"And what do you think of Iceland?" they'd ask, in perfect English.
If I forgot myself and responded in English, Birdie elbowed me. Unlike at home, where Sigga and Birdie were always quick to correct me, these strangers seemed awed that I spoke even a word of their language. My accent, they exclaimed, was flawless. My vocabulary impressive. The grammar, yes, that is difficult. That will come.
At the time I was bewildered by the attention; now I understand how few people in the world attempt to learn Icelandic. It made me something of a star, and I was happy, for once, to let myself shine. A Frey-Star.
14
On the evening of our second day in Reykjavik, Ulfur and his parents held a dinner party in our honor. Yes, the occasion made me nervous, with its echoes of our welcome-to-Gimli disaster party six years earlier. But I was a different person now. The girl who turned the cartwheel was Before Freya. Now I was After Freya, a restrained, contained shadow of my former self. Expect no fateful gymnastics, Cousin. No ambulances, no mothers in comas.
Not to say that nothing happened. Much did. One thing in particular. A thing by the name of Saemundur. Rhymes with eye-moon-lure. Saemundur was Ulfur's sixteen-year-old son, who was living with his father while his mother was finding herself in Spain. (At the time it seemed strange to me, this idea of locating your lost self in another country. A place where you'd never been. It no longer seems so odd.) Ulfur's other children were in their twenties, both in graduate school in the States, but Saemundur was like me, a late-in-life child. If he existed at all-something I was beginning to doubt. Two days we'd been at the house of books and still no sign of Saemundur. "Out with his friends," Ulfur would explain apologetically. "Or so he says. He has not adjusted well to this divorce of ours. He blames it on me. He'd rather be in Spain with his mother. He'd rather be anywhere, he says, except here with me.
Saemundur's room was in the basement and had its own entrance. And exit. Only once had I caught a glimpse of him, from a third-floor window as he headed out through the front garden, across the street, and over the bridge in a rainstorm. Saemundur from the back at a distance in the rain: Lanky. Long black hair blowing in the wind. Wearing a blue jeans jacket decorated with brightly colored patches. It gave him a clownish air, as if he were an escapee from the circus. I watched him lope across the bridge like a tightrope walker, long arms swaying for balance against gusts of wind and slanting rain. And then he vanished on the other side, and I hadn't seen him since.
For this special dinner Saemundur was expected, Ulfur announced. And he'd better show up. I was hoping he would. I wanted to see his face.
Two long tables were set with sparkling china and gleaming silver and tall candlesticks. "It's fancy," I said to Birdie. "Are they rich?"
"They are indeed. Not Ulfur but his father. Johann was a Shell executive. Big money."
A shell executive. Maybe in Iceland you could get rich trading precious shells? I didn't have a chance to ask because the guests began arriving, nearly twenty of them. Some were relatives I'd met already, or not; others were people with an interest in Olaf ur's work: the chair of the Icelandic Literature Department at the university; a number of contemporary poets; the head of the National Library. Ulfur's mother, Lara, and a few other women had control of the kitchen; as usual, Birdie took no interest in that. I remember cream of lobster soup served in large white tureens, a platter with the largest whole salmon I'd ever seen, lamb that tasted like an entirely different breed of meat. Toasts were made, to me and Birdie, to Olafur, to Iceland, to Canada. Steal! the guests would cry, then lock eyes before drinking. Only one seat at the table remained empty: Saemundur's. Ulfur would glance over at it and shake his head angrily. I too stared-would I never meet the mysterious Saemundur?
The dinner party conversation was fast-paced and often heated; I followed it only in fragments. What I do remember is Ulfur dominating the discussion.
No sooner were we rid of the Danes then along carne the Americans.
-They've never owned us.
-But theyve got their army base here.
We're in NATO, what do you expect?
Exactly. And I'm not alone. Remember the anti-NATO riots of fortynine?
-Without NATO who would protect us?
An Icelandic army?
We could be neutral ...
-And who do we need to be protected from? We kicked the British out of our waters for good just two years ago. We didn't need the U. S. army for that.
-Cod Wars are different from Cold Wars, Ulfur minn.
And another argument, equally heated, about the Canadian immigrants. One of the guests had flown to Canada to attend the hundredth anniversary celebration of the Icelandic settlement in Gimli.
-You should see this festival they have Islendingadagurinn, they call it. Much honor paid to their pioneers.
I don't see what's to honor them for, Ulfur said.
I agree-abandoning our country in its time of need!
-They had no choice. They were starving.
-And there was the eruption, the terrible ashfall.
And besides, they made more room for everyone else. That region in the East was overpopulated. It couldn't sustain all those people. After the immigrants left, conditions improved.
-They didn't know that at the time!
Who knows anything at the time?
-It's easy enough to look back and call them traitors.
-And I say call them adventurers in the old Viking style. This was not the first time our people voyaged to North America. Remember when the Norse settled Vinland one thousand years ago?
Really, can the emigration have been so terrible, if it produced the great poet Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands?
Canada didn't produce him! Ulfur had become red in the face. Iceland produced him. As you well know, he was mentored here in Iceland by his uncle Pall. Olafur is an Icelandic poet through and through.
I disagree. He was only a child when he left.
-But he wrote all his poetry in Icelandic. Using Icelandic verse forms. And traditions.
Poetry about the life in Canada.
-And his childhood in Iceland, don't forget.
Birdie, who'd been oddly quiet during these discussions, stepped in. "My father was a man of two lands. He saw himself as straddling the ocean, one foot in Iceland, the other in Canada. And speaking of Olafur, Freya would like to recite for you one of his greatest works."
I felt Birdie nudge me with her foot from across the table. Luckily, she had warned me in advance of her plans. I'd tried to object, but Birdie had insisted. "How else are you to repay their hospitality?"
How else indeed? I got up from the table and stood in front of the fireplace with my hands behind my back, as Birdie had instructed me to do. Everyone was watching me: the dinner guests, the gallery of ancestor photos behind me on the mantel. And Saemundur's empty chair. I set my eyes on it and was about to open my mouth when out of the corner of my eye I saw Birdie gesturing wildly with her hair-the signal that I was to push my own long hair off my face. "You hide behind that hair like a veil," Birdie would say. I tucked my hair behind my ears and began. It was Olafur's signature "New Iceland Song," a poem of eighteen stanzas that I'd worked on memorizing all summer. (I wonder now if Birdie had been preparing me for just this occasion. In fact I'm sure of it, as sure as I can be of anything related to that trip.)
Olafur's "New Iceland Song" was the most difficult piece I'd memorized yet, but I'd been grateful for the challenge. In the past year I'd begun to tire of Old Gisli's funny verses and lying rhymes. I did not refer to them as apa- mensskubragur (baboonish nonsense) or arnaleir (eagle muck), no. But I was coming to appreciate Olafur's complex phrasing, the subtle musicality of his lines, his command of the Icelandic language, which seemed in his hand a different order of language altogether.
"New Iceland Song" recounted the immigrants' saga, from their beginnings as impoverished but literate peasants on their remote island, then the sun-obliterating fall of ash, Askja's
terrible eruption, which as a child Olafur had mistaken for the onslaught of the mythic Ragnarok, destruction of the world. How haunting was the fourth stanza, echoing the words of the ancient poem Voluspa: The sun turns black, fumes reek, cast down from heaven are the hot stars ... And then the journey, these once-accomplished seafarers no longer at the prow of a Viking ship but stuck deep in the hold, seasick and bereft and clinging frantically to the feeble dream of a new life in a new land. And that first year in Canada-one child after another buried from the smallpox, the entire colony quarantined, struggling to build clumsy log shelters before the first storms of winter-storms more bitter and freezing than any they had known in Iceland. Then in the midst of hardship the settlers scraping together funds for nothing other than a printing press! To outsiders perhaps a strange act by a strange people, for words are not food on the table. Unless you're an Icelander-then the words, the stories, the poems in your language are what sustains you. Oh, how beautifully phrased was the last line of that stanza, and I paused there, dared to lift my eyes from Saemundur's empty chair and pass them over the tables where the guests were listening, rapt. A few even had tears running down their cheeks. How thrilled I was in that moment. I thought of Mama and Sigga and Stefan, and Olafur, Skald Nyja islands, how proud they'd be to see me here in Iceland, reciting the poet's greatest work! I opened my mouth to begin the next stanza.
And then I saw him. He stood in the doorway that led from the back stairs to the living room, leaning against the threshold in his jeans jacket, arms folded across his chest, head cocked to one side. His hair was so black and his skin so white he seemed nothing more or less than a ghost. From across the room I could see his eyes, the color of moon. The strange green moon of some other planet. Not ours.
Across his wide full lips was something like a smile. A smile with a twist. A smirk? I imagined suddenly that I looked like a fool. A foolish girlchild reciting for the grown-ups. I heard Birdie prompt me with the first words of the next stanza, and somehow I stumbled through the rest of it. My concentration was broken. I let my hair fall across my face. I squinted my eyes and stared at my feet. And when it was over and I finally looked up, the first thing I saw was the empty doorway. And Saemundur's empty chair. No one else had seen him, I realized. Not the guests or Birdie or his father, who certainly would have had something to say. Sly Saemundur and his vanishing act!
Birdie was staring at me quizzically: What went wrong? I looked away, hurried back to my seat. I had failed, I had stumbled. My cheeks burned. But the guests were clapping and murmuring and smiling at me. Luckily my performance was quickly overshadowed by the conversation that followed. A conversation, I understand now, that was no accident but entirely orchestrated by Birdie to bolster her cause with Ulfur. That she chose that particular poem for me to recite-that too was part of her plan. Unless I am becoming as paranoid as Birdie herself. But no, that poem would easily lead the dinner table conversation exactly where she wanted it to go, and it did.
"What a marvelous poem!" someone remarked.
"And the only one he wrote, was it not, about the early life of the colony?"
"Interesting you should say that." It was Birdie speaking. "Actually, there are others. But they seem to be lost."
"Lost? What do you mean lost?"
Birdie had the attention of the entire table now. She paused a moment, looking carefully around the room, then began speaking in an urgent, almost conspiratorial tone. "After Olafur left Iceland as a child, he wrote a series of letters to his uncle Pall, during the first ten years he was in Canada. In the letters he enclosed poems, mostly juvenilia, of course, but some may have been better than that, composed in his early twenties, when his talent was truly flourishing."
"You have seen these letters, these poems?" The man who asked this question I remember clearly. He had a full beard, a loud voice, and he was head of the largest publishing house in Iceland. His name was Sveinn.
"Me? No. But my mother has. She heard them read out loud when she was a child on Pall's farm. Pall had died by then, but his son treasured the letters, and the poems."
"But where are they now?" Sveinn demanded.
"My question exactly!" Birdie paused, dramatically, then looked over at Ulfur. Ulfur pushed his glasses up to the top of his nose.
"I always thought they were here," Ulfur explained. "In my father's collection."
"Are they not listed in Lara's catalog?" Sveinn was growing increasingly alarmed.
"No, they're not published. Not in book form. I was sure I'd seen them, in a homemade binding, somewhere ..."
Sveinn turned now to Ulfur's elderly father. "Johann, what do you say to this?"
"I say I've never seen them. Anyone claiming these were in my possession, that is nonsense."
A silence fell over the table. "I have come to Iceland," Birdie began, to find these lost letters and early poems of my father. Ulfur has kindly promised to help."
"Where will you start?" someone asked.
"In the East. Some of Pall's people still live there."
Ulfur brightened. "Yes, yes, I think there is a good chance the letters will be found in a trunk in an old farmhouse. Mystery solved!"
"And then you will need a publisher," Sveinn suggested, more calmly.
"Oh, absolutely," Birdie said. "And I'll translate them into English myself. A double volume, of letters and poems."
"And what of your own work, Ingibjorg?" Sveinn again.
Birdie hesitated. "It is nearing completion. Whether it is worthy of your attention ... well, I'll leave that to Ulfur to decide. He has promised to read it." She winked at me, acknowledgment of her false modesty. To me she'd confided her belief that it might be the greatest poem ever written in Icelandic. Perhaps the greatest poem ever!
"Yes," Ulfur said, recovering from his embarrassment over the letters. "We are taking a bit of a vacation, now that the weather is clearing. Tomorrow we leave for the summerhouse at Thingvellir Lake. And from there we will show our young Freya the sights, and I will read Ingibjorg's manuscript the manuscript of the daughter of Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands!"
"And then we'll head east," Birdie added. "To look for the letters."
This was all news to me. I could scarcely take it in. My cheeks were still burning with shame. Worse things had happened to me than forgetting the line of a poem, but at that moment I couldn't remember what they were. How stupid I must have looked standing there with my mouth open in front of all the guests! In front of Saemundur Sly Ghost.
While the guests drank coffee I slipped away from the table, but instead of heading up the stairs to the guest room on the third floor, I took the back stairway down to the basement. There were two doors: one led to the outside, the other to Saemundur's room. I stood for I don't know how long in darkness outside Saemundur's door. I was afraid to switch on the light. I listened. My heart beat. I tried not to breathe. Then I heard a sound in his room, and I bolted out the back door and into the garden.
Ulfur was right: things were clearing up. For the first time since my arrival I could see sky. It was nearly midnight but there was no darkness, only clear sky and dim sun. I stared out at the lake, imagining Saemundur crossing it like a tightrope walker. I thought about his moonish eyes. Searched the sky for moon and saw none. Where did the moon go on these sunstruck nights?
Back in my bedroom it was too bright to sleep, and I lay awake for hours envisioning Saemundur's face in my mind. Like a mime, with his wide expressive mouth, his high cheekbones. A mime, a clown, a tightrope walker. Haunting me like a ghost. Eye-moon-lure, I whispered. Eye-moon-lure.
15
Nothing, not even Birdie's magical spiel on the airplane, could have prepared me for what lay beyond Reykjavik. Iceland is land alive, the earth split open, forming and re-forming before your eyes. Vast vistas of swirling black and neon green moss-drenched lavascapes. Volcanoes in all directions and at every stage of existence: smoldering, dormant, extinct. Glaciers on the move, their hoary tongues licking the edges of
meadows. Water falling everywhere, trickling spilling clamoring rumbling down rocky crevices and canyons. And spitting up boiling hot from holes in the ground. Meandering through this riot of lava and ice and emerald slopes as if it were the most ordinary scenery in the world: wild horses, stout-bellied and thick-maned, peering out from behind fringed bangs. And the ubiquitous sheep, with their spiraling horns and shaggy dreadlocked coats. "We're outnumbered," Birdie would say when we'd round a bend and confront six sheep napping in the roadway. By this she meant the fact that there are more sheep than people in Iceland. Far more. Everywhere you go it's sheep agraze: munching grass on top of turf-roofed ruins, nipping at odd bits of growth in barren lava fields, hoofing it up the rocky bank of a waterfall. "We let them roam free," Ulfur explained. "And this is why they taste so good. The lava moss gives them a particular flavor. So we give our sheep the run of the island."
I wanted the run of the island. I'd never seen nature so wild. I was used to the timid rolling hills of Connecticut, the flat scrubby shore of Lake Winnipeg. Forests. In Iceland there are no trees to speak of.
"Trees get in the way," Ulfur explained. "They block the view."
Trees can't grow in Iceland. That's the truth of it. Little does.
But I could grow there. I felt myself expanding. For the first time since Mama's accident, I had no dutiful routines, no canes to keep track of, no Mama to tend. It freed and it terrified. I began wearing my hair pulled back. The wind made me do it in Iceland it never stops blowing-and at first I felt bare-faced. Then Birdie touched her fingertips to my cheekbones.
You're a beauty, she told me.
Me a beauty? I shook my head laughing, but during those days at Ulfur's summerhouse, I allowed myself to believe it. Or at least to consider the possibility. The landscape itself emboldened me. I spoke up more, dropped my shield of shyness and silence. I began to speak only Icelandic, then to think and even dream in it.
The Tricking of Freya Page 13
