The Tricking of Freya (17 page)

"And marry him?"

"And marry him. But it was the young man who wrote those letters she
fell in love with first. And for the past few years, Sigga and I have been trying to get them back. Me, mainly."

"Why?"

"Why?" Birdie's voice rose. "Why? Because Sigga has a right to see the
letters again before she dies. Because they provide invaluable documentation of the early years of the New Iceland colony, through the eyes of a young poet. Because your uncle Stefan needs access to them for the book
he's writing on the history of New Iceland. And because I've never read
them, that's why!"

"Where are they?" I whispered, hoping to lower the volume of our conversation. Birdie was waking up the other passengers.

"Good question, elskan. Good question. Ulfur thinks he can help us find
them. You know who Ulfur is."

I certainly did. I'd never met him, but Birdie talked about him often. Ulfur was a distant cousin of ours, and the great-great-grandson of the farmerpoet Pall. Ulfur had been Birdie's host when she'd spent an entire summer
in Iceland in 1964 for the hundredth birthday celebration of our grandfather Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands. According to Birdie, Ulfur had done more
than anyone else in Iceland to promote Olafur's reputation. Ulfur and
Birdie had worked together, by mail, on a number of translations of Olafur's
work into English. And Ulfur was a very important scholar in Iceland. "Ulfur," Birdie boasted, "was almost single-handedly responsible for arranging
the return of Iceland's precious Sagas from the Danes."

"But why were Iceland's Sagas in Denmark?"

"Because Denmark ruled Iceland for centuries, they tried to own everything about us, they inserted their words, their spellings, into our language.
And they held our ancient manuscripts for safekeeping. But once Iceland
was fully independent, they were able to negotiate the return of the manuscripts. The first shipment arrived by boat in 1971. Ulfur sent me a newspaper clipping. Thousands of Icelanders appeared at the harbor in Reykjavik to
welcome our hooks home again. The Sagas, the Eddas-back in Iceland at
last!"

Ulfur, the way Birdie talked about him, was a near god. Once when
she'd been drinking just enough to get dreamy but not enough to get mean,
Birdie told me she considered Ulfur myndarlegur. Myndarlegur is a high
compliment in Icelandic, encompassing not one but a cluster of appealing
traits. Handsome, first and foremost, but also stately, hardworking, skillful,
and generous. When I was nine I'd found a photograph of Ulfur in the top
drawer of Birdie's vanity. With his black hair and high cheekbones, he
looked plenty myndarlegur to me.

"Do you want to marry Ulfur?" I'd asked her. Without, of course, men tioning that I'd found the photograph. Birdie raged at any perceived invasion of her privacy. Much less an actual one.

"Marry Ulfur? He's already married, baby! He's got a wife and children
back in Iceland. He's got a boy around your age, as a matter of fact, named
Saemundur."

"If Ulfur weren't already married, would you marry him?" I thought she
would scoff at that question too, but she didn't. Nor did she answer.

At some point in Birdie's all-night monologue, our stewardess, Steinunn,
brought us trays with baked salmon and parsleyed potatoes, a Coke for me,
and for Birdie, the first of several miniature bottles of Brennivin. Birdie chatted with Steinunn while I stared out the window at the green sky and orange
sun, barely able to nibble my fish.

"If Ulfur knows where the letters are, why doesn't he just give them to
you?"

"Good question. Back in Sixty-four, he told me he didn't have them, but
that he was sure he could locate them in his father's collection. His father,
Johann, has an extensive private collection of Icelandic books and manuscripts. But this past winter I got a letter from Ulfur saying he never found
them. That he'd looked everywhere there was to look, even put out a call in
Morgunbladid, but the letters never turned up."

"What's Morgunbladid?"

"Iceland's main newspaper. Morning paper. Have you forgotten all the
Icelandic I ever taught you? Because you're going to have to start speaking
it, you know, as soon as we land. Bara Islensku. Icelandic only."

"Are you going to look for Olafur's letters while we're in Iceland?"

"Bingo! I doubt Ulfur has even tried very hard. He's got other fish to fry,
now that he's been made head of the Arni Magnusson Institute. My theory
is that the letters are somewhere in Ulfur's father's library. Or else in a
trunk in some old lady's farmhouse in East Iceland." She swallowed all in
one gulp her third shot of Brennivin. "We're going to find Olafur's letters,
Freya min. And we're going to bring them back to Gimli."

And then we landed.

And then we landed.

And then we landed.

Three days have passed, Cousin, and I still cannot bring myself beyond
that one line. What I fear most is not that I won't be able to remember the
trip with Birdie but that I will. It is wedged deep in my memory, lodged in
the nether-crevice that separates not-remembering from forgetting.

Spread here on the table in front of me is a map of Iceland. I searched a
dozen bookstores over the past few days before finding one; it would have
been easier to locate a map of the moon. It was worth the trouble. It's more
than a memory aid: this map reminds me that the trip to Iceland was no
glorious dream, no brutal nightmare, but an actual physical journey. Still, as
I sit here conjuring, I can't help but wonder if I don't look like my mother,
with that befuddled, dream-remembering expression crinkling her face.

And then we landed.

The first thing I remember is sideways rain at dawn. Standing outside
the Keflavik Airport attacked by ferocious horizontal wind slamming razorsharp pebbles of water. Velkoinin til Islands! I clutched my cherry red suitcase, exhausted from lack of sleep, hair wet and whipping against my face.
Iceland's rain made Gimli's downpour seem mere drizzle.

Next, Ulfur leaping out of a very small European car and running toward us through the rain. His hair was no longer black like in the photograph in Birdie's vanity but brilliant silver-white. With a goatee to match.
Still myndarlegur though. Birdie strode to meet him, looking glamorous in
her salmon pink coat and head scarf, but if there was any romance between
them, I couldn't detect it in that brief rain-soaked airport hug. For me Ulfur
had only a brisk nod and a handshake, his eyes veiled behind misted
glasses. Then he tossed our luggage in the trunk of his little car.

From the backseat I rubbed clear a spot in the fogged window. What I
saw: black earth. Mile after mile of stark black lava fields. No houses no
trees no people. Not even a sheep. This was Iceland? Or had we landed on
Venus after all? Pluto perhaps? Whichever was most remote from earth.

During the entire drive to Reykjavik, Ulfur and Birdie talked together in
the front seat, ignoring me completely. Mostly it was Ulfur who spoke, in
low serious tones I was too exhausted to decipher. I kept hearing the word
hjonaskilnadur. It was not a word I recognized. Hjon, I knew, meant married couple. Was Ulfur proposing to Birdie? Was that the real purpose of
our trip? Then I remembered that Ulfur was married. I studied his face in
the rearview mirror. The fog had cleared from his glasses and I could see
the color of his eyes, greenish brown, but with dark circles underneath. Not
quite as myndarlegur as the photograph, I decided. Yet Birdie could not
seem to take her eyes off him. Once she even reached over and took his
hand. What would Ulfur's wife think?

Out the window to my left was the ocean; the lava seemed to reach to its
very shore. I shuddered in my damp clothes, sucked a strand of my hair. I
never said good-bye to Mama, I kept thinking. I never said good-bye. Would
Mama have really sent me off to Iceland without saying good-bye? Later, at
Ulfur's house, I asked Birdie if we could call Mama.

"Phone Gimli?" Birdie scoffed, in that harsh laugh of hers. "Freya min, it
would cost a fortune. It would cost practically as much as a plane ticket.
Nobody calls Canada from Iceland."

Then she saw I was crying. "You can write postcards," she conceded. "To
Anna, and Sigga, and your uncle Stefan. Every day, baby. Think how thrilled
they'll be!"

Her face darkened for a moment. Perhaps she was allowing herself to think of those three, not thrilled but frantic, seared with worry. Later I
would learn all about those days. How search parties dove Lake Winnipeg,
in case we'd drowned in the storm. Or been struck by lightning. At the police station in Winnipeg after our capture, Birdie would insist that she'd left
my mother a note saying exactly where we were going and for how long.

"A note?" My mother screamed. "A note? We never found a note. You
never wrote a note!"

"Are you accusing me of lying?"

"Oh, I am," my mother said bitterly. "I most certainly am."

Our entire trip rested on lies that shifted beneath us like tectonic plates
and eventually collided. Did your mother believe her own lies? I have to
doubt that. It was all too calculated. And what about me? How many of
Birdie's lies did I believe? All and none. One part of me still wondered if my
mother really knew I was in Iceland. It was a fear that rose up in me at least
once a day: Marna! That one word stood for all my doubts. And then I'd push
it down. To believe that Birdie had lied seemed worse to me than to believe
her. To believe Birdie had lied to me would mean she was practically ...
evil. And so I chose belief, fragile as a china cup. Once a day for the entire
three weeks I wrote Mama a postcard, every inch crammed with my tiny
neat script. Here we are at Thingvellir. Here we are at Gullfoss. Every postcard ending with I miss you, Mama, underlined three times. Birdie gave me
beautiful Icelandic stamps to paste into the corners, stamps with horses
and puffins and geysers.

Yes, every day I wrote a postcard, and every day instead of mailing it to
Canada as she claimed, Birdie stashed the postcard inside the lining of her
suitcase. It was Sigga who discovered and delivered them, finally, to Mama.
A week after our return. Nineteen cards Mama read all in one sitting,
weeping.

Ulfur lived on the edge of a lake in the middle of Reykjavik in a house of
books. The house, it turned out, was not Ulfur's but his parents'. He'd
moved in with them after his divorce. Hjonaskilnadur, that mysterious word
I kept hearing on the ride from the airport. I'd made the mistake of asking
what it meant.

"It means I am divorced now," Ulfur had explained from the front seat.
"Iceland's divorce rate is soaring, you know. One of your American influences, I suppose. And my ex-wife? She is in Spain, discovering herself. Is
that not another of your American trends?" He fixed his gaze on me in the
rearview mirror. I smiled uncertainly. I had no idea what he was talking
about, but I recognized the tone in his voice: sarcasm, ragged as an unhealed
scar. Birdie's weapon of choice, her favorite tongue-sword. No wonder she
liked Ulfur so much. I knew by then that sarcastic questions were best left
unanswered. Instead I nodded my head vaguely, in a way that could have
meant either yes or no. Or nothing. I wasn't sure I liked this Ulfur. I turned
and stared out at the lava again. After a half an hour or so, the red- and blueroofed city of Reykjavik came into sight, and we were puttering up cobblestone streets and over a bridge that crossed a lake to the house of books.

Cousin, that house was the most marvelous thing I had ever seen. Not
from the outside. From the outside it was a three-story cement facade
painted pastel green. But the inside! Books lined every wall of every room.
Books climbed up stairs and rested on landings. Books stretched over the
arches of doorways like bridges, stood guard over mantels. Old leather-bound
volumes with gilt titles gleamed in glass cabinets. Books in the basement,
books in the attic. Four stories of books. How many, I wanted to know.

"Nine thousand, six hundred," Ulfur answered. "Approximately. The
largest private book collection in Iceland."

Ulfur's father was the book collector, his mother the cataloger. The elderly couple lived on the main floor. Johann was nearly blind, but Lara was
still spry enough to climb the ladders and retrieve books for Birdie. Which
is pretty much how we spent our first two days in Reykjavik. It rained and
rained and rained, sideways and upside down, with huge gusting winds on
the lake. "Not a day for touring," Ulfur would announce each morning with
a wry smile. I was restless, eager to get on the Ring Road and start seeing
the glaciers and volcanoes and waterfalls. But Birdie didn't seem to mind.
In fact, she became terrifically excited. Overexcited, my mother would have
said. But of course Mama wasn't there. Birdie was in book heaven, flitting
from room to room with Lara's tattered catalog in hand, piling books on
every floor of the house. When she wasn't retrieving books she was poring over them, reading lines out loud, exclaiming to herself, making scribbled
notes on her worn Word Meadow manuscript.