"But aren't the letters ours?"
"Of course they are! But never forget: Ulfur is sly. He tricked the Danish government into relinquishing Iceland's ancient manuscripts they'd possessed for centuries! Be prepared for slick legal maneuvering, claims that the letters are his because they were originally mailed to Olafur's uncle Pall, and Ulfur is a direct descendant of Pall's. More important, he believes the letters belong in Iceland, to Iceland. He may be able to convince others, build a case for it. Remember what he said at the dinner party back in Reykjavik? That Olafur should be considered an Icelandic poet, not a North American one? And don't forget his remark about the emigrants. Why should we honor them, he asks! He despises us, Freya rnin. He despises everyone who left and their descendants as well. No one should write in Icelandic but an Iceland-born Icelander. That's why he wants to suppress my manuscript."
"He didn't like it?"
"Oh, Freya. You don't understand, do you? It's not about like or dislike, literary merit. He won't admit that of course. Arnaleir, he called my manuscript!"
I felt an inkling of outrage at Ulfur, protectiveness toward Birdie. Word Meadow was the sum of her life. Who was Ulfur to call it eagle muck?
"Ulfur is terrified of my brilliance," Birdie continued, as if she'd heard my silent question. She was making her own slick case, wooing me to her side, setting me up as her accomplice. "You have to look at things in context, Freya. Who has written any modern poetry of worth in Iceland? No one! The would-be poets of today are weighed down by the old forms, by the long-lost golden age of Icelandic literary prowess. It is only when Icelanders travel across the ocean that they can break free. Like Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands. And now me. It's too much for poor Ulfur, to see all this liter ary achievement taking place among the descendants of the emigrant traitors. And so he will suppress my manuscript, call it eagle shit, drive me back across the ocean, while he steals for himself Olafur's letters and all the lost poems they contain. He'll be the one to arrange and edit them, to write the introduction, and to publish the collection to great fanfare! Oh, certainly, he'll invite us to the celebrations. So he can gloat!"
"He told you all this, this morning?"
Birdie laughed. "A clever schemer like Ulfur reveal his designs? Never. Too sly for that. That is why we have to act quickly, Freya min. We have to get to the East before Ulfur does. Not because he thinks we'll be there. No, I've convinced him we are on our way back to Gim i.
"But how will we get to the East without Ulfur to drive us?"
"The jeep, of course!"
"Ulfur said we could use it?"
Birdie laughed again. "So innocent, Freya. But the time for your innocence is over. No, dear girl, we do not have Ulfur's permission to take the jeep east."
"You mean we're going to steal it?"
"Borrow, Freya, borrow. We'll return it when we're done. He'll never know it's gone. The next thing Ulfur will hear of us is news from the other side of the ocean, that the letters have been located and are in our possession!"
Unbelievable, you say? It does appear ludicrous now, I admit, Birdie's deluded cloak-and-dagger scenario. And yet at the time it seemed reasonable or at least possible to me. Birdie's thinking was still linear then, if obsessive; the extreme thought-jumping was yet to commence. Nothing she'd said to me was beyond the scope of reality. I turned it all over in my mind as we trudged through that strange terrain. I remembered Ulfur saying the things Birdie now quoted, that Olafur should be considered an Icelandic poet, not a Canadian one. That the emigrants had abandoned their nation in its time of need. And it was true, too, that Ulfur was ambitious. So ambitious that he neglected his wife and children. And Olafur's lost letters were clearly important. I'd seen the reaction among Icelanders whenever Birdie had mentioned them. It all added up, well enough anyway. The fact that I'd never liked Ulfur, the way he dismissed me as a mere American girl, made it easier for me to swallow the bad things Birdie said about him. Ultimately, Birdie was terrifically persuasive, answering each of my questions, quelling my doubts, then hooking me in by claiming she needed my help. How, exactly, she didn't specify, but I felt a sense of importance I'd never known. She appealed to my child's sense of utter uselessness in the world. Now I had a role to play, a mission to accomplish. It was what my mother and grandmother wanted for me. They'd saved their money so that Birdie and I could take this trip, so that I could see Iceland, so that we could bring Olafur's letters home. Birdie and I would be heroes. My past crimes would be, if not forgotten, perhaps absolved. And so when Birdie asked, finally, Do you still want to go back to Girnli? truthfully, I didn't.
And of course I was exhausted, my judgment was impaired. We'd been walking for hours, Birdie carrying my suitcase most of that time. At some point she led us back onto the Thingvellir Lake Road, and the first car that drove by slowed and offered us a ride. How strange we must have appeared, carrying our suitcases on that deserted road, Birdie in her bright salmon pink coat and matching head scarf. Birdie waved the driver off.
"Why can't we take a ride?" I protested. "Saemundur says it's safe to hitchhike anywhere in Iceland."
Birdie shook her head. "Agents of the Wolf are everywhere."
I didn't like how she kept calling Ulfur "the Wolf." True, it was his name; Ulfur does mean wolf in Icelandic. Animals are not uncommon first names, a pagan throwback, I imagine. Hrafn (raven) is a common name, and so is Bjorn (bear). But to call Ulfur Ulfurinn-the wolf was something different altogether. It sounded crazy. Sure, Ulfur was a bit arrogant and pompous, but a wolf? And would Ulfur really send agents to follow us? Especially if he believed we were on our way back to Gimli?
I said nothing, kept walking; I hadn't forgotten the shoulder-shaking Birdie had given me back at Thingvellir. Soon I began to stumble, then tripped on a pothole and skinned my palms when I fell. When the next car offered us a lift, Birdie accepted. The driver, a gruff farmer, made no attempt at conversation. If he was an agent of the Wolf, he did a good job of disguising it, and left us at the summerhouse gate in under five minutes. As it turned out, Birdie and I had covered nearly the entire distance from Thingvellir to the summerhouse on foot, at least twelve, maybe fifteen miles I'd guess, looking at the map of Iceland spread in front of me. Nothing to a mania-fueled adult, but for a thirteen-year-old girl who'd spent a long midsummer's day delving into the forbidden-caving, drinking, kissing -then enduring Birdie's god-awfulest scene, it had been a bone-tiring expedition. My feet felt tender and blistered, my legs trembled as we slipped through the metal gate and walked up the driveway to the little wooden cottage, now dark and empty.
And there was the jeep glowing in the twilight, the keys dangling from the ignition as if Ulfur had actually left it for our use. I walked past it up the steps to the summerhouse.
"Where are you going?" Birdie called.
"To bed?"
Bed was not to be. "You have to start thinking, Freya min. What if Ulfur hasn't returned directly to Reykjavik? What if he is on his way to the East right now, hours ahead of us?"
"With Saemundur?"
"I wouldn't be surprised if he's roped Saemundur into his plot. Saemundur's allegiances remain to be seen."
I had already decided not to tell Birdie about the kiss in the ice cave. It was beginning to seem vitlaus to me: not crazy, but stupid, wrong. Why had I squandered my first kiss on a boy I would never see again? A boy, as it turned out, whose father was trying to bring Birdie down? And yet still I delighted in the scent of him that clung to his worn jacket. I traced its patches, Holland's windmill, France's Eiffel Tower. Places Saemundur had been. Birdie kept plenty of secrets from me, I reasoned. Could I not keep this one from her?
I climbed into the front seat of the jeep and waited. After a while Birdie emerged from the summerhouse laden with provisions: jars of pickled herring, rye crackers, a flashlight, an unopened bottle of Brennivin, two sleeping bags, and a brown paperback book, which she handed to me. Iceland Road Guide. "You're going to navigate, Freya. That will be your job." I
studied the book's front cover. "Be on the safe side," it advised. "Use the Iceland Road Guide."
As it turned out, my navigational skills would not be required for quite some time. Birdie made a beeline for the East. Or as close to a beeline as you can get in Iceland, which meant the Ring Road. Yes, finally, we were taking the Ring Road, just as she'd promised on the plane. The glorious Ring Road, from which one can see all the marvels of Iceland. If one stops. We did not, except for infrequent and rushed breaks at various Esso stations.
"Our sightseeing days are over, Freya min. You might as well climb in the back and sleep."
And so I lay curled on my side, hip sunk into the gap between the seats, cheek pressed against the stiff leather seat cover, Saemundur's sleeping bag opened on top of me, while half of Iceland half of the entire island! disappeared behind us. The marvelous sights Birdie had promised to show me, all vanished unseen. Disappointment stung my eyes, clenched the back of my throat. I no longer tried to follow on the map, or consult the Ice land Road Guide. What was the point? There was only one: to get to the East before the Wolf. Birdie drank hot coffee from a thermos spiced generously with Ulfur's Brennivin and drove like the maniac she was, pushing the jeep to bone-rattling, heart-jostling speeds along the treacherous Ring Road, which was in many places unpaved, unmarked, unlit, and even one- laned. Einbreid Brit, the signs warned. As if a one-lane bridge could scare Birdie, or a Blind Heid. Countless blind rises. Who knew what you might meet over the top? More often than not it was nothing, no one. Iceland is among the least populous nations on the planet. Even in the height of summer tourist season, we had the road practically to ourselves. Once I woke to find us traveling through a fog thick as wool.
"Please stop," I pleaded. "It's not safe." I longed to Be on the safe side, use the Iceland Road Guide. But there was no stopping Birdie. She plowed through the fog until we slammed into something with a terrible thud. It turned out to be a sheep. I heard its spiral horns crack on the pavement as it fell. Saw blackish blood seep through its woolly chest. Birdie just backed up the jeep, circled around it, and kept going.
"But what if it's hurt?"
"Of course it's hurt."
"What if we killed it?"
"Then it's dead."
"Don't you have to pay the farmer if you hit one of his sheep? That's what Ulfur says."
"What Ulfur says?"
I knew I shouldn't have mentioned his name.
"Ulfur," she continued, "would like nothing more than for us to set up camp by a dead sheep on the side of the road while he gets his wolf-paws on Olaf ur's letters! Freya, Freya, Freya, crying over a sheep. Why don't you cry over my Word Meadow? Why don't you cry over Olafur's lost letters?"
And on we drove.
19
The next time I woke it was five a.m. and the sun was streaming brightly across the far horizon of the ocean and into the jeep. The road leaned perilously close to steep ocean cliffs, not a guardrail in sight. Just Birdie chugging Brennivin-laced coffee from her thermos. The steep twists and turns made me woozy. What would keep us from plunging into the sea? Birdie, reckless, yet keen, hugging the jeep around those curves hand in glove.
I slept a few more hours and woke again as we turned from the fjordjagged coast and began winding inland up a series of narrow switchbacks. Out the jeep's back window swirled stupendous views of cascading canyons. I turned forward again; I was sick of stupendous views. We passed no one: no car, no building, no signs warning blind heid or einbreid bru, not even a sheep. I must have dozed sitting up. The next thing I knew we'd arrived at Brekka.
Yes, the same Brekka where Ingibjorg the light-mother spied the newborn Olafur's teeth and cried Skaldagemlur! The Brekka where Olafur's uncle Pall challenged him to memorize the poem Voluspa. The Brekka where Olafur's uncle and father debated the merits of emigration until Askja punctuated their quarrel with a frisky quake, then erupted full-blown three months later, blackening the sun and tricking little Olafur into thinking Ragnarok had commenced, the world's end begun.
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 kn
ow 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."
The Tricking of Freya Page 18