Skald Nyja
Islands! Tell me about your life, Freya dear."

Suddenly I was tired of talking. I was tired, period. "I want to lie down."

Thorunn set me up in her son Kjartan's old bedroom. I lay on my side on
the narrow bed, staring out at the gray sky, the snowflakes spinning down.
For once it wasn't bright outside when it should have been dark it was
simply winter when it should have been summer. I fell asleep at five in the
afternoon and didn't wake up until the following morning.

At some point while I was sleeping Thorunn came in and laid a quilt
over me. Then she did something strange. She kissed me on the forehead.

"Goda nott," she whispered. "Goda nott, elskan."

I think now that when Thorunn kissed me good night she had already
decided what she was going to do.

The first thing I saw on opening my eyes the next morning was the white
world outside. White sky, white fields, and even the river only the palest gray.
It had stopped snowing. I opened the window. It was still and not terribly
cold. Muted. I splashed my face with icy water, then climbed down the narrow wooden staircase. In the kitchen the table was perfectly set, with brown
bread, cereal, hard-boiled eggs, smoked salmon, skyr, and coffee.

"A feast!" I smiled at Thorunn.

"You slept through last night's dinner," she said. "You must be hungry."

And I was. I hardly noticed how silent Thorunn was through our breakfast, but looking back, I can see it. Looking back, I can see a lot of things.
I've grown so tired of looking back! (At the moment it makes me so exhausted I hardly want to continue. But I promised not to skip the ending,
and I won't. I wouldn't trick you like that.)

After breakfast Thorunn led me back to the little parlor with the low
ceiling. We sat side by side on the couch again. The shoe box marked Ingibjorg (Birdie)" was still sitting on the coffee table. Suddenly I had the urge
to get up, go outside and see the snow. Anything but sit in the cramped little parlor looking at photographs of dead people.

"Maybe we can go for a drive today?" I suggested. "The snow doesn't
seem too deep."

"Oh that'll be fine," Thorunn said. "I'll take you visiting. There are many
people who want to meet you, you know. But not yet. First I want to show
you something." She picked up a piece of paper from the coffee table and
unfolded it. I could see that it was one of the old-fashioned genealogical
charts, like the one she'd brought to Sigga last autumn in Gimli. The kind
where one person's name is in a circle in the middle, and all the ancestors
ripple out in concentric circles back through time.

Except I could see that this was only half a chart. The top half of the
page was filled with names and dates, the bottom half completely empty.
There were circles drawn, but the contents were blank.

"I stayed up late last night," Thorunn said. "Working on this for you."

Then she handed me the chart, and I saw that the name in the center
circle was my own, and underneath it was the date of my birth. And in the
next band, the one that encircled the top half of me, was Birdie's name, and
the date of her birth and her death. On the bottom half, where my father
should have been, there was nothing.

"This is wrong," I said. The page was trembling in my fingers. "Birdie
was not my mother."

Thorunn took my hand, but I jerked it back.

"My mother was my mother," I said. "I have a photograph of her, right after she gave birth to me. Holding me. And Sigga's standing right there! Sigga
came to Connecticut to help my mother take care of me." But what did any
of that prove? How had Mama always described my arrival? Out of God's clear blue heaven she said I came. Not once had she ever said I'd come from
her own womb.

"Birdie was not my mother!" I repeated.

Thorunn was silent. Finally she said, "I thought someone would have
told you by now." She spoke quietly. "I never understood why they kept it a
secret. So harmful. That's what I said to Sigga's friend Halldora, at Sigga's
birthday party in Gimli. Halldora pretended not to know, but she knows.
And now you do, too. You are Birdie's child, Freya."

Then she opened the shoe box and handed me Birdie's letter. No, it
wasn't a suicide note. But it was desperate all the same. She'd written it to
Thorunn shortly after giving birth to me. Not in 1962, as Halldora had
claimed, but in February 1965.

Reading Birdie's letter made me feel sick, like a waterfall plunging inside out. "I'm going for a walk," I heard myself say. I remember Thorunn
rushing to the door behind me.

"Don't try to stop me," I warned.

She didn't. She held a coat in her hand, a big coat. Not her own. A yellow down jacket, so old the feathers poked through in places. It must have
belonged to her husband, Arni, or her son, Kjartan. I remember thinking
that.

And then I walked out into the snow. It was deeper than it had looked
from inside, just below my knees, higher where it had drifted. I was wearing
sneakers. Snow packed into my socks as I lifted each foot up through the
dense powder and put it down again. I walked like this along Thorunn's
driveway covered in snow and across the road covered in snow. I was heading to the river, the only thing not covered in snow, but it was white all the
same. Still as glass and reflecting the white sky. I kept slipping on rocks that
I couldn't see because they were covered in snow. That was fine with me.
It's what I wanted for myself-to be covered in snow. Because I was snow.
I was mute and I was numb, and I stayed that way for days, weeks, long after the farmer Thorunn sent to find me pulled me up out of the snowbank
on the edge of the Lagarfljot River. I remember struggling against him. Not
because I wanted to die out there, nothing as clear or simple as that. I only
wanted to curl up in a comma and be snow.

Most histories of Iceland subscribe to what I call the birth-death-rebirth
theory. It's how I learned it from Birdie, and it goes like this:

After Iceland was first settled in the ninth century came its millennial
golden age, an explosion of literary, parliamentary, and religious activity, the
high point of Icelandic civilization. Then descended its dark ages, civil strife
in the twelfth century that lead to six hundred years of domination by foreign
rulers, a long period of general decay punctuated by virulent plagues, unrelenting frosts, and volcanic eruptions. At times Iceland teetered on the verge
of extinction. Then finally came the great nineteenth century national awakening and cultural renaissance that culminated with Iceland proclaiming its
independence in 1944, emerging at long last yet with great vigor into the
modern world.

There you have it in a nutshell: origination, degeneration, regeneration.

Enter the revisionists, a new generation of Icelandic historiographers
who are chipping away at the veracity of Iceland's trusty national narrative.
The golden age was not so golden, they argue, the dark ages not so dark, the
foreign rulers not so nasty, the claims of near extinction most probably exaggerated. Some revisionists even go so far as to suggest that the whole paradigm was merely a propaganda ploy, clever packaging by nineteenth-century
nationalists attempting to awaken the Icelandic people from their centuries-long torpor with a rousing call to national pride: We were a great
people once, we can achieve greatness once again!