The Tricking of Freya (52 page)

They say she'll be better off without me, that I'm unfit to raise a
child. They've gotten the court to declare this! My mother my sister my
doctors and the Canadian government are all in collusion against me.

Skaldagernlur! My baby was born with a tooth cutting through her
gums, Thorunn. Like Olafur. I checked before they took her away from
me. She'll be a writer I'm certain, if Anna doesn't stifle the living life
out of her.

Even my breasts are weeping.

They want to keep me here still, at Selkirk Asylum. They say we
must guard against postpartum depression. But it is not giving birth to a
beautiful infant that is depressing, no! It is having your child kidnapped
by your closest relatives in collusion with agents of the government!
How could such an act not crush one's very soul???

At least they let me name her. Anna would have named her Cathy or
some other bland American name.

I named her Freya.

I was finishing my third cup of coffee and my tenth reading of the letter
when Stefan came into the dining room. He'd been out tending his rosebushes, before the heat of the day came on full force. I remember the light
sweat on his brow, the streak of dirt left on his forehead when he wiped it
off with his gardening glove. The way he slouched slightly in the doorway,
impossibly tall and yet never imposing. A square, Birdie had called him
once. Herself deemed a trapezoid. And me, a little ovoid, ready to hatch.

"You were born prematurely," he said.

I nodded. One more fragment of truth floating up for air.

"If you count back-" He stopped, then tried again. "I've done the calculations. February minus eight equals ... June."

None of this was making sense to me, despite my three cups of coffee.
Eloquent Stefan, suddenly stammering about February minus June? I sat
and waited. He came to the table and sat across from me. When he poured
himself a cup of coffee, I noticed his hand was shaking. Trembling. Even
though it was cool in the house, a new trickle of sweat was accumulating on
his forehead, dripping down his brow in a muddy smear.

"Freya, what I'm saying is ... I don't think the father of Birdie's child
was someone she, someone she ... knew ... in Iceland. The timing isn't
right. She was there in April and May of 1964. But the child, I mean you,
you were born in February, so you must have been conceived in June. After
she returned to Gimli."

So I'd been wrong about that too. Searching in Iceland for a lover of
Birdie's who never existed, or at least was not the father of her child. Of me.
Leave it to logical Stefan to do the math.

"Do you know," I ventured, "if she was seeing someone then? When
she got back from Iceland?" I remembered my mother referring to various
boyfriends of Birdie's, but never by name. Fly-by-nights, she called them.
No-goods. Or married men. No one suitable.

There was a long silence. At first I thought Stefan was thinking, trying to
remember back thirty years, distinguish one shadowy paramour from another, lining the dates up in his mind. But looking back, I understand that
he was simply trying to summon his courage.

So, yes, technically speaking, Stefan is my father. You say you figured that
out too? I don't believe you. Stefan himself didn't know, he insists on that,
and I believe him. I count myself lucky, that I was conceived during Stefan's sole one-night stand with Birdie, when she returned from Iceland
manic and charming and filled with love for everything on the planet, even
Stefan the square. I'm grateful my father is not some shadowy tryst I could
spend years trying to track down, only to be disappointed.

I don't call Stefan "Dad," but he's the closest I've ever come to having a father. Our bond continues to deepen. The last time I saw him was for Sigga's
funeral in Gimli last winter. (Sigga went quietly, excusing herself from
Christmas dinner at Stefan's house to lie down in the guest room and expire.
Just like the Saga heroine she admired so much, Aud-the-Deep-Minded, who
slipped away from a family feast to die in regal solitude.) We write frequently,
Stefan and I-he's a technophobe and eschews e-mail-and he plans to visit
us in Iceland soon.

I've also engaged Stefan to help me with a special project I've embarked
on: translating Olafur's letters. Yes, Olafur's letters turned up. It seems they
were here all along, in the basement archives at Ulfur's house on the lake,
misfiled. Ulfur was horrified at first, then embarrassed, then thrilled. Then
he handed them over to me. Birdie would have been disappointed by that.
There was no cloak and dagger, no plots, no legal battles over the letters.

My Icelandic isn't quite up to the task, but there are plenty of people to
turn to for help. Ulfur, of course. He'll do anything to help the letters see
the light of day. And his daughter, Johanna, Saemundur's sister the linguist.
And of course Stefan back in Gimli. He helps with background research on
the New Iceland colony, names and places mentioned in Olafur's letters.

No, Birdie's lost Word Meadow never resurfaced. But Birdie said I had
an ear, a tongue. I was born with a tooth cutting through my gum. Maybe
I'll write my own Word Meadow someday.

Some things I may never get used to. They leave babies out in the snow
here. Oh, they're bundled up, of course, in carriages with stiff awnings, but
still it is not uncommon when there's a light snowfall to see carriages put on
porches for the babies' afternoon naps. To accustom them to the weather, it
was explained to me. It makes them hress, vigorous and strong.

Care for some hakarl? Take a hunk of raw shark meat and bury it in the
sand until it putrefies. Make sure a man urinates on it every few days. After
several months, dig up, rinse, and serve. That's how they made it in the old
days. Of modern hakarl-making methods I know nothing, but the hakarl I've
tried tastes rubbery and smells of rot. Other traditional Icelandic delicacies
include singed sheep head-complete with eyes and pickled ram's testicles. More common are tasty lamb, fresh cod, and endless variations of
soured milk products. Plus the odd supermarket vegetables, impossibly long
skinny cucumbers sealed in plastic, heads of lettuce sold in the tiny pots they
were grown in, roots trailing obscenely. Hothouse produce, an Icelandic specialty. Food can't be grown on this island, not outdoors anyway. These ingenious Icelanders, with their geothermally heated hothouses. I hear they're
working on hydrogen-powered cars next.

Icelanders love gadgets. Televisions and computers and cell phones and
every other techno-toy that appears on the market. They have expensive
tastes. The simple peasant life of my grandfather is for the most part long
vanished. Iceland has one of the highest standards of living in the world,
and they're in debt up to their ears to pay for it. Still, can you blame them?
After six hundred years of mostly abject poverty, middle-class materialism
has a singular appeal.

Lutheranism is the state religion of Iceland, yet somehow it doesn't feel all-pervasive. There are even groups of neo-pagans, modern worshipers of
Odin and Freyja. Me, I put my faith in words.

The wind never stops.

I suppose I'll always be something of an outsider here. Icelanders are a
welcoming yet insular lot. They don't consider me an Icelander, and I don't
consider myself one. The older people call me a Vestur-Islendingur, Western
Icelander, the name given to those who went west to Canada and America.
I think of myself as an American, as much as Birdie hated that. Yet I probably fit here better than anywhere.

Do I miss my old life? It was hardly a life, hardly fit to miss.

A couple of months ago I began having earthquake dreams. Icelanders are
disposed to believing in prophetic dreams, and I managed to alarm a number of friends with my visions of planets cracking open. What I saw, again
and again, was the image of a nearly round object. Fine lines would appear,
fracturing its surface; soon the entire sphere would shatter into pieces. I
woke in terror. One morning I realized I was dreaming not of planets cracking open but of an egg hatching.

Saemundur wants us to have a child.

Am I fit? Probably not. My illness could worsen. I could erupt into a
full-blown Birdie one of these days. Worse yet, our child could bear these
same mood-sick genes.

Or she could be born with teeth cutting through her gums. Or both.

In Havamal, that slender tome of Viking wisdom, it says, A man's fate
should be firmly hidden to preserve his peace of mind. My ancestors believed
we emerge into this world with a peculiar fate tucked inside like a seed that
unfurls itself over the course of our lives. Our deaths are with us from
birth. What matters is not our fate but what we make of it. These days,
many believe our fate is sealed by our genes, passed down through the generations in endlessly recombining combinations of DNA. Genes unfurling
like seeds throughout our lives, diseases blooming in our veins, dooming us
sure as any fate bestowed by God or gods.

Leave it to an entrepreneurial Icelander to capitalize on Iceland's obsession with genealogy he's starting a company that will catalog and then
rent out to the world's scientists Iceland's uniquely chronicled gene pool. The nation is debating the project hotly at the moment, the potential for
abuse-ah, the conspiracy theories Birdie would have fabricated!-the potential for discovering the sources of multitudes of diseases. Even identifying the gene for bipolar disorder.

But none of this helps me now. Saemundur could leave me if I won't
have a child. Or I could leave him. Fly back to New York. Don't ask me. I'm
no volva, I've got no gift of prophecy.

I live surrounded by my people, the living and the dead.

I still miss them both, every day, my two mothers. The gentle one with
her spruce green eyes, the wild one with her moods shifting like lake
weather.

And even though you aren't you anymore, not the you I was hoping to
find, I wish you nothing but the best. Do you remember how to say goodbye in Icelandic?

Bless bless.

I must first thank my mother, Edith Bjornson, for so generously sharing her
memories, books, family papers, and many, many hours of conversation.

I am very grateful to my steadfast supporters and early readers of the
manuscript: Madeline Sunley, Elizabeth Pollet, Atsuro Riley, Amy Blackstone, Marjory Nelson, Susan Fleming, Vanessa Barrington, Vicky Funari,
and Charles Baldwin. Special thanks to Paula Harris and Celia Sack for
loaning me a place to write.

In Canada I wish to thank Nelson Gerrard, the local historian and
genealogist whose remarkable book Icelandic River Saga put me under the
spell of my ancestors. A huge debt is owed to both Nelson and Sigrid Johnson, Head of the Icelandic Collection at the University of Manitoba, for
their careful reading and correcting of the manuscript; any remaining errors
are my own. Thanks also to Tommi Finnbogason and Stefan Jonsson.

In Iceland I would like to thank Anna Nora Arnadottir, Sveinn horgrims-
son, Finnbogi Gu6mundsson, Ingibjorg horsteinsdottir, Agusta Arnadottir,
Gunnar Kjartansson, Johanna Stefansdottir, Ottar Kjartansson, Hrefna
Robertsdottir, Eirikur Kolbeinn Bjornsson, Halldora Hreggvi'sdottir, Arni
Geirsson, Margret Loa Jonsdottir, Stefania Hrafnkelsdottir, Bolivar Kvaran
and his wife, Lilla, and the Institute of Gunnar Gunnarsson and its director,
Skuli Bjorn Gunnarsson.

I am deeply grateful to my agent, Katherine Cowles, for making it happen, and my editor, George Witte, for his insightful guidance. I would also like
to thank my copy editor, Susan M.S. Brown, and the staff of St. Martin's
Press.

And especially Oliver Kay, for everything.