The Souvenir Museum
Perhaps she should have known that she would find her lost love—her Viking husband, gone these many years, on the island of Funen, in the village of his people. Asleep in the hut of the medicine woman, comforted by the medicine woman, loved by the medicine woman, who was (it turned out) a podiatrist from Aarhus named Flora. The village itself was an educational site and a vacation spot where, if you wanted, you could wear a costume and spin wool for fun. As for Aksel—was he Joanna’s common-law ex-husband, or ex-common-law husband? Eleven years ago they had broken up after living together for ten. “Broken up”: one summer Aksel had left for Denmark and she never heard from him again.
Not never. He sent an apologetic postcard from London. But never after that, nothing for eleven years. She’d married, been made a mother, lost a mother, been legally divorced, finally was fully orphaned by her father’s death. Her father, who had been heartbroken when Aksel disappeared, for his own sake. Who else would breakfast with him on white wine and oysters? Who would discuss the complexities of savory pies, pork, kidney, the empanada versus the Cornish pasty? They had adored each other. Enormous and bearded, condescending and fond, ravenous, sad-eyed, the pair of them. Mortifying, when Joanna thought about it, how alike they were: her friends commented on it. It was her father who referred to Aksel as a common-law husband, when he was in every way a boyfriend, including the way she thought about him, years later: with a lechery untouched by having to legally untangle.
After the funeral, her father’s cluttered bedroom was like the tank of an animal who perhaps had died or perhaps had fallen asleep behind the greenery: she looked and looked for him. Nothing felt definitive. The watch was in the nightstand drawer beneath an expired passport, heavy and silver, a steam locomotive on its case, a yellowing sticker on the back: PLEASE BRING TO AKSEL. She read and reread the sticker. Leo, her son, was like his grandfather drawn to long-ago things, though nine-year-old Leo particularly loved weapons and had nearly every morning for two years drawn in pencil an armory. He liked blades best: swords, bayonets, the occasional flail. He was not allowed toy weapons, though they came into the house the back way. That is, in Lego boxes: bow and arrows the size of safety pins, pistols that snapped into the tense and insatiable hands of Legomen.
She turned the watch over in her palm. Perhaps Leo could get interested in horology. She pictured him hunched over a watchmaker’s bench and thought about tossing the note and keeping the watch. Instead, she transferred it from her father’s nightstand into her own. Bring, he’d written. Not mail, not get. The sticker was as close to a will as he’d left, goddamn him. She should probably—she thought, aware of the daft expression already on her face—attempt to honor it.
It took a year to settle the estate, sell the condo, come into the little bit of money that would allow them for the first time to travel abroad. Joanna bought Leo the bunk beds that she had wanted as a child. When she went to wake him up for school in the morning, she never knew at what altitude she would find him. That morning he’d hidden himself in the top bunk among the stuffed animals and the alligator-patterned comforter cover, which had disgorged its comforter. Then she saw one bare heel. Even his heel was fast asleep and dear.
“Leo,” she said.
The heel disappeared. He balled himself up under the covers as though winding himself awake. Then he sat up and blinked, bare-chested and skinny.
“What do you think about Vikings?” she asked him.
“They’re not my favorite,” he said, and put out his hand. “Glasses?”
He was newly bespectacled, having failed a vision test at school. Because he hadn’t cared she’d picked him out a pair of square black glasses, so that he looked not like the bookish skinny wan pubescent boy he was, but a skinny wan 1980s rocker. Wow, he’d said, stepping out of the optician’s, scanning the parking lot, the parking lot trees, the Starbucks and the Staples. Wow. Just like that, both he and the world looked different.
She found his glasses on a bookshelf and handed them up. “Vikings aren’t your favorite?”
He scooted to the end of the bunk and climbed down the ladder. “I like Romans.” The underpants he’d slept in were patterned with lobsters, too small. “Vikings didn’t really have horns on their helmets. Did you know that?”
“I did not,” she said.
For a year and a half, before Leo could read but after he’d begun to talk, Joanna had known everything in his head, thoughts and terrors, facts and passions. He’d belonged to Fairyland then; afterward, to books and facts. Now he had thoughts all the time that she hadn’t put in his head, which she knew was the point of having children but destroyed her.
“So,” she said. “I have a friend in Denmark. I was thinking we might go there this summer.”
Leo sat at his desk and picked up a pencil. In the voice he used for lying, or when he cared too much about something, he said, “If we go, could we go to Legoland?”
“I thought that was in California.”
“Real Legoland,” Leo explained. “Danish Legoland. Denmark’s where Lego was invented.”
“You’re not too old for all that?”
The glasses magnified his incredulous look. He looked like a 1950s TV journalist who knew he was being lied to. “Mommy, you know I like Lego.”
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.” Lego: its salient angles, its minute ambitions. On her own childhood trips, Joanna had been at the mercy of her father’s interests. He drove the car; he decided where to stop it. Not amusement parks, not tourist traps. Instead: war museums, broken-toothed cemeteries, the former houses of minor historic figures, with tables set for dinner—soup tureens and fluted spoons—and swords crossed over the fireplace. Joanna, aged nine, ten, forever, had wanted to go to Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland. To the Mystery Spot, where ball bearings rolled uphill. To Six Flags Over Anywhere. A sign for Legoland would have driven her mad with longing, would have made her whine, even though whining—her mother would point out—had never gotten her anywhere. Her father would have driven on to some lesser Civil War battlefield to inspect an obelisk.
Leo was a child of divorce, and all his own vacations were airplane volleys from Rhode Island to California and back. The two of them had never really traveled together.
“All right,” she said. “We’ll go to Legoland.”
She had already renewed their passports, bought the tickets, reserved a Volvo with a GPS. But you had to give a child the illusion of choice.
Legoland was overwhelmingly yellow, and Leo, abashed, hated it. The rides had electric signs outside which estimated how long you’d have to stand in line to ride them. The log flume was a forty-five-minute wait. The polar roller coaster, an hour and five. It was an ordinary overcrowded amusement park. They had flown from Boston to Paris, then Paris to Billund, to end up at this place, the first day of their vacation. He wondered how long they would have to stay for his mother to get her money’s worth. She could be grim about expensive fun. The crowds of children upset him, blonder than the blondest American blond. Flaxen hair, he thought. Like from a book. Flaxen hair and cornflower-blue eyes, though he’d never seen flax or cornflowers in real life. If he had, he might think, Blue as a Danish child’s eyes, pale as a Danish child’s mullet. The blondness itself seemed evil to Leo. A blond child who screeches and steps on your foot is compelled by its blondness; a blond mother who hits you with her stroller—here comes another one, rushing after her child, who is attempting to climb into the lap of the life-sized Lego statue of Hans Christian Andersen—does it out of pure towheadedness.
In America he would have cried out, but in Legoland he felt he had to bear it.
Even the gift shop was disappointing. He’d been imagining something he couldn’t imagine, some immense box that would allow him to build—what? A suit of Lego. A turreted city big enough to live in. Denmark itself. He did not dream in Lego, not anymore, but sometimes he still raked his hand through the bins of it beneath his bed as a kind of rosary,
to remind himself that the world, like Lego, was solid and mutable, both.
Joanna, too, found Legoland terrible; Joanna, too, could not confess. It was a kind of comfort, because Aksel had always been exhausting on the subject of Denmark versus America. Denmark was beautiful, and so were Danes; America was crass, and every moment of American life was a commercial for a slightly different form of American life, you could not so much as enjoy a hamburger without having your next hamburger advertised to you, though the hamburgers would be exactly the same: spongy and flavorless. “Americans have garbage taste,” he would say, tucking into an American banana split. “Not you, Johanna.” He always added a spurious h to her name. “But someday you will go to Denmark, and taste the ice cream, and you will understand.” Clearly the man had never been to Legoland, where even ice cream required a half hour’s wait in line, and then was a tragedy of dullness.
They stopped at a self-serve slush stand that allowed you to mix all the flavors you wanted into a tall plastic glass that looked like a bong. Leo’s personal cocktail came out army green. This had always happened to his Play-Doh, too, when it got mixed together. He drank it with his eyes closed and winced. He most resembled his late grandfather when unhappy.
“Poor bunny, you’re jet-lagged. Here. Let’s sit.” They sat on the bench next to the Lego Hans Christian Andersen, and Joanna had a sense that they shouldn’t, they should leave the space clear for people who wanted pictures of themselves with a Lego Hans Christian Andersen. But why should those people get their way?
“I’m not jet-lagged,” he said.
“Do you want to just go to the hotel room?”
“Is the hotel room in Legoland?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Oh.” Then, “I hate it here.”
“Denmark?”
He looked at her aghast. “This isn’t Denmark,” he said. “Can we go? It’s not what I thought it would be like.”
“Yes,” said Joanna, grateful and motherly, a good mother, indulgent. “What did you think it would be like?”
But she knew. In our private Legolands we are the only human people.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said, and she handed Leo her phone. “You choose. Wherever you want to go, we’ll go. I know Vikings aren’t your favorite, but I have a friend at that Viking village—”
“What Viking village?”
“A Viking village,” she said. “We’ll go at the end of the week. In the meantime, do some research. Plan the next three days. If you want, we can come back to Legoland—”
“I’m never going to come back to Legoland,” he said passionately.
When our children love what we love, it is a blessing, but O when they hate what we hate!
Denmark was studded with little museums dedicated to misery and wealth and the unpleasant habits of men, and Leo wanted to go to every one. He was warming to the Vikings. There was a kind of gentle boredom to Denmark, which was in itself interesting: archaeological museums whose captions were entirely in Danish, with displays of pottery, shards and nails and swords and bits of armor. To become interested in a boring subject was a feat of strength. A splinter of Viking armor was more interesting than the whole suit, to Leo, because even though it was in a glass box it might fit in your pocket. Perhaps he liked bits because of his nearsightedness—now that he had glasses, it was disquieting what loomed on the horizon—but entire objects told the entire story, and therefore belonged to everyone. Looking at a piece of a thing, he might think, deduce, discover something nobody ever had, which was all he wanted in the world.
They took a ferry to the island of Ærø. In the old shipyard Leo made rope with a crank-operated machine, and, with the help of a blacksmith, a plain iron hook. The blacksmith was a lean man with a sad, rectilinear face and hair the color of clapboard. The black iron glowed orange when you put it in the forge, and when you hammered it orange sparks flew off and then you were left with something so black and solid you couldn’t imagine it had ever been otherwise.
They went to the Workhouse Museum, three maritime museums, the Danish Railway Museum. Of course Joanna missed her father, seeing his dullest passions alive in his grandson. Who else could love trains so much that they were still interesting in a museum, where they were robbed of their one power, movement? Not Joanna, but she could love somebody who did. She felt a useless pride in Leo’s peculiar enthusiasms; Leo’s pleasant father liked action movies and video games, like any American boy.
Joanna had arrived with three pieces of Danish: Taler du engelsk? (The answer was always yes, I do), tak!, and the words for excuse me, which she remembered because it sounded—she thought it sounded; she had a terrible ear—like unskilled. Unskilled! Taler du engelsk? Tak! Soon she picked up the vocabulary of ice cream—Aksel was right, vanilla ice cream in Denmark was hallucinogenically delicious—kugler, waffler, softice, flødebolle, though a month after they got home Joanna would wake up in the middle of the night wondering, Is the Danish word for thanks pronounced tock or tack? And which pronunciation had she used? The wrong one, she was sure.
Aksel’s watch was in her pocket. She’d put it in a Ziploc bag to keep it clean and hadn’t so much as wound it. It wasn’t hers to wind. She liked the weight of it about her person.
Did she still love Aksel? No, but the memory of him came in handy sometimes.
They found the Souvenir Museum the old-fashioned way: first one roadside sign, then another. The museum was in the grounds of a modest castle. Like Legoland, the name was full of promise. Souvenir: a memory you could buy. A memory you could plan to keep instead of being left with the rubble of what happened.
A teenage girl with a drowsy, dowsing head slid a pamphlet across the ticket desk, and then pointed to the door to the museum. Leo opened the pamphlet. The museum was made of six rooms. He was startled to see that the last one was called Forbidden Souvenirs.
A year ago Leo might have asked his mother what Forbidden Souvenirs meant. Now he was seized with a terrible, private fear that he didn’t want her to disturb or dispel. He read books about war; his mother didn’t. Soldiers took souvenirs: ears, teeth, shrunken heads, scalps.
His mother, innocent, admired the first glass case, which was filled with salt and pepper shakers. Two Scottish terriers, black and white. One Scottish terrier (salt) lifting its leg in front of a red fire hydrant (pepper). The next glass case was also filled with salt and pepper shakers. There was a density to the collection that felt like a headache, or the physical manifestation of dementia, where the simplest items had to be labeled for meaning: china Eiffel Towers marked PARIS, cheap metal London Bridges marked LONDON. It had clearly been somebody’s private collection, a problematic Dane’s hoard. Surely all the salt and pepper shakers had been made in one vast factory in Japan or China, then stamped with geographic locations and shipped off.
“After this,” she said, “we’ll go to the Viking village. Your grandfather would have hated this place. What’s the matter?”
I don’t want to see, he thought, but also he did.
He was stepping into Forbidden Souvenirs. It took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at: coral, ivory, alligator shoes, exotic game of all sorts, pillaged antiquities.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he said.
A faceless mannequin wore a leopard jacket over nothing, its skinny white featureless body obscene. “Grandma had a mink stole,” Joanna said. “I can’t remember what we did with it.”
Some of the objects flaunted the original animal: the head of an alligator biting shut a pocketbook, the dangling back paws of a white fox on a stole. Was that better or worse than the elephant carved out of an elephant tusk, the tortoise incised into the tortoise shell?
“I thought there would be ears,” said Leo. “From the enemy.”
“What enemy?”
“I don’t know,” said Leo helplessly. “The enemy dead.”
“No ears,” said Joanna in an improbably cheery voice. She gestured a
t the glass case. “Nothing to worry about.”
“I wasn’t,” he said. But he had been, the worry was in him, the fear of seeing something he shouldn’t have, human, severed. The feeling was traumatic and precious.
“Anyhow,” she said.
“Do they pretend there?” he asked.
“Do they what where?”
“Pretend at the Viking village. Dress up and say they’re Vikings.”
“Oh. Not sure. Why?”
“The Renaissance Faire,” he said darkly.
They’d gone to a Ren Faire when Leo was four. He’d gotten lost in an iron maze built of child-sized cages and began to sob—she had a picture of him that she’d taken before she’d noticed the tears—and a man dressed as an executioner had to talk him out, gesturing with his plastic ax. Leo liked to bring it up from time to time, evidence of Joanna’s bad judgment. He liked history. He did not like grown-ups in fancy dress.
She said, “It’ll be great.”
“That’s what you said about Legoland.”
Had she? “Leo—”
“I said I didn’t want to go.”
“No, you—”
“Yes I did,” he said. The words were underlined, she heard it, and later she would understand it as the first sign of adolescence, and she would forgive him, but she didn’t forgive him now.
“Well,” she said, “we’re going.”
The eyes of a half dozen taxidermy animals were upon them, as though betting on who’d win the argument, and who’d end up in the museum. Then the humans turned and wordlessly went from the room.
In the morning they drove to Odin’s Odense, their bags packed in the trunk of the rented car. That night they would go on to Copenhagen, then fly back to the States. Joanna looked in the rearview mirror at sulking Leo. Next year he would be tall enough to ride up front, but for now he was in the back seat. You get to choose, she’d said, and she’d hoped to finagle him into believing that a trip to the Viking village had been his choice. What she’d endured for him! Three days of stultifying museums. They had traveled together beautifully, sleeping in the same room for the first time since his infancy. Ruined now. She knew the ruination she felt was her own treacherous heart.
The Souvenir Museum Page 16
