The Tricking of Freya

by Christina Sunley

  As we reached the rim of the caldera she took my hand. Far below us down a sheer slope of scree lay a milky green pool. Saemundur had told us about it: Viti-an Icelandic word for hell-was the crater formed when the volcano collapsed in on itself a hundred years earlier. Olafur's eruption.

  "Greetings, light-mother!" Birdie called out. I shivered with shame though there was no one to hear or see. And then to my horror she began making her way down the slope, half-scrambling, half-sliding. The mink fur fastened to her belt swung wildly. She was halfway down before I could bring myself to follow. This will be it, I told myself. This is why we have come. Birdie would dunk herself in the steaming waters of Viti and emerge reborn. And then we could climb back up the scree and down the other side and if we were lucky and there was enough gas left we'd make our way back through the treacherous Odadahraun to Egilsstadir. Then Reykjavik. Then home to Gimli.

  At the bottom of the slope Birdie disrobed. Animal pelts first, then salmon pink coat. Then wrinkled blouse and pants, bra and underwear, socks and boots. "Naked as the day I was born," she yelled gleefully, then plunged in, laughing and splashing. "And they say there's no going back to the womb!" Around us towered the ugly scraped raw rock of the caldera. Birdie swam out toward the middle, a pale spot of flesh in milkish water.

  She emerged skin steaming and began to dress. No clothes this time, only the stolen sealskin draped over her shoulders. She was a volva now, sitting on a rock that jutted over the pool of water, the antler gripped in one hand. She began chanting herself into trance. A poem of some sort, the words seemed to rhyme. Her voice was melodious with an undercurrent of urgency. I sat mute at the water's edge, sucking salty licorice. The words went on and on. Was she chanting the poem Voluspa? Her own Word Meadow?

  I listened for as long as I could, until my entire body shook with cold and my feet turned numb in the snow. We could die out here. It was the end of August. The roads to the interior would close soon, that much I knew. Saemundur had said so. Askja might not see visitors again until next summer. And what would they find? A pile of bones wrapped in mink stoles and sealskin.

  I stood up. Stared Birdie in the eye. She didn't blink, continued chanting. I braced myself against the wind and began scrambling up the scree.

  21

  I was found the next day inside Saemundur's sleeping bag in the middle of Askja Way, lying between the twin ruts of jeep tracks. Not by tourists or scientists but by a search and rescue crew. In the midst of the Odadahraun. Twelve miles from Askja, they say. I must have walked it, but I don't remember. Honestly. For once, I truly don't.

  For my life, I have Saemundur to thank. Askja was his idea. The last sighting of us had been at the gas station in Egilsstadir. After that, nothing. We should not have been hard to miss in Ulfur's tan jeep, a blond woman in a pink coat and a teenage girl in a patched jeans jacket whose photos were plastered on TV and in newspapers across the country. But there were no sightings, anywhere. Vanished into thin air, the headlines claimed.

  That's when Askja crossed Saemundur's mind. At first Ulfur thought it preposterous that Birdie and I could travel to Askja by ourselves ... until Saemundur confessed to the secret driving lessons. Ulfur called the police. A search crew left from Akureyri, the only other place in Iceland aside from Reykjavik that could reasonably be called a city. Two sets of two men in Land Rovers. After waking me, questioning me, feeding me a hard-boiled egg and a piece of bread, they laid me in the back of one of the vehicles covered in blankets and drove me to Akureyri. I was in shock. The other group continued on to Askja in search of Birdie. You have to find her, I insisted. Over and over. Please. I felt I'd betrayed her. Abandoned her. If she didn't survive it would be my fault. And if she did?

  At the hospital in Akureyri I was treated for exposure. Many people came to visit me. Eirikur and Hrefna, our schoolteacher hosts from Brekka. A woman named Thorunn, who said she was Sigga's niece. Even a television crew. Plus Ulfur and Saemundur. Everyone so sorry for what had happened to me. Especially the Wolf. But I didn't feel like a victim, I felt like a criminal again. I pretended to sleep whenever someone entered the room. Once I opened my eyes and Saemundur was standing above me with his dark waving hair. Eye-moon-lure. He smiled with his wide mime grin and I forgot myself and smiled back. I told him I had his jacket. He said I could keep it. I talked to my mother and Sigga by phone once a day.

  Birdie's mania reached its peak in the hospital in Akureyri. She was revved so high she nearly expired, her heart beating so fast it almost burst. I heard two nurses discussing her in the hallway outside my room. Shortly after, the mania collapsed into severe depression and Birdie was transferred to Klepp, the mental hospital in Reykjavik.

  A few days later I was flown from Akureyri to Reykjavik in a tiny plane I think we flew directly over Askja but I couldn't be sure-and then from Reykjavik to Winnipeg on the last charter flight of the summer.

  Everyone met me at the airport, Mama and Sigga and Stefan. Birdie was still in Reykjavik. Ulfur was not pressing charges. They were keeping Birdie at Klepp until she had stabilized enough to travel. Then they would fly her back to Canada and admit her to the Selkirk Asylum. After that, we didn't know what would happen to her. At least, no one was telling me. We got into Stefan's Rambler. I sat in back with Mama. She held my hand and wept. Everything seemed flat: Winnipeg, the prairie, my life. I don't remember speaking at all. I couldn't look my mother in the eye. I just stared out the window. I was surprised when Stefan pulled into the train station.

  "Aren't we going to Gimli?"

  We were not. School was starting in less than a week back in Connecticut, Mama explained. And besides, she added, holding back a sob, you are never going back to Gimli as long as Birdie is alive.

  "That's enough of that, Anna," said Sigga. "Time will tell."

  "Time will not tell," my mother answered. "I will tell. I will decide. If you want to see us, you can come to Connecticut."

  At first I was relieved to be back home in Connecticut with Mama. She was no Birdie, and suddenly I loved her for that. Her moods did not turn on a dime or shift like lake weather. She did not hate me one moment, then profess to adore me the next. Her love was constant and, now that I had been returned to her, even more intense. She never blamed me for going off with Birdie, and for that I was grateful. But she never let me mention Birdie's name again. As if she could erase her sister completely.

  I worried about Birdie constantly. In our monthly phone calls, Sigga assured me Birdie was "recovering nicely" at Selkirk. I couldn't imagine it being very nice. But what could I do? My mother was true to her word. We never went back to Gimli while Birdie was alive, which wasn't long. She killed herself six months after I was flown back from Iceland. On my fourteenth birthday.

  Cousin, I'll tell you what I know about your mother's death, which isn't much. When Birdie was finally able to talk, to feed and dress herself, the Selkirk Asylum released her to Sigga's care. Two days later she was found dead of an overdose in her bedroom at Oddi. That was all my mother would tell me. It was my fourteenth birthday. My mother insisted that was coincidence, that Birdie no longer knew one day from another. I knew better, I knew how her mind worked. When I left her side at Viti, when I turned my back on her world-saving prophecy, when I sent the men to capture hershe put me in the enemy camp. I was no better than the Wolf. Maybe worse.

  If Birdie had lived, would we all have reconciled eventually? I like to imagine so. That each sister would have forgiven the other. That Birdie would be cured and understand that I was only trying to save us both. And our strange little Gimli summers would have resumed again. But I doubt that. I think the rift would have been permanent. Vague, befuddled Mama became suddenly sharp and clear on one thing: she would never forgive Birdie for kidnapping me and endangering my life. Even after Birdie died, I don't believe she ever did.

  I had trouble wrapping my mind around death. I dreamt of Birdie constantly, woke weeping. By day I hid behind my veil of long hair and somehow sleepwalked
through my first year of high school. Mama never trusted me again. I tried hard, but it didn't matter. My fateful cartwheel she would never remember, but my Iceland escapade she could never forget. Suspicion clouded her eyes. She looked at me like I might disappear at any moment. And so I lived up to her expectations. I became a sneaky teenager, an escape artist. I started hanging around with bad kids. Smoked cigarettes, then pot. Drank beer under the train trestle. Had sex with a boy while supposedly bowling. Made friends with a small circle of girls. Listened to their secrets, kept my own.

  How did I feel? you ask. As little as possible. Whipped off my homework in half an hour after dinner and got straight A's. I figured as long as I kept up my grades and didn't get caught, no one could really complain. And no one did. I was just one more girl with long straight hair parted in the middle wearing a patched jeans jacket and rolling joints through the late 1970s. I didn't stick out. I was invisible, Hidden Folk. I studied French, pushed Icelandic out of my head. Airy-singing words replaced lilting-throaty ones. I was mistress of the double life; I continued keeping track of my mother's canes and habitually lied about my whereabouts.

  The summer after eleventh grade my mother suggested we go back to Gimli. Just for a week? Sigga was very old, didn't I want to see her again? I wouldn't go. It was a way of punishing my mother for not letting me see Birdie again. And I couldn't bear to show my face in Gimli. All those good people searching Lake Winnipeg for me while I was cavorting at Thingvellir. My mother, rightly, did not trust me enough to leave me alone, so neither of us went.

  I drifted through high school, then on to college in Massachusetts. Yes, I'm rushing, Cousin. I realize that. But I'm trying to get back to your story, or rather, my story as it relates to you. And Birdie. And those years in between relate to nothing. I was a shell. So I'll be brief. I couldn't wait to go away to college, but once I arrived I was aimless. I studied some (psychology, history, more French), drank my way through semesters, found a new crowd of bad kids who were good to me.

  I missed my mother. Who was keeping track of her canes? I imagined her sitting alone knitting Icelandic sweaters in our darkened house, haunted by ancestor photos. Sometimes I talked about leaving school and coming home again, but Mama wouldn't hear of it.

  "College is your time, Freya," she'd say. "I'm fine here. You put me right out of your mind."

  If only.

  Iceland and Gimli were easier to forget. The immigrant Icelanders are so obscure you could easily go your entire life in this country and never hear a word about them. The English, the French, the Italians, the Irish, the Eastern Europeans, the Japanese and Chinese, the Mexicans, the Norwegians and the Swedes, even the histories of the African slaves and Native Americans were touched upon in my college history classes. Not fully, not truthfully, but at the very least mentioned. Of the Icelanders who settled in Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, even Utah, not a word. And why is that? you ask. For you yourself, I imagine, have never heard of us either. New York, New Jersey, New England, New London, New Brunswick all the old world places made new but New Iceland? Nobody's heard of New Iceland. Was it because we were so wretchedly oppressed? Hardly. If anything, the opposite was true. We assimilated more quickly than most, with our fair features and devotion to literacy, our ability to persist through hardship etched in our genes. No, the answer is simple enough, it seems to me: there were too few of us to matter. All said, only fifteen thousand Icelanders emigrated at the tail end of the nineteenth century-a droplet lost among the million-size waves of immigrants who flooded North America's shores. It's no wonder we never made it into my college history books.

  And that was fine with me. Gimli and the house called Oddi; Sigga and her Blue Book; the old ladies at Betel recounting their dreams; the old men at Betel peering at chess pieces through wire-rimmed glasses; the annual Fjallkona spectacle; Gisli and his lying rhymes; Stefan and his historical expeditions; Birdie and her Word Meadow-especially Birdie-gone, gone, gone. Icelandic? I never spoke a word. When people asked about the origin of my name, as they inevitably did, I answered, Scandinavian. So pleasingly generic. Or sometimes, A Norse goddess. Guys liked that. Guys liked me. I was tall and blond and thin. And if I bordered on being too blond with my wispy whiteblond hair, and too gangly thin, and so pale I verged on ghostly-no matter. My near-albino looks were considered exotic; my reserve was mistaken for confidence, my shame for mystery. No one knew me, of course; I let no one in, distanced myself most especially from myself. Alcohol is good for that. I skidded along on the desperate surface of things. Only at night did my old life emerge, dream images flashing like a drowning swimmer bursting to the surface: the ice cave, Brekka, Askja. Kaleidoscope dreams splintered with fragments of lava and glacier and ash and the brightest greenest grass on the planet.

  It was at the end of my junior year, on a hungover May morning, that my mother dropped dead in the A & P supermarket. Yes, just like that. No comma this time. Just a full and sudden stop. Aneurysm. Related to the original fall, the coma, the brain damage? The doctors couldn't say. They weren't sure. She didn't suffer, they assured me. But I did.

  How could Mama up and die like that? Before I'd ever had a chance to confess, to tell her It was me. Before I ever had a chance to apologize for vanishing to Iceland. Granted, I'd had years and years to say those things. But I was young, I believed I had years and years more. It never occurred to me that my mother could die. My father had died, my aunt had died, but my mother? After her first lucky resurrection, I guess I'd come to believe her immortal, or at least ... enduring.

  I left school and returned home to Connecticut. Stefan and my mother's dear friend Vera flew in from Winnipeg. It was a shock to see them after so many years. But everything was a shock. Vera arranged the funeral, she was good at that kind of thing. She'd run the Ladies Aid, she'd been the Fjallkona. Stefan came as Sigga's emissary. Sigga was ninety, too frail to travel. He was to discuss with me my plans for the future. He was to convince me to come back with them to Gimli. If only for a visit. It'll do you good. It'll do your amnia good. Maybe in August, for Islendingadagurinn? Maybe, I finally agreed. I was nothing if not a good liar. Not brilliant like your mother, Cousin, but competent, convincing. I would return to school, I promised, as soon as the house sold. Above all, I insisted, I would be fine.

  As soon as Vera and Stefan returned to Gimli I began to cry. Weeks on end. It was not the only thing I did. I also watched television, lying on the living room rug with my chin propped in my hands, my feet crossed in the air behind me. Talk shows, mainly. A lot of incredible things were going on in people's lives. Twins separated at birth, living with a longing and never knowing what it was ... reunited at last. Fathers who had never said "I love you" to their sons ... choking out the words for the first time. When the guests cried, I cried. But where was my second chance?

  After three weeks of crying I turned off the television. I would contact the real estate agent Vera had found and start the process of selling the house. I would pack up Mama's things and ... do what with them? I walked through the house. My bones felt oddly light, like the wings of origami birds. And my vision seemed strangely keen. Certain objects belonging to Mama seemed to ... glow. Glow is too strong a word. To emanate. As if something of my mother remained inside. Like a cut flower in a vase, dead but with some life still coursing through the stem. This was how I saw my mother's hairbrush sitting on top of the television set, the reading glasses attached to a woven red cord hanging from the kitchen doorknob, a pair of brown leather loafers, molded exactly to the shape of my mother's small wide feet. The essence of Mama's life still clinging to her belongings. But how long, I worried, until that essence would begin to evaporate?

  I found my mother's camera, which itself did not have the glow-the camera had not been much used-then drove Mama's car to the drugstore and bought a roll of black-and-white film. Why black and white? It seemed more ... objective. Scientific. By the time I got home the sun was setting. I had no fl
ash. I had to work fast. I brought each object into the den, where a narrow beam of setting sunlight streamed onto the carpet. First I laid one of Mama's lace cloths on the floor. Then each object by turn hairbrush, loafers, sunglasses-I photographed, from different angles. Even through the lens I could distinguish the glow of my mother rising out of the objects from the ordinary late afternoon sun falling onto them.

  A week later the photographs were back from the drugstore. I sat behind the wheel of Mama's car and opened the package. The hairbrush was a hairbrush. The shoes shoes. The glasses glasses. All nearly lost against the white lace background. It was something about the exposure, I decided. That was why you couldn't see the glow. So I took the train into Manhattan, to a professional photography lab on the far West Side. Klaus Steinman's Photographic Ltd. "Specializing in black & white," the ad in the yellow pages claimed. I took a screeching old freight elevator two floors down, then rang a bell on the counter and waited. A small man with age spots on his forehead and only a lick of white hair down the middle of his skull like a skunk appeared from a back room. Klaus Steinman himself, the hottempered ex-Prussian army officer who would become my first employer, although of course I didn't know that yet.