The Tricking of Freya

by Christina Sunley

  "Enough of that depressing subject!" Thorunn went into the kitchen and came back with a plate of ponnukokur. "Now it's your turn to do the talk„ ing.

  That was not a problem. I told her about my drive east with Saemundur. I went on about the rocks at Vik like witches' caps poking up from the surf, sand that was black instead of yellow, floating among the icebergs, visiting Oddi and how our house in Gimli was called Oddi, Sigga had named it that. And Saemundur this and Saemundur that. I could hear how fast I was talking but there was nothing I could do to stop it. I forced myself to take a sip of coffee and a bite of ponnukokur. It was delicious, stuffed with berries and cream. In that moment Thorunn managed to get a word in edgewise. "You remind me of your mother," she said. She was smiling again.

  I thought that was strange, for the briefest second. "You met my mother?" I asked. But I never gave her a chance to answer. "My mother never came to Iceland, you know. She was afraid to fly. Birdie always made fun of her for that. They didn't get along, Birdie and my mother." And I was off on a new subject. I told Thorunn about how my mother never brought me to Gimli until I was seven years old, how Birdie never forgave her for that, how Birdie and my mother were always quarreling over whether I should learn Icelandic or not, but I was certainly glad Birdie had taught me, even though as a child I'd struggled mightily with malfraedi, the wicked grammar, but I wouldn't be here talking to Thorunn now in Icelandic if Birdie hadn't-

  Suddenly I stopped, aware that Thorunn was staring at me, a shocked look on her lean face. A couple of times she started to speak, then clamped her thin lips tight again. "Your mother?" she asked, finally.

  "Yes, my mother. And Birdie. They fought terribly."

  Thorunn continued staring at me. I began to feel miffed. Hadn't she ever heard of siblings who didn't get along? Surely she wasn't on perfect terms with every single one of her fourteen brothers and sisters?

  "Your mother," she said again. "Birdie. Tell me about this."

  I started talking about the rivalry between my mother and my aunt, how my mother was practical and steady and plain, Birdie wild and charming and beautiful. Thorunn studied me while I was talking.

  "She was beautiful, yes," Thorunn said. Her voice trembled. "Such a tragedy, what happened to your ... Birdie."

  Then she stood up and left the room. I drank my coffee in silence while I waited for her to come back, though coffee was the last thing I needed. My mind was racing again. Oh, I would have to be careful, careful indeed. The mere mention of Birdie seemed to have shaken Thorunn. Out the window I saw that the snow was now covering the grass completely, and the sky itself was no longer visible. I vowed to myself not to mention Birdie again, at least not on this first day of my visit. As it turned out, I didn't need to.

  Thorunn returned with a shoe box, which she placed on the couch between us. On the lid of the box was written "Ingibjorg (Birdie)." Inside were photographs from Birdie's various visits. "She always stayed with us, when she came to Iceland. No matter how busy she was. Like when she came for Olafur's centennial, and they were busy driving her around the country to speak about her father. Still she insisted that they stop here at Gislastadir." She handed me a photo that showed Birdie, Thorunn, Arni, and a darkhaired man who looked very familiar, all standing in front of the Gislastadir farmhouse.

  "Is that Ulfur Johansson?" I asked.

  "Oh yes, that's Ulfur. He drove Birdie all over Iceland that summer. He's very important, you know. He was head of the Arni Magnusson Institute. He got our manuscripts back from Denmark. Our Sagas!"

  "I know Ulfur," I pointed out. "I've been staying with him in Reykjavik."

  She looked embarrassed. "Yes, yes, of course. I'm sure you know him much better than I do. I only met him the one time."

  I studied the photograph. Birdie stood with her head close to Ulfur's, her blond hair bright against his dark. I still hadn't ruled Ulfur out, and now my suspicions were raised again.

  "And here's Birdie at Brekka," Thorunn continued, "the farm where Olafur, Skald Nyja islands, was born. Birdie always stopped at Brekka, whenever she came to the East. It's just down the river from here, you know. I can take you there tomorrow." She glanced out the window. "If the weather permits."

  "I've seen Brekka," I said. "Birdie took me there, when she ... brought me to Iceland."

  "That was a terrible mix-up now, wasn't it? I remember being so surprised, when it came out in the papers that you two were missing, and neither Birdie nor Sigga had even told me you were coming, and then the two of you were found at Askja.... Birdie never even called me! But I went to see her anyway. At the hospital in Akureyri. I saw you there too. I stayed with my cousin in Akureyri, so for two weeks I could visit Birdie at the hospital every day, until they flew her back to Winnipeg. I never saw her again."

  "What was Birdie like, at the hospital?"

  "Pretty terrible. Depressed. She didn't speak. They had her drugged, I suppose. I wasn't surprised, I admit, to hear that she ... killed herself. Not after I'd seen her like that. But so terrible for you, to have your ... your Birdie ..."

  "It was terrible all right. She killed herself on my fourteenth birthday. She died hating me."

  "Hating you? Oh no, certainly not that. Birdie loved you. She loved you with all her heart."

  "How would you know, Thorunn? Did she send you a suicide note? Because she certainly never left one for us. She used her suicide as revenge on me, on everyone she believed betrayed her."

  I could hear my voice, the sarcasm, the rage rising up, but I couldn't stop it. I was tired of people feeling sorry for Birdie. As if she were the sole victim of her illness.

  "And did you know," I continued, "that Birdie had a child? That the child was taken away from her at birth? And that no one seems to know who or where this child is, or even believes that it exists? I came all the way to Iceland to find Birdie's child, who is now an adult, because I owe that much to Birdie." My voice was loud and excited. I was thinking of all the pages I'd written for Birdie's child, pages that I'd have to burn, because there was no one to read them.

  I'd gone too far. Thorunn's thin lower lip was trembling and she brushed her eyes with the heels of her hands. Then she composed herself, speaking in a warm cheery voice again, a voice I no longer trusted. "I'm sorry, dear. Surely this is not something we should be discussing! Not when I am sitting here having coffee with the very granddaughter of Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands! Tell me about your life, Freya dear."

  Suddenly I was tired of talking. I was tired, period. "I want to lie down."

  Thorunn set me up in her son Kjartan's old bedroom. I lay on my side on the narrow bed, staring out at the gray sky, the snowflakes spinning down. For once it wasn't bright outside when it should have been dark it was simply winter when it should have been summer. I fell asleep at five in the afternoon and didn't wake up until the following morning.

  At some point while I was sleeping Thorunn came in and laid a quilt over me. Then she did something strange. She kissed me on the forehead.

  "Goda nott," she whispered. "Goda nott, elskan."

  I think now that when Thorunn kissed me good night she had already decided what she was going to do.

  The first thing I saw on opening my eyes the next morning was the white world outside. White sky, white fields, and even the river only the palest gray. It had stopped snowing. I opened the window. It was still and not terribly cold. Muted. I splashed my face with icy water, then climbed down the narrow wooden staircase. In the kitchen the table was perfectly set, with brown bread, cereal, hard-boiled eggs, smoked salmon, skyr, and coffee.

  "A feast!" I smiled at Thorunn.

  "You slept through last night's dinner," she said. "You must be hungry."

  And I was. I hardly noticed how silent Thorunn was through our breakfast, but looking back, I can see it. Looking back, I can see a lot of things. I've grown so tired of looking back! (At the moment it makes me so exhausted I hardly want to continue. But I promised not to skip the ending, and I won't. I
wouldn't trick you like that.)

  After breakfast Thorunn led me back to the little parlor with the low ceiling. We sat side by side on the couch again. The shoe box marked Ingibjorg (Birdie)" was still sitting on the coffee table. Suddenly I had the urge to get up, go outside and see the snow. Anything but sit in the cramped little parlor looking at photographs of dead people.

  "Maybe we can go for a drive today?" I suggested. "The snow doesn't seem too deep."

  "Oh that'll be fine," Thorunn said. "I'll take you visiting. There are many people who want to meet you, you know. But not yet. First I want to show you something." She picked up a piece of paper from the coffee table and unfolded it. I could see that it was one of the old-fashioned genealogical charts, like the one she'd brought to Sigga last autumn in Gimli. The kind where one person's name is in a circle in the middle, and all the ancestors ripple out in concentric circles back through time.

  Except I could see that this was only half a chart. The top half of the page was filled with names and dates, the bottom half completely empty. There were circles drawn, but the contents were blank.

  "I stayed up late last night," Thorunn said. "Working on this for you."

  Then she handed me the chart, and I saw that the name in the center circle was my own, and underneath it was the date of my birth. And in the next band, the one that encircled the top half of me, was Birdie's name, and the date of her birth and her death. On the bottom half, where my father should have been, there was nothing.

  "This is wrong," I said. The page was trembling in my fingers. "Birdie was not my mother."

  Thorunn took my hand, but I jerked it back.

  "My mother was my mother," I said. "I have a photograph of her, right after she gave birth to me. Holding me. And Sigga's standing right there! Sigga came to Connecticut to help my mother take care of me." But what did any of that prove? How had Mama always described my arrival? Out of God's clear blue heaven she said I came. Not once had she ever said I'd come from her own womb.

  "Birdie was not my mother!" I repeated.

  Thorunn was silent. Finally she said, "I thought someone would have told you by now." She spoke quietly. "I never understood why they kept it a secret. So harmful. That's what I said to Sigga's friend Halldora, at Sigga's birthday party in Gimli. Halldora pretended not to know, but she knows. And now you do, too. You are Birdie's child, Freya."

  Then she opened the shoe box and handed me Birdie's letter. No, it wasn't a suicide note. But it was desperate all the same. She'd written it to Thorunn shortly after giving birth to me. Not in 1962, as Halldora had claimed, but in February 1965.

  Reading Birdie's letter made me feel sick, like a waterfall plunging inside out. "I'm going for a walk," I heard myself say. I remember Thorunn rushing to the door behind me.

  "Don't try to stop me," I warned.

  She didn't. She held a coat in her hand, a big coat. Not her own. A yellow down jacket, so old the feathers poked through in places. It must have belonged to her husband, Arni, or her son, Kjartan. I remember thinking that.

  And then I walked out into the snow. It was deeper than it had looked from inside, just below my knees, higher where it had drifted. I was wearing sneakers. Snow packed into my socks as I lifted each foot up through the dense powder and put it down again. I walked like this along Thorunn's driveway covered in snow and across the road covered in snow. I was heading to the river, the only thing not covered in snow, but it was white all the same. Still as glass and reflecting the white sky. I kept slipping on rocks that I couldn't see because they were covered in snow. That was fine with me. It's what I wanted for myself-to be covered in snow. Because I was snow. I was mute and I was numb, and I stayed that way for days, weeks, long after the farmer Thorunn sent to find me pulled me up out of the snowbank on the edge of the Lagarfljot River. I remember struggling against him. Not because I wanted to die out there, nothing as clear or simple as that. I only wanted to curl up in a comma and be snow.

  36

  Most histories of Iceland subscribe to what I call the birth-death-rebirth theory. It's how I learned it from Birdie, and it goes like this:

  After Iceland was first settled in the ninth century came its millennial golden age, an explosion of literary, parliamentary, and religious activity, the high point of Icelandic civilization. Then descended its dark ages, civil strife in the twelfth century that lead to six hundred years of domination by foreign rulers, a long period of general decay punctuated by virulent plagues, unrelenting frosts, and volcanic eruptions. At times Iceland teetered on the verge of extinction. Then finally came the great nineteenth century national awakening and cultural renaissance that culminated with Iceland proclaiming its independence in 1944, emerging at long last yet with great vigor into the modern world.

  There you have it in a nutshell: origination, degeneration, regeneration.

  Enter the revisionists, a new generation of Icelandic historiographers who are chipping away at the veracity of Iceland's trusty national narrative. The golden age was not so golden, they argue, the dark ages not so dark, the foreign rulers not so nasty, the claims of near extinction most probably exaggerated. Some revisionists even go so far as to suggest that the whole paradigm was merely a propaganda ploy, clever packaging by nineteenth-century nationalists attempting to awaken the Icelandic people from their centuries-long torpor with a rousing call to national pride: We were a great people once, we can achieve greatness once again!

  I'm not buying it. I've got nothing against revisionism per se. New facts come to light and require consideration, accommodation even. As you can imagine, I've had to engage in quite of bit of revisionism myself, since that day when I flung myself into the void of a freak June blizzard.

  And I do see their point-it's all a bit too neat. Yet I find myself oddly loath to discard the handy birth-death-rebirth framework. True, it's ridiculously ubiquitous. Take the poem Voluspa, for example, the volva's prophecy. It begins with the miraculous creation of the world in a fusion of fire and ice, followed by a golden age of the gods, who built the glorious Gimli, where they played chess and fashioned treasures from gold. Upon this sunny scene soon rumbled the battle of the gods, the doom of the earth, stars falling from the skies, and the sun turning black. And yet, when all hope seems lost, the volva sees the earth rising a second time, fair and green.... Christianity, of course, also has plenty to say on the subject of resurrection. And Buddhism: We're born, we live, we die, we live again.

  Bud bloom rot germinate.

  Once you start looking, the archetype pops up everywhere: it's the cycle that spins history, love, narrative, life itself. Take my own story: the golden age of my Gimli summers, followed by the dark ages of my darkroom years, and now? Now I'm in some sort of rebirth born of dissolution. Or so I would like to believe. Living in Iceland is a way to start over, begin at the beginning again. And what better place than one of the newest landmasses on the planet? When I walk on a lava field, I'm stepping on brand-new earth, the planet is being born beneath my feet. It does great service to my self-mythologizing.

  When did I start knowing so much about meta-theories of Icelandic history? When I went back to school. I'm enrolled at the University of Iceland, majoring in Icelandic literature with a minor in history.

  I've lived in Iceland three years now; I'm due to graduate this spring. Both my mothers would be very proud.

  The Icelanders have an expression, hvalreki, which is equivalent to windfall. An unexpected gift of good fortune. It means whale wreck, or stranding of whales. In the old days, if a whale washed up on the beach, it was considered nearly unbelievable good luck. Whale blubber to light lanterns with, meat for food, bones for carving utensils and toys ...

  Sometimes I think of Saemundur as my hvalreki. Other times not. What did his ex-wife say? That he was selfish, erratic, and arrogant? I second that. We live together in a small flat in downtown Reykjavik. It hasn't been easy with Saemundur, and whether we'll be together forever, who can say? I doubt we'll marry. M
arriage has lost its popularity in Iceland. Other than that, I've promised to say little. There are limits to what I can reveal about Saemundur in this book, limits he himself prescribed, and I don't blame him. He's no fictional character. You can look him up in the Reykjavik phone book under S: Saemundur Ulfursson, leidsogurnadur. Road-story-man. Sign up for one of his tours, if it pleases you.

  And it is Saemundur you can thank for this book, if you wish to thank anyone at all. After I'd recovered from my collapse and moved in with him, I took all these pages-the ones I'd typed in New York on Birdie's old Underwood, plus the red-and-blue notebooks-and stuffed them in a box at the back of a closet. I could never bring myself to read over them again, but neither did I burn them. I was determined not to go down Birdie's path of self-destruction.

  One day about a year ago Saemundur was cleaning out the closet, came across the box, and discovered inside a jumble of typewritten pages and notebooks. When he asked if he could read them, I said yes. I keep no more secrets.

  When Saemundur was done reading he asked, "What are you going to do with this book?"

  I know what you're thinking, that on some level I must have known all along. Maybe so. Yet I tell you it was the biggest shock of my life, worse than Birdie's suicide or even my mother's death. It unraveled me. For a time I believed I was dead. When you can't talk or sleep or eat you might as well be. I stayed at Thorunn's for several days after her farmer friend plucked me from the snowbank, until she telephoned Ulfur, who arranged for Saemundur to pick me up and drive me back to Ulfur's house in Reykjavik. It was a time of nothingness. Nothingness felt good to me, compared with knowledge.