However, she hung on to her Icelandic identity in private. She read the few Icelandic books she could find, followed what little news there was of Iceland in the local papers. Read the Icelandic papers Lögberg and Heimskringla at the local library. Her husband did not read or speak Icelandic and had no interest in learning.
When Henry was away, as he frequently was, she spoke Icelandic to Tom. She read to him about the sagas. Henry had shown him where England was on the globe that sat in their living room. “I’m your other half,” his mother said to him, and when he asked where this other half had come from, she showed him where Iceland was. He learned early that Iceland was their secret, just as the Icelandic treats she made were something shared only between the two of them.
The year Tom was twelve, a letter arrived from one of Gudrun’s sisters, who had tracked her down to tell her that their mother had cancer and wanted Gudrun to return home so she could ask forgiveness in person. Gudrun had replied, thanking her for the information, but signed her name, Guðrun Ásta Einarsdóttir, kanamella.
There quickly had been another letter, an apology, an acknowledgement that Gudrun had every right to be angry for the unjust accusation. A token of reconciliation was included. It was fine Icelandic wool, enough to knit an adult sweater against the Canadian cold.
Gudrun felt the wool and knew it was the best that could be had. Her sister said, in her note, “We send this asking for your forgiveness.” When the sweater was finished, she wrote to her sister and thanked her for the gift. After that, they wrote twice more.
When Gudrun said that she was going to see her mother before she died, Henry said, “That’s very expensive,” and she said, “I’ve got my own money.” She’d saved what she could from working.
Three months later, Gudrun flew to Iceland. Before she left, Tom asked her to show him where her plane would be going. She traced her finger across Canada, from Winnipeg to Newfoundland. From there, she took another plane to Iceland. She was to be gone a month. If her mother died before Gudrun was scheduled to leave, she would change her flight so she could attend the funeral.
He thought, at first, when she didn’t return on time, that her mother must have died close to the end of the month, then that there must have been a delay caused by the weather or a problem with the airplane. He’d gone to the library to search through the various newspapers for evidence of a crash.
Finally, one Saturday afternoon, while he was helping Anna clear out an apartment in which a renter had died, he said, “I wonder when my mother will come back.”
And Anna, believing that life should be met head on and a spade should be called a shovel, said, “She’s not coming back.”
Tom had been cleaning a cupboard. He was so shocked that he stood up and banged his head. “It’s not a big cut,” Anna said when she looked at where he’d hit the edge of the metal cupboard. She dabbed at the blood with a tissue. “You’ll have a little scar, but it’ll heal. Nobody will know. Your hair will hide it. You’ll survive.”
Tom had protested. “All her belongings are still here. All her porcelain figurines. Her things in the kitchen.”
“She took what she wanted,” Anna said. “The rest, she left behind.”
His whole body became weak. He thought he might fall down and not get up, but automatically, on their own, his hands started cleaning.
Tom felt heartsick, felt he’d been cast off a cliff into an endless void, as if the falling would never stop. And when he thought of his mother’s belongings—her Royal Doulton figurines, her Royal Albert china, her crystal—all displayed in her china cabinet for when Henry’s relatives came over, he realized there was nothing, not one single thing to indicate that she was Icelandic.
“She can’t just leave,” he said, refusing to believe that she could have left him behind. She’d said she was his other half. They’d shared all those times reading stories and learning about Vikings. They had secrets.
“Your father thought she was coming back, too. She sent him a letter.”
His body ceased to be his body. It went on doing things, cleaning the fridge, the stove, washing the floor, but he was no longer connected to it.
“You can take care of yourself,” Anna said. “You need to know anything, you ask me.”
At first, he thought that there would be a letter to him or a postcard. When December came, he checked the mail every day for a Christmas card. There was nothing.
He often thought of what Anna had said: “She took what she wanted.” She hadn’t taken him, hadn’t sent for him. His father wrapped himself in a stoic silence. That first Christmas, his father, not remembering it was Christmas until it was upon them, gave Tom one of his chess books and a chess set.
Mrs. Galecian asked them both to Christmas dinner, but his father declined and told Tom to go. Tom accepted immediately, and Anna and her daughter, Tanya; Anna’s brother and his wife and two girls; her younger sister and her boyfriend; and an elderly aunt all crammed into Mr. and Mrs. Galecian’s two-bedroom bungalow, a bungalow redolent with smells of turkey, cabbage rolls, perogies, onions, beets, pickles, potatoes and strange vegetables Tom had never heard of. The meal was boisterous and noisy, and laughter filled the room. The brother dipped his spoon into the dish of kutya and flipped it against the ceiling. Everyone clapped when a bit of the boiled wheat and honey clung to the ceiling, because it was a sign of good fortune for the coming year. They danced afterwards and Anna showed him how to polka, and then he did the polka with her daughter, who was twelve years old. Everyone clapped in time to the music as Tom and Tanya hopped around the room.
After they walked back to their apartment block, Anna asked him to come in for a moment. She handed him a gift wrapped in Christmas paper with a blue ribbon around it. He hadn’t known what to say, and if he had tried to thank her, he would have started crying, so he hugged her, then fled down the hall and up the stairs to his own apartment. Safely behind the shut door of his bedroom, he opened the gift. It was a finely hand-knit sweater of blue wool. He hoped that his mother had sent it but then realized that he had seen Anna knitting it.
“You should make friends,” his father said to him. “Pick the kind who will help you get ahead in life. Join some clubs.” His father belonged to the Masons.
He’d joined the chess club at school, and Anna had taken him to events with Tanya. He’d celebrated their holidays, their birthdays, their anniversaries. It was at these events that he’d learned about laughter. For a moment, he thought about the tables laden with food and liquor, the noisy, excited talking, the hugs instead of handshakes, and the way the absurdity of life was celebrated.
His father paid for whatever Tom needed but was home less and less. Henry was distracted, as if in a daze a lot of the time, and when he did spend time in the apartment, he tied flies or worked out historical battles with his toy soldiers.
After a time, his father seemed to see things around him once again, and one day they went on the bus to Assiniboine Park, where Henry showed Tom how to use a fly rod on the grass. Once Tom had mastered casting, they walked to the Assiniboine River and fished from the bank. Twice a summer they took the bus to fish at Lockport. They took sandwiches, fruit and dessert with them in his father’s rucksack and bought cold drinks from the local concessions. During these all-day excursions they carefully avoided talking about anything personal. Instead, they talked about military history and biographies. His father loved military history. They discussed the conduct of the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, the D-Day landings. They never discussed the chair that sat empty at the dining room table or the place setting that went unused.
Tom often lay in bed and reflected on little things his mother had done as she prepared to leave. She began to encourage him to look for jobs—running errands, carrying groceries, occasionally babysitting, but most of all making himself useful to Anna.
Was it part of her plan when she took him to the bank and helped him open an account? She put $5.00 into it for him, and he deposited
$2.50 that he had saved. She said it was their secret and not to mention this account to his father.
She’d explained to Tom that even though most people in Iceland lived on farms, they raised sheep and dairy cows, not vegetables or flowers. After Anna told him his mother wasn’t coming back, Tom took his mother’s three ceramic pots with their plants from the kitchen windowsill and dropped them one by one three storeys into the alleyway below. He packed his books about Iceland, his pictures of Vikings into a box and shoved it over the top of the Dumpster.
Was she implementing her plan when she asked Anna to hire him to do jobs around the apartment block? Mrs. Kolababa, Anna Kolababa—Anna told him to call her Anna, but Henry said he didn’t ever want to hear him calling Mrs. Kolababa by her first name. After all, he said, although she was socially inferior, she had the right to her dignity. After that Tom always referred to her as “Mrs. Kolababa” in front of his father.
When he was sixteen, Tom was cleaning a vacated apartment for Anna and mentioned that he wanted a real job for the summer.
“You wanna work construction?” Anna asked. “You’re a skinny kid.”
“I want a real job,” Tom replied.
“You do a good job on this apartment, I’ll talk to my cousin Peter. He’s building a house. It’s hard work.”
That summer he carried lumber, ran errands, gofered for a month but, gradually, was allowed to do more, always watching, listening, writing down everything he’d learned in a scribbler before he went to sleep at night. He kept the job until school started, and the greatest praise he’d ever received was when Peter said, “You come back next summer. There’ll be a job.”
Toward the middle of grade twelve, Tom mentioned going to university. His teachers had encouraged him to continue his education. Tom believed his father would be opposed because Henry had often expounded on the inferiority of Canadian schools, on the best strategy being to get a job with a good company and stay there until retirement with a good pension. But Henry’s world had crumbled around him when he’d been declared redundant after decades of loyalty. Companies that he’d cited as pillars of certainty had disappeared with hardly a trace.
His father, it turned out, was relieved that Tom hadn’t decided to take a trade. In Wales, the family had struggled to get out of the mines. After their move to England, they struggled to get out of the trades. His father never suggested a program of study for him. Tom chose history and criminology for no particular reason, except that his father loved history and biographies. Also, Tom liked memorizing dates and names, building frameworks of boxes one on top of the other and then filling the boxes with shelves and, on every shelf, putting a major date and incident. At first, the boxes represented centuries, but gradually, as he learned more, they became decades, each floor filled with people and events.
Tom was just starting his third year examinations when his father was killed. Henry, who thought riding the bus was safer than driving a car, was waiting at a bus stop when a tire came off a gravel truck and struck him.
Tom was studying at the kitchen table when a policeman came to tell him.
Chaos. Chaos. He thought of it as suddenly finding that there was no ground beneath his feet. The policeman was very kind, and a social worker came to the apartment to talk to him. The phone rang, and it was a relative, a portly man who always wore a pork-pie hat, the sort that men wore in black-and-white movies. He’d phoned to ask Henry something about his income tax. Tom told him what had happened. He said he’d be right over. He came and said not to worry, he’d talk to the undertaker. He wanted to go into Henry’s office, but the door was locked and Tom had no idea where the key was kept. He thought on a chain in his father’s pocket. All the doors in the apartment had locks. Tom had a key to the front door, but all the other keys were locked in his father’s bedroom. When his mother was still with them, she’d kept the keys in her pocket.
The Anglican minister came. He was a tall sallow-faced man with a lazy eye that wandered disconcertingly as he talked. He patted Tom on the shoulder, talked about the meaning of life and asked did he know if his father wanted a full funeral? Tom had no idea. He kept waiting for his father to come home.
The undertaker gave Tom his father’s personal effects, including the office key, and Cousin Donald—his name turned out to be Donald—opened the office door and they went inside. Everything was precise, just the sort of office you’d expect of a man who trimmed his moustache every morning. Not a piece of paper lying around. The filing cabinets were locked, but there were keys for those, too. Tom had the sense that what they were doing was sinful, disrespectful, but Cousin Donald said it all had to be done. He went through the drawers. The files were clearly marked. Will, funeral plan, power of attorney, bank accounts, pension plan, birth certificates. To Tom’s shock, there were divorce papers for his parents. His father had never said anything about a divorce. Everything was in its place, purposeful, except one piece of paper. It was torn from a notebook. Printed on it in his father’s careful cursive hand was the word Valhalla. If it had been in his mother’s writing, he’d have thought nothing of it. But his father cared nothing about Icelandic mythology and, ever since Gudrun had not returned, wanted to hear no mention of Iceland. Tom folded it and put it in his wallet.
The undertaker had been prepaid, and the will said that there was to be a graveside service. The plots—one for Henry, one for Gudrun—were paid for. His father’s body was to be cremated, the urn buried. The urn was already chosen and waiting. Nothing left to chance.
There was nothing to do except put on his best clothes and turn up at the gravesite. There were twelve people, including the undertaker and the minister. The undertaker had the urn in a blue cloth bag. Tom thought at first it was a bag from his father’s whisky. The minister said a few words, and the urn was placed in the ground. Then they all went back to the apartment, where Anna had tea and coffee and dainties ready. They talked about what a terrible tragedy it was and asked Tom what he wanted to do, but Tom was unable to pay much attention because he was worried that his father’s ashes had been brought to the cemetery in a whisky bag.
A sharp-nosed woman in a big hat took him aside. She claimed to be a second cousin and said that his father had always intended for her to have the Royal Doulton figurines in the locked china cabinet. She had a box and wrapping paper in the car, she said, and was prepared to pack them up right then and there so he wouldn’t have that responsibility.
“What people says don’t count,” Anna declared as she thrust a tray of cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches at the woman. “It’s only good what’s in writing.”
Tom went to see his professors. They all offered to defer his exams.
For three months, he lived as if his father would come back at any moment. He never sat in his father’s chair.
His mother had been the queen of the kitchen. It was her domain. She wanted no help when she cooked. She said the kitchen was small, and with two people in it there were likely to be accidents. It was Tom’s job to wash the dishes, put them away and set the table for the next meal. Tom would have helped in the kitchen, but his mother said that if he got involved, she’d never be able to find anything. It was Anna who let him help her in the kitchen. Her family were used to crowding in together as one person cooked meat, another made a salad, while someone else prepared dessert.
The family lawyer called. His father had a small life insurance policy. Tom asked Cousin Donald why there wasn’t much money in the estate.
“Gambling at bridge is high-stakes stuff,” Cousin Donald replied.
While Gudrun was still at home, his father had gone out to play bridge one night a week. After she left, he gradually went out more and more, until he was playing bridge three or four times a week.
It had never occurred to Tom that his father was gambling.
When money was finally deposited into his account, he went to Anna’s apartment and paid her the amount that was owed for his rent. She hugged him. Tom’s parent
s were the longest residents in the building. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re a good boy. You work hard.”
He thought about drinking his father’s port and dry sack, but it seemed impossible, forbidden even in death. He wrote his deferred exams and passed them. Anna’s cousin was building houses in Thompson and gave Tom a job. They worked long hours. He’d fall into bed, sleep, get up for work again. Six days a week. He was grateful that the work didn’t leave him much time to think. When he returned to Winnipeg and moved back into the apartment, that changed.
He didn’t know what changed, but the day after he arrived, he went into his parents’ bedroom and lay on the pink silk coverlet on his mother’s bed. Then he lay on his father’s blue cotton quilt. He lay with his hands behind his head, not planning on sleeping but just staring at the ceiling, smelling his father’s pipe and aftershave. He thought there’d still be the faint smell of his mother’s lavender, but it had faded away, been overwhelmed by Prince Albert pipe tobacco. At last, he got up and went to the grocery store two blocks away. He asked for empty boxes, and Mr. Cohen, the owner, who knew Tom because he had sometimes stocked shelves, immediately went into the stock room and came back with a dozen boxes in a grocery cart.
“I got you tinned-goods boxes so there shouldn’t be any bugs in them. You take the cart,” he said, “but you bring it back. It’s worth a lot of bucks.”
Tom promised. He went back to the apartment and began going through his parents’ drawers, piling their clothes neatly into the boxes until all the drawers were empty. Then he went through the closet, carefully folding his mother’s dresses and his father’s suits. He cleaned out the bathroom. He ran out of boxes and realized he would need more. On the way back to the grocery store, he stopped at Anna’s apartment and asked how to get rid of stuff. Anna said, “I’ll call our church, Saint Nicholas. They’ll come and get it. Did you look in all the pockets? Sometimes people leave money in their pockets.”
In Valhalla's Shadows Page 10
