Unlike most things not seen since childhood, the Blue Book seemed
just as huge and heavy as it had to me back then. Of course, it might have
grown in the meantime; the chronicling of a family history is by its nature
an ever-expanding endeavor. I couldn't resist flipping its pages before placing it on Halldora's cart. Genealogies of all types were crammed between the blue leather covers, some in English, some in Icelandic, some handwritten, some typed, some photocopied from books. I remembered as a child being dulled into near-oblivion by the lists of names and dates. They seemed
no less wearisome now. Even so, I handled the book tenderly. It was Sigga's
lifework, this exhaustive exhausting tome of ancestry.
Sigga was waiting for us in the library, seated at the table. I kissed her on
the cheek, lightly, her skin so fragile I was afraid even my lips might bruise
her. Then I placed the Blue Book in front of her and took the seat opposite.
Halldora sat next to Sigga, hands neatly folded in her lap.
"I want you to have this, Freya," Sigga announced.
I reached across the table, but she stopped me with her hand. "Not now.
Now I'm just going to show it to you. Get you oriented. But after I'm gone.
I'm leaving it to you. Soon you'll be the only one of my people left on this side
of the ocean. You'll become the keeper of the family history. Of course I'd
always planned to leave it to your mother. Birdie never had the patience for
this type of work. Anna was the one for details. A very smart person, your
mother, not flashy like Birdie, but keen. To think that she ... and leaving
you alone in the world ... Are you sure you're managing all right, Freya?"
"I'm fine, Amma. Really I am."
Sigga said nothing, and I wondered if she saw through me. She was
never easily fooled. But no, she was drifting.
"Oh dear, where was I?"
"Freya is to take on the responsibility," Halldora prompted. "That's
where you were.
Sigga nodded.
"But, Amma ... what will I do with it?"
"Do with it? You'll save it of course. Keep it up to date. All these pages
with paper clips, you'll see, I've written the changes in pencil but they need
to be typed up. Can't type anymore because of the arthritis. I've heard you
can put it all into a computer. Do you know how to use one? Stefan won't
have anything to do with that, he's so old-fashioned. But one of our relatives
in Reykjavik is doing a lot of this work on the computer. You can get information from him. And then, eventually, you'll pass it on to your children."
"What if I don't have children?"
"Not have children?"
"Some people don't. Birdie didn't." I scanned Sigga's face for a reaction,
but there was none. "Anyway, I don't know if I will. I'm almost thirty, I'm
not even married."
"Women are waiting much too long these days," Halldora commented.
"Well, Freya still has plenty of time." Sigga looked at me reassuringly.
"Now, let's begin. You'll need to listen very carefully. And I've made Halldora promise to stop me if I ramble. Imagine spending all that time yesterday on Aud-the-Deep-Minded, when you don't even know the names of my
own sister's children back in Iceland! And they're related to you on both
sides, you know, through your grandfather and me. In fact, that will give us
a good place to start, since you'll be meeting them this summer."
"They're coming for the festival?" Halldora asked.
"No, Freya is going to Iceland! Thorunn invited her!"
"Did she now?" Halldora looked skeptical, with good reason. I wondered
if I should bother telling Sigga I wouldn't be making the trip to Iceland in
the summer. It didn't seem worth upsetting her. Let an old woman believe.
Who knew if she would even be around by then, or have enough of a memory left to remember who I was, much less where I'd promised to go? It
seemed impossible and impossibly sad to me that a mind like Sigga's could
ever lose its way. But I'd already seen it starting to happen, mistaking me for
my mother ... Sigga-the-Deep-Minded was as good as gone.
"Sigga," Halldora prodded. "I think it's time we get started."
"Started?"
Halldora reached in front of Sigga and opened the Blue Book. "You were
going to show Freya how you and Olafur are related."
"I was? Yes, yes, of course. And we're going to begin with this." She pulled
out a folded piece of paper lying loose in the front of the book, opened it, and
spread it flat on the table. "My niece Thorunn from Iceland had this prepared
for me by a genealogist, brought it to me last week as a birthday gift."
In front of us lay a handmade drawing that I mistook at first for a map of
the solar system. It was a particular type of Icelandic genealogical chart,
Sigga explained. She pointed to her own name handwritten in a small circle
at the exact center. Surrounding her name expanded a series of concentric
rings, the closest one sectioned in half, the next into quarters, the next into
eighths, etc. Ten circles in all filled the page. Ten generations. The ring closest to Sigga's name, bisected horizontally, contained her parents'
names, her father in the top section, her mother in the bottom. The next
ring contained in its top two sections her father's parents, and in the bottom
two sections, her mother's parents. And so on. As if you dropped yourself
like a stone in the middle of time's lake and all your ancestors rippled out
around you in perfect concentric symmetry. It was quite beautiful, actually,
like some ancient alchemical diagram, all the names handwritten in neat
foreign script. The chart went back to the early seventeenth century, Sigga
explained. "It could go even further, but the genealogist ran out of room."
"But there are only first names ... ?" I puzzled.
"The first name is what matters. You can figure out the last names easily
enough. Just look to the next ring to see who the father is, and add son or
dottir. Easy as pie. But there are no siblings in this kind of chart. Just parents and grandparents and great-great-greats."
The lack of siblings gave the chart its symmetry. Instead of forking
wildly in all directions like the branches of a traditional family tree, it unfolded like the rings inside an old-growth trunk, circling backwards generation by generation over time. I swirled my finger through the names like a
labyrinth, the Thorunns and Ingibjorgs, the Palls and Jons and Gunnars.
Next Sigga turned to another genealogy chart in the Blue Book, this one
working forward in time with neat boxes and lines, documenting parents and
children, grandparents and greats, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins.
This was the genealogy Sigga had worked on so painstakingly during my
Gimli summers, tracing Olafur's side of the family; it ran about forty pages.
"Did you ever reach the Viking poet Egil Skallagrimsson?" I asked.
"That's a separate chart, in the back. We'll get to that later." Sigga was
hitting her stride, focused and intent. "Right now I'm going to show you exactly how your grandfather and I are related. Actually, we're related in several completely different ways-can you imagine that?"
I could. Not specifically, of course, but it seemed entirely possible and
indeed probable to me that every Icelander is related to every other Icelander somehow, if you're willing to look back far enough. The real question
was, Did I want to imagine, much less understand, such ancestral connections in all their exhausting intricacies? I did not. I could not. The truth is
that even with the aid of three cups of Halldora's coffee and a couple of stale butter cookies I barely managed to keep my eyes open as I attempted to follow Sigga's crosscuttings between the circles and squares. Olafur's third
cousin had married Sigga's mother's first cousin. And so on.
"Amma," I pleaded. "I don't think I'm cut out for this."
"Nonsense, elskan." She patted my hand reassuringly. "You'll catch on
soon enough."
After my tedious lesson in Blue Bookology, I took Sigga back to her
room and settled her in bed.
"I do hope you'll see Vera, Freya. She called yesterday, I forgot to mention it, and when I told her you'd extended your stay, well, she practically
insisted you go to Winnipeg and pay her a visit."
"I don't know, Amma, I-"
"Your mother's dearest friend in all the world," Sigga reminded me.
Dear Vera, Mama sighed. Indeed, Birdie smirked inside my head.
That afternoon Stefan and I packed up the parlor. The old brass clock that
had been a wedding present for Sigga and Olafur, Winnipeg etched in tiny
lacy script on the clock face. Had Sigga's sister come from Iceland for the
wedding, and bought the clock in Winnipeg? Maybe at Eaton's? I detached
the pendulum and wrapped it separately in tissue paper.
"Why don't you take it, Freya? I can ship anything you want to New York."
"Thanks. I'll ... I need to think it over. Figure out what I have room for."
My basement apartment flashed through my mind. It was not large, but there
was plenty of room. In the eight years I'd been there I'd never furnished it; it
was only temporary, after all. If I took the furniture from Oddi, I could have
a real bed instead of a futon on the floor, a desk instead of a door balanced on
two file cabinets, a dining table, a couch. Wooden bookshelves instead of
milk crates. A dresser or two. I could rent a U-Haul, drive it all back to Manhattan. But did I really want an apartment furnished by my dead?
In a box labeled "Family Photos" I wrapped in tissue paper the framed
portraits from the mantel. Surely, Stefan commented, I would want these. I
nodded vaguely, like my mother, in a way that could mean either yes or no, or
nothing. I emptied out the rest of the china cabinet while Stefan collected
lace doilies and knickknacks from the coffee tables.
"What about this?" I pointed to the fringed lamp Birdie had brought back from one of her shopping sprees. "Why don't you take it, Stefan? Just your
style."
For once Stefan actually laughed at my humor. "Birdie surely had extravagant tastes," he admitted.
"Remember when she came back with those awful presents for us? The
rooster for Sigga, and the scarf with acrobats for me, and ... what did she
get for you?"
"The dog statue. `For our ever-loyal Stefan."'
"Birdie could be cruel."
"She certainly could."
Indeed.
"Well, I guess we better get to it," I suggested.
"Get to what?"
"Birdie's room." I still hadn't gone in there. But maybe with Stefan it
would be easier.
"Freya," he began, then paused. "I thought you knew. Birdie's room
is ... empty. I packed it up a long time ago. After ... it happened."
Of course. I'd just assumed that since the rest of Oddi was a perfect time
capsule, Birdie's room would be too. "What did you do with everything?"
"Actually, it's all in my attic. Sigga asked me to store it until she could
bring herself to sort through it."
"And she never has?"
"Not yet. She blamed herself for Birdie's suicide. Felt she should have
kept a better eye on her after she was released from the Selkirk Asylum. But
Birdie always did what she wanted. There was no stopping her in anything.
Anyway, you can take a look at Birdie's things when you come for dinner tonight. I'll take you up to the attic, pick anything you want. Or all of it."
Or none of it. Then again, I could just have Stefan ship it all to my storage locker in Queens. Then the two dead sisters' belongings could keep
company, getting along more peaceably than their owners ever had.
Stefan's house was a large and rambling affair, with many rooms, way too
big for one person yet none of the rooms was empty-each was stuffed to
the brim with Icelandica. It seemed less a house than an archive with a
bedroom and a kitchen.
"Why start a museum?" I joked. "Just have people come here."
Stefan laughed. "Actually, I'll be loaning many of these pieces to the museum." On the tour of his house I saw countless old trunks, a handcrafted
bed frame, display cases with carved figurines, and a bedroom furnished in
the style of a nineteenth-century Icelandic farmhouse. One large upstairs
room was completely filled with file cabinets.
"Where does it all come from?"
"I'm a collector. A scavenger. And people know that. When the oldtimers die the relatives call me in to help sort through things. See if there's
anything of historic value. The children never know what to do with it all.
Often they're grateful to simply unload it onto me. Boxes filled with letters
from people they've never heard of, unlabeled photographs, books in a language they can't read a word of. They know I'll take good care of these
things. And then the detective work begins. Tracking down the names behind the faces in old photographs. Identifying images of buildings that have
long since crumbled. Reading through tattered letters."
"People must trust you a lot."
"I suppose."
"You probably know more about families around here than all the old
gossips at Betel combined." He laughed. I was warming him up, and it was
working.
"My head's full of family secrets. But most of those people are gone now.
There's no one left to tell."
Tell me, I wanted to say. About Birdie's child. For suddenly I was certain
again that he knew, something.
Dinner was roast chicken, rosemary potatoes, a salad with the last of the
tomatoes from Stefan's garden. "You're quite the cook," I said. "For a bachelor."
Stefan blushed. "One learns to take care of oneself, I suppose."
"Some learn better than others." I was referring to myself, but he didn't
know that.
"I hear you may be going to Iceland next summer, Freya."
"Well, Thorunn invited me. But I can't say I'm exactly anxious to return.
Not after my last trip. What a disaster. I made quite a bad name for myself, you know. We were all over the newspapers. Half the island was out searching for us. A couple of outlaws."
"All the more reason to go back."
"To exploit my notoriety?"