Of course the three kings knew all about the End-Time, too, how the wolf would swallow the sun, the earth sink in the sea, brothers slay brothers, and gods fight giants in Ragnarok, the greatest battle of all.
"And then?" Gylfi asked. He was sweating now, fearing his own endtime drawing near. It seemed there was not a single question he could ask that they could not answer.
"And then," proclaimed High, "the earth rises again fair and green, and the gods who survive build their new gold-roofed palace called Gimli!"
And with that the three kings crossed their arms across their chests and glared down at Gylfi in triumph. Clearly they considered themselves the winners. But Gylfi had nothing to lose, nothing but his life. "And then?" he asked softly.
Ahem. And a royal silence. Finally High spoke. "Beyond that we do not know," he conceded. "But who does? I've never heard anyone tell further into the future of the world than that." The other two nodded in agreement.
Be that as it may, Gylfi had stumped them, and spared his own life in the process. As soon as High conceded his lack of knowledge, poof! With a big bang the whole thing vanished: the triple kings on their triple throne, the shield-shingled hall. Gylfi found himself standing alone, on open ground, having won the contest, perhaps was he not still standing? but tricked yet again by the magic of those clever Aesir!
And so this tale has come to be known as Gylfaginning, which means The Tricking of Gylfi, though despite having been tricked Gylfi made out just fine in the end. He returned home, as all good heroes eventually do, and presented to his own people everything he had learned from the three kings, who were none other than Odin himself in disguise. And these same stories were then passed along, generation to generation, and became in time that marvelously overwrought cosmology known these days though it is hardly known at all-as Norse mythology (of which I've provided only a mere and cursory summary, for if I stopped to tell every tale those three kings told the strange characteristics of each of the nine worlds, not to mention the name of practically every last dwarf and giant-we'd never get on with our own story).
And what of our story, yours and mine? What does Gylfi have to do with us? I drove into Gimli in my rental hearse not with a pack of questions but with a bundle of fears. Yet I would have questions soon enough, and plenty. Face trickery and deceit. Still, maybe in the end, Cousin, you'll decide Gylfi has nothing to do with us. Or that there is no "us," and you want nothing to do with me. So be it.
The next time I woke it was high noon. As I crossed the motel room to the window I felt something coarse underfoot: sand tracked by the room's previous occupants, gritting the bare soles of my feet. But I was lakeside, that's what mattered. I'd arrived too late the night before to discern anything more than the lake's dark presence, though walking from my car to the motel I'd heard its soft lap, inhaled the familiar lake-water smell. Now in the daylight I gazed at it out the window, lazing large and blue to the horizon. There it was. There I was. I'd expected to feel something, something big, but instead ... a watery nothing. Nothing I could put a name to. The far shore wasn't visible and never was, I remembered, even on the clearest days. Lakes in this part of the continent get big as small seas. But on this morning it seemed most unsea-like, dull and pond-still.
I sat on the sagging edge of the bed and smoked a cigarette. If the lake was disappointing, the motel room was outright depressing. The lingering stink of wet swimsuits, the sand on the floor. The Viking, I realized, was a dive. As if I'd rented a bed at the bottom of a grimy, empty aquarium tank. I took a last deep drag on the cigarette, then tossed the butt in the toilet. Gloom be gone. It was time to begin my first day back in Gimli. I left the hearse parked in front of my room at the Viking and set off along Gimli's sandy beach toward town.
My plan had been to spend the morning getting acclimated, then the afternoon visiting with Sigga. But now the morning was spent, and I found myself not lingering as I'd intended but striding down the beach, which was utterly empty. The early morning sun had disappeared lake weather shifts fast-replaced by dense banks of cloud. Everything seemed diffuse: the gray expanse of cloud cover, the gray expanse of lake. Against this backdrop like a film played my beach memories: there I was in my blue checkered swimsuit, burning lobster bright. There was Birdie lounging majestically and tossing me mandarin orange bits. I blinked my eyes, the visions vanished.
I walked on. In the distance to the south I could see Willow Point, where the Icelanders had first landed. Stefan and Birdie had taken me there, recounted that well-told story of our origins. How hard Birdie had worked to edify me, imbue me with a vanishing culture. I took off my shoes, waded the shore like I used to. What had she called me then? An egret, with my fringe of white-blond hair, my long gawky legs. An egret and a poet. What would she call me now? If she made a ghostly appearanceand I wouldn't have put it past her to suddenly surface in the water, shaking her head like a wet dog and laughing raucously as a seal-she would see that all her effort on me had been wasted. My life a deliberate erasure of all that history, lore, and myth. I lived by what could be seen and photographed, in black and white, here and now.
Each step I took produced an icy, satisfying splash. Too bad, dear dead Birdie. People emigrate, they assimilate. The Vikings weren't the only roamers. The earth's people are always moving on, swarming the planet in endless migratory trails, losing great chunks of their histories in the process. Who stays put anymore? Who can lay claim to anywhere? Not me, certainly, and not to Gimli. My grandfather may have been one of the original settlers and a great poet to boot, my grandmother a fixture of the community, cataloging its books and family lines, but I myself had never been more than a summer visitor. And the bland Connecticut suburb where I'd spent the balance of my childhood-I have no ties to that anymore either. I haven't been back since my mother died and I fled to Manhattan. And the city? I'm a transient among transients, my roots phantom. In a year, I could be anywhere. Unlikely, but possible.
I turned from the waterline and headed across the beach toward town. At the curb I sat down to brush the sand off my feet and re-shoe. Whatever membership I'd had in Gimli was long expired. I expected no great welcome, prayed, in fact, not to run into anyone I knew. Not yet, anyway. I gave the lake one last glance before heading up Centre Street into town. Yes, Centre Street. Compared with all the Icelandic place names that abound in the region, names like Arborg and Hnausa and Geysir and Hecla, the street names of Gimli seem almost comically plain. Centre Street runs through ... the center of town. Where it meets ... Main Street. The rest is a grid, numbered avenues running north-south, numbered streets east-west. In New York City it makes sense, but there in Gimli it struck me as ludicrous, to bother numbering such a simple grid. As if it were possible to get lost in a town with only five streets running in any one direction.
I stood for a few minutes at the juncture of Centre and Main, citing the old landmarks that still remained: Golko's Hardware, Tergesen's General Store, the Esso station, the Gimli Theatre. A few new establishments, but not many. It was the same little Gimli, and yet I began to sense that things were entirely different. An eeriness begging capture. I took out my camera and began wandering around snapping photographs: the tiny cement shack still bearing the chipper OLSON FISH sign with its smiling fish mascot and a chalkboard announcing PICKEREL. The cluttered windows of Tergesen's, est. 1899, with the staid blue VELKOMIN sign. And then it dawned on me, the source of the strangeness: I was the only pedestrian in sight.
In the old days, my old days anyway, the streets were mobbed with visitors, licking ice cream cones, buying postcards and fishing lures. Maybe Gimli had become a ghost town after all? Then the breeze picked up and I remembered it was late September, the high season long past. I'd never visited Gimli in the fall, though it was not quite autumn yet. The elms were still green, a toughened dusky end-of-summer shade. A few maples were starting to tip yellow. The sun was shining again, the clouds had scattered. I began to feel as if I were dream walking. I had spoken a word to
no one. There was a curtain, a barrier between me and Gimli, as real and invisible as the air itself. I might have been looking at a postcard, strolling a movie set. I couldn't make it feel real. And I wanted to. I'd come all this way, traveled miles and decades, and I wanted to feel something. Of course, I had to consider the possibility that I had nothing left to feel, that I'd rendered myself incapable of true feeling.
Or maybe I just hadn't had my morning coffee yet.
The bakery had moved itself across the street sometime in the last sixteen years, but it was the same establishment with the same Icelandic breads and pastries, thick with doughy-cinnamon smells. I stood in line behind a silver-haired woman who was having trouble making up her mind. "What do you call this?" she would ask the teenage girl behind the counter. "And this?" Each answer produced a short chuckle. Then she turned to point to something in the glass display case to our right and her face revealed itself in profile. My heart leapt-Sigga!
Not Sigga. My first ghost. There was a resemblance though: this woman could have been Sigga thirty or forty years ago, in her sixties perhaps. And she spoke English with an accent similar to Sigga's. The woman was an Icelander, and what she was doing in Gimli in late September I couldn't imagine. When Icelanders came it was usually in the summer, especially in early August, so they could attend the Icelandic festival and consort with distant cousins.
"This you call vinarterta?" the old woman asked the girl.
"It's an Icelandic pastry," the girl explained, tucking her lank brown hair behind her ear impatiently. I was beginning to feel a bit impatient myself.
"An Icelandic pastry indeed!" The woman laughed. "In Iceland I think we don't have so many layers as this one! How many layers is that?"
The girl leaned over and counted. "Seven," she reported, in her flat Manitoba accent.
"Seven! No wonder I do not recognize this. In Iceland, it is made only with three. Maybe four."
"My grandmother always makes it with seven," I said, surprised at myself for jumping in. Doubting if at one hundred Sigga baked much of anything anymore. Could she still read? Walk? Had she finished the Blue Book, traced us all the way back to Egil Skallagrimsson?
"Lucky for you." The woman was facing me now, smiling, and I couldn't help but feel she looked familiar, aside from her resemblance to Sigga. Yet she wasn't from Gimli, I was sure of that. She turned back to the lankhaired girl. "I'll take one piece of the vinarterta, please."
Then she was gone. And although I hadn't planned to I ordered two pieces of vinarterta myself, along with a large black coffee. As I walked back down Centre Street, sipping the dark stuff from my cup and nibbling the vinarterta, I thought of Sigga teaching me to make ponnukokur my first morning at Oddi. What's ponnukokur? I'd so innocently asked, provoking Birdie's horror that Mama had taught me nothing of Our People. Did it matter, Birdie, was it worth it, in the end, to rake Mama over the coals like that? To force Icelandic grammar into a seven-year-old's lazy summer brain? True enough, I was willing. I savored my time with Birdie, adored her, mostly. And there was no harm in it, not in the Icelandic lessons or the telling of Olafur's stories, the obscure Norse myths. The harm was something else. The way Birdie had flown me to distant lands, real and imagined, her wing tips grazing heaven, then dragged me graveward when she plunged back down.
The vinarterta took a too-sweet turn in my stomach and I dropped the last bite into the gutter for a lucky gull. The second piece I was saving for Sigga, whom I was on my way to see. Even though I hadn't called ahead to arrange anything, had in fact had no contact with Sigga at all either prior to or since my arrival, I had my heart set on a private visit before the birthday party that night. No public reunions, please. I was nervous enough without subjecting myself to the inevitable small-town scrutiny. I found myself wondering who would be at the party, who would remember me and, worse, remember my part in that final summer with Birdie. Who would shake their heads disapprovingly behind my back, as if they understood something, when I myself never had and I was at the tangled center of the thing?
To hell with all of it! Betel was gone. I was standing on the comer exactly where Betel once stood, and there u'as no Betel. I turned around in bewilderment; across the street rose a new, L-shaped building. I crossed over and was staring at the building hesitantly when an old woman nearly knocked me over. A thin, tiny person, but not frail, no. Despite her cane she was making good time, nearly brisked me right off the path.
"Excuse me," I called after her. "Can you tell me where Betel is?"
The old woman turned and gave me a perplexed and toothy smile. "Why, this is Betel. You're standing in front of it."
The new Betel. Of course. I remembered now, Stefan telling me about it in his Christmas card last year.
"Are you here for a visit then? We do love visitors."
"To see Sigga Petursson. Do you know her?"
"Know Sigga? Of course I know Sigga! I just happen to be one of her very dearest friends, Mrs. Halldora Bjarnason. And who might you be?"
"I'm Freya. Her granddaughter." We'd reached the entrance by this time and I held the glass door open for the old woman, though I had no doubt she was strong enough to do it herself. But Halldora didn't move, just stood on the front step staring at me through thick-lensed glasses that magnified her eyes into wobbling brown marbles.
"Sigga's been waiting for you," she said finally. Crossly?
"Well, my flight got in late last night, and then I overslept a bit this morning-
"Years!" Halldora interrupted. Then marched into Betel with a loud rap of her cane.
Living in New York these past eight years, I'd come to think of myself as brave. Hadn't I arrived as an orphan in a city of strangers, then reinvented myself as a skilled black-and-white printer and aspiring photographer? Each day I braved the crowded subways, lecherous men on street corners, my bossy boss, toxic darkroom chemicals, and on top of it all spent hours taking and developing my own photographs in my spare time. True, I rarely showed them to anyone, not, I told myself, because I was afraid to but because I was waiting until I was good enough.
But there is a difference between being tough and being brave. I see that now. Standing in the doorway to Betel was far more terrifying than a nerveracking wait at a deserted three a.m. subway station. If I were truly brave, I would have returned to Gimli long before. No, I was nothing but a toughskinned chicken two chicken steps from fleeing town in a disgrace of feathers and fear.
Once, twice I circled the block, rebuilding my confidence with cigarettes and desperate attempts at reason. If Sigga hated me, she would not have invited me to her party. Simple as that. If other people despised me, well, that was their business. If the old ladies of Betel wanted to think of me as an ungrateful, coldhearted, kin-denying, selfish American of a granddaughter, let them. They were probably right.
24
Hesitantly I opened Betel's front door and entered the foyer.
Dr. Brandur Gudmundsson was the first Icelander to obtain a medical degree in North America, a revered leader among the Winnipeg Icelanders, and the founder of the Betel retirement home. So read the plaque under his oil portrait hanging prominently in Betel's entryway. It was the same painting that had hung in the entrance to the old Betel. Bless that man for his good Works, Mama used to say each time she passed it. Good old Dr. Gudmundsson, father of Mama's dear friend Vera. Would Vera be at the party? Of course she would. In the portrait Dr. G had a sweeping handlebar mustache. Birdie liked to call him a pompous patriarch, claimed it was actually the hardworking women of the Ladies Aid who were the driving force behind Betel. She herself would never end up in Betel, Birdie claimed. Betel was for good Lutherans, and she was nothing of the sort. Right she was.
The entry area over which Dr. G presided smelled faintly of Lysol with an undercurrent of the sickly-sweetish odor emitted by the extremely aged. The room itself was empty, but around the corner I found an administrator sitting behind a desk.
"Can we help you?" The woman was alone,
the plural institutional. She wore a pantsuit, and her hair was cut neatly at the shoulders.
"I'm here to see Sigga Petursson."
"Are you a relative?"
"Yes." I took a breath, then forged ahead with the awful truth. "I'm her granddaughter."
"Ah yes. We've heard you were coming." She seemed genuinely pleased, unlike cranky Halldora. She took my hand. "I'm Sylvia Johnson, Director of Care. The party starts this evening. Downstairs here in the reception room, six o'clock."
"I'll be there," I promised. "But I was hoping for a visit beforehand."
"I'm sorry, dear. But no visitors for Sigga today. Big day ahead. Needs her rest. I'm afraid you'll have to wait to see her at the party, along with everyone else."
That would not do. But I knew better than to attempt to sway the forces of bureaucracy. "Of course," I responded. "I understand." I even managed a smile. "I used to come here," I added. "Not here, but to the old Betel. When I was child. My mother and I came every morning to sit with the old ladies and knit socks."
"Is that so? How good of you. Is this your first time to the new Betel then?"
I nodded, and the next thing I knew I was getting the grand tour. The new building had cost $4.7 million to construct, boasted state-of-the-art medical equipment, offered recreational and social services. Everything was shiny spanking new: the dining room, the reception room where Sigga's party would be held, the chapel, the library (a gift from the government of Iceland), the lounge, the residents' floor. "How wonderful," I exclaimed. And then, just as I was turning to go, "Is there a bathroom I could use?"
The Tricking of Freya Page 23
