Yes, that Brekka. Except, of course, it was no longer that Brekka, imprinted by Birdie in my child's mind exactly as Olafur had left it a hundred years earlier, its turf roofs peaked in ashfall, its fields of hay wilted into
barren corpse-yards of famished livestock and fume-choked birds. But
nothing dies utterly, not even in Iceland. After some years even the ashwasted East had succumbed to earth's green insistence. If Olafur and his
family had stuck around they'd have seen the earth rise again fair and green,
just as the volva foresaw at the end of Voluspa.
The current residents of Brekka, as it turned out, were not even kin, but
despite being no relation to either Pall or Olafur, they took seriously their
obligation as guardians of the famous farmstead. Hrefna and Eirikur were
their names, a pair of retired schoolteachers from nearby Egilsstadir, both
well versed in the poets' lore. On that first morning they led us to the two
stone monuments (one Olafur's, one Pall's) that rose like cairns at the site
of the old homefield. Visitors, they explained, often came to pay homage to
the farm that had borne Iceland such splendid literary fruit. While they
couldn't allow people inside the original sod-roof farmhouse it was too ruined, even dangerous in its decrepitude-they invited many travelers into
their own cement home, across a stone-stubbled field from the original
Brekka, to see their shrine to the poets. Portraits, photographs, books by
and about the two poets, even a plate glazed with an image of Pall's face
all were stored in a glassed-in cabinet in their tiny living room, already overstuffed with their own families' artifacts. But Olafur's letters? No, they'd
never heard of any, much less set eyes on them.
"I see," Birdie said. And then: "Has Ulfur Johannsson been here?"
Not that they remembered. They even checked their guest book. Assured that the Wolf was nowhere in the immediate vicinity, Birdie explained to them our quest. Prefaced, of course, by my recital of Olafur's
"New Iceland Song," which as Birdie had calculated, made their eyes shine
with sentiment. They immediately offered-insisted-on putting us up,
letting us use their house as our base of operations.
Birdie did not hesitate to take full advantage of their kindness. Relying
on the list of likely contacts she'd compiled with Ulfur, we set up appointments by phone, sometimes three or four in a day, then set out in the jeep,
Birdie at the wheel, me navigating from the front seat, Iceland Road Guide
in hand. Some of the contacts were distant relations of Pall's, others local people with an interest in his work. We soon developed a routine, the Freya
and Birdie dog-and-pony show: after introductions and a series of suspicious questions from Birdie regarding Ulfur (all answered in the negative),
I would recite Olafur's "New Iceland Song," then Birdie would relate the
sad tale of the lost letters. It was a moving performance on easy marks,
since Olafur and Pall were East Iceland's main claims to fame. All the
farmhouses we visited, all the people we imposed upon! People with names
like Halldora and Stigur and Skuli, who lived on farms with names like
Skeggjastadir and Hallfredarstadir and Arnarstadir, dug through their attics
and archives, libraries and storage rooms, closets and cabinets, and made
endless phone calls on our behalf.
"What about Sigga's people?" I asked.
"What about them?"
"Aren't we going to visit them?"
"They have nothing to do with the letters!"
"But doesn't Sigga want us to meet them?"
Birdie stumbled, recovered the lie again. ,of course, they're expecting
us. But they're a bit farther north. After we find the letters, then we'll go see
them. After we find the letters, we'll do anything you want."
"Visit the glacial lagoon?"
"Absolutely."
At the end of each futile day we'd return to Brekka empty-handed, driving along the road that followed the northern bank of the Lagarfljot River.
How beautiful that drive was, the low-lying glacial river, pale and blue and
calm, far from its icy source, meandering where it pleased, fluted with lush
green banks, framed by rounded sheep-grazed hills and distant lavenderhued mountains. Despite its name, Iceland does know true green, its summer brief but showy, a shameless display of emerald brilliant as winter's
northern lights, the island's entire circumference a perfect circle of verdancy. But Birdie was immune to weather or beauty or anything but Olafur's
letters. Her single-mindedness consumed not only her but me as well. I became nothing but an appendage that recited Olafur's verses on command
and navigated routes to remote farms that might lead us to his lost letters. I
was tired? I was hungry, thirsty? I missed my mother? Birdie was beyond not
caring; my complaints, being non-epistolary in nature, simply failed to regis ter. Luckily our various hosts insisted on feeding us; otherwise I doubt
Birdie would have thought to eat or even remembered food existed. With the
strangers we encountered she poured on the charm, but alone with me in
the jeep she became increasingly bitter and dispirited. There was less than a
week left before our flight back to Winnipeg, and as each day passed Birdie's
desperation flared more and more frequently into paranoia. Sometimes she
claimed that Ulfur had set people in the East against us.
"But no one's even met him," I'd protest.
"So they say, elskan. So they say."
Other times, she seemed convinced that the reason the letters were
nowhere to be found was that Ulfur had had them in his possession the entire time. New strands of Ulfur's plot continually unfurled in Birdie's
fevered brain. The Arni Magnusson Institute, the foundation Ulfur headed
whose charge was to recover and preserve ancient manuscripts, was probably in on it as well.
What had Saemundur called his father? The Prime Minister of Sheepskin Manuscripts. "But the Arni Magnusson Institute only cares about the
really old stuff," I pointed out. "That's what Saemundur told me. Vellum
manuscripts, that kind of thing."
A front, Birdie declared, for more malevolent objectives. Different people we'd met on the trip entered Birdie's set, each with a role to play.
Sveinn, the bearded publisher at Ulfur's dinner party who'd expressed an
interest in publishing Olafur's letters once they were found, became a central figure in the plot. "How well Sveinn played his part that night," Birdie
complained. "Feigning surprise at the existence of Olafur's lost letters! He
probably has them typeset at his office in Reykjavik, ready for publication."
Even Ulfur's father, the elderly near-blind Johann, was incriminated, accused of hiding the letters from the world all those years, secreting them
among his thousands of books.
Birdie's anxiety leaked onto me. I found myself unable to sleep at night
on the little cot in the living room at Brekka, wracked with worries. Not
Birdie's worries, not Ulfur and his various spies and agents, but my own.
What if we returned to Gimli empty-handed? Would Sigga be disappointed
in me? Who was walking Mama to Betel in the morning? Who was keeping
track of her canes? Did Saemundur hate me now for stealing his jacket? When I finally slept, the sheep we'd struck and left for dead on the Ring
Road appeared with bloodied wool and cracked horns, chiding me with
plaintive bleats.
A night of ruins and a ruined night.
Our last evening at Brekka, Birdie yanked me from sleep, rushing me
into jeans, sneakers, and a wool sweater topped by Saemundur's jacket,
then snuck me out the front door and across the rubbled field to the old
Brekka farmhouse. The moon was massively full, bursting silver bright, but
the sun was a goner, not officially set but obscured by the cliff that towered
over Brekka like a menacing giant.
"My father's house," Birdie said, and took my hand.
I thought that was all she wanted: for me to see it. Like the time she
dragged me from sleep to my first orange-grinning sunrise on the lake in
Gimli. This time we gazed not upon a morning lake but at the five conjoined
wood-framed structures built into and dwarfed by the immense cliff. Long
grasses fringed the boarded doors and windows, a green hump of earth formed
the roof. The stone walls were crumbled, covered with moss and lichen. The
wooden face of each structure weathered to the color of bone.
It was a stunning sight by moonlight. I squeezed Birdie's hand. Sight
seen. I yawned and turned away.
"Where do you think you're going?" Her salmon coat hideous pink in the
moonlight.
"Back to bed?"
In my dreams.
Birdie's plan was for me to find a way inside the ruined farmhouse. I
would be small enough to fit through a window. Once inside, I was to find
a door and let her in too.
"But why?"
"The letters, little fool." Birdie hiss-whispered though no one could hear,
our schoolteacher hosts, Hrefna and Eirikur, asleep in their homely farmhouse across the stone-littered field. Did Birdie really believe we might find
Olafur's long-lost letters stored safe and sound in this rotted century-old
farmhouse?
She did.
I mustered my courage. "Can't Eirikur open it for us in the daytime?"
Birdie laughed. "You don't get it, do you? Eirikur is being paid off by Ulfur or the Arni Magnusson Institute or the university or the National Library or the government or Sveinn the publisher to guard the letters stashed
in the old farmhouse. Once we leave the country, eureka! Ulfur `discovers'
the letters; cameras and news teams and reporters and scholars and ordinary Icelanders flock to the scene; the letters get published; and Eirikur's
farmhouse is restored and designated a national monument! All thanks to
Ulfur, esteemed scholar and national hero, savior of Iceland's oh-soprecious literary heritage. What else is left in life for poor Ulfur? All the ancient manuscripts have been peaceably returned to Iceland by the Danish
government and displayed under Ulfur's directorship at the Arni Magnusson Institute. Fanfare subsides, wife deserts, children rebel, nothing remains for poor Ulfur but to siphon our rightful fame-"
I took the flashlight from Birdie's hand and started up the grassy slope
that led to the roof of the farmhouse, preferring the unknown horrors of
ghostly ruins to her rambling diatribe against Ulfur. When I reached the
top, I looked down to see Birdie waving me onward, pink head scarf fluttering wildly in the wind. I knelt down and unlatched the one rooftop window
that hadn't been boarded up. It creaked open and I shone my light through
to a room down below. What if instead of landing on my feet I crashed right
through rotten floorboards into a musty dank hellhole beneath the earth?
Marna!
I landed on my butt in a thud-puff of dust, but the floor held. I surveyed
the room with my flashlight. Nothing but raw wooden-plank walls, floorboards, and ceiling beams. Nothing painted, every surface coated with
dust. Eirikur had told us the building had been abandoned only thirty years
earlier, after the War, but the air I breathed in, then coughed out, tasted
centuries old.
After a moment I realized I must be standing in the badstofa, the lofted
living-sleeping quarters of Olafur's time. This was where Olafur's family
had gathered for their evening readings, where Olafur had recited the poem
Voluspa that fateful Easter night. For a brief moment I felt a thrill-I was
standing where Olafur, Skald Nyja islands, had stood, maybe the exact
spot! then remembered my task.
The top edge of a steep staircase appeared under my light. Down below
was where the sheep had been kept in the wintertime, to keep the humans
warm above. I remembered that from Mama's bedtime story-sheep in the
house?-and imagined falling asleep to the bleating of sheep. Then my
dream-sheep rose woolen-bloody in my mind.
A piercing "FREYA!!!" broke my nervous reverie, a scream that could
raise the dead or at least our slumbering hosts across the field. Not Freyaare-you-okay-in-there? but a scary Gryla chin-teeth-sharp-and-glistening
voice, an answer me or I'm coming after you voice.
The stairs creaked but held solid as I crept down by flashlight. "Just a
minute, Auntie!" I called out, like this was an ordinary house and I was answering an ordinary door. Except the door once I finally found it wouldn't
open. Nailed and boarded shut from the outside, why would it open from
the in? Why indeed? Birdie had tricked me, sent me in under false pretenses. The dirty work was mine alone in that creepy stone ruin that was
nothing more than a cave minus Saemundur. Instead, Birdie stuck her head
through a broken window and directed my search. "Look in that corner,
Freya, try lifting those boards."
"There's nothing here!" I kicked angrily at a pile of splintered wood, capsizing a rusted iron pot big enough to bathe in.
"Keep looking. The next room."
"How?"
"Through the passageway. Olafur said the rooms connect through a passageway at the back."
Tunnel more like it. I had to slouch my way through, and the rough stone
walls snagged at the patches on Saemundur's jacket. Finally I emerged into
another room, barren-dank as the first. What was Birdie thinking, that we'd
find the letters safe and dry in a locked metal box labeled "Olafur's Lost Letters"? I called out my weary inventory of naught, not knowing or caring
whether Birdie could hear me. "A broken loom. Leg of chair. Pile of bones,
dog or fox." Then, "Stones." A wall crumbled into a pile of rocks, blocking
the passageway that led to the remaining rooms. Happy day!-or night or
whatever it was-there was nowhere left to look.
I made my retreat, back through the passageway and up the rickety
stairs to the badstofa. But how to hoist myself through the window? I had nothing to stand on. Yet I was tall, wasn't I, Freya the Tall Birdie had called
me on our first meeting, and my arms were long enough to reach the sill,
my legs strong enough to prop myself on a narrow ledge that ran horizontally around the room. From there I wriggled out through the window headfirst and stood for a moment on the turf roof, wheeze-breathing fresh air
into my dust-irked lungs. Then I glared at Birdie down below and raised
both my arms up in a gesture of empty-handedness: See, Birdie? Sweet failure. I saw it clearly: our whole mission, doomed from the start and inane to
the core. Surely even Birdie understood that now?