That was malfraedi (mowl-fry-thee). Like vertigo, it was a word I loved to
pronounce while hating what it meant. Mal is language and fraedi is study
of, so mal plus fraedi equals grammar. Malfraedi made me bite my lip until
it was bloody, so pretty quickly Birdie would move me on to aefingar (eyevin-gar). Exercises. Some aefingar were English that you had to make Icelandic, and some were Icelandic you turned into English, but no matter
which way I translated them, they never made sense. Looking back on it
now (and I've got my copy of Snaebjorn's Primer right here on my lap), I can
see why. The individual sentences may have been correct, but Snaebjorn's
paragraphs defied all sense. Take Aefingar 25:
After all this time we are still here. I am going to walk round the lake; I
wanted to walk up the mountain slope, but it was too steep for vie. The
maids saw it through the key-hole. I put the flowers in the windows and
the plates on the table. The beautiful poem "Locksley Hall" is by Tennyson. You have never been kind to me. Now come with vie across the
river. Bring the knives and forks, please. I pay nothing beyond what was
agreed to. It is raining on the new white tents. Let its see you run round
the table.
What was Snaebjorn thinking?
So much for malfraedi. So much for aefingar.
All this, while Mama was napping.
Once in a burst of frustration I blurted out the unthinkable. "But why do I
have to learn Icelandic?"
"Why?" Birdie paused, stunned. "Because our language connects us as
surely to our ancestors as our blood. Once you learn Icelandic you'll be able
to read the Sagas and the ancient poems in the original, even though they
were written nearly a thousand years ago. Our language is pure, Freya min.
Can the English read their Beowulf untranslated? They cannot!"
I must have looked less than eager to delve into centuries-old Icelandic
manuscripts, because Birdie added, "Plus, you'll need to know Icelandic
when I take you to Iceland."
"You're taking me to Iceland?"
"Indeed I am. Someday we'll go to Iceland, elskan, just you and me."
I was not inclined to believe her. Hadn't she once promised to take me
flying?
Sometimes instead of Icelandic lessons in the afternoon Birdie took me to
the beach. Once we even went in the morning. It was the day Birdie and I
were the very first people on the lake. First to make our marks on the sand
slated clean by night rain, tempting as a fresh sheet of manila paper awaiting crayon. My small footprints premiered, the half-moons of my heels, the
five astonished dots of my toes. The lake flat and sleepy, the sky a blue so
soft I wanted to lay my cheek on it like felt. I'd never seen the lake so early.
I wasn't allowed there by myself because I could drown, and by the time
Birdie woke each day and we packed a lunch and changed into our suits, it
was the other side of noon, no patch of sand unchurned by running kidsteps and mother-size footprints dragging beach chairs and umbrellas, the
whole thing a sprawl of towels, shovels, beach balls, buckets.
This day was different. Birdie had been up all night I'd heard the
sound of typewriter keys splattering deep in the night like rain. She'd typed
straight into dawn and then tiptoed across the hall into my bedroom and
whispered, Come, elskan, we're going to watch the sunrise. I said No, I didn't
want to, cranky with broken sleep, shivering in my nightie, hating Birdie for
dragging me down the stairs, shooshing me past the bedroom where my
grandmother and mother lay sleeping, through the kitchen, and out the
back door along the two blocks to the beach and no sun to be seen. Just a
cool darkness fringed pink. Birdie led me to the edge of the shore and took
my hand. I jerked it away, scuffed my feet in the hard cold sand.
And then it began, not my first sunrise, but the first I had witnessed with
my own bare eyes: a small lump of ember on the far eastern rim of the lake
spilling its sly orange grin over pale water. I grabbed back Birdie's hand, the
squeeze between us a pulse of light. Then Birdie spread a plaid blanket onto the sand and the next thing I knew she was sleeping, her head a blond mess
nested in the crook of her elbows. And I was alone with the ember-risen sun,
the sand flat and perfect as a just-made bed.
Unattended, my mother would have said, if she'd known.
On afternoons when Birdie wanted nothing to do with me, when she
locked herself in Olafur's study to work on her Word Meadow poem, or took
off on one of her shopping sprees, or during those days or even weeks when
who knew where she was or when she was coming back to Gimli, if ever, I
helped Sigga at the Evergreen library. Sigga was the Head Librarian, elderly but vigorous. When I was with Sigga in the library, the world became,
briefly, orderly and safe.
"Is it true Icelanders cared more about their books than their babies and
that's why they brought so many books with them from Iceland but left so
many of their babies behind?"
"Of course it's not true." Sigga pushed her glasses up the bridge of her
nose indignantly. "Infants couldn't survive the journey to America, and in
those cases the parents left them behind to be raised by relatives."
"What happened to them?"
"Nothing happened to them. They grew up in Iceland is all."
"But the Icelanders did bring a lot of books with them?"
"They surely did. What else did they own worth bringing? Nothing.
Most of them were destitute. But you know the saying, Bliudur er boklaus
inadur-Blind is the bookless man. Who told you that nonsense anyway?"
"I don't remember." It was Birdie, of course. I hadn't known if she was
joking or not about the babies. About the books the evidence was clear: the
Gimli library was full of books that had come over in immigrant trunks.
When the old people died, their children would donate the books to the library, since most couldn't read Icelandic themselves.
"When you came to Canada, did you bring your books in trunks?"
"No, I shipped mine later. But that was different. I came in 1920. I had a
place to come to. When the first Icelanders arrived in the 1870s, they didn't
have anyone to ship anything ahead to. They hardly knew where they'd end
up. Besides, I thought I was only visiting for a summer."
"Where did you stay when you came?"
"With your afi Olafur. In Arborg."
"Even though he wasn't your husband yet?"
"No, he wasn't. But he took in all sorts of visitors from Iceland. He welcomed anyone. As long as they were willing to work his farm!"
"And then your books arrived?"
"A year later they did. They came by the slow boat. By that time Olafur
and I were engaged to be married. Imagine the scandal-he was thirty years
older than me! Eight sets of shelves he had to build, to hold all our books."
Gimli's library had new books as well, in English and even some in
French, but the old Icelandic ones were my favorites. Sometimes I couldn't
help wondering as I ran my fingers along their crinkled leather spines if
maybe a particularly heavy book had taken the place on the ship of a baby
who grew up in Iceland never knowing its parents.
In the late afternoon came Coffee. Except coffee was for grown-ups, so I
drank milk. In Gimli milk still came in bottles from cows that lived in places
like Arborg and Geysir and Hnausa. Sigga baked the sweets we ate for Coffee, using the cookbook published by the Ladies Aid of the First Lutheran
Church, Victor Street, Winnipeg, 1937 edition. There was a new volume
every couple of years, but Sigga swore by the 1937 edition. The cookbook
had a soft green cover that was worn and torn and creased and stained, but
Sigga said it had held up pretty well considering. It had four different recipes
for ponnukokur, but Mrs. B. B. Jonsson's was the best. There were two
recipes for vinarterta; Mrs. B. J. Brandson's was best. Especially if you added
an extra egg. Mostly Sigga baked cookies, like gingersnaps (two recipes,
Mrs. Peterson's best), or Pearl Palmason's Thimble Cookies, which meant I
got to roll the dough into balls and press the centers in with a thimble and
fill them with jam. For visitors Sigga wanted to impress, like Mama's dear
friend Vera, who ran the Ladies Aid of the First Lutheran Church singlehandedly, we made layer cakes, sometimes with frosting and sometimes icing. My favorite recipes were Frosting for Featherweight Cake and Celestial
Icing. The Ladies Aid cookbook even had recipes from people who weren't
Icelandic, like Scotch Crumpets from Mrs. J. Campbell. Sigga said there were lots of Scots in Winnipeg. At the back of the book was a page of
Household Hints. Heat clothespins in oven in cold weather and they will retain sufficient warmth to keep the fingers comfortable while hanging out the
clothes on a cold day.
For coffee cups we used what Birdie called the Lucky Dozen: the ones
I'd picked out on the day of Mama's welcome-home-to-Gimli party. Those
twelve were the sole survivors, the only ones not inside the cabinet when I
kicked it over. The first time we had Coffee after Mama came back from
the hospital she noticed that the china cabinet was nearly empty. Stefan
had replaced the glass, but three of the four shelves were bare.
"What happened to your beautiful cups?" she asked Sigga.
I froze. I didn't know yet that Mama couldn't remember anything about
her accident. I felt my cheeks burn and I stared at my sneakers. For a long
time no one said anything. Then Sigga explained that she was getting klutzy
in her old age, what with her arthritic fingers and all, and if she kept it up
there would be no cups left.
I adored the Lucky Dozen, with their dainty feet and gold-lipped rims. I
wanted to be the one to set them out for Coffee, but Sigga said no. She
never let me near that china cabinet again.
Coffee was served in the parlor. "It's like a morgue in here," Birdie complained after Mama put up her special heavy drapes.
'T m sorry," Mama said. `Its my eyes.
"You have nothing to be sorry about, elskan." Sigga touched Mama's
head.
Sometimes it was just us for Coffee, but often we had visitors, like the
Arnasons with their little girl exactly my age. Her name was Nancy and she
always had a doll or two tucked under her arm. Did I want to play dolls? I
did not. Or the elderly Brandson sisters with trembling coffee-spilling fingers. On weekends Vera came; Birdie never came to Coffee on the Vera
days. Best was when Stefan appeared with his grandfather Old Gish, who
walked with the two troll-headed canes. He was the one who had entertained me with Gryla poems at Mama's welcome-home-to-Gimli party.
"Here comes Gryla . . . " he would tease me when he walked in the door. I
sat on his lap while he taught me funny verses line by line, first in Icelandic,
then in a rough English translation. His knee was bony, but I didn't mind. I was especially thrilled by the lygirimur-lying rhymes nonsense poems
brought over from Iceland.
I have seen the cat sing from a book,
The seal spin flax on a spinning wheel,
The skate curry a hide for a pair of breeches,
And the skua knit a sock of yarn.
I soon surprised everyone by reciting entire lying rhymes from memory,
in Icelandic. Despite my failures at grammar, it turned out I had a good ear
for pronunciation and a talent for what Gisli called leggja a rninnid-laying
things in my memory. Gisli taught me other verses too, verses he'd composed himself and others that had been circulating through the community
for years, verses about topics lofty and mundane: scathing caricatures of locals, satires of ministers, brawls, family feuds, rumors, desires, regrets.
Each verse had a story that went with it, an occasion or circumstance that
prompted the versifier to compose the verse, and as told by Gisli these stories were often as entertaining as the verses themselves. The verses composed by Gisli and others like him were considered not high art but a form
of common sport. Gisli called himself a hagyrdingur, a versifier, which was
not the same as a true poet like my grandfather Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands.
A great poet like Olafur was in a different class altogether, Gisli insisted.
His own verses he referred to as arnaleir: eagle muck. Sigga said Nonsense,
Gisli had a true talent.
One thing Gisli was very strict about was that any verse measure up to
the standard of the form: four lines, with complicated requirements for alliteration, rhyme, and meter. "None of that free verse for me," he'd insist.
Apamensskubragur."
"Baboonish nonsense indeed!" Birdie huffed. "Some of the greatest poetry today is written in free verse. Do you think poetry should stand still exactly as it was invented on a faraway island a thousand years ago?"
"That I do." Gisli grinned. "That I do."
Birdie's own epic poem, Word Meadow, was in free verse, but I myself
became a traditionalist, endeared to the form Gisli taught me, with the first
and third lines alliterative, echoed by the first letters of the second and fourth lines. Soon I was composing verses of my own, in English, which
Gisli would attempt to translate into Icelandic, often with hilarious results.
Once Birdie realized I had a knack for recital, she tried to get me to
memorize poems by Olafur, Skald Nyja islands, but they were over my head
and I much preferred lying rhymes and scary Gryla verses. Each time Gisli
came for Coffee, he would teach me a new verse, nodding his grizzled head
approvingly while he sucked coffee through the sugar cube clenched between his yellowed teeth.
I liked to memorize things because that way you could make the words
stand still. You didn't have to know whether a horse should be hestur or
hesti or hesturn or bests; that was already done for you. Once an Icelandic
word got stuck in a poem, its shape-shifting days were over.
Each person in an Icelandic family can have a different last name. Here's
how: Say the wife is named Thora Palsdottir because her father was named
Pall; her last name means daughter of Pall. Women don't take their husbands' names when they get married but keep their fathers' their whole
lives. And say her husband's name is Thorgeir Arnason because his father's
name was Arni, so he's son of Arni, except it's spelled Arnason with an a because even proper names decline. Now if Thora Palsdottir and Thorgeir Arnason have a son, his last name will be Thorgeirsson. And if they have a
daughter, her last name will be Thorgeirsdottir. That's how in one family
you can have four different last names. But people in Iceland don't go by
last names much, even to this day. Your real name is your first name, and
everything is done on a first-name basis. All the names in the Icelandic
phone book are alphabetized by first name; you might have to search
through five hundred Bjorns to find the one Bjorn you're looking for. Even if
you're the president, they call you by your first name: a headline in an Icelandic paper might read PETUR WINS ELECTION. That's why everyone refers
to our grandfather as Olafur, even when he's written about in books and articles, which is like writing a scholarly essay on how William wrote Hamlet.