The Tricking of Freya

by Christina Sunley

  The Summerhouse Days. That's how I came to think of them later. As much as I tried not to. Some memories refuse oblivion. In the Summerhouse Days, Birdie was in high spirits. Too high. The kind of free-spiraling high from which you can only free-fall crash and burn. I should have recognized the signs: the rapid speech, the frenetic flow of ideas. Birdie's getting talky, my mother would have said, if she'd been there. Birdie's going over. But Mama wasn't there, Birdie had made sure of that. And to my mind Birdie seemed nothing less than magnificent in the Summerhouse Days. Cheeks apple bright, eyes sparkling like sun on lake. Everything was about to happen for Birdie: she was about to recover her father's long-lost letters. Ulfur was about to read her years-long manuscript and declare it brilliant and pass it along to the loud bearded publisher Sveinn. Word Meadow, Birdie confided to me, was on the verge of great acclaim on both sides of the ocean. Even the weather was splendid in the Summerhouse Days. By Icelandic standards, anyway. Which means it rained daily but never all day long. And at least once each day (or night) we glimpsed bare and unclouded sun, sometimes for hours at a time. Weather is Iceland's only true god, and truly fickle in the way of all gods. In the Summerhouse Days the weather god was merciful.

  How many days? I can't say exactly. A week or more. Sure, I could figure it out by checking the daily postcards I wrote to Gimli. But they're buried deep in a storage locker in Queens, along with the rest of my mother's belongings, which I packed up after she died and never looked at again.

  Yes, I pay a monthly rent to store my dead mother's things. In case I should want.

  I don't.

  So, we'll estimate here. And really, what does day mean when you're talking about an Icelandic summer? Every day was like two in one. More happened to me in those Summerhouse Days than in a whole Gimli summer or an entire humdrum year of school in Connecticut.

  I may share your mother's penchant for exaggeration, but I hope you'll believe me when I say those Summerhouse Days were the happiest of my life. Yet the beginning of that trip was inauspicious. The morning of departure, the morning after the dinner party and my faulty recital, Birdie and I rose early. Out our third-floor window I saw for the first time since our arrival in Iceland blue sky. The colored rooftops of Reykjavik were set against white-capped Mount Esja, the lake shimmered in sunlight. Leaving Birdie upstairs to do her makeup, I raced down to breakfast, then came to a halt outside the kitchen door. Ulfur and Saemundur were arguing.

  "All summer you've been complaining that we don't go to the summerhouse. And now we are finally going and you don't want to come?"

  "Exactly." Saemundur's tone was calm and defiant.

  "Explain that!"

  "For me you're too busy to go. But now the American Princess arrives, the American Princess and the Canadian Queen, now you have time to go to the summerhouse. Anything for the daughter and granddaughter of the great Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands! For me, for Mama you have no time. Only for consorting with the descendants of dead poets. And recovering precious manuscripts. It won't be so easy, will it, recovering your wife? Your son?"

  Long silence.

  Then Saemundur, again: "You don't trust me to stay here without you?"

  "Trust you? How can I trust you after-"

  Then a hand on my shoulder: Ulfur's mother, Lara. "Come, elslean," she said, loudly enough to interrupt the argument. Silence fell in the kitchen and we entered the room. Lara led me to the table and to my horror seated me next to Saemundur. The table was laid with sliced brown bread, boiled eggs, cheese, cured lamb. Delicious skyr, a bit like yogurt, a bit like sour cream. But I wasn't hungry. The American Princess: Saemundur meant me. Was that how he thought of me? As a spoiled goody-goody who recites for company? Ulfur greeted me with a gruff good morning, but Saemundur didn't say a word, didn't even glance at me. I tried not to look directly at him either, though I couldn't help notice his wiry tightrope walker arms reaching rudely past me for bread, meat, cheese, coffee. I stared at my empty white plate, let my hair fall in my face. Even when Birdie came to the table I didn't look up. I allowed her to fill up my plate like I was a child who couldn't choose for herself.

  Unlike Stefan's roomy Rambler, Ulfur's car was European and compact. Saemundur and I sat in back leaning against opposite doors, faces pressed out opposite windows. Yet our long legs cramped at odd angles verged perilously close. We'd each adopted a similar strategy: by pretending to sleep, we wouldn't have to talk, not to each other or to Ulfur and Birdie up front. I missed the scenery that morning, for the sake of that huddled silence. Birdie leaned over the front seat and stared at us, then turned back to Ulfur.

  "They're sleeping. Both of them." She used the word krakkanar, which means something like kids.

  "Saemundur's no kid, but he acts like one. Rejects any kind of responsibility or authority."

  "How Icelandic of him!"

  "What do you mean?" Ulfur sounded defensive.

  "I only meant ... you're a fiercely independent people."

  Was she referring to the famous book by Halldor Laxness, Independent People? I was supposed to be sleeping so I couldn't ask.

  "Independent, yes," Ulfur agreed, "but on the other hand, we are a very responsible society."

  "Oh yes, so duglegur!" That favorite word for hardworking.

  "I'd like to see more of that trait in Saemundur. He is barely passing in school. I tell you, he is a boy who is refusing to grow up. Reckless. Like that incident I told you about last summer."

  I sensed Saemundur stiffen beside me. I hoped Ulfur would say more, but he fell silent and Saemundur relaxed again.

  "And Freya," Birdie said. "She is too grown up for her age. She doesn't let herself act like a child."

  "She does seem awfully serious, for an American girl."

  I held my breath. I was afraid Birdie would reveal my whole story. And what did Ulfur mean, an American girl? That seemed to sum up precisely what he thought of me. I was a child, a girl, an American. He'd hardly said a word to me directly the entire visit. I could see why Saemundur resented him, but Birdie couldn't seem to get enough of him. I continued listening as their conversation shifted to a discussion of where we would go on our trip to the East to find Olafur's letters. Who to visit, where to search ... I tried to follow, but Saemundur pulled my attention like a magnet. Even in my blind silence it was impossible to erase his presence. I could smell him, an intoxicating mix of stale cigarette smoke, grimy jeans, boy-sweat. Once, his leg fell against mine. I let it stay. Warming then burning at the point of contact. He was truly sleeping now, and I could take him in surreptitiously through half-closed eyes. The raven-black hair that fell in waves to his shoulders. The high planes of his cheeks. The dark slashes of his brows. His wide mouth, set tight all morning, now loosening, lips full and slightly parted. His moon eyes eclipsed by closed lids. And beyond him the strange swirling land.

  Then the car hit a bump and he jolted awake and caught me staring. Flashed me a dirty-moon glare and jerked his leg back.

  I must have slept too. When I woke we were driving along a lake, and for a confused moment I thought I was back in Gimli. Except this was a lake of a different order, a lake bordered not by sand and scrub and spruce forests but by bare rocky plains and distant mountains.

  "Thingvallavatn," Ulfur announced. "The largest lake in Iceland. It may look calm to you at the moment, but it can turn rough in the blink of an eye.

  Lake u'eather shifts fast.

  After following the lakeside for a few miles we turned onto a dirt road which eventually narrowed into a driveway. Saemundur was awake now too, and when Ulfur stopped the car at a wooden gate, Saemundur leapt out and opened it. He turned his face toward the lake as we drove through. Ulfur stopped to let him back in the car, but Saemundur waved him off. Out the rear window I watched Saemundur latch the gate and walk slowly toward the house.

  Ulfur's summerhouse was plain blond wood, set on stilts. Tall grasses grew up around it. Out front was a tan mud-clotted jeep. Jeppi. We would use it for touring
, Ulfur explained. I peered inside. I'd never ridden in a jeep. The keys were dangling in the ignition.

  "Couldn't somebody steal it?" I asked. "When you're not here?"

  Ulfur laughed. "That, fortunately, is one of your American trends we have yet to adopt!"

  Inside, everything was made of the same simple blond wood. A large plate-glass window framed an expanse of lake and mountains. I had the feeling Birdie had been to the house before-she glanced around with a wistful smile, then carried her things into a bedroom. I was still staring out the window. "It's beautiful here," I said, to no one in particular.

  "Too bad it's sitting empty all summer," Saemundur answered, without looking at me, but clearly in response to what I'd said. Did that count as speaking to me?

  "We're here now," Ulfur replied. "So enjoy it."

  First lunch, Ulfur announced. Then Thingvellir. Thingvellir, it turned out, was just a short drive from the summerhouse. Thing means parliament, vel- lir means plains; Thingvellir is the site of the ancient parliamentary gathering. "Thingvellir," Ulfur proclaimed, is the single most important place in Iceland. The history of Thingvellir," he continued, "is the history of Iceland."

  Thingvellir! Birdie winked at me across the table. All through the years, whenever we came across a reference to Thingvellir in a story or a poem or a conversation, Birdie would say, "I'm going to take you there, elskan. Just wait. Someday I'll take you to Thingvellir."

  And now we were going. I felt a sudden burst of love for Birdie. If it weren't for her I would never have come here, never had a chance to see Thingvellir with my own eyes. Mama would certainly never bring me, Mama who was afraid to fly, Mama who was old before her time. With a twinge of guilt I realized I would see something my mother never would. Like when I was four years old, scaling the giant maple and peering down at earthbound Mama far below.

  Unlike me, Saemundur seemed not to care about visiting Thingvellir. I watched him devour two sandwiches in large, rushed bites without speaking, without seeming to hear a single thing his father said. Then he tipped his head back and took a long chug of milk that emptied his glass, wiped his mouth with his sleeve, and stated that he had no desire to go to the single most important place in Iceland. He's been a million times. He could stay home and fish for trout on the lake and have dinner ready by the time we returned. Then he smiled, and in that smile I could see it was all a joke to him. Suddenly, I was no longer entranced with Saemundur. I was tired of his sulking and brooding, his surly remarks. This was my trip, not his. My only chance to see Iceland. "Then don't come," I wanted to say. "Stay home and fish. Drown, if you like." But of course I said nothing, and at first neither did Ulfur. Then he folded his napkin and stood up from the table. To me and Birdie he said, "Bring warm jackets. It gets windy at Thingvellir." Then he turned to Saemundur. "Start up the jeep. We'll be out in a minute."

  When we got outside, Saemundur was sitting behind the wheel of the jeep and Ulfur was next to him up front.

  And that was that.

  16

  I want to take you to Thingvellir once I find you. Birdie would have wanted that for you. In the meantime you'll have to make do with mere words.

  Thingvellir, Cousin, is no Parthenon. There are no majestic ruins to behold; there were never any buildings in the first place: no columns, no arches, no roofs to support. Thingvellir is simply a seam of our planet, a raw and jagged spot on a volcanic plain, split by rocky chasms and chunky fault lines, surrounded by distant mountains, veined by river, and bordered by lake. Complete with the requisite waterfall. These were pagans, remember, who held their rudimentary parliament here each summer. In bare nature they worshiped, and so it should not be surprising that in bare nature they convened their government. But first they had to discover a need for one.

  In the beginning, as Ulfur explained it to us that day, the settlers were lawless, and proud of it. They had arrived in Iceland at the end of the ninth century seeking freedom from Norway's tyrannical King Harald. Iceland was empty, save for a scattering of Irish monks. The immigrants could do what they liked. And what they liked was to be kingless. The settlers lived together in homesteads consisting of families, servants, and slaves under the power of local chieftains, who provided a localized sort of justice.

  But after a while-maybe fifty years or so the settlers began to feel the need, if not for a king, then for a common law. There were disputes, and no universal method of resolution. Law was necessary, they agreed, and they set about devising not only a set of laws but a government as well.

  "In the end," Ulfur continued, "Thingvellir was the spot they selected for the convening of the first parliament, the Althing."

  We were standing then, the four of us, at the Law Rock, from which the law-speaker annually recited Iceland's laws from memory. Behind us rose the steep wall of Almannagja (everyman's chasm), below us the remains of the stone booths inhabited by the godi-pagan chieftains doubling as parliamentary representatives-during the two weeks of the Althing.

  "And you should not imagine," Ulfur went on, raising his voice over the rising wind, "that the annual Althing was an occasion only of solemn courts and heated legal wrangling. There were contests of sport and wit, telling of tales and reciting of poems, matchmaking and courting, drinking, and of course fighting. It must have been a lively scene indeed."

  I looked out across the plain. A blue tourist bus had pulled up and was unloading passengers at the Thingvellir church, a nineteenth-century addition to the old pagan site. The dark clouds that had been stuck to the distant mountains like magnets were now being drawn toward us at dizzying speed. I realized we were down to three. "Where's Saemundur?"

  Ulfur turned and stared down the Almannagja chasm, first south no Saemundur-then north. There he was, leaning over a bridge.

  "What's he doing?"

  "Visiting the Drowning Pool, I imagine. His favorite spot."

  I left Birdie and Ulfur at the Law Rock. By the time I reached Saemundur he was climbing along the rocks below the bridge, his black hair whipped by the wind. I peered into the pool of clear water, which seemed scarcely deep enough for drowning, then followed Saemundur down the rocks to the pool's edge, clambering as nimbly, I hoped, as a mountain goat. Proving myself no princess. Not that Saemundur noticed. He glanced up at me only once, then returned to staring into the pool. I squatted next to him.

  "I'm looking for bones," he said at last.

  "Whose? Who drowned here?"

  "Many people. Women, I should say. Men they beheaded, but women they drowned. The pool was deeper back then. They pushed the women and held them underwater with a pole until they drowned."

  "Why" -?

  "Babies out of wedlock. Sorcery. Although most of the supposed witches in Iceland were men.

  "That was how the Althing used their laws?"

  "Well, by that time the Danes had taken over Iceland, so it was Danish judges who came here and passed the verdicts of drowning."

  "What about children?"

  "What about them?"

  "If men were beheaded and women were drowned, what happened to children who committed crimes?"

  "I don't know. I've never heard of such a thing. Children committing crimes!" He looked at me, I said nothing. "Why, have you committed a crime, young Freya? An innocent such as you?"

  I blushed. "I'm not innocent," I mumbled, as if to imply I led a secret life of crime-I didn't of course; that came later but I wanted Saemundur to think so.

  He threw a stone into the pool and watched it sink. Around us rose the sound of water burbling from the stream into the pool. Farther off I heard a louder rush. "Is that the waterfall?"

  "It's upstream."

  We climbed up a steep trail to the top of the Almannagja chasm. Sac- mundur was wearing his jeans jacket with the colored patches, and as I scrambled to keep up with him I could see that the patches represented different countries.

  "Have you been to all those places?" I asked as we climbed.

  "What?" he shouted. />
  The wind had scattered my words far across the plains. It blew even more wildly from the top of the chasm, where the view seemed to sprawl across half the planet. I felt breathless, from the view and the climb and this unexpected proximity to Saemundur. I reached over and touched one of the patches, a windmill.

  "Last summer." He smiled at the memory. "Holland, France, Italy, even Portugal."

  "You saw all those places in one summer?"

  He nodded.

  "That's amazing."

  "My parents didn't think so."

  "Why not?"

  "I went by myself."

  "You ran away?"

  "You could call it that. But I sent them postcards. I was always planning to come back. To tell the truth, I hardly thought they'd miss me. They were too busy fighting and divorcing and all that. I hitchhiked all over Europe by myself."

  For a moment I was too awed to speak.

  "I don't know what my father was so upset about. I mean, his precious saga character Egil Skallagrimsson took off on Viking expeditions at twelve years of age. But my father hasn't forgiven me. He says he'll never trust me again.

  I nodded, thrilled by this sudden intimacy. Yet I couldn't imagine doing such a thing, not telling my mother where I was, even for a few hours. A sudden fear rose up in me: Marna! We were walking along the ridge of the chasm, side by side, heading north to the falls. Mama knows where I am, I assured myself. Doesn't she?

  And then we were standing on the edge of the waterfall. Far off I could see Birdie and Ulfur by the Law Rock. Saemundur leaned against a large stone on the very edge of the falls and lit a filterless cigarette, cupping his hand and bending his entire body around it to block out the wind. I wondered if his parents knew he smoked, even let him smoke, but I didn't ask. I didn't want to sound like a princess.