I imagined I heard Birdie sigh. Gone was her handsome myndarlegur scholar; in his place stood an old man, shorter and stouter. His glasses looked impossibly thick, and magnified the bags and wrinkles under his eyes. Not frail, but depleted somehow. He took my hand, then pulled me to him in a hug. I found myself staring down at the barren planet of his head.
"You've grown." He laughed, pulling away and studying me at arm's length. "Or else I've shrunk. Another indignity of aging." He drove slowly through the fog, which lasted nearly the entire distance to Reykjavik. No matter how hard I stared out the window there was nothing but white. The black lava fields were out there, somewhere. I could sense their enormous blankness. But I could see nothing.
"I haven't seen fog this thick since ... the last time I was in Iceland." The image of the spiral-horned sheep rose in my mind-the one Birdie had hit and run on our madcap race to the East-and I regretted having mentioned the fateful trip so soon in our meeting. Ulfur didn't seem to mind.
"We're good at fog, here in Iceland. It's part of our ... mystique."
We spoke in English, which I felt slightly ashamed about. Icelandic only, Birdie had ordered. But I suppose Ulfur was used to speaking English with American visitors, and I was too exhausted and nervous to attempt anything else. Mostly I listened while Ulfur caught me up on his family news, and I was relieved to find him friendlier, less remote than I'd remembered. He was still living in his parents' house on the lake, he explained; they'd both died in recent years and left the house-and the book collection-to him. Ulfur occupied the first floor, while his daughter, Johanna, her husband, Gunnar, and their children lived on the second and third floors. I would be staying on the fourth floor, in the guest room across from the library.
The house was empty when we arrived. Johanna and Gunnar were both at work; their daughters were visiting Gunnar's parents in the countryside, and Ulfur would be spending the day at the Ami Magnusson Institute, where he was retired in name only. Ulfur assumed I'd want to rest, and I did, but it was not to be. By the time we'd arrived in Reykjavik the morning skies were clear, and the wisps of curtain on the four windows of this turret do little to deter the light. The views are spectacular, distractingly so: the lake in one direction, Mount Esja in the other. My mind was abuzz with memories and plans, and by nine a.m. I gave up on sleep and went out walking. I didn't take a map, I wasn't planning to go far. I stood for a time on the bridge that crosses the lake, the bridge where I first caught sight of the black-haired loping Saemundur. Ulfur had said Saemundur might or might not come to the family dinner tonight. "I left a message on his answering machine. We'll see if he shows up or not. It's impossible to know his schedule these days. He's often out of town."
"For work?"
Ulfur laughed. "I suppose you could call it that. He leads tours into the interior. For hard-core nature lovers. Masochists, I call them. Who would want to spend their summer vacation wandering around a barren lava field? Apparently, people do. `Deep Nature' he calls this outfit of his. `Experience the last wild place in Europe.' At least he is employed and not living off the government anymore."
Ulfur's view of Saemundur has clearly not improved much over the last seventeen years. We'll see what I think. If he shows.
But back to the bridge. I stood a long time, letting my thoughts drift along the surface of the sun-glittered lake. Everything I saw seemed extraordinarily vivid to me. The colors of the buildings on the opposite bank appeared bright and saturated, with red-, cream-, and rust-colored bricks topped by red and blue roofs. White birds circled, then alit on a small island in the middle of the lake. Mottled clouds swarmed the distant whitepeaked Mount Esja. I felt the shock of it, standing there. I am not in New York anymore. I have no job, no home. There is no more Sub, no more subterranean apartment. Only me here now on the island where I went missing seventeen years ago. I began to walk.
I found myself on Odinsgata. Odin's Street. Then Thorsgata, Baldurs- gata, Lokastigur: Thor's, Baldur's, Loki's streets. And finally: Freyjugata. Freyja's street. It was quite ordinary, Freyja's Street, trim houses with tiny gardens bursting with red poppies and purple pansies. I remembered the bags of black-cat Freyja licorice Birdie had purchased as our sole source of sustenance for the trek to Askja. Birdie's revered goddess, reduced to branding licorice. And streets. She alone of the gods yet lives.
I continued walking, past churches and graveyards and school yards, away from quaint god-charmed streets onto busy urban thoroughfares lined with tall gray apartment buildings, the type you'd expect to see in some stark Eastern European city, but not here. In a place where the weather, the land itself, is so harsh, it's hard to believe people would build such bleak constructions. Compared with New York the sidewalks seemed empty, a few pedestrians here and there.
In a small market I asked the clerk if he sold licorice, in Icelandic. The Freyja kind, I explained. With the black cat. He chuckled some comic error of my grammar I supposed. And a postcard, I added. I have decided to write Sigga a postcard every day of my trip. To make up for the ones that Birdie never mailed. And this red-and-blue notebook I bought there too. At the corner of a busy street called Sudurgata I found a flower stand, and for three times what I would spend in Manhattan bought a bouquet of freesia for Ulfur's daughter, Johanna, who is hosting me for dinner tonight.
I crossed the bridge sucking salty licorice, inhaling freesia, thinking of you, and your mother, and wondering whether you are Saemundur, and if not, how will I ever track you down? I'll have to speak to Ulfur, as soon as possible. See what he knows of the matter, or rather, what he might be willing to reveal. It's late afternoon now, time to shower and change, ready myself for dinner and for re-meeting Saemundur, bestower of my first kiss, who may or may not show up, who may or may not be you.
Dinnertime. How do I look?
It is nearly midnight now, I am back in my turret room, looking out over the city that seems not to know the meaning of the word night. I have so much to tell you by way of my clumsy hand, my fingers straggling light-years behind my mind.
At first, our dinner party consisted of me, Ulfur, Johanna, and Gunnar. Johanna seemed nothing like Saemundur, a serious and sensible brownhaired woman in her late thirties, a linguistics professor at the University of Iceland. She thanked me politely for the flowers, but I found her hard to read. Her husband seemed even more inscrutable. We sat at the same table where Ulfur and his parents had hosted the welcome dinner for Birdie and me seventeen years ago. The same table with the one empty plate. "Is Saemundur coming?" I ventured.
"Oh, we set a place for him," Ulfur said drily. "Like a ghost." He began carving the roast lamb.
"He's completely unreliable," Gunnar said. "I don't know how he manages that business of his."
"Saemundur," Johanna added, "is feckless. I believe that is the right word. Careless and irresponsible. What you Americans would call the black sheep of our family."
"Baaah!"
A loud and perfect imitation of a bleating lamb, nasal and gravelly, so real I thought for a moment there was an animal in the room with us. It was only Saemundur, standing in the kitchen doorway. He wore a scuffed leather jacket. His long black hair was gone, cut short now, but not neat. Curly and askew. Yet he had that same wide mouth like a mime's, the same high cheekbones. He seemed impossibly handsome to me in that first moment, and at the same time, I wondered if he might in fact be homely and odd-looking, and I was simply under his strange spell again.
He slung the jacket over the back of the empty chair. "I see you have been discussing my bad habits again. Don't worry. I approve. It gives you something to bond about." He spoke in Icelandic, but I understood most of it. Then he caught my eye. His eyes that same strange green, that glacial river color. "Freya," he said, solemnly, still speaking in Icelandic. "Welcome back to Iceland." He came over to my seat, I stood up, and he took my shoulders in his hands and pulled me to him in a brief hug. Then he stepped back and studied me, reconciling the me of now with the me of then? "It's g
ood to see you again, Freya, after all these years. Good of you to give Iceland a second chance."
I nodded, but couldn't speak. My heart quivered like one of those skinny whippet dogs you see shivering on the streets of Manhattan.
"Don't be rude," Johanna scolded Saemundur, in Icelandic. She'd mistaken my silence for incomprehension. "Won't you speak English with our guest?"
"Why? She speaks Icelandic, don't you, Freya?" Saemundur took his seat now, across from me at the table.
I composed a sentence in my mind, then offered it up: "Not very well, anymore. I've forgotten so much. And it's so easy to make mistakes."
Saemundur clapped his hands. "Not bad! And it'll come back to you. If you force yourself to speak it, that is, and don't worry about mistakes. We Icelanders are easily impressed when anyone makes the least attempt with our arcane and ridiculously complicated language, we forgive all mistakes. Except my sister, perhaps. She is, as you may know, the captain of the Icelandic language police."
"Language ... police?" I repeated in English, to make sure I'd understood.
"What my brother refers to," Johanna responded, in English, "is my position on the committee that regulates the Icelandic language."
"The top language cop, that's what our Johanna is," Saemundur coun tered, in Icelandic again. He poured himself a generous glass of red wine. "She makes sure we keep our tongues utterly pure and uncorrupted."
I thought Johanna might flinch, but she seemed indifferent to Saemundur's teasing. "The committee makes sure that no horrid foreign words infiltrate our precious ancient language," Saemundur continued. "Like viruses. You'd be amazed, Freya, at how many of these words try to cross our borders. Words like television and computer and telephone. Why, if we didn't have Johanna and her word cops, we'd all be speaking English by now. American, no less. No insult intended." He winked at me. "So Johanna and her committee sit around coming up with Icelandic versions of these same words. Hence our word for telephone: Simi, the ancient word for thread. The word for computer is particularly clever, I think: tolva, consisting of the word talc, which of course means number, and volva, meaning seer or prophet. So a computer is a number-prophet. And a computer monitor, this is my favorite one, is taken from our old word for window, back before we had glass, nothing other than the embryonic sack of a lamb! Quite modern, quite efficient, really, don't you think, this recycling of obsolete words?" He was looking straight at me, but did not wait for an answer. "And the committee protects us from various diseases of the language. The dreaded dative sickness, for example, a horrible illness that causes increasing numbers of Icelanders to substitute the dative form of the verb for the accusative. Something that in other countries, mind you, is considered simply the normal progression of language, changing over time. Evolving even. Language is alive, don't you agree? An organism. But here in Iceland, we demand that the language must be spoken exactly as the ancestors spoke it. God forbid any television or radio broadcaster makes a grammatical mistake-why, he could be fired on the spot!" He paused for a moment to take a long deep sip from his wine. "And then on the other side of the table, we have my esteemed father, still toiling away on the ancient manuscripts."
If I thought Saemundur's family would be offended by his tirade, I was wrong. They'd heard it all before. Only Ulfur seemed miffed. "Johanna has made a great and valuable contribution to our society. She does work we can all be proud of."
"And if you'd shut up long enough, Saemundur," interjected Gunnar, speaking his first words since Saemundur's arrival, "then maybe we can hear a little from our guest, who surely did not travel across the ocean to hear you rant and rave."
"Yes, Freya," Ulfur urged. "Tell us about your life in New York."
I did the best I could to make it sound worthy. From a distance, the very act of residing in New York City takes on a certain glamour, and photography can be made to seem a respectable career. Next they wanted to know my travel plans. I told them I planned to visit Sigga's relatives in the East, but beyond that had no itinerary. Immediately I received a torrent of suggestions: Ulfur would show me around the Arni Magnusson Institute, Johanna would take me on a tour of the university and the National Library. And we must take Freya to the Blue Lagoon, Gunnar added. Of course, he continued, there were many things to do outside of Reykjavik as well. I would have to spend a weekend at the summerhouse at Thingvellir Lake. And see Thingvellir itself.
"She's already seen that," Saemundur commented. "On her last trip." A silence fell over the table.
"Or you can let Saemundur drag you onto a glacier," Ulfur suggested, and I realized his old sarcasm had not disappeared entirely. "He is, after all, an official tour guide now. A professional."
"A glacier," I repeated. I felt rattled. I hadn't come to Iceland to play tourist, I'd come to find you, Cousin, and you alone. As I ate the ponnukokur Johanna served for dessert, I thought about Saemundur. Or to be more precise, about whether Saemundur is you. Aside from his dark looks, he seemed to me not so dissimilar to Birdie, with his dramatic entrance, his teasing monologue, his black-sheepishness.
Before Saemundur departed, he invited me out for a night on the town over the weekend.
"I must apologize for my obnoxious little brother," Johanna remarked while we were washing up. "Don't feel obliged to go out with him on the weekend. If that's not your kind of thing."
"Oh, I won't," I assured her. I did not say that I prefer my sheep black, and feckless.
Damn light. It's five in the morning now, and no, thanks for inquiring, I have not slept. Warning: do not expect any leniency from the Icelandic sun. Yes, the Icelandic sun. I refuse to believe it's the same star as New York's. The Icelandic sun requires no sleep-it dips under the horizon a bare hour, hardly long enough to rest its head on night's black pillow, and then it's rising again, infusing everything-the sky, the lake, the buildings of Reykjavik, my turret room, my brain-with its sly yellow-gray light. Or maybe it's the light generated by my racing thoughts that's keeping me awake. I feel lit from the inside.
Close the curtains, you say? You think I haven't tried? Flimsy and illfitting. I'm tempted to rip them off the windows. No, what I need is to spin myself through a darkroom light trap. Or return in winter, when the Icelandic sun jaunts off to Spain like a wayward wife and abandons her people to nearly unremitting darkness.
Yes, I'm in a foul mood. I've ruined everything, Cousin. I've pulled a Birdie. I've offended Ulfur, irreparably. I might as well start packing.
We two insomniacs met by chance in the library an hour ago. It was exactly as I remembered it: four walls of floor-to-ceiling books, the built-in bookcases making it seem the walls are themselves constructed of books. The same pair of chairs still by the window, where Birdie had sat reading under the midnight sun. Except that now one was occupied by Ulfur, a lamp illuminating his bald head like a glowing globe.
I startled him; he startled me. Ulfur blamed his insomnia on old age; I attributed mine to jet lag. I wished him luck getting back to sleep and headed out the door, but he gestured for me to sit in the chair opposite him.
Mistake. We were both exhausted, strained. And yet I felt wide awake and alert. The conversation began easily enough-we chatted about Sigga's health, and I told him about the new museum opening in Gimli, and Stefan's efforts to complete what would soon become a permanent exhibit on Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands.
"I'm sure it will be charming," he said.
I think it was that word, charming. It rubbed me the wrong way, and so did the next words out of his mouth. "So, you've come to complete your tour of Iceland?"
An innocent question, you think? I thought not. Beneath it I heard insult: that Ulfur does not take me seriously, that I am a failure, that unlike Birdie or Olafur I could have no serious reason for visiting Iceland. Just another American making the well-worn trek to the homeland, entertaining romantic notions of ancestral connection. Roots for whites, the whitest of whites. "I'm not here as a tourist," I said.
"Really?" His voice had th
at arrogant tone I'd so hated on my last visit.
"Yes, really. I'm here on family business."
"Not looking for those lost letters of Olafur's, I hope."
"Of course not."
"A futile effort, I'm afraid."
"That's not why I'm here."
Why did I decide that four in the morning was a good time to introduce the subject of Birdie's child? All I can say is that I'm sorry, Cousin. Poor judgment. I got riled. Tactless. "It's about Birdie," I began.
"Oh," he said. "Yes. Terrible. Such remarkable talent, wasted."
"Remarkable talent? I thought you didn't approve of Birdie's work."
"Did she say that?" He shook his head. "Perhaps I was more harsh than was warranted. Birdie's work was very ... experimental. I'm a bit of a traditionalist, you see. I believe I told her Iceland wasn't ready for her book. I should have admitted it was myself who wasn't ready."
Yes, you should have. But arrogant men don't admit to such things. "She told me you called her manuscript eagle muck."
"Eagle muck? That's hardly I'm sure I never-"
"Are you saying she was lying?"
"Lying? Clearly, she was delusional. Did you know that she believed I was some kind of wolf, pursuing her?"
"Not just any wolf. The Fenris Wolf. The one that swallows the sun."
We both smiled at that, awkwardly. "She had quite an imagination, your aunt. I misinterpreted everything. I thought she was simply a high-spirited, temperamental writer. Prone to flights of fancy. Still, I should have seen the signs. Realized she was mentally ill."
Mentally ill? Of course Birdie was mentally ill. I know that for a fact. But to hear those words come from Ulfur's mouth incensed me. "That wasn't all she was, you know. She wasn't like that all the time. And many people considered her to be tremendously talented."
The Tricking of Freya Page 32