The Tricking of Freya

by Christina Sunley

  Saemundur laughed. "Enough to keep you busy in Reykjavik then."

  "For a while, yes."

  "When you want to escape, when you get tired of questioning old men and decide to see Iceland, let me know, okay?"

  "Okay," I agreed, making a different promise to myself: resist eye-moonlure. At all costs. Already I could feel a tug when I met his strange green eyes. I needed to focus, to accomplish this one thing. To redeem myself, if such a thing were possible at this late date, in the eyes of my dead.

  "How long are you staying in Iceland?"

  "Until I find Birdie's child." And then I said it out loud, the mantra that had been pulsing through my brain. "Birdie's child is here in Iceland."

  33

  Over the next three weeks I met with nine of the men on Ulfur's list and the widow of the tenth. Ulfur's roster of potential paramours contained an odd mix-mostly in their sixties, a few in their seventies, one over eighty and in addition to Snaebjorn included a genealogist named Arni Hjalmarsson; three poets (Bjarni Jonsson, Johannes Kjartansson, Hallur Hallsson); the publisher Sveinn Vigfusson, whom I'd met years ago at Ulfur's dinner party in Reykjavik; a distant cousin on Sigga's side, Einar Thorlaksson; a wealthy fish exporter named Halfdan Jakobsson (quite handsome in his day, hence his appeal to Birdie; I found him intolerably boorish); plus two university professors, Bjorn Gislason in Icelandic literature and Eirikur Palmason in history. I also met with the widow of Tomas Hrolfsson, a Lutheran pastor descended from the farmer-poet Pall, mentor and uncle to Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands. The eleventh man, Thorgrimur Skulason, was visiting his son's family in London and would not return until mid-July. Ulfur knew the least about Thorgrimur, only that he had had some kind of government job, and that Birdie had met with him on each of her visits to Iceland.

  Normally I would have found meeting so many strangers exhausting, if not impossible. But that June in Iceland I felt an odd change occurring: I seemed to be shedding my curmudgeonly exterior. After years of near her- mitude in Manhattan, I began enjoying human company, even craving it. I couldn't explain it, except to remember that I'd felt a similar opening up the last time I'd come to Iceland. I chalked it up to arriving in a new country, a free agent. It came on gradually, this newborn extroversion, increasing day by day, until I felt as if I could meet every single person in Iceland, if it meant finding Birdie's child. My tongue became the proverbial word-meadow. Introductions and small talk I conducted in Icelandic, which never failed to impress my subjects, and as the interview began in earnest I'd switch to English. I wanted to make sure I understood every word that was said. Anything could be a clue.

  My faux-purpose, the writing of an article about Birdie's life for The Icelandic Canadian magazine, was only part pretense. I was indeed writing about Birdie, not for a magazine but for her long-lost son or daughter. The stories the men told me I planned to add to my own. After all, I'd known Birdie only when I was a child, and there weren't many people left in Gimli who were able or willing to remember her. These accounts would help round out the portrait.

  Unlike my recent experience in Gimli, where Birdie had burned so many bridges, the Icelanders I met with were more than happy to recall their encounters with her. Manics in small doses can be quite appealing, even exhilarating. Yndisleg (charming), falleg (beautiful), rnalgefin (loquacious), fyndin (witty), skernmtileg (entertaining), snjal (brilliant); also slysa- leg (unlucky) and skritin (peculiar). All adjectives I jotted in my notebook during the interviews. I decided early on to record everything that seemed important, then sort it out later.

  Each of the men I met with remembered Birdie fondly and quite clearly, considering the amount of time that had passed, and many went to great trouble to answer my questions, often searching through boxes of old photographs and journals for details about her visits. At some point in the interview, I would discreetly slip in a question related to a lover Birdie may have had in Iceland. I wanted to contact him, I'd explain, to see if he had saved any letters from Birdie. If he had been married at the time of the affair, or if there was any other reason he wanted his identity kept secret, I would ensure his name did not appear in print. I was convinced it was an excellent ruse. It gave the man I was interviewing all the assurance he needed to come forth and admit the affair. As a final touch, I would write my name and Ulfur's phone number on a card, and let him know he could call me if anything else came to mind.

  Unfortunately not a single one took the bait. Yet even repeated failure did not deter me. I went on to the next interview equally confident that this one, surely, would reveal himself as the true father of Birdie's child. It was simply a matter of time, a process of elimination.

  It took three weeks to schedule and conduct all the interviews. Icelanders are always jaunting off to their summerhouses in the summer who can blame them, considering what winter brings? Several of the men on Ulfur's list I had to meet with twice, because when I arrived at their homes for what I'd expected to be a one-on-one interview I found instead a large gathering of my subject's family and friends awaiting me. It is not every day that the granddaughter of the great Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands, comes to town.

  Sveinn Vigfusson, the publisher, I met with several times for another reason: I became convinced he was hiding something from me. His thick beard had turned white since I'd first met him, but he still spoke in a loud and commanding voice. Oh yes, he remembered me quite well from Ulfur's dinner party, when at thirteen I'd shyly recited Olafur's "New Iceland Song" in front of the guests, stumbling through the last verse. He took me on a tour of Iceland's largest publishing house, where he'd reigned for many years and still, he confided, exerted much influence. He began to grow on me, despite his overbearing manner. But whenever we spoke of Birdie, his mood would darken and he'd become uncharacteristically silent. "Such a tragedy, your aunt's death. Such a remarkable and talented woman." No, he had never read her Word Meadow, but he'd read some of her earlier poetry and thought she showed great promise. And that was all he could bring himself to say on the subject of Birdie. When I mentioned the possibility of an Icelandic lover, he just shook his head blankly. He'd never heard of anyone, had no further leads for me. He seemed deeply troubled at the mere thought of Birdie, tugging on his beard, changing the subject or lapsing into silence.

  I, of course, recorded his every word and gesture in my notebook, and for the entire second week of my investigation became convinced that Sveinn was the one. When I finally confronted him directly, he looked sheepish, but the secret he revealed was not the one I'd been hoping for. It seems he'd made a pass at Birdie once, when she was in Reykjavik for Olafur's centennial celebration-and been rejected. "Swatted off like a fly" was the phrase he used. "I can assure you, Freya, to my deep regret, that nothing of that nature ever occurred between Ingibjorg and myself."

  Cross another off the list.

  What did I do in those three weeks, when I wasn't interviewing old men, in- somniacally cycling the lake, or poring over microfiche in the National Library? Even with the sheets of black plastic Johanna had taped to my windows, I slept only a few hours each night. I didn't need more than that. I seemed to have bountiful energy, more than usual in fact. And I found plenty to do. Yes, in Reykjavik, despite Saemundur's claim that Reykjavik is nothing. True, it's no Manhattan, no grand European capital, no Paris, no Madrid, not even a Copenhagen. Compared with New York, Reykjavik seems a mere village, and as European cities go it's an infant. Discovered in 874 by the Norwegian Viking Ingolfur Arnason, who named it Smoky Bay for its geothermal steam, Reykjavik has been continuously inhabited ever since. Yet it didn't become anything remotely resembling a town until the end of the eighteenth century, when it transformed itself into a certified trading post, population 300. By 1901 there were 5,000 inhabitants, today just over 100,000. Since World War II, when Iceland gained its independence, it's been nothing but expansion, buildings springing up erratically around the core of the old city, some elegant, some clunky, others frankly odd. Take Hallgrimskirkja, a moder
n church with a jutting basalt steeple meant to resemble an erupting volcano. Or the Pearl, a glass-domed restaurant that revolves on top of gleaming hot water tanks. These sights I saw and more, by foot, by bike, by bus, sometimes taken in a car by one of the men on Ulfur's list, who rapidly transformed themselves from suspects into gallant elderly hosts. I bathed with Johanna and her husband, Gunnar, and their two little girls in the healing waters of the Blue Lagoon, the silica-rich runoff from the Svartsengi geothermal energy plant, purported to cure all manner of skin diseases and other ailments. Imagine bathing in neon blue waters with silver smokestacks towering above.

  Icelanders love to bathe, soak, and swim. Early on, the publisher Sveinn took me to one of Reykjavik's many geothermally heated municipal swimming pools. "This water we are soaking in," he explained, "first came down on our ancestors as rain, one thousand years ago. Scientists have proven this." After that I brought a listing of the city's pools with me wherever I went, and managed to avail myself every day, swimming in the pools, soaking in the hot tubs, imagining the waters as rain on Egil Skallagrimsson's head.

  I also spent many an hour at Ulfur's workplace, the Arni Magnusson Institute, located in a nondescript gray building at the University of Iceland. Here I could gaze at the original ancient manuscripts, with their illuminated drawings of Birdie's feared Fenris Wolf, the Midgard Serpent (tail in mouth, circling the earth), one-eyed Odin and his eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, as well as historical characters such as the troll-faced Egil. I visited cafes and sipped espresso while scribbling endlessly in my red-and-blue notebooks. Nor did I let the weather deter me; it was variable, to put it kindly.

  Icelander to tourist: "Do you have all four seasons where you come from?"

  "Yes," the tourist replies, but not all before lunch!"

  And I took photographs. Of what? Everyone I met. The men on Ulfur's list, of course, each got a portrait. And anything else I saw that caught my eye: violets in the old Reykjavik cemetery, the light reflected on the wing of a tern. Hundreds of photographs I took, maybe a thousand. I even bought a new camera one day, on a whim, a Nikon that cost practically as much as my plane ticket.

  Oh, I kept myself busy all right. The fact is, dear reader, I was having a fabulous time.

  And there was Saemundur. Yes, I know. I'd promised not to let myself get distracted, but really, I reasoned, what harm could it do? There were more than enough hours in an Icelandic summer day-I could spare a few for Saemundur when he zipped across the lake to Ulfur's house of books. Mostly he was out of the city, leading tours of glaciers, ice caves, volcanoes, and other remote badlands, but it seemed that whenever he was back in town he found an excuse to come by his father's place. When Johanna re marked sarcastically that she'd seen her little brother more in the month of June than in the entire preceding year, I began to wonder if I might have something to do with Saemundur's unannounced visits. Perhaps he had begun to wonder if he was, in fact, Birdie's child? If so, he never mentioned it again, and I didn't press the subject. Time would tell, I hoped. Or maybe he thought nothing of the sort. Maybe instead he felt some obligation toward me, implicated as he was in my last disastrous visit? Not that I blamed him, of course. In fact, I wondered if part of his mystique for me was that he had, quite literally, saved my life.

  "I have to thank you," I told him one night. We were sitting in the kitchen after everyone else had gone to bed.

  "For what?"

  "Saving my life, back then. Alerting the police that we were at Askja. I don't think anyone would have found us in time, if it weren't for you."

  "Nice of you to say. But when you look at it another way, it's all my fault. I should never have given Birdie those jeep driving lessons. It was obvious she was up to no good."

  "Did you know what she was planning?"

  "Not exactly, no. But I felt guilty all the same. And then when I heard she'd committed suicide-"

  "Just a minute," I interrupted. "Don't go taking credit for that. You'll have to get in line. As it turns out, everyone I knew and loved felt responsible for Birdie's suicide: my mother, Stefan, Sigga. Even your father. And me.

  "You?"

  "Especially me. She killed herself on my fourteenth birthday, you know."

  "I didn't."

  We sat in silence, staring into our empty coffee cups. It occurred to me then that they all felt sorry for me, Ulfur and Johanna, Saemundur. That's why they were being nice to me, indulging me and my investigation. It was nothing but pity. And I was nothing if not pitiable, or so I thought. The tide of enthusiasm I'd been riding crashed in that moment. I was crying, damn it, in front of Saemundur. He reached for my hand, but I jerked it back, pushed my chair from the table.

  "Enough sob stories for tonight."

  "Freya-"

  After that night we didn't mention Birdie anymore, but Saemundur kept coming around, and I couldn't keep myself from looking forward to his visits. One evening when Saemundur had joined us for dinner, Johanna asked after his girlfriend. I flinched. A girlfriend? Of course Saemundur would have a girlfriend. What had I expected?

  But he shrugged it off. "Halla? Oh, it's nothing serious with her."

  "It never is, is it?"

  "I did try marriage, you know. It was a resounding failure."

  "You were married?" I blurted out.

  "In my twenties. For three years. It seems I'm too selfish, erratic, and arrogant to make a proper husband."

  "No surprise there," Johanna remarked.

  Saemundur knew better than to take me to more clubs. Usually he'd spirit me off to some odd spot or another. The river Ellidaar, where you can fish for salmon in the middle of Reykjavik. The graveyard on the other side of the lake, where violets and pansies gleamed at the foot of moss-encrusted gravestones. One day near the end of my third week in Reykjavik we visited the town of Hafnarfjordur, nestled in the Burfell lava field. After parking Saemundur's motorcycle, we walked along a street where brightly painted houses seemed to sprout from clumps of black lava.

  "Hafnarfjordur is a key fishing center, but more important, it is home to a large population of elves. The residents are making quite a business off that these days. Giving elf tours and selling trinkets."

  "People are so gullible. What a bunch of nonsense."

  "Nonsense? You don't need to go that far, Freya. What happened to that idealistic little girl I once met?"

  "Turned into a cynical New Yorker. Don't tell me you believe in elves, Saemundur."

  "I won't say I don't. And you'll find that's the case with most Icelanders. Supposedly over 90 percent of us believe in elves. Or rather, don't disbelieve in them. Anyway, that's why there are so many odd twists to the streets here in Hafnarfjordur." We were walking up a hillside where the road abruptly circled a large boulder. "That rock there is an elf home. Construction crews build around such spots, or face the consequences."

  "Consequences?"

  "All sorts of bad luck. Accidents to the crew, that sort of thing. It's standard practice all over Iceland. There are just more elves here in Hafnarf- jordur. So more crooked roads."

  "And what do these elves look like? Have you ever seen one?"

  "Not personally, no. And remember, there are different kinds of elves. Like the huldufolk. Hidden People. They live in the rocks, in a parallel world to ours. They're the same size as us too. They look ... human. And sometimes they steal human babies."

  "Maybe that's what happened to Birdie's child, stolen by the Hidden People." It actually seemed plausible to me, at the moment. "That's why my search is so futile."

  "Don't tell me you're giving up."

  "No, but I'm not getting anywhere in Reykjavik. I've been through everyone on your father's list who's not dead or on vacation. All dead ends. I'm thinking it's time to visit Sigga's niece Thorunn in the East. I met her in Gimli last fall, she lives on a farm near Egilsstadir. Ulfur says I could fly there in a couple of hours."

  "Why fly? You won't see anything that way. Let me drive you. I've got a tour star
ting in Akureyri, in the north, next week. We'll drive up the East Coast, I'll show you the sights, I'll drop you off at Thorunn's."

  "That's a generous offer. But I think I'll take the plane."

  "You'll never see anything that way," Saemundur repeated. I could see he was offended, but I had good reason for wanting to fly: the way to Thorunn's was the same route Birdie and I had taken in the stolen jeep. I had no desire to retrace that madcap ride.

  That night as I lay sleepless in my turret room I remembered the marvelous sights Birdie had promised to show me. Except that once we were on the Ring Road, there was no time for that. Our tourist days were over. The Wolf was on our trail. Damn Birdie. She'd ruined so many things for me. I imagined drifting in a tiny boat amid a pool of glistening icebergs. Why not see the glacial lagoon now?

  Why not indeed?

  34

  I haven't been honest with you. Looking back on these pages, I see I've left some things out. And made myself sound entirely more sensible than I actually was. It's a whitewash. Sure, I dropped plenty of hints. And maybe you figured it out, maybe you're smarter than I was at the time: during those three weeks in Reykjavik, I had no idea that anything was wrong with me. On the contrary, it felt like everything was right. I viewed the changes occurring in me not as symptoms but as transformation. Hadn't I felt a similar blossoming on my first trip to Iceland? And I was free from my job, for the first time in years, I was out of grimy crowded Manhattan and on an island of endless light. I was on the verge of finding Birdie's child. I was reunited, however briefly, with the long-lost love of my youth. Life seemed expansive, full of possibilities. Looking back, I can see I was ascending into mania. At the time, I simply felt happier than I ever had in my life.