by Justin Go
At a bookstore at Tegel Airport I buy a thick copy of The Icelandic Sagas and I sit near the airplane gate, my backpack between my knees. The brooch is in my pocket. I open the book and try to concentrate.
10 May 1924
Camp III, 21,000 feet
East Rongbuk Glacier, Tibet
An inch of powdery snow covers every surface in the tent. Ashley and Price sit on the windward side, pushing their backs against the flapping canvas to anchor it in the gale. Their camp is a cluster of tents pitched below an ice cliff at 21,000 feet, only the thin sheet of weatherproofed canvas separating them from the blizzard. Ashley sits with his legs in his sleeping bag, the gabardine shell stiff and coated with ice.
The wind eases for moment, then rises to a scream, hammering the canvas until Ashley cannot believe only air and snow are striking the tent. The flapping is so hard that nothing but a yell can be heard between them.
—Shall I check the guylines? Ashley bellows.
—No, Price calls. We’d only get more snow.
Their eyes follow the sputtering lantern hung from the tent ceiling. It swings and pitches and the shadows in the tent shift with the wind. They are too exhausted to yell much, but it is too dangerous to sleep. The climbers wait, hoping it will pass.
Half an hour later the wind lowers enough to allow talking. Somervell’s face appears in their shelter’s door, his eyebrows and beard crusted with snowflakes. He squeezes inside, clawing the snow from his collar.
—What’s the verdict? A stroll up to Four in the morning?
Ashley coughs into a dirty handkerchief. He looks at Somervell, whispering hoarsely.
—Hugh’s sulking. He left his swimming togs at Phari.
No one laughs. The climbers have been battered by storms for five days, the winds too strong for travel, the nights too cold for sleep. The weather is worse than on any previous expedition and they do not know why. The porters believe the expedition is doomed, that it is being punished by the mountain gods as a warning. Even the British know they will have to retreat soon if the weather does not break.
Price pries open a tin of strawberry jam.
—We must eat something—
He gathers snow from the tent floor and drops it in a tin bowl, dumping the frozen jam on top. He stirs the icy reddish mixture with a large spoon and passes it Ashley. Ashley takes a tentative bite.
—Not half bad.
They pass the bowl around and Somervell picks a book off the floor. Three Tragedies. The leather binding is soft from use, the gilding nearly worn off the page ends.
—Surely it’s Walsingham’s turn?
Ashley shakes his head, touching his throat.
—Not over this racket.
Somervell flips to where they left off in Hamlet and begins to read, his voice rising and falling not for theatrical effect but to overcome the changing volume of the wind. Ashley watches Somervell’s hand tremble as he reads. They are all shivering.
The wind returns to its previous strength and they can no longer hear. The three men lean into the windward side of the tent, the wind lashing their backs as it rises to a deafening howl. The lamp blows out. It is pitch-black inside, the canvas snapping and fluttering as the Sherpas call anxiously from the next tent. Price yells back in Nepali.
Something hard strikes Ashley’s shoulder through the canvas, stunning him. A rock or a piece of ice. He wonders if the tents will tear and he pictures the scene: huge flurries of snow pouring in, the swirling maelstrom of sleeping bags and foodstuffs and equipment, then the tent itself gone, carrying off the climbers or leaving them naked beneath the glow of the clouded moon. It would be death. They are so far from base camp, and base camp so far from civilization, that they might as well be the only men in Tibet, the only men in the world. Price bellows to the other climbers.
—Sounds like Fritz has brought out his Maxim.
Ashley yells hoarsely in the darkness.
—We’ll never get to the third act.
Hours pass before the wind calms and Somervell returns to his tent. Ashley lies on his back in the dark, his eyes open. He feels the rock below him jutting into his shoulders. He gets up to realign his kapok mattress, replacing the sleeping bag on top. He lies back down and curses.
—I swear there’s a fucking boulder right under me. Who cleared the ground here?
Price chuckles in his sleeping bag.
—It wasn’t any sahib. Want to swap places?
—No.
Ashley closes his eyes, listening to the flapping of canvas, a sound of clinking metal. A guyline must have broken from its anchor, freeing the metal fitting to flail among the stones.
—Someone ought to anchor that, Price whispers.
—They certainly ought to.
They fall silent. The unanchored canvas keeps flapping.
—Bloody freezing, Ashley mutters. I don’t suppose there’s a spare fleabag in the other tents?
—I doubt it. Would you fetch it if there was?
Ashley turns onto his side, trying to avoid the sharpest stones beneath him. Occasionally the wind looses a clump of snow upon his face and he sweeps it off clumsily with a wet mitten.
—You remember, Ashley says suddenly, the girl I was talking about. Soames-Andersson.
—Of course.
—It was my fault she went off. I didn’t know what I had, nor how to keep it.
They hear footfalls outside their tent, Somervell walking by to fix the guyline. The flapping ceases. The footsteps pass by again.
—I only wanted to say that, Ashley adds. I’d never said it before.
—All right.
Ashley coughs for a spell and sits up, taking the canteen from inside his sleeping bag. He tugs the cork out and inverts the bottle, but only a few drops trickle into his mouth. The snow has not yet melted. He plugs the canteen and lies down.
—There’s more, Ashley wheezes. Something happened before we sailed.
—The girl?
—She sent me a telegram. I hadn’t heard from her in years.
—What did it say?
—Hardly anything.
Price shifts in his bag. —Are you all right? Shall I light the lamp?
—I’m fine. I’ll clam up.
Ashley has another coughing fit. He hacks some fluid into his handkerchief and lies back down, breathing more freely than he has for hours.
—Maybe you ought to go after her, Price says.
There is a long pause.
—It wouldn’t work.
—Perhaps you ought to try anyway.
—Perhaps.
—We really ought to sleep.
—I know.
Ashley coughs and turns onto his back. He feels the sting of an ice fragment melting through his silk undershirt into his ribs.
—How old are you, Ashley? Twenty-eight?
—Twenty-nine.
—That’s still young.
—It doesn’t feel young.
—Of course it doesn’t, Price says. But it might if you let it.
Ashley laughs and the laugh turns into a wheeze. He says good night to Price and pulls up the collar of his sleeping bag, trying to recall the exact words of the telegram. There is the sound of flapping canvas again and he knows another guyline has come loose in the wind.
THE ISLAND CITY
The flight lands at Keflavík Airport, thirty miles from the Icelandic capital. I look out the window as the airplane taxis slowly across the tarmac. The runway is slick with rainfall, the grass a deep rich green.
The halls of the terminal are silent. There are huge circular windows, portholes to the wild country beyond. Collecting my bag from the carousel, I pass through an empty customs gate. At an ATM I withdraw nearly the last of my savings in a currency I’ve never seen before.
I step outside the automatic doors into the open air. It’s bracingly cold. In one day I’ve gone from autumn to nearly winter. I board an express bus for the city center, but halfway through the journey the driver
pulls onto the shoulder without explanation.
The passengers get off and stand around the barren strip of highway, smoking cigarettes or talking in low voices. From each side the black asphalt drops to fields of broken lava crowned with moss and lichen. I pass from the shelter of the bus and the wind strikes me, flapping my jacket and nearly toppling me. The driver leans against the bus behind me lighting a cigarette. He sweeps his hand forward, signaling I ought to walk on.
I step off the road onto jagged slabs of lava, straining to keep my balance as I hop from one stone to another. The fragments are jet-black, the lichen green and brown and orange. I walk twenty yards, then fifty. I swivel around. The lava and lichen stretch out the same in every direction.
Reykjavík is a strange and lonely place. It seems barely a city at all, only an arrangement of colorful houses perched around a bay, their corrugated roofs standing sentry against the driving wind and rain. Dark and savage hills loom above, foreboding the wildness of the country beyond.
One walk along the windswept harbor and I know I’ll need a warmer coat. I rummage through an indoor flea market, choosing an olive green German army parka. The elderly vendor accepts my money and peers knowingly at me through thick glasses, as if we share some deep secret.
—It is very warm, she confides.
But when I step outside, I realize the coat barely protects me from the freezing wind.
I’m staying at a new youth hostel on a hill, spotless and shining. On a dining table in the glass-enclosed kitchen I make a list of all the ways I might progress in my search. The list has twenty-three items. I have eleven days until October 7.
I speak to jewelers and antiques dealers, even a curator at the National Museum of Iceland. They tell me little of Ísleifur Sæmundsson, only the same few anecdotes that appear in auction catalogs and surveys of Icelandic crafts, none of which I can read myself. These sources record that Ísleifur was born in 1872 and died in 1936. He made elegant pieces of jewelry heavily influenced by the late Urnes style, but produced few works and seems not to have made his living as a jeweler. He was born in a village called Seyðisfjörður in the Eastfjords—a collection of remote inlets on the far side of the country—but the place of his death isn’t recorded, nor the location where he produced his work.
—You’re not even sure where he lived?
The curator sighs. —He was a minor jeweler. He probably stayed in the Eastfjords his whole life. Back then, it was nothing but tiny fishing villages. No one cared where he was from—
—But this wasn’t even that long ago.
The curator shakes his head.
—We’re lucky to know anything about him at all.
I walk to the National Registry to consult records of births and deaths. I speak to people at the Swedish, Danish and British embassies, at Reykjavík City Hall and every relevant bureau of the Icelandic government. I find nothing. It’s now September 29: I’ve got only eight days left, and though I feel a strange conviction that Imogen came here, I know it has no real evidence behind it. If I’m going to leave Iceland, I’ll have to leave soon.
At a vast cemetery beside the university, I walk among the chipped headstones, many of them centuries old, the inscriptions illegible, the chiseled characters worn smooth or blanketed in lichen. Because of Icelandic naming conventions, there’s a solemn repetition to the names: Eriksson, Eriksdóttir, Stefánsson, Stefánsdóttir. I take a few pictures and walk to the newer part of the cemetery to look for Soames or Andersson, knowing this is hopeless.
Early the next morning I ride the bus to the Icelandic Genealogical Society, where I have a long chat with an amiable old man who once lived in New York. He seems troubled by the difficulties of my research.
—You don’t know where in Iceland this woman lived?
—No. Maybe in the east.
—And you don’t know when she came here?
—I don’t know if she came at all—
—So all you have is her name.
—She might have changed her name.
The old man looks at me with sympathy.
—You may never prove she came here, but just the same you’ll never know she didn’t come. There are too many records. Suppose you knew the name of this woman, and the town she lived in, and when she lived there. You’d search the births and deaths and marriages, of course. But you’d still have the census, the church records, the courts, the tax and property records, the newspapers, medical charts, the passenger lists—
—Passenger lists?
—From the old steamships. Those are worst of all. No indexes, just thousands of names listed by ship. In your case, if this woman came before the war, she must have come by ship. But unless you know the name and date of the ship, it’s pointless—
—Where are they?
—Where are what?
—The passenger lists. I want to look at them.
It takes me several minutes to persuade the old man. Finally he takes out a scrap of copy paper and writes the address in pencil.
—If you must, they’re at the National Library, near the university.
He lifts the slip of paper, dangling it in the air.
—But if I were a young man again, I’d find a better way to waste an afternoon—
I ride another bus to the National Library, where I page through massive hardbound lists of merchant ships, searching for passenger lines that ran from Europe to Iceland. I learn that the steamship company Eimskipafélag Íslands sailed between Britain and Iceland, with two ships from Leith to Reykjavík via Copenhagen, and another two ships from Hull to Reykjavík. These ships had bad luck. Three of the four were lost to war: the Gullfoss, seized by Germans in Copenhagen in 1940, the Goðafoss torpedoed by U-300 off the Icelandic coast in 1944, the Dettifoss torpedoed by U-1064 near the Firth of Clyde in 1945. At the reference counter I order the microfilm passenger lists for these ships from the 1920s and 1930s.
—And do you know if any ships went from Germany to Iceland?
The librarian furrows her brow, scrutinizing my request list.
—Maybe the Hamburg America Line. But we don’t have their records here. There were other Danish and Norwegian ships that came, I can bring you their lists—
Soon I realize the old man was right. The reels of microfilm are endless and organized only by each ship’s port of entry. I roll through them quickly, barely looking at the passenger names, only the vessel names and the shipping lines. I have no idea when Imogen would have come or where she would have come from, but I scroll on anyway. I see that a Danish line called Det Forenede Dampskibs-Selskab ran a ship called Primula from Copenhagen to Reykjavík. Its lists were entered in longhand, the columns in English or Danish or Icelandic with the passenger’s name, age and sex, the ports of embarkation and disembarkation, sometimes their profession.
Some of the names are familiar. Gunnar Andersson, 38, Húsavík, Fiskimaður. I find another ship that called at the Eastfjords, a steamer called the Nova of the Norwegian line Det Bergenske Dampskibsselskab. The line ran from Bergen to the Faroe Islands, stopping at Eskifjörður in eastern Iceland en route to Reykjavík. The Nova’s lists run back only to the mid-1930s. I pull out another box of microfilm and I’m about to change the reels when I see a name at the bottom of the illuminated screen.
Charlotte Derby. 18. Southampton, England. Eskifjörður.
It means nothing. I know it means nothing. An English girl with the same first name as my grandmother traveling to eastern Iceland in July 1936. A coincidence only because the age is right, because my grandmother was born in 1917. But why would she go to Iceland? I lean back in my swivel chair, looking at the ceiling. I imagine Charlotte coming of age in England, boarding a steamer for Norway and then for Iceland to visit the woman she called her aunt, Imogen preparing for her visit and commissioning the brooch from Ísleifur, the initials engraved on the reverse—
It’s absurd. Charlotte would have no reason to travel under an assumed surname, and if she did she could just a
s well have changed her first name. There’s also the obvious fact that Charlotte is a common name and common names are bound to occur in these lists, even English names. I scan the lists for familiar names. There’s nothing else in the Nova’s lists, but forty minutes later I find an Eleanor M. Cotter, age forty-eight, sailing from Hull to Reykjavík on the Goðafoss in 1934. An hour later I find a Charles Bell, age nineteen, sailing from Leith to Reykjavík on the Bruarfoss in 1929.
I switch off the machine. I’m grasping at nothing, names and dates and ports pulled out of a hat. There must be dozens of people named Eleanor and Charles and Charlotte in these lists, and if I looked long enough I’d probably find an Imogen. I no longer even believe in my own theories. I take the microfilm reels back to the desk.
Back at the hostel I check my e-mail, but Mireille hasn’t written me back. The only message is from Khan.
James and I were pleased to hear of the information you’ve uncovered; we would be interested to see the documents with regard to the contact between the two parties in 1924. He expressed concern, however, that the chain of research you are following cannot lead you to the evidence required for distribution of the estate. James reminds you of your time constraint, and he suggests reappraising your options before proceeding—particularly as far afield as Iceland.
As October is fast approaching, I think it would be helpful to schedule a call with James at your earliest convenience. Please let me know when you are available.
Yours Sincerely,
Geoffrey Khan
I write to Khan that I’m already in Iceland, but I’ll call the law firm soon. Then I log on to my bank account. I have only three hundred dollars left and no ticket off this island. My credit card shows an unpaid balance of $612, with $88 of available credit. I can’t ask my family for money to continue this absurd search. Nor can I get anything from Prichard until I’ve found real evidence, and anyway he doesn’t seem to approve of my trip to Iceland.
