Prospero's Son: Life, Books, Love, and Theater

by Seth Lerer

  They were all there that spring, though, when Ted Hughes came to read. Hughes: leathern, drunk, unshaven, with that “I killed her” look on his face. He read the “Crow” poems without looking up, hunched over the hill of his sorrow, playing the wounded poet to the hilt.

  He’d brought along a poet I’d not heard of yet, Seamus Heaney, who had begun his career writing dazzling jewels of verse about Northern Ireland and his literary calling and had, in the mid-1970s, turned to poems about bog people. These were men and women, some dead on their own, some murdered horribly, who had been preserved in peat in northern Europe for something like fifteen hundred years and then were dug up, with their skin tanned like leather and their teeth like burnished ivory. After Hughes hauled himself offstage, Heaney got up, red faced and smiling, and read “The Tollund Man”:

  Some day I will go to Aarhus

  To see his peat-brown head,

  The mild pods of his eye-lids,

  His pointed skin cap.

  He went on, evoking the old alliterations of Germanic verse, alluding to the buried dead like markers of old nations, refracting his sense of longing through his Northern Irish lilt, looking for “Something of his sad freedom.”

  That term, I was beginning Old Norse with the Tolkien student, and I ran to her the next day: help me be Seamus Heaney; send me to Iceland to find the Norse dead; help me translate the sagas and the Eddas; let me live in their Middle Earth. She wrote off, made a few phone calls, and by late May it was all arranged. I’d fly to Reykjavik and stay with Jonas Kristjansson, the keeper of the institute where all the Old Norse manuscripts were held, the most important scholar of Icelandic literature and culture, and he’d set me up with a farm family where I would work throughout the summer and learn modern Icelandic—so close to Old Norse, I was told, that even rustic shepherds could read Njáls Saga.

  I studied frantically, took a tutorial in modern Icelandic with a graduate student, read newspapers and books, and prepared the set texts for what would be my course of exams the following year. These included the mythological writings of Snorri Sturlusson, a thirteenth-century Icelandic bishop who codified all the old tales of the gods and heroes, together with a treatise on poetry; the poems of the oldest Norse peoples, tales of Hamthir, Atilla, Brunhild; and the saga of Hrafnkel, a bullying landowner from the earliest days of Iceland’s settlement, whose story was written in a prose simple enough even for me. I packed my books, blue jeans, sweaters, my Icelandic dictionary, pencils, and a writing pad, and on July Fourth I took a plane from Gatwick to Glasgow and then from Glasgow to Reykjavik.

  “Reykjavik” literally means the reeking seaport, a name conjured from the mists and sulfurous miasma that hung over the cove, the legacy of centuries of geothermal bubbling and of cold air coming off glaciers and settling, wet and heavy, over the warmer sea. I landed at the airport on a runway that looked adzed out of lava, took a bus to the terminal downtown, and waited for the Kristjanssons. I should say Jonas, for as I learned on the plane, Icelanders should be called only by the first names. The phone book, even, was arranged by first names, with the patronymics afterward and, sometimes, an appellation of a job (Jon Jonsson, baker). There were no inherited last names, just first names and father’s names, and I thought how I’d introduce myself: Seth Lawrensson, Seth Larsson. Komiþ þjer saelir, I memorized—may bliss come to you, the standard greeting of hello.

  I waited four hours. There were no phones, no messages. Icelanders, the woman at the information desk informed me, have complicated lives. They’ll be here.

  Jonas did show up, oblivious to the time, completely unaware that I had landed half a day before and sat, the lone green-eyed Jew on the entire island, for hours in a terminal of brown-eyed blonds. He spoke to me right away in Icelandic, and I couldn’t understand a word. I beg your pardon. “Oh, you don’t speak Icelandic?” Well, I was studying it at Oxford, I began, and I reeled off some of the stuff I’d memorized and said something like, everyone says the language hasn’t changed in a thousand years. “Oh that!” He laughed. “No one really believes that.” He drove me to his house (by now, it was close to midnight), where I did manage to meet his wife and ask her for a glass of water—lati∂ mik fá glas vatn. I went to bed not having eaten in a day. The next morning I woke up, no one in the house. I took a bath—Ég vil a∂ ba∂a mík. I’d figured out the request, but there was no one there to ask. I got dressed, found no food in the house, and walked out into Reykjavik, looking for something to eat and something to do.

  Three days passed like that. Each evening I’d come back, the door would be open, someone might or might not be home. Then, on the fourth day, Jonas announced he was taking me to the bus, that I should tell the driver I was going to Uppsalir, a farm in the north, and he’d let me off. About how long is the ride, I asked. Oh, about ten hours.

  There was, or seemed to be, only one major highway round the island. The bus snaked across lava plains and fjords, through headlands, into misty valleys. Half-sleeping, half-carsick, I heard the alliterations in the rumble of the engine.

  Ða com of more, ofer misthleoþu

  Grendel gongan, Goddes ire baer.

  It was day’s end when the bus stopped, dead in the middle of the road, and let me out. Uppsalir. I got out, he drove off, and even though it was past ten o’clock, the sun was bright in the Icelandic summer sky. Godes condel beorht.

  On the western horizon, a dust cloud came up, moving fast, like (I remembered) Robby the Robot tooling along the desert in Forbidden Planet, while the astronauts gaped in mute wonder at his speed. A jeep pulled up, and a young man, about my own age, with snowy blond hair halfway down his back, jumped out. He stuck out his hand and said his name, Eythor, and I said Seth, and we got in and drove across the plains, up to the hillside, where a little farmhouse stood, where I would work and sleep and eat for the next eight weeks without a sunset.

  We parked and walked into the house, warm with the smell of geothermal heat (all the hot water, I was told later, came from the local hot springs, and the whole house smelled like a burnt match). I met, first, the father, Arni, whom I’d meet again the next day when he took me out to fix a fence and twisted the barbed wire with his bare hands. I met Solveg, the mother, who made cakes and cookies without measuring a thing. I met Drifa, the elder daughter, and her boyfriend, Vigfuss, who promised to show me how to shear a sheep with nothing but a pair of scissors. And then there was Anna-Solveg.

  Anna-Solveg, thirteen, towheaded, spoke some English, smart. She had the same garnet-brown eyes as everybody in the family, and she wore a torn rag around her neck with as much panache as if it were an Hèrmes scarf.

  Love at first sight. It was her room they’d put me in, much to her anger, and her anger made her even more compelling. She had learned her English, as she told me, not only from school, but from listening to ABBA records, and hardly a day went by when she did not break into a song from one of their albums—lyrics syrupy with Scandinavian imaginings of American popular culture, songs she had clearly memorized phonetically, with no idea of what they meant:

  You’re a teaser, you turn ’em on

  Leave them burning and then you’re gone

  Looking out for another, anyone will do

  You’re in the mood for a dance

  And when you get the chance . . .

  You are the dancing queen . . .

  She took me to the shed that first morning, with her mother, to introduce me to the cows. Each one had a name, but I can only recall one now. Midnaetti, Midnight, they called her, black as the night sky that I would never see, uddered each morning with milk that Anna-Solveg would squeeze out, working each teat like she was wringing solace from a stone.

  I was given a shovel. Moka skít, she said, and I could figure out the etymologies—moka, to muck; skít, shit. I shoveled cow-shit for an hour, piled it into loads outside the barn, where it matured into manure. Now, lead them up the mountain, she said. She gave me a long stick and showed me how to hit each one
on the rear to get them moving, how to say “hloot, hloot” to prod them along, and then she pointed up the hill, an hour’s walk. I pushed them on, covered in cow dung, along the fence line, and an hour later I stood looking down at Uppsalir, the river mouth that lead out to the fjord, the snow against the opposite hillside.

  By ten o’clock, I was back in the house, having coffee and bits of herring on black bread, brushing the flies off my dungy jeans, when an old man walked into the kitchen. He was no taller than I was, but he carried himself as if, with a word, he could stretch up to ceiling height. A face fjorded with wrinkles, blond hair turned waxen gray, and eyes as brown as garnets. Komi∂ þjer saelir, I said, smiling and putting out my hand. He looked at me and simply said yes, Já, the way some Icelanders did, sucking in the word rather than breathing it out—Já, pronounced “yeow,” sucked in like the breeze in a cave mouth, a word that came to me at that moment as an acknowledgment not of my presence but of life itself.

  This was Bjarni, Arni’s father, then eighty-six years old, who’d built the farm and lived until the 1960s in a sod hut on the property, who—I was told that evening when I was formally introduced, or better yet, presented, to him—would eat only from the wedding silver and china that he’d received sixty years before, and that I had the special task of setting for him at the evening meal. Each word he uttered came out like an oracle. I don’t recall him ever speaking an entire sentence. Every now and then, he’d suck in a significant “Já,” or comment on weather or the landscape:

  þokk (mist)

  Snjá (snow)

  Rigna (rain)

  Hraun (lava)

  One day, I pieced together a sentence about a sheep I’d seen high up the mountain when I’d led the cows. The sheep was dead, its entrails splayed across its wool, bite marks across its throat. All I could say was, Ég sá kindur sem var dauður. He looked at me, breathed in a “Já,” and smiled, as if to recognize that I could speak, that I had understood farm life and death, that I could see in that dead animal the way things were up here.

  On Sundays, we would visit relatives and friends, and they would introduce me as their American student. Ég er námsmaðr, I’d announce. I am a student. Ég elska Islands. I love Iceland. I’d look around these afternoons, at all the boys flirting with Anna-Solveg, and her laughter, and her towhead and her eyes as brown as garnets, and she’d look at me across the room and jerk her chin away like a shying horse, and turn her back on me. Ég elska þig. I practiced it silently.

  What does your father do, the relatives would always ask, and I would try to explain: he’s a management consultant; he was a teacher; he’s an amateur actor. None of these phrases translated. An uncle peered at me one afternoon, and said the word Menntamálaraðuneytið, and I nodded. I looked it up later: it means ministry of education. Sure. From then on, I told people that my father worked in the ministry of education, and they’d nod, size me up and down, and then say that they’d never seen anyone with green eyes before.

  One Sunday, in an unexpected burst of summer warmth, we all went swimming. Ninety kilometers away, there was a public pool, fed from a local hotsprings, and I knew that we were getting close when the rich sulfur smell blew in through the jeep’s open windows. I had no bathing suit. Vigfuss found a pair of my blue jeans, took them outside, and cut the legs off, and proudly presented them to me, like a cat proud of a dead bird at the doorway: bathing suit, he said, in English.

  The men changed in a large, communal open space, barred only by a wooden door, no roof, no lockers, a few benches, and a toilet. All the men stripped down and I noticed just then that they all were uncircumcised. I don’t think I’d ever seen an uncircumcised penis before, and here were dozens of them, tufted in dark blond hair, their heads cowled in their foreskins. Even the non-Jews of my generation had been circumcised back home, and here were naked men, walking around without the slightest care, each foreskin pointing at me like an accusation. There was no wall to hide behind, no locker door, no bush. I pulled my pants down, took off my underwear, and stood there, two breaths, three breaths, waiting for someone to notice, wondering if they’d point. Ég er Gyðyingur, I am a Jew. I’d practiced that sentence for just such a moment, but nobody seemed to notice, no one cared. Umskorrin, circumcised. I knew that word as well.

  This was the genius of Icelandic, a language without loanwords. For a thousand years, the Icelanders would make up words for unfamiliar things out of their own vocabulary. Great polysyllables for science or technology or faith would be reduced to what my tutor said were calques: words made up, bit by bit, by translating the parts of other words. The television, for example, was the sjónvarp, the picture thrower; the radio, the utvarp, the out-thrower, a calque for transmitter. Umskorrin meant “scored around,” and I looked down at my Jewishness and saw it, scored around, the ceremony of the English word now stripped down to a scar.

  I put my cutoffs on and ran out to the pool. The water smelled like rotten eggs, but I jumped in, and it was hot—not just warm, but really hot, like a fresh-drawn bath. I flailed around, feeling myself poach in the water, and Anna-Solveg came up, wearing nothing but a pair of cutoffs herself and a bra, and said, “þu ert moðirsik,” and splashed me as she swam away. Moðirsik, homesick I thought, sick for my mother, though what at this moment would lead Anna-Solveg to such insight into my loneliness I could not fathom.

  When we got back to the farm, I looked up moðirsik in my dictionary. It means hysterical. Hysterical—from hystero, the Greek for uterus, for in the nineteenth century the physiologists who coined the term thought that the uterus itself was mobile, strange, and full of vapors, and any woman who behaved in strange ways was thought to be suffering from such disturbance. Moðirsik, unmanned, with a dictionary on Anna-Solveg’s bed.

  That night, Eythor took me out to the barn and pointed to a great rolled-up net. He motioned for me to grab one end, and he took the other, and we walked down to the river that led to the fjord. I held one side against the river bank and he walked across, waist deep, without flinching, unrolling the net across the current, staking it on the other bank, four hundred or so feet away. Then he tromped back across the riverbed, clapped me on the back, and said, “Á morgun við bordum fisk,” tomorrow we eat fish.

  And sure enough, he woke me up before I had to go and shovel shit the next morning, and we grabbed the net, now heavy and twitching, and half a dozen fish—part trout, part salmon, so they seemed—were caught gill-wise across the webbing. Silungur, he called them. We dislodged them, banged their heads against the rocks, and brought them to the house. That night, poached in home-churned butter from the cows I’d harried, with potatoes dug from the backyard, rhubarb and yogurt for dessert, they went down, pink-fleshed and perfect.

  In his Saga, Hrafnkel takes on a young boy as a farmhand. He can do anything he wants, but he can never ride Hrafnkel’s favorite horse, Freyfaxi. Do that, and I’ll kill you. But one day, the boy finds that the sheep have scattered, and he goes to get a horse to chase them. Only one remains for him to mount, Freyfaxi. He gets on, rides off, collects the sheep, and then comes back. Freyfaxi gallops up to the farmstead, and Hrafnkel comes out, finding the horse all sweaty. Did you ride him? he says to the boy. And the boy does not deny it. Hrafnkel takes his axe and kills the boy with a single blow.

  The story goes on, with the relatives pressing a lawsuit, getting compensation, punishing the farmer. But pride intervenes, and all the men eventually get their comeuppance. Everyone gets an option: do this and you’ll live; do that and you’ll die. You have two choices—Mun ek bjoda þér tvá kosti. The phrase shows up again and again. There’s very little in the story of great drama. I’d sit in Anna-Solveg’s room, reading the story, writing down vocabulary, translating and trying to make sense of its simplicity. There were no gods or heroes. There was no great drama, like the burning of Njál’s house or the performance of Egil’s poetry. Just a few men of few words, and a horse, and choices.

  Literature is the story of bad choice
s. If the boy had not ridden the horse, there would be no story. If the men had not gone after Hrafnkel afterward, there would be no story. If Hrafnkel had not sought revenge, there would be no story. Good choices make for quiet lives. Bad choices make for saga. Had I stayed at home, there’d be no story.

  I was not made for saga. Each day, I’d try a task they’d set me: little ones at first, like shoveling shit or digging up potatoes. The greater challenges eluded me. One morning, Midnight pushed me against the barbed wire as I tried to get her up the hill, and Arni had to come, a smile as wide as the river mouth across his face, to disentangle me like a trapped trout. Another day, I went off with Eythor to find huge driftwood logs along the seacoast. There were no trees here—they had all been cut down by settlers hundreds of years before, and nothing grew back, just scrub and grass, and lava. But the farmers knew that far across the North Sea into Norway, loggers bundled their haul into great rafts and floated them along the coast to shipping ports, and every now and then, a log or two might dislodge itself from the pack and float along the currents, lodging, months later, against sandbars on the northern coast of Iceland. We took the jeep and spun along the beach, kicking up surf and sand with the rear tires, until we spied one, bleached out, like a beached sea creature. It must have been twenty feet long, and I thought only of Beowulf’s ocean—hronrad, the road of the whale. We managed to roll it up-beach, lift it up onto the jeep’s roof, and tie it on. We drove back, celebrating our dead catch, as if we had speared a monster.

  That evening, Arni, Eythor, and some local men dragged the log up the hill to what would be the new barn. This was, now I understood, to be the central post for a new roof, and I was given a shovel again, this time to dig a hole for the log. It had started to drizzle, and the dirt turned quickly into earth-shit, but I dug away, until after an hour or so I had made a hole about three feet deep. Arni and the men lifted the log upright and stuck it in the hole. It quivered, but it held. While all hands held it straight, Eythor then came up with a wheelbarrow full of cement. He dumped it in, much of it splattering on my boots, and then tamped it down. We stood there, holding up the log, the rain now pelting, all sense of clock-time lost, until the cement set enough for us to go inside for dinner.