The Tricking of Freya (47 page)

I hated anyone calling Birdie crazy. "How can you know for certain?
You're the right age, exactly. And Birdie was here in Iceland with your father
in the summer of 1961, nine months before you were born."

"And there were no other men in Iceland the summer Birdie visited? My
father, the only man in Iceland!"

He stood, arms folded across his chest, glaring at me. The sound of
waves hitting the shore welled up between us. I couldn't blame him. Who
wants to hear that the woman he believed all his life to be his mother is not,
after all, his mother? At least not in the biological sense. And that his real
mother was his father's mistress? Maybe Ulfur was right, I had to learn to
be more tactful. But would tact lead me to Birdie's child?

"Saemundur . . ." I tried speaking more gently. "I'm sure you're right. But
I have to rule you out. Is there any proof you can offer me?"

"Now I have to prove my identity to you? Really, Freya." I thought he
was done then, but he continued. "First of all, if you think my mother
would have raised the child of my father's mistress in her own house, as her
own-well, you've obviously never met my mother. Inconceivable. Besides
that, I have my mother's nose, exactly. And has it ever occurred to you that
I look nothing like Birdie? Quite the opposite, in fact? And finally, do you
really think that if I were the grandson of the great Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands, that my father would be able to keep quiet about it?"

I smiled at that. "You're right. I'm sorry, Saemundur. Like I said, I just
had to rule you out." I wasn't sure that I had ruled him out, not conclusively, but there was clearly no point in pressing him further. We stood
quietly on the beach, listening to the waves. It must have been three in
the morning by then because the sun was nowhere to be seen. It was Saemundur who broke the silence.

"Do you have any other ... suspects?"

"Actually, I do. Your father gave me a list of names, various men Birdie befriended on her visits to Iceland. He cautioned me that he had no reason to
believe Birdie had had an affair with any of them. Still, it's worth meeting
them. I've got to start somewhere. There are twelve names on Ulfur's list.
Eleven, since I already crossed one off today. I don't think old Snaebjorn Jons-
son was any match for Birdie."

Saemundur laughed. "Enough to keep you busy in Reykjavik then."

"For a while, yes."

"When you want to escape, when you get tired of questioning old men
and decide to see Iceland, let me know, okay?"

"Okay," I agreed, making a different promise to myself: resist eye-moonlure. At all costs. Already I could feel a tug when I met his strange green
eyes. I needed to focus, to accomplish this one thing. To redeem myself, if
such a thing were possible at this late date, in the eyes of my dead.

"How long are you staying in Iceland?"

"Until I find Birdie's child." And then I said it out loud, the mantra that
had been pulsing through my brain. "Birdie's child is here in Iceland."

Over the next three weeks I met with nine of the men on Ulfur's list and the
widow of the tenth. Ulfur's roster of potential paramours contained an odd
mix-mostly in their sixties, a few in their seventies, one over eighty and
in addition to Snaebjorn included a genealogist named Arni Hjalmarsson;
three poets (Bjarni Jonsson, Johannes Kjartansson, Hallur Hallsson); the
publisher Sveinn Vigfusson, whom I'd met years ago at Ulfur's dinner party
in Reykjavik; a distant cousin on Sigga's side, Einar Thorlaksson; a wealthy
fish exporter named Halfdan Jakobsson (quite handsome in his day, hence
his appeal to Birdie; I found him intolerably boorish); plus two university
professors, Bjorn Gislason in Icelandic literature and Eirikur Palmason in
history. I also met with the widow of Tomas Hrolfsson, a Lutheran pastor
descended from the farmer-poet Pall, mentor and uncle to Olafur, Skald
Nyja Islands. The eleventh man, Thorgrimur Skulason, was visiting his son's
family in London and would not return until mid-July. Ulfur knew the least
about Thorgrimur, only that he had had some kind of government job, and
that Birdie had met with him on each of her visits to Iceland.

Normally I would have found meeting so many strangers exhausting, if
not impossible. But that June in Iceland I felt an odd change occurring: I
seemed to be shedding my curmudgeonly exterior. After years of near her-
mitude in Manhattan, I began enjoying human company, even craving it. I couldn't explain it, except to remember that I'd felt a similar opening up the
last time I'd come to Iceland. I chalked it up to arriving in a new country, a
free agent. It came on gradually, this newborn extroversion, increasing day by
day, until I felt as if I could meet every single person in Iceland, if it meant
finding Birdie's child. My tongue became the proverbial word-meadow. Introductions and small talk I conducted in Icelandic, which never failed to impress my subjects, and as the interview began in earnest I'd switch to English.
I wanted to make sure I understood every word that was said. Anything could
be a clue.

My faux-purpose, the writing of an article about Birdie's life for The Icelandic Canadian magazine, was only part pretense. I was indeed writing
about Birdie, not for a magazine but for her long-lost son or daughter. The
stories the men told me I planned to add to my own. After all, I'd known
Birdie only when I was a child, and there weren't many people left in Gimli
who were able or willing to remember her. These accounts would help
round out the portrait.

Unlike my recent experience in Gimli, where Birdie had burned so
many bridges, the Icelanders I met with were more than happy to recall
their encounters with her. Manics in small doses can be quite appealing,
even exhilarating. Yndisleg (charming), falleg (beautiful), rnalgefin (loquacious), fyndin (witty), skernmtileg (entertaining), snjal (brilliant); also slysa-
leg (unlucky) and skritin (peculiar). All adjectives I jotted in my notebook
during the interviews. I decided early on to record everything that seemed
important, then sort it out later.

Each of the men I met with remembered Birdie fondly and quite clearly,
considering the amount of time that had passed, and many went to great
trouble to answer my questions, often searching through boxes of old photographs and journals for details about her visits. At some point in the interview, I would discreetly slip in a question related to a lover Birdie may
have had in Iceland. I wanted to contact him, I'd explain, to see if he had
saved any letters from Birdie. If he had been married at the time of the affair, or if there was any other reason he wanted his identity kept secret, I
would ensure his name did not appear in print. I was convinced it was an
excellent ruse. It gave the man I was interviewing all the assurance he needed to come forth and admit the affair. As a final touch, I would write
my name and Ulfur's phone number on a card, and let him know he could
call me if anything else came to mind.

Unfortunately not a single one took the bait. Yet even repeated failure
did not deter me. I went on to the next interview equally confident that this
one, surely, would reveal himself as the true father of Birdie's child. It was
simply a matter of time, a process of elimination.

It took three weeks to schedule and conduct all the interviews. Icelanders are always jaunting off to their summerhouses in the summer who
can blame them, considering what winter brings? Several of the men on Ulfur's list I had to meet with twice, because when I arrived at their homes for
what I'd expected to be a one-on-one interview I found instead a large gathering of my subject's family and friends awaiting me. It is not every day that
the granddaughter of the great Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands, comes to town.

Sveinn Vigfusson, the publisher, I met with several times for another
reason: I became convinced he was hiding something from me. His thick
beard had turned white since I'd first met him, but he still spoke in a loud
and commanding voice. Oh yes, he remembered me quite well from Ulfur's
dinner party, when at thirteen I'd shyly recited Olafur's "New Iceland Song"
in front of the guests, stumbling through the last verse. He took me on a
tour of Iceland's largest publishing house, where he'd reigned for many
years and still, he confided, exerted much influence. He began to grow on
me, despite his overbearing manner. But whenever we spoke of Birdie, his
mood would darken and he'd become uncharacteristically silent. "Such a
tragedy, your aunt's death. Such a remarkable and talented woman." No, he
had never read her Word Meadow, but he'd read some of her earlier poetry
and thought she showed great promise. And that was all he could bring
himself to say on the subject of Birdie. When I mentioned the possibility of
an Icelandic lover, he just shook his head blankly. He'd never heard of anyone, had no further leads for me. He seemed deeply troubled at the mere
thought of Birdie, tugging on his beard, changing the subject or lapsing into
silence.

I, of course, recorded his every word and gesture in my notebook, and
for the entire second week of my investigation became convinced that
Sveinn was the one. When I finally confronted him directly, he looked sheepish, but the secret he revealed was not the one I'd been hoping for. It
seems he'd made a pass at Birdie once, when she was in Reykjavik for Olafur's centennial celebration-and been rejected. "Swatted off like a fly" was
the phrase he used. "I can assure you, Freya, to my deep regret, that nothing of that nature ever occurred between Ingibjorg and myself."

Cross another off the list.

What did I do in those three weeks, when I wasn't interviewing old men, in-
somniacally cycling the lake, or poring over microfiche in the National Library? Even with the sheets of black plastic Johanna had taped to my
windows, I slept only a few hours each night. I didn't need more than that.
I seemed to have bountiful energy, more than usual in fact. And I found
plenty to do. Yes, in Reykjavik, despite Saemundur's claim that Reykjavik is
nothing. True, it's no Manhattan, no grand European capital, no Paris, no
Madrid, not even a Copenhagen. Compared with New York, Reykjavik
seems a mere village, and as European cities go it's an infant. Discovered in
874 by the Norwegian Viking Ingolfur Arnason, who named it Smoky Bay
for its geothermal steam, Reykjavik has been continuously inhabited ever
since. Yet it didn't become anything remotely resembling a town until the
end of the eighteenth century, when it transformed itself into a certified
trading post, population 300. By 1901 there were 5,000 inhabitants, today
just over 100,000. Since World War II, when Iceland gained its independence, it's been nothing but expansion, buildings springing up erratically
around the core of the old city, some elegant, some clunky, others frankly
odd. Take Hallgrimskirkja, a modern church with a jutting basalt steeple
meant to resemble an erupting volcano. Or the Pearl, a glass-domed restaurant that revolves on top of gleaming hot water tanks. These sights I saw
and more, by foot, by bike, by bus, sometimes taken in a car by one of the
men on Ulfur's list, who rapidly transformed themselves from suspects into
gallant elderly hosts. I bathed with Johanna and her husband, Gunnar, and
their two little girls in the healing waters of the Blue Lagoon, the silica-rich
runoff from the Svartsengi geothermal energy plant, purported to cure all
manner of skin diseases and other ailments. Imagine bathing in neon blue
waters with silver smokestacks towering above.

Icelanders love to bathe, soak, and swim. Early on, the publisher Sveinn took me to one of Reykjavik's many geothermally heated municipal swimming
pools. "This water we are soaking in," he explained, "first came down on our
ancestors as rain, one thousand years ago. Scientists have proven this." After
that I brought a listing of the city's pools with me wherever I went, and managed to avail myself every day, swimming in the pools, soaking in the hot
tubs, imagining the waters as rain on Egil Skallagrimsson's head.

I also spent many an hour at Ulfur's workplace, the Arni Magnusson Institute, located in a nondescript gray building at the University of Iceland.
Here I could gaze at the original ancient manuscripts, with their illuminated drawings of Birdie's feared Fenris Wolf, the Midgard Serpent (tail in
mouth, circling the earth), one-eyed Odin and his eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, as well as historical characters such as the troll-faced Egil. I visited
cafes and sipped espresso while scribbling endlessly in my red-and-blue
notebooks. Nor did I let the weather deter me; it was variable, to put it
kindly.

Icelander to tourist: "Do you have all four seasons where you come
from?"

"Yes," the tourist replies, but not all before lunch!"

And I took photographs. Of what? Everyone I met. The men on Ulfur's
list, of course, each got a portrait. And anything else I saw that caught my
eye: violets in the old Reykjavik cemetery, the light reflected on the wing of
a tern. Hundreds of photographs I took, maybe a thousand. I even bought a
new camera one day, on a whim, a Nikon that cost practically as much as
my plane ticket.