The Ring Road was only the beginning of Birdie's pre-travelogue, the golden thread upon which she strung wonder after wonder, beginning with Iceland's most famous waterfalls, Gullfoss and Dettifoss. Then she waxed eloquent about the greatest glacier of all Iceland, all Europe, Vatnajokull.
"And next to Vatnajokull, Freya rnin, is the glacial lagoon where giant icebergs float. I'll take you there. And right underneath the glacier is a volcano.
I remembered my mother's story about the eruption of Askja, the fall of black snow, the flight of Olafur's family to Canada. "Are we going to see Askja?"
"Of course we'll see Askja, silly! But Askja's only one of them. There's Laki, Hekla, Krafla... Volcanoes can erupt at any time. The whole island's alive, I tell you. If you look closely enough, you can see the land breathe."
How long would it take, I wanted to know, to circle the entire island?
"Ten days or so, I've heard. I've never done it. The Ring Road wasn't built when I visited Iceland back in the sixties. It'll be the first time, for both of us."
We would visit Thingvellir, site of the ancient parliament. Sigga, Birdie informed me, especially wanted to make sure I would see that. The original Oddi, too, the farmstead where Snorri Sturluson was raised. And of course we would travel to the East, to visit Olafur's farm, Brekka, the site of the wondrous Olafur story Birdie had told me my first summer in Gimli.
"Brekka is still there?"
Birdie laughed. "Where would it go?"
And multitudes of far distant cousins. Sigga had made a list, Birdie explained, of various people I absolutely had to meet. A lie of course. From time to time, Birdie would toss in little remarks like that-Sigga wanted to make sure I met so-and-so, Mama wanted me to see such-and-suchmeant to validate the trip in my mind. And it worked.
Traveling to Iceland had seemed about as probable to me as flying. Now I was doing both. But as night became morning, I began to understand that there were other reasons for our journey, reasons that went beyond the edification of Freya.
"I had a very bad winter, Freya min. Dark beyond belief. But this trip is going to redeem everything. I'm going to get the letters back."
"Letters?"
"Olafur's letters. The ones he wrote to his uncle Pall back in Iceland after he emigrated. You see, Pall was one of the ones who stayed behind. Swore he'd never abandon his homeland. Pall was a famous poet in his own right, in the farmer-poet tradition, and he mentored Olafur when he was a boy in Iceland. It broke Olafur's heart to leave Pall behind. And so when Olafur left for Canada, he wrote to Pall, every week for ten years, until Pall died. The letters are wondrous, wondrous! Or so I've heard. Remarkable and detailed descriptions of life in the colony, the tragedies that befell New Iceland. The smallpox, the flooding, the frightful freezes. Not to mention the religious disputes that split the colony in two. And of course every letter contained a verse or two composed by Olafur. These were the very letters your amnia Sigga read as a girl when she was growing up in Iceland. She was a cousin by marriage to one of Pall's sons, and worked for a time on their farm at Brekka. Pall was dead by then, of course, but his son had kept Olafur's letters, treasured them, and during the long winter evenings they took turns reading them out loud. It was those letters that convinced Sigga to come to New Iceland and meet the poet Olafur himself."
"And marry him?"
"And marry him. But it was the young man who wrote those letters she fell in love with first. And for the past few years, Sigga and I have been trying to get them back. Me, mainly."
"Why?"
"Why?" Birdie's voice rose. "Why? Because Sigga has a right to see the letters again before she dies. Because they provide invaluable documentation of the early years of the New Iceland colony, through the eyes of a young poet. Because your uncle Stefan needs access to them for the book he's writing on the history of New Iceland. And because I've never read them, that's why!"
"Where are they?" I whispered, hoping to lower the volume of our conversation. Birdie was waking up the other passengers.
"Good question, elskan. Good question. Ulfur thinks he can help us find them. You know who Ulfur is."
I certainly did. I'd never met him, but Birdie talked about him often. Ulfur was a distant cousin of ours, and the great-great-grandson of the farmerpoet Pall. Ulfur had been Birdie's host when she'd spent an entire summer in Iceland in 1964 for the hundredth birthday celebration of our grandfather Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands. According to Birdie, Ulfur had done more than anyone else in Iceland to promote Olafur's reputation. Ulfur and Birdie had worked together, by mail, on a number of translations of Olafur's work into English. And Ulfur was a very important scholar in Iceland. "Ulfur," Birdie boasted, "was almost single-handedly responsible for arranging the return of Iceland's precious Sagas from the Danes."
"But why were Iceland's Sagas in Denmark?"
"Because Denmark ruled Iceland for centuries, they tried to own everything about us, they inserted their words, their spellings, into our language. And they held our ancient manuscripts for safekeeping. But once Iceland was fully independent, they were able to negotiate the return of the manuscripts. The first shipment arrived by boat in 1971. Ulfur sent me a newspaper clipping. Thousands of Icelanders appeared at the harbor in Reykjavik to welcome our hooks home again. The Sagas, the Eddas-back in Iceland at last!"
Ulfur, the way Birdie talked about him, was a near god. Once when she'd been drinking just enough to get dreamy but not enough to get mean, Birdie told me she considered Ulfur myndarlegur. Myndarlegur is a high compliment in Icelandic, encompassing not one but a cluster of appealing traits. Handsome, first and foremost, but also stately, hardworking, skillful, and generous. When I was nine I'd found a photograph of Ulfur in the top drawer of Birdie's vanity. With his black hair and high cheekbones, he looked plenty myndarlegur to me.
"Do you want to marry Ulfur?" I'd asked her. Without, of course, men tioning that I'd found the photograph. Birdie raged at any perceived invasion of her privacy. Much less an actual one.
"Marry Ulfur? He's already married, baby! He's got a wife and children back in Iceland. He's got a boy around your age, as a matter of fact, named Saemundur."
"If Ulfur weren't already married, would you marry him?" I thought she would scoff at that question too, but she didn't. Nor did she answer.
At some point in Birdie's all-night monologue, our stewardess, Steinunn, brought us trays with baked salmon and parsleyed potatoes, a Coke for me, and for Birdie, the first of several miniature bottles of Brennivin. Birdie chatted with Steinunn while I stared out the window at the green sky and orange sun, barely able to nibble my fish.
"If Ulfur knows where the letters are, why doesn't he just give them to you?"
"Good question. Back in Sixty-four, he told me he didn't have them, but that he was sure he could locate them in his father's collection. His father, Johann, has an extensive private collection of Icelandic books and manuscripts. But this past winter I got a letter from Ulfur saying he never found them. That he'd looked everywhere there was to look, even put out a call in Morgunbladid, but the letters never turned up."
"What's Morgunbladid?"
"Iceland's main newspaper. Morning paper. Have you forgotten all the Icelandic I ever taught you? Because you're going to have to start speaking it, you know, as soon as we land. Bara Islensku. Icelandic only."
"Are you going to look for Olafur's letters while we're in Iceland?"
"Bingo! I doubt Ulfur has even tried very hard. He's got other fish to fry, now that he's been made head of the Arni Magnusson Institute. My theory is that the letters are somewhere in Ulfur's father's library. Or else in a trunk in some old lady's farmhouse in East Iceland." She swallowed all in one gulp her third shot of Brennivin. "We're going to find Olafur's letters, Freya min. And we're going to bring them back to Gimli."
13
And then we landed.
And then we landed.
And then we landed.
Three days have passed, Cousin
, and I still cannot bring myself beyond that one line. What I fear most is not that I won't be able to remember the trip with Birdie but that I will. It is wedged deep in my memory, lodged in the nether-crevice that separates not-remembering from forgetting.
Spread here on the table in front of me is a map of Iceland. I searched a dozen bookstores over the past few days before finding one; it would have been easier to locate a map of the moon. It was worth the trouble. It's more than a memory aid: this map reminds me that the trip to Iceland was no glorious dream, no brutal nightmare, but an actual physical journey. Still, as I sit here conjuring, I can't help but wonder if I don't look like my mother, with that befuddled, dream-remembering expression crinkling her face.
And then we landed.
The first thing I remember is sideways rain at dawn. Standing outside the Keflavik Airport attacked by ferocious horizontal wind slamming razorsharp pebbles of water. Velkoinin til Islands! I clutched my cherry red suitcase, exhausted from lack of sleep, hair wet and whipping against my face. Iceland's rain made Gimli's downpour seem mere drizzle.
Next, Ulfur leaping out of a very small European car and running toward us through the rain. His hair was no longer black like in the photograph in Birdie's vanity but brilliant silver-white. With a goatee to match. Still myndarlegur though. Birdie strode to meet him, looking glamorous in her salmon pink coat and head scarf, but if there was any romance between them, I couldn't detect it in that brief rain-soaked airport hug. For me Ulfur had only a brisk nod and a handshake, his eyes veiled behind misted glasses. Then he tossed our luggage in the trunk of his little car.
From the backseat I rubbed clear a spot in the fogged window. What I saw: black earth. Mile after mile of stark black lava fields. No houses no trees no people. Not even a sheep. This was Iceland? Or had we landed on Venus after all? Pluto perhaps? Whichever was most remote from earth.
During the entire drive to Reykjavik, Ulfur and Birdie talked together in the front seat, ignoring me completely. Mostly it was Ulfur who spoke, in low serious tones I was too exhausted to decipher. I kept hearing the word hjonaskilnadur. It was not a word I recognized. Hjon, I knew, meant married couple. Was Ulfur proposing to Birdie? Was that the real purpose of our trip? Then I remembered that Ulfur was married. I studied his face in the rearview mirror. The fog had cleared from his glasses and I could see the color of his eyes, greenish brown, but with dark circles underneath. Not quite as myndarlegur as the photograph, I decided. Yet Birdie could not seem to take her eyes off him. Once she even reached over and took his hand. What would Ulfur's wife think?
Out the window to my left was the ocean; the lava seemed to reach to its very shore. I shuddered in my damp clothes, sucked a strand of my hair. I never said good-bye to Mama, I kept thinking. I never said good-bye. Would Mama have really sent me off to Iceland without saying good-bye? Later, at Ulfur's house, I asked Birdie if we could call Mama.
"Phone Gimli?" Birdie scoffed, in that harsh laugh of hers. "Freya min, it would cost a fortune. It would cost practically as much as a plane ticket. Nobody calls Canada from Iceland."
Then she saw I was crying. "You can write postcards," she conceded. "To Anna, and Sigga, and your uncle Stefan. Every day, baby. Think how thrilled they'll be!"
Her face darkened for a moment. Perhaps she was allowing herself to think of those three, not thrilled but frantic, seared with worry. Later I would learn all about those days. How search parties dove Lake Winnipeg, in case we'd drowned in the storm. Or been struck by lightning. At the police station in Winnipeg after our capture, Birdie would insist that she'd left my mother a note saying exactly where we were going and for how long.
"A note?" My mother screamed. "A note? We never found a note. You never wrote a note!"
"Are you accusing me of lying?"
"Oh, I am," my mother said bitterly. "I most certainly am."
Our entire trip rested on lies that shifted beneath us like tectonic plates and eventually collided. Did your mother believe her own lies? I have to doubt that. It was all too calculated. And what about me? How many of Birdie's lies did I believe? All and none. One part of me still wondered if my mother really knew I was in Iceland. It was a fear that rose up in me at least once a day: Marna! That one word stood for all my doubts. And then I'd push it down. To believe that Birdie had lied seemed worse to me than to believe her. To believe Birdie had lied to me would mean she was practically ... evil. And so I chose belief, fragile as a china cup. Once a day for the entire three weeks I wrote Mama a postcard, every inch crammed with my tiny neat script. Here we are at Thingvellir. Here we are at Gullfoss. Every postcard ending with I miss you, Mama, underlined three times. Birdie gave me beautiful Icelandic stamps to paste into the corners, stamps with horses and puffins and geysers.
Yes, every day I wrote a postcard, and every day instead of mailing it to Canada as she claimed, Birdie stashed the postcard inside the lining of her suitcase. It was Sigga who discovered and delivered them, finally, to Mama. A week after our return. Nineteen cards Mama read all in one sitting, weeping.
Ulfur lived on the edge of a lake in the middle of Reykjavik in a house of books. The house, it turned out, was not Ulfur's but his parents'. He'd moved in with them after his divorce. Hjonaskilnadur, that mysterious word I kept hearing on the ride from the airport. I'd made the mistake of asking what it meant.
"It means I am divorced now," Ulfur had explained from the front seat. "Iceland's divorce rate is soaring, you know. One of your American influences, I suppose. And my ex-wife? She is in Spain, discovering herself. Is that not another of your American trends?" He fixed his gaze on me in the rearview mirror. I smiled uncertainly. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I recognized the tone in his voice: sarcasm, ragged as an unhealed scar. Birdie's weapon of choice, her favorite tongue-sword. No wonder she liked Ulfur so much. I knew by then that sarcastic questions were best left unanswered. Instead I nodded my head vaguely, in a way that could have meant either yes or no. Or nothing. I wasn't sure I liked this Ulfur. I turned and stared out at the lava again. After a half an hour or so, the red- and blueroofed city of Reykjavik came into sight, and we were puttering up cobblestone streets and over a bridge that crossed a lake to the house of books.
Cousin, that house was the most marvelous thing I had ever seen. Not from the outside. From the outside it was a three-story cement facade painted pastel green. But the inside! Books lined every wall of every room. Books climbed up stairs and rested on landings. Books stretched over the arches of doorways like bridges, stood guard over mantels. Old leather-bound volumes with gilt titles gleamed in glass cabinets. Books in the basement, books in the attic. Four stories of books. How many, I wanted to know.
"Nine thousand, six hundred," Ulfur answered. "Approximately. The largest private book collection in Iceland."
Ulfur's father was the book collector, his mother the cataloger. The elderly couple lived on the main floor. Johann was nearly blind, but Lara was still spry enough to climb the ladders and retrieve books for Birdie. Which is pretty much how we spent our first two days in Reykjavik. It rained and rained and rained, sideways and upside down, with huge gusting winds on the lake. "Not a day for touring," Ulfur would announce each morning with a wry smile. I was restless, eager to get on the Ring Road and start seeing the glaciers and volcanoes and waterfalls. But Birdie didn't seem to mind. In fact, she became terrifically excited. Overexcited, my mother would have said. But of course Mama wasn't there. Birdie was in book heaven, flitting from room to room with Lara's tattered catalog in hand, piling books on every floor of the house. When she wasn't retrieving books she was poring over them, reading lines out loud, exclaiming to herself, making scribbled notes on her worn Word Meadow manuscript.
The collection was impressive, even I could see that. And it was pure Icelandica: mythology, history, literature, science, art, folktales, ghost stories, sagas, travelogues, family histories, novels, and poetry. Poetry and more poetry. One whole shelf devoted to our grandfather
Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands; another to his uncle Pall, who was Ulfur's great-great-grandfather. A copy of the first Icelandic Bible. A nineteenth-century Icelandic translation of Hamlet. A seventeenth-century copy of Saemundur's Edda. One whole room with four walls of Icelandic Sagas. Ones I knew of, like Laxdaela Saga, Njal's Saga, Egil's Saga. And dozens more I'd never heard of. I remember Birdie at midnight, perched in a window seat reading a vellum manuscript by the light of the midnight sun.
Myself, I was drawn to Johann's collection of old and rare maps that hung on the wall of the front entrance to the house. Maps of Iceland through the ages, more lively and colorful than the map now folded open in front of me, with its geologically correct gradations of blue, white, green. My favorite was a sixteenth-century map that showed Mount Hekla with red flames leaping from its cone; underneath, in Latin, the words Entrance to Hell. A giant sea monster lurked offshore, men in boats harpooned whales. The maps were displayed in chronological order. If you compared the first with the last, you could see that in the beginning the Icelanders had not yet discerned the shape of their own island, its jagged fjord-addled circumference.
Books and rain, books and rain: those were our first two days in Iceland. And visitors. Nearly as many as the books. They dropped by for morning coffee and for lunch and for afternoon coffee and for dinner and for evening coffee. Always beginning with a discussion of who was related to whom and how. Birdie had brought Sigga's Blue Book with us, and of course Ulfur's parents had genealogy books and charts. Once the establishment of kinship was complete-discussions I quickly abandoned trying to follow-the relatives would turn their attention to me.
The Tricking of Freya Page 12
