Earth sinks in the sea, the Sun turns black, Cast down from Heaven are the hot stars, Fumes reek, into f ernes burst, The sky itself is scorched with fire.
Is that the end, then, of everything? No, it is not, the volva says.
And Olafur now feels as if he himself were in a trance. It is Easter, and he is reciting, just as his uncle Pall promised he would, the Voluspa entire for his family during the evening reading. He is beginning the final section, reciting with great passion the volva's vision of the world's rebirth:
I see Earth rising a second time Out of the foam, fair and green: Down from the fells, fish to capture Wings the eagle; waters f low.
And finally little Olafur he was just eleven at the time-comes to the end of the poem. He stands in the murky whale-light, in front of his entire family, and recites from memory (astonishingly, he has made no mistakes so far) the volva's last line, the end of the great poem:
I sink now.
"But the volva was wrong, wasn't she?" Olafur asked his uncle Pall that night before bed.
"Wrong how?"
"The world never came to an end as she predicted."
"Not yet, my boy," Pall said with a wink. "Not yet."
It was the very next morning, the day after Easter 1875, that Olafur woke to the rain of ash, the obliterated sun and blackened sky. "Ragnarok!" he screamed, convinced the wolf had swallowed the sun. And who could blame him? What else was he to think? True, it was not the end of the world as the volva foresaw it so many centuries ago. But it was certainly the end of the world as Olafur knew it. The volcano Askja's ashfall poisoned the entire East of Iceland in a wide swath all the way to the coast. A year later, Olafur and his mother and father and brothers were on a ship bound for a New Iceland in Canada.
"Did Uncle Pall go too?" I asked Birdie.
"He stayed behind," Birdie said sadly. "Olafur never saw his uncle Pall again. But he wrote him many letters over the years, and mailed him the poems he began composing in New Iceland. But that's another story altogether."
Wider and wider through all the worlds I see ... That first summer in Gimli I began to think of Birdie as a kind of volva when she told me bedtime stories, an enchantress folding me into her wings with words, soaring us far from the scene of my cartwheel crime. I loved her for that.
8
Pardon me, Cousin. The Olafur story was a diversion, then and now, distracting me from my mother's fall. The truth is I've been dreading this next part. About how Mama never got much better again, never uncurled completely from the comma. The doctors said the symptoms might go away in time, or not. In Mama's case it was not.
Vertigo was one symptom. Ver-ti-go. I couldn't help loving saying that word. What it was and what it did I hated. It was that eggbeater inside Mama's head making her feel like she was a lawn-spinning two-year-oldwhen she was standing still. She had to walk with a cane to keep her balance. For the rest of her life, she walked with a cane. Different canes. She was always losing them. She'd prop one up in the soup aisle at the supermarket deciding between Campbell's Chicken Noodle and Campbell's Chicken with Rice, and then she'd walk out of the store without the cane. By the time she discovered it was gone, she couldn't remember where she'd left it.
And her blond hair turned white, in just two months. She didn't seem to notice, but I did. Back in Connecticut, kids at school thought she was my grandmother. And I let them.
Plus she stopped reading. She could still understand the words, but the movement of her eyes on the page, scanning back and forth and back and forth, brought on the vertigo. When we returned to Connecticut, she had to give up her job as a copy editor. For a while she didn't work at all. She just sat home handcrafting. Then she started selling her pieces at a couple of boutiques in town. Hand-knitted Icelandic sweaters and scarves and caps and slipper-socks that go halfway to your knees, made from real Icelandic wool she ordered from Iceland. Scratchy, yes, but warm enough to keep a sheep through a long Icelandic winter. People bought it up. That's what we lived on: sweater money, and my father's life insurance and pension.
It meant Mama couldn't read to me at night anymore. It meant I read to her instead.
Light became a bad thing. Migraines. In Connecticut we pulled the venetian blinds down to the sills and tilted the slats so no light could get in, and at Oddi in Gimli, Mama sewed heavy curtains for the parlor windows that matched the moss green couch. And whenever she went out in Gimli or Connecticut or anywhere else she had to wear sunglasses, even if it was cloudy, even if it was raining.
Even snow. Especially snow.
Worst was how she stayed curled in on herself. I'd have to call her name three times-Mama. Marna. Mama!-before she'd answer. She had a distracted look, like a person always on the verge of remembering a dream that keeps slipping away. She'd forget stuff a lot. Her keys, where she parked the car in the supermarket parking lot, what day it was. I had to remember things for her. I kept track of her for her. When we left the house, I checked her purse: sunglasses keys wallet Kleenex brush. Sunglasses keys wallet Kleenex brush.
About the accident itself Mama remembered zero. Sigga said that was best. Let her think she slipped and fell. (And not that I turned a cartwheel in the parlor at her welcome-home-to-Gimli party and smashed the china cabinet and she found me lying in a pile of broken glass and shards of china and fainted and cracked her head on the way down.) Slipped and fell, Mama would say if she had to explain the accident to someone.
I hated to hear Mama lie like that, even though she didn't know it was a lie.
Sigga said it was best for Mama not to know, but I believed Sigga thought I was the one it was best for. Because if Mama knew it was my fault she broke her head, she might decide to never talk to me again. She might not want me for a daughter anymore. In the back of my mind lurked the worry that Mama might remember, that one morning she might wake up with her pillow-mussed hair and sleep-sanded eyes and that dreamremembering look on her face. Cartwheel ... she'd say, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. Crash ... ? And then her eyes would sharpen to hard points and she'd say, It was you, Frey. You did this to me.
I had to prepare for that day by being good. Gooder than good. So even if she did remember, she might decide to keep me anyway. That's why I took such good care of her, acting like a mother even though I was the child. Draping cold washcloths over her eyes during migraines. Running all over town looking for lost canes. I told myself it was because I loved her, but inside I knew it was because I wanted her to keep me.
Sometimes all the not-telling-Mama piled up inside me. Sometimes I thought I might burst the truth. Say It was me. And have her pull me on her lap and stroke my hair and gaze at me with her spruce green eyes and say, It doesn't matter, elskan, I'll always love you anyway. But what if she didn't? So I kept it secret. And blamed myself double, to make up for Mama not knowing.
No, she never found out. And so I never got punished for my crime. That's why I had to get busy and punish myself, so I would never do anything that bad ever again. In those first few weeks after Mama got back from the hospital, I would sit quietly with her in the parlor in the daytime with the drapes pulled and figure out my punishment. I considered my options. Like Never speak again, which only lasted halfway through breakfast until Sigga said, Enough of that nonsense, child. Another one I tried was Never smile again, but Mama kept wanting to know if I was sad over and over until I got so sad I almost started crying. Then she tickled me and I rolled off the couch giggling. It wasn't until I was at the beach one day with Birdie that I figured out the perfect punishment. Birdie was trying to read and I kept asking her to tell me a story about Freyja the goddess or Egil the poet or anyone but me. Finally she looked up from her book to a group of kids playing catch with a blue-and-yellow beach ball, and three girls racing in the sand, and a girl and a boy doing handstands, and she said, "Go play. Go play, damn it, like a regular kid."
Never play again!
It made perfect sense: Only children played. And I'd done something
so bad I didn't deserve to be a child anymore. So I would be a not-kid and notplay with other kids. At school back in Connecticut during recess, I would stand on the edge of the playground and not-play jump rope and not-play tetherball and not-play hand-slapping rhyming games like Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack. In Gimli summers it meant that I didn't race girls or even boys on the beach even though I was a long-legged egret and could have beat most of them. Or build rafts out of driftwood and pretend to be Indians canoeing. I could watch other kids doing those things, but I couldn't do them myself. Even if they asked me. Which they stopped doing pretty quickly.
No thanks. I don't like to play.
You don't like to play?
You'd think someone would have noticed that I wasn't being myself, but the thing is no one in Gimli really knew me. I'd only been there one day before the accident. Only Mama knew the old me, but she wasn't herself anymore either. There was the Before-Mama and the After-Mama. The Before-Freya and the After-Freya. There was Before and there was After.
Even Mama's eyes seemed to change, from crisp spruce green to the fuzzy color of an algae-choked pond.
After Birdie ran away and came back bearing meanie-gifts, she shaped up for the rest of the summer. That's what Sigga told her to do, and Sigga was the only one with any influence over Birdie. It was the day after Mama got home from Winnipeg, and Sigga was sitting at the kitchen table packaging all the meanie-gifts to send back to Eaton's department store. The silverand-black rooster pin for she who rules the roost. The miniature dog statue for our ever-loyal Stefan. And the beautiful silk acrobat scarf for our little gymnast. (The chocolates for the sweetest sister a girl could have Birdie devoured herself. I found the wrappers under her bed.) I was standing behind the kitchen door peeking through a crack. Birdie was sitting across from Sigga with her elbows on the table and her forehead pressed into her hands. After she was done repackaging, Sigga put all the gifts into a cardboard box and taped it up. That's when she said it. "You either shape up, Ingibjorg. Or you ship out."
Birdie said nothing, didn't even lift her head out of her hands, but I guess she was listening because she hardly fought with anyone again for the rest of that summer, not even Mama, not even once. Which was nice except it turned out she was saving it all up for our last day. Somehow Birdie got it into her head that Mama and I would leave at the end of the summer and never return to Gimli again. All summer long Birdie would ask Mama if we were definitely coming back the next summer. Mama would just nod her head vaguely yes or shake it vaguely no or say We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Which I didn't understand because I hadn't seen any bridges on the way to Gimli.
On the last day of my first Gimli summer, Stefan drove up early in the morning in his Rambler station wagon to drive us to the Winnipeg train station. Just as he was loading my cherry red suitcase, Birdie came running out of the house in her negligee wailing. Sigga tried to hold her back, but she wasn't strong enough. Birdie ran after us as the car rolled down the driveway, sobbing and banging her hands on Mama's window until Mama said, "Stefan, stop the car." I was sitting in the backseat. Mama rolled her window down and said in an unusually definite voice, "We'll come back to you next summer, Birdie. I promise."
And we did. We went back every summer until the year when there wasn't a Birdie to come back to anymore.
By now all those summers have blended in my mind. What took place when I couldn't tell you. It's just one long Gimli summer. Until the last one. Which strictly speaking doesn't even count as a Gimli summer.
I'm getting ahead of myself.
A typical Gimli summer day? Okay. That's a good idea. I'll take you through a typical day if you promise to remember that nothing was ever typical. Not where Birdie is concerned.
9
Sometime after the accident Mama began spending the bright mornings of our Gimli summers at Betel, the old folks' home for Icelanders (founded by the Great Dr. Gudmundsson, father of Mama's best friend and Birdie's archenemy, Vera). Keeping company with the old folks. Every morning before the sun got too high I would walk Mama over to Betel. Sand is uneven and not good for canes, so instead of taking the beach we went straight across on Second Avenue, past the cottages brimming over with families and visiting relatives. Mama knew most of the cottagers and stopped to talk to anyone we ran into. Betty Vigfusson, who made the best ponnukokur my mother had ever tasted but don't tell your aroma Sigga that. The elderly Brandson sisters, who shook their heads sadly from their front porch at the sight of my poor tragic mother, a widow, and then that terrible accident and now look at her, old before her time and raising that child all by herself in the States-then waved at us with their tremulous hands. And the Arnasons, who had a little girl exactly my age and didn't I want to come over and play with her? Just once?
Five blocks with my mother on a Gimli morning walking cane-paced and stopping to chat with every single person we encountered could easily suck an hour from a summer's day. While Mama chatted I would hopscotch in place and count leaves in Betty Vigfusson's elm or stare into the sky shaping clouds into palaces. By the time we got to Betel, I felt like I might explode from impatience. But inside Betel, inside Betel made our walk down Second Avenue seem like a speed-of-light sprint to Mars. Inside Betel everything took place in the slowest motion possible. First I'd open the front door for Mama and we'd stand in the entranceway while her eyes adjusted. Betel was redbrick exterior, dark wood interior, and in the summer the shades were drawn to keep it cool because, as Mama said, old people can't abide heat. Which meant Betel was dark inside the way Mama liked for and needed it to be. Still her eyes behind the sunglasses required a moment to adjust. As we passed the portrait of Vera's father, the Great Dr. Gudmundsson, Founder of Betel, Mama would say, "Bless that man for his good works." Every morning Mama said Bless that man for his good works.
Then we would stop by Mrs. Thompson's office. Mrs. Thompson was the Matron of Betel, and she held a special place in her heart for Mama. "The good your mother does cannot be underestimated," she would say to me, often and reprovingly. Mrs. Thompson did not hold a special place in her heart for me. I was convinced she knew about my crime and held it against me. If I was running an errand for Mama or one of the old people, fetching a book or a knitting bag, and I saw Mrs. Thompson coming, I'd slink back against the wall, but she always saw me. She'd sink a bony claw into my shoulder and say, "Your mother has suffered a tragic accident that will likely debilitate her for the rest of her life. Do you understand that?"
I did.
Mostly everyone at Betel was nice to me. Mostly they doted on me and said what a well-behaved and grown-up little girl I was. Which made Mama happy because no one had ever said anything like that about me before. Which made me happy because it meant my punishment was working.
Mama and I would settle into the downstairs common room and pretty soon the old ladies would come sit with us. Runa and Thora, Gudbjorg with the three chins, and sometimes Margret hobbling along on her walker. And others, depending on who was feeling well that morning or who was alive that summer and hadn't died during the winter when we were back in Connecticut. All morning long Mama and the old women knitted things to sell through the Lutheran Ladies Aid to raise money for Betel, and while they knitted they talked, sometimes in Icelandic, sometimes English, depending on who was in the room and what was being said. Runa and Gudbjorg liked to talk about dreams. Not just their own dreams but dreams people they knew had dreamt and even stories about dreams people had dreamt back in Iceland. Dreams that came true. Like a woman named Agusta dreamt that three moons fell into Lake Winnipeg and that summer three men died in fishing accidents. Once while Mama was in the bathroom I told the old women about the dream Birdie had the night before Mama's accident, where Birdie was back at their old farm in Arborg and they had sheep instead of cows and Mama pulled up in a car and got out and the sheep trampled her. Runa nodded seriously and said Birdie had the dreaming gift. Thora shook her head and said, En er petta ekki skritid?But is this not strange?
Which meant yes, things are strange. (Mama agreed with Stefan that dream-talk was draumskrok--dream nonsense-but I believed in it. I had lots of dreams myself. And nightmares. My good dreams I told to Mama and Sigga at the breakfast table, but the nightmares I saved for Birdie when she heard me cry out in the middle of the night. Birdie knew all my nightmares.)
Mama tried to teach me to knit, but all I produced were tangled messes.
There were old men at Betel too, squinting seriously at the chess board from behind their thick glasses. It was a slow-motion game where maybe you moved one piece an hour.
Every once in a while one of the old people would try to send me out to play. Betel is no place for a little girl on a summer morning. I knew they were right. Sometimes it felt like I couldn't breathe inside Betel, but I figured it was part of my punishment. What better way to be a not-kid than to spend my time with people in their eighties and nineties? Some lived to be over a hundred. Every July we celebrated Runa's birthday and every July she said it would be her last but it never was. She turned 100 my first summer and then 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106. Maybe 107, but I can't say because after Birdie died we stopped going to Gimli. An old man named Siggi said Icelanders lived a long time because they ate so much cod. Some of the men chewed on hardfiskur while they played chess. I tried it once and spat it out. It was stringy and salty. But I guess it was worth it if you wanted to live to be 100.
Birdie didn't like Mama taking me to Betel with her. "How dreary, Anna."
"Someone needs to visit Our Old People," Mama insisted. "It makes them so happy, to see a child. And Freya likes to go, don't you?"
The Tricking of Freya Page 8
