Each person in an Icelandic family can have a different last name. Here's how: Say the wife is named Thora Palsdottir because her father was named Pall; her last name means daughter of Pall. Women don't take their husbands' names when they get married but keep their fathers' their whole lives. And say her husband's name is Thorgeir Arnason because his father's name was Arni, so he's son of Arni, except it's spelled Arnason with an a because even proper names decline. Now if Thora Palsdottir and Thorgeir Arnason have a son, his last name will be Thorgeirsson. And if they have a daughter, her last name will be Thorgeirsdottir. That's how in one family you can have four different last names. But people in Iceland don't go by last names much, even to this day. Your real name is your first name, and everything is done on a first-name basis. All the names in the Icelandic phone book are alphabetized by first name; you might have to search through five hundred Bjorns to find the one Bjorn you're looking for. Even if you're the president, they call you by your first name: a headline in an Icelandic paper might read PETUR WINS ELECTION. That's why everyone refers to our grandfather as Olafur, even when he's written about in books and articles, which is like writing a scholarly essay on how William wrote Hamlet.
In North America the immigrants abandoned the naming system they'd used for over a thousand years. The first crop of children born in Winnipeg or Gimli or North Dakota or Wisconsin took the last names of their fathers instead of the first. And just like that, there were no more Jonsdottirs, only Jonssons, which soon became Anglicized to Johnson. First names changed too: Bjarni turned to Barney, Olafur to Oliver, Vilhjalmur to William, Ses- selja to Cecilia, Kristin to Christina. Generation by generation, names that couldn't be assimilated began to disappear entirely, names that had been in use since the Saga times and before, men's names like Ingimundur, Sigtryg- gur, and Steingrimur; women's names like Adalbjorg, Siggurros, and Petrina. Vanished to the land of lost immigrant names.
All this I learned from Sigga, our very own aettfraedingur. Aett (rhymes with light) means family as in family line, so an aettfraedingur is someone who studies family lines: a genealogist. Sigga wasn't a professional, but Stefan said she could have been. She was often called upon to help Canadians and Americans track down their long-lost relatives back in Iceland, or help Icelanders locate distant cousins in North America. Even strangers who weren't related to us Sigga helped. Although by the time Sigga got done with them it usually turned out they were. Related, I mean. In Olafur's study, Sigga stored four tall wooden file cabinets of family papers. All sorts of people's families', not just ours. That's what Sigga did in the evenings mostly, work on her aettfraedi. She had a special project she was doing on Olaf ur's aett (which was also my mother's nett and your mother's aett, and of course yours and mine as well). It was called the Blue Book because she was binding all the pages between two blue leather covers. By the time I came to Gimli my first summer, she was already in the sixteenth century. She said one day she'd trace Olafur all the way back to the Viking poet Egil Skallagrimsson.
I couldn't imagine anything more boring than aettfraedi. Just looking at Sigga's endless charts made me dizzy. How could I possibly care if Jon Petursson was the son of Petur Jonsson, who was the son of another Jon Petursson, if I'd never met any of them and they all lived nearly two hundred years ago in a country I'd never even visited?
"When you get older," Sigga said. "You'll care."
"Or not." Birdie declared genealogy to be tedious. "Thank God for the Siggas of the world," she'd say. "Someone's got to do the dirty work."
So there you have it, a typical day in one of my Gimli summers: old folks at Betel in the morning, midday grappling with Icelandic grammar or stalking the beach like an egret, Coffee with visitors in the late afternoons. In the evenings, each of us had our work: Mama knitting or embroidering, Sigga researching the Blue Book, Birdie composing her Word Meadow. Me, I wrote verses of my own, and at the end of the summer Birdie would help me bind them into little books.
No, I can't show you one. They're gone now. I burned them, after Birdie died. It doesn't matter. They were childish arnaleir, eagle muck. Baboonish nonsense.
10
The way I saw it, Mama and Birdie divided me in two: Mama had me in the mornings, and Birdie had me in the afternoons. Birdie and Mama tried to stay out of each other's way; when their paths crossed, quarrels ignited between them. I thought badly of Birdie for picking fights with Mama, and I thought badly of Mama for not standing up to her younger sister. I liked to imagine that she used to, before her accident. But now she backed down quickly, growing silent and far away while she absently rubbed at the spot on the back of her head where she had fallen.
Sigga pleaded for peace between sisters. "What would your father think? Two middle-aged women squabbling like children." And if that didn't work, she'd just shake her head sadly and sigh. "Fraendur eru fraendum verstir." Kin are worst to kin. I knew all about that. Hadn't I nearly killed my own mother? Every time I saw Mama wearing sunglasses inside, every time I saw her gripping her cane during a spell of vertigo, every time I saw her run her fingers through her coarse gray hair, I felt shame. Each time I was introduced to new people in Gimli I'd stare at my shoes, glancing up quickly without moving my head, searching their faces to figure out if they knew. I tried to stay as invisible as possible. I figured with my pale skin and whiteblond hair I could easily blend into walls or even air.
People mistook my shame for shyness, and I let them. She never used to be shy, Mama would say. At least (and here she would rub the back of her head, as if she could draw lost memory to the surface) I don't remember her being that way.
Only Birdie saw through my act. "You can't fool me, Freya min. With that Goody Two-shoes business."
I pretended not to know what she meant, but I knew that she knew that I wasn't myself anymore. And I was glad she knew. Because someday, when my punishment was over, I could go back to being my old self again. And if I had trouble remembering exactly who I really was, then maybe Birdie could help put me back together again. Except of course it didn't work out that way. When Birdie died, she took the old me along with her.
Sometimes even Mama wouldn't put up with Birdie anymore. If Birdie said something Mama deemed absolutely unforgivable, Mama would announce she needed to go to Winnipeg for supplies. She would pack up my cherry red suitcase and her overnight bag, and we'd catch a ride with a cottager heading to Winnipeg, where we would stay with Mama's best friend, Vera, on Victor Street, at the house where the Gudmundssons had taken in Sigga and Birdie and Mama after Olafur died. That's when Mama and Vera had become friends-and when Vera and Birdie had developed a resoundingly mutual dislike. Vera considered Birdie disgraceful, Birdie thought Vera a horrid snob. But Mama wouldn't put up with Birdie talking badly about Vera. All of Mama's vagueness would vanish, her eyes would sharpen, and she'd say in a strangely crisp tone: "Not one more word, Birdie. Not one."
Vera was Mama's haven from Birdie. The supplies Mama needed were yarn and embroidery thread and fabric, all things she could have bought in Gimli at Tergesen's General Store. But then we wouldn't have been able to escape from Birdie. Once we arrived in Winnipeg, Vera would drive us over to Eaton's Department Store. It was the same store Birdie frequented for her spending sprees. Vera's husband, Joey, was the general manager of Eaton's, which is how Vera secretly arranged that Sigga could return the things Birdie bought-or stole during her sprees. "You're never to tell your aunt Ingibjorg," Vera warned me. "Or there could be a lot of trouble."
What kind of trouble I couldn't imagine. Except maybe out of spite for Vera, Birdie would choose a different store for her sprees. Then again, maybe it was out of spite for Vera that Birdie chose Eaton's in the first place.
At Eaton's, Vera would convince Mama to buy something bright and flowery. "Honestly, Anna, you're letting yourself get a bit dowdy, if you don't mind my saying." Mama didn't seem to mind, though I never saw her wear the outfits Vera made her buy.
I too became a target of Vera's improvement
efforts. "Honestly, Anna, you mustn't let that child act so shy. It's becoming odd, is what it is." Once I recited one of Gisli's verses to Vera in my loudest voice, to prove I wasn't so shy, but all she said was "Honestly, Anna, I don't know why you allow her to learn that kind of doggerel." Vera didn't approve of my Icelandic lessons either. Once when she was visiting us in Gimli, she arrived in the middle of one of my sessions with Birdie. "Honestly, Ingibjorg, why on earth are you torturing that child with a language she will never use?"
Vera didn't speak with an accent the way Mama and Birdie did because she'd been raised not in the rural Interlake area but in urban Winnipeg. "Daddy," Vera would boast about the Great Dr. Gudmundsson, "never let us speak Icelandic. He didn't want us to have accents. As far as Daddy was concerned, we were born Canadians and should sound that way." And then she would look around her living room, with all its fancy objects from Eaton's, as proof of how well they'd done for themselves. Vera lived in the biggest house on Victor Street, but she and Joey were thinking of moving because the neighborhood was starting to crumble, and other areas of town were beginning to seem more desirable than Winnipeg's old Icelandic ghetto, the West End.
Vera always watched me very closely, as if she was afraid I would turn a cartwheel and bring all her precious knickknacks from Eaton's tumbling to the floor. If Mama got a dizzy spell and had to lean on her cane, Vera would look directly at me and shake her head slowly. Pity, or disapproval? I was never sure.
There was nothing Birdie loved more than to imitate Vera. "Honestly, Anna," Birdie would say, mimicking Vera's faux British accent, "I don't know what you see in Vera. Is it that her father, the Great Dr. Gudmundsson, was the first Icelandic doctor in Canada? Or her husband is the manager of Eaton's? Maybe it's just that she doesn't have a crazy sister. Or that her boys don't speak a word of Icelandic. Do tell."
"At least," Mama replied, "I have people I can call my friends."
"I have friends."
As were many things Birdie said, this claim was an exaggeration. Your mother had exactly one true friend in the world: Stefan. Stefan in his oldfashioned cardigans and old man's pipe, though he was the same age as Birdie. "Like one of those elderly bachelor farmers in Arborg," Birdie would tease.
"Why don't you marry him?" I asked once. It was clear even to me that Stefan would marry Birdie in a moment, if she would have him.
"Marry Stefan?" When Birdie stopped laughing she explained, "Stefan's a square, that's why."
"Then what are you?"
"I'm a ... trapezoid."
"And me?"
"You're a little ovoid."
"What's that?"
"Like an egg. Ready to hatch."
Into what? I didn't want to know.
Square or not, I adored Uncle Stefan and his kind, steady presence in my Gimli life. He taught history and English at the Riverton High School during the school year, but summers he was free to pursue his life's work: a history of the New Iceland colony. Sometimes Birdie and I would tag along with Stefan on his research expeditions. Once he took us to the plot of land, on the lake north of Gimli, where my grandfather Olafur's family had first settled. There was nothing left, just empty scrubland and an old grave site. Inside a wobbling wooden fence, several headstones leaned in the high grasses. The graves, Stefan explained, belonged to an Indian family, the Ramseys. The Ramseys had been living on the land the Canadian government had given to the Icelanders.
"You mean land the Icelanders stole from the Indians," Birdie interrupted.
"The Indians ceded the land. It was a legal transaction." Stefan sounded irritated.
"And then the Icelanders killed them off with smallpox," Birdie continued. "Entire Indian families, like the Ramseys, wiped out."
"On purpose?" I asked.
,,of course not," Stefan answered. "Many Icelanders died too. Your grandfather was lucky, his family was vaccinated. Otherwise you wouldn't be here today."
"I'm sorry," I whispered to the Ramsey gravestones before we left that day. "I'm so sorry."
Our summers in Gimli always came to an end in the same way, with what Mama referred to as Birdie's god-awful scenes. Other families marked their end-of-summer leave-takings with hugs and kisses and best wishes; our departures were marred by tears and accusations, silences, even threats. No matter how well a particular summer had gone, Birdie always seemed to think the worst of us when we were on the verge of leaving. My mother, Birdie raged, exploited her as an unpaid babysitter. Mama's symptoms were all an act to prevent her from facing the meaninglessness of her life. Me, I was a pest whose presence rendered Birdie completely unable to work. If it weren't for me, she would have finished her Word Meadow long ago. Sigga's crime was treating Anna as her favorite, when she, Birdie, was a poetic genius and the true heir to Olafur's legacy. Anna was nothing but an American housewife. Zip-zap: Birdie's tongue could lash you like a stroke of lightning.
Once I woke on the morning of departure to find my cherry red suitcase lying open and empty on the bedroom floor. During the night Birdie had snuck in, removed all my clothes, and replaced them in the dresser drawers. All this, while I was sleeping.
Other times Birdie ruined our last days in Gimli by refusing to speak to us. Birdie could emit the loudest silence ever heard. If we passed on the stairs, she looked right past me, like I was less than a ghost. At the time I figured she was preparing herself for what it would be like at Oddi once Mama and I were gone. Looking back, I wonder if it wasn't me she was preparing, for the huge silence I would face once she was dead.
Several times she threatened to kill herself if we left. Sigga said it was because Birdie never got over her father dying when she was just a girl. Mama said Birdie was trying to grab the limelight as usual. I didn't say anything. I was too scared to speak. What if I said the wrong thing and she killed herself? What if I said nothing and she killed herself anyway?
One time Mama arranged for Stefan to secretly fetch us a day early, at six o'clock in the morning, just so we could avoid Birdie's god-awful scene. I tiptoed past Birdie's bedroom with my cherry red suitcase. The plan was for Stefan to meet us around the corner so the rumble of his aging Rambler wouldn't wake Birdie up. But somehow she knew. Mama and Sigga and I were almost to the comer when Birdie came flying down the driveway screaming, "Plotters! Schemers! Traitors!"
"Please," Mama begged. "You'll wake the neighbors."
The last day of my last Gimli summer was different. It was quiet. No screaming, no god-awful scene. That's because Birdie wasn't there. She'd been committed. To Selkirk Asylum. For kidnapping me.
No, it wasn't really a kidnapping. It was just a vacation. Except no one believed us.
11
Your mother would be very proud.
Of me, that is. Of the way I've been writing: on the subway in my head, in the darkroom illegibly on the backs of discarded test strips, in my apartment through the night on Birdie's old Underwood. Now I keep myself awake with the same raining type that percussed my Gimli summer nights.
If I don't write to you, I dream. Silly dreams: Birdie rising up out of Lake Winnipeg, strands of wet hair knotted around her neck like blond seaweed. The truth is that things haven't been going well for me since I found out about you. Screwups at the Sub. I stay up late writing you, then oversleep in the morning. It's no easy feat, waking up in a basement apartment. Each morning, I have to trick my brain awake, make it believe day when all my senses register night. I show up to work late and bleary-eyed, and my prints keep turning out flat. Flat trash! my boss, Klaus, calls them. Flat means lack of distinction between shades of gray. In other words, mud. Klaus is a hottempered old man, ex-officer in the Prussian army. He is rarely kind, but lately he has been especially harsh. Today he went so far as to rip up one of my prints. Says I'm losing my eye. I've already lost my ear, my tongue. What's next?
The summer Birdie kidnapped me was the same summer Mama's friend Vera was chosen to be Fjallkona. What's a Fjallkona, you ask? In a minute. The more important questio
n is what's a kidnapping. Know this: your mother did not steal me from my bed in the night. I was not bound and blindfolded. There was no ransom note collaged with letters cut from newspapers. I vanished voluntarily, if unwittingly. Birdie called it a surprise vacation, just the two of us, and I believed her. I chose to believe her. I could claim in my defense that I was only a child, simply being a good girl, doing what I was told. That I didn't know any better.
The truth is I'd turned thirteen. My wings itched. It was my first chance to fly and I took it.
Birdie and I set off for Iceland in the middle of Vera's speech at Islendingadagurinn. That's eece-len-ding-a-dagur-inn. Quite a word, I agree. Except it's not one word but three: Icelandic words are sticky. Islendingadagurinn = Icelanders-Day-The. A kind of St. Patrick's Day for Icelanders. Each year, a different Fjallkona reigned over the festival. The Fjallkona was supposed to represent an upstanding matron of Canadian Icelandichood and was selected by committee each spring. The costume remained the same over the years: the white peaked headdress for Iceland's snowcapped mountains; the green cape for her verdant slopes. It was the same costume Sigga wore in her own Fjallkona portrait, which adorned our mantel back in Connecticut. Back then, in the years before I made my first visit to Gimli, I'd believed Sigga to be a queen. I was not so far off. The title of Fjallkona in our little Gimli world imbued only slightly less than regal status. So when Mama's dear friend Vera was chosen to be Fjallkona for Islendingadagurinn 1978, Mama was thrilled. "Our very own Vera," she kept repeating. I was thrilled too-even if I didn't exactly like Vera, even though I sensed she disapproved of me, I couldn't help getting drawn into the preparations, watching Vera try on her green cape and white headdress, listening to her practice her speech. Sigga too seemed pleased and passed along various practical tips to Vera for her coming reign.
The Tricking of Freya Page 10
