The car’s built-in GPS brought them deeper into the suburbs, red-tiled roofs, no businesses. “This doesn’t look right,” said Leo from the back, hopefully. But the GPS knew what it was doing, and there they were. Odin’s Odense.
They had to pass through a little un-Viking modern building that housed admissions, a gift shop, and flush toilets. Joanna wondered whether she should ask after Aksel, but what if he had a Viking name? The old woman behind the counter thrust a map at her and frowned encouragingly. The museums of the world are filled with old women, angry that nobody will listen to them, their knowledge, their advice. Joanna hadn’t told Leo why they were here, in case it came to nothing.
She gave him the map. “Here. It’s in English.”
He consulted it and said casually, “There’s a sacrificial bog.”
“That might come in handy.”
They walked together into the Viking village on one of those days of bright sunshine, the sky so blue, the clouds so snowy white, everything looked fake. Though why was that? Why, when nature is its loveliest, do human beings think it looks most like the work of human beings?
Was her detection system still tuned to Aksel’s frequency? Once she could walk into any room and know he was there. She detected nothing.
The Viking huts were 89 percent thatched roof, like gnomes in oversized caps. A teenage boy in a tunic and laced boots ducked out of one, his arms laden with logs. He gave Joanna a dirty look, and she understood that he was mad at his mother, wherever she was, in whatever century, and therefore mad at all mothers.
Leo, too. He pointed to a small structure with no roof and said gloomily, “I think this is the old smithy.”
There was nothing smithish about the old smithy. Joanna put her hands on her hips as though she were interested in smithery, though all she could feel was her heart beating warrantless through her body. She knew she and Leo would forgive each other. She knew that it was her duty to solicit forgiveness from everyone, but just then she was tired of men whose feelings were bigger than hers. She felt as though she’d grown up in a cauldron of those feelings and had never gotten out.
“Okay. What’s next?”
“The medicine woman’s hut.”
Inside the medicine woman’s hut, a squinty, hardy-looking woman of about sixty sat on a low bench, stirring an open fire with a stick.
“Hi, hi,” said the woman. This was the jaunty way some Danish people said hello, and Joanna always felt exhilarated and frightened saying it back, as though she might pass for Danish a few seconds more. Which was worse, being found out as American, or as a fraud? It was a big space, illuminated by the fire and the sunlight coming through the front and back doors. The fire was directly underneath the highest part of the thatched ceiling: Viking fire safety. “Say hello,” said Joanna to Leo.
A preposterous command. He didn’t.
The medicine woman gestured to a low long bench across from her. In English, in the voice of the iron age, the woman said, “Welcome. Where do you stay?”
Were they supposed to be ancient, too?
Leo tried to feel it. Before Denmark, he hadn’t realized how much he wished to be ancient. To be Danish. To be, he thought now, otherwise for a reason.
His mother said, “Last night, near Svendborg.”
The medicine woman nodded, as though approving of this wisdom. “It is beautiful there.” She withdrew her stick, inspected the end, stuck it back in. “You have been to Langeland? The ‘big island,’ you would call it?”
“No.”
She nodded again. “You must.”
She was the medicine woman: everything she said had the feel of a cure and a curse. Yes: they would go to the big island. It was inevitable.
On the big island, thought Joanna, she might forget her big mistakes; on the big island, they would scatter their memories, if not her father’s ashes. They had not brought his ashes. There were too many of them.
“There is an excellent cold war museum,” the medicine woman said.
What was a cold war, in the land of the Vikings?
“It has a submarine,” the medicine woman said to Leo. “It is the largest in Europe, I believe. I took my son. Also minigolf close by. A good place to holiday, if you do not come here. Wouldn’t you like to come to holiday here someday? That is what we do. We put on the clothes and—puh!—we are Vikings.”
“Yes!” Leo said. “You mean, you stay here? You sleep here?”
“Of course!” She turned to the corner of the hut and said a sentence or two to a pile of blankets. Perhaps it was an ancient incantation. Nothing happened. She said it again. They could not find a single English cognate among the syllables.
The pile of blankets shifted. An animal? No. The blankets assembled themselves into a shadow of a man.
The shadow became an actual man, sitting up.
The actual man was Aksel.
He was eleven years older and much thinner and he had shaved his beard, even though he was now a Viking. He’d always had long, squintish eyes; they had acquired luggage. He yawned like a bear, working all the muscles of his jaw; that is, he yawned like Joanna’s long-ago love, the foreigner she’d fallen for when they had worked together on a college production of True West. Joanna had been prop mistress, and had collected twenty-seven working toasters from yard sales and Goodwills. Aksel directed, and had broken every one of those toasters in a single impassioned speech to the actors, sweeping them off a table while declaring, “I don’t want you to act, I want you to react, I want you to get mad.”
The medicine woman said, “Aksel’s mother told us you were coming here with the boy.”
Joanna nodded. She still didn’t know what millennium they were supposed to be in. “You get mail here?”
“She texted.” The medicine woman mimed with her thumbs.
“Johanna,” said Aksel. That needless, endearing h.
How many time frames was she in? College, mid-twenties, the Iron Age, the turn of the last century. He was recognizable to her—she’d worried he wouldn’t be—and beloved to her, too.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, in a serious voice.
It was a good question. He didn’t look like her father. That might have been what brought her here. The watch could be mailed; Legolands were legion; but where in the world was a man like the man she’d just lost?
Her actual heart found the door behind which her metaphorical heart hid; heart dragged heart from its bed and pummeled it. Years ago she’d wondered what, exactly, constituted love: the state of emergency she felt all ten years of their life together? Not that the building was on fire; not that the ship was about to sink; not that the hurricane was just off shore, pulling at the palm trees: the knowledge that, should the worst happen, she had no plan of escape, not a single safety measure, she was flammable, sinkable, rickety, liable to be scrubbed from the map. That feeling was love, she’d thought then, and she thought it now, too.
“My father died,” she said.
“Ah, Walter,” said Aksel, and he rubbed his jaw dolefully. “I am sorry. Recently?”
“A year ago. I have something for you. We decided—this is Leo—we decided it was a good time to come to Denmark, to deliver it.”
“Hello, Leo,” said Aksel, who looked half in dreamland, populated as it was by Ancient Danes, long-ago girlfriends, and preteen American boys. “I am very glad to meet you.”
“You know my mom?” said Leo.
“That friend I mentioned.” Then to Aksel: “I Facebooked your mom, but I guess you’re off the grid.”
“I am very much upon,” he said. “You just don’t know my coordinates.” He looked again at Leo and nudged the medicine woman’s back with his knee. “This is Johanna,” he said of Joanna. “This is Flora,” he said of the medicine woman. “Shall we go for a walk, Johanna? Just for a moment.”
The medicine woman turned to Leo. “Do you want to play a game? My son is doing so. Come, he will teach you.” She got up and ushered Leo throug
h the front door, and Joanna and Aksel went out the back, the fire smoking, a hazard, but the Vikings must have known what they were doing.
“I’ve thought of you often, Johanna,” said Aksel. In the sunlight he was shaggy, his color was not so good, but he was beautiful, a beauty. His clothes smelled of smoke. He seemed a victim of more than recreational Vikinghood.
“You’re on vacation,” she said. “I thought perhaps you’d become a professional Viking.”
“Ah, no. I am a software developer. Flora, she is a foot doctor. And you?”
“Bookkeeper.”
He nodded. “You were always a keeper of books. Let us discuss what you have brought me.”
The minute she pulled the watch from her purse she missed its weight. She opened the Ziploc bag, suddenly worried that watches were supposed to breathe.
“Ah!” said Aksel, mildly. He took the watch and put it instantly inside a pouch he had tied to his belt, as though any sign of modernity were shameful. “Walter knew I admired this watch. That is what you came to give me?”
“It’s what my father wanted you to have.”
“And only this.”
He started walking, and she followed, her long-ago husband, her lost love, to the banks of the sacrificial bog, if bogs had banks. Aksel said, “But not the boy.”
“Not the boy what?”
“He isn’t my son.”
“What? No! He’s ten.”
“Ah!” said Aksel. “My mother said you were coming with a boy, and Flora thought maybe. She has a keen sense for these things.”
She saw on his face an old emotion, disappointment shading into woe. “What did you think?”
He turned to the bog. “I might have liked it. Flora has a son. It might have saved me.”
“Saved you? Viking you, or you you?”
The bog said nothing. Aksel said, “I can love anyone,” and took her hand. It was the first time he had touched her. A moment ago she’d thought that would be the last step of the spell, the magic word, the wave of the wand. But it wasn’t.
I could lie, she thought. She’d never really lied, not like that, a lie you would have to see through, a first step on the road to a hoax, an entirely different life, where facts and dates and numbers were fudged. Leo did exist because of Aksel. He would not otherwise.
But then Aksel dropped her hand, as though he’d been joking. “Women are lucky. God puts an end to their foolishness. But men, we are bedeviled till the end of our days.”
She said, with as much love as she could muster, quite a lot, “Fuck off.”
“All right, Johanna.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I didn’t want—” But there he stopped. The Viking village was all around them, smoke in the air, the bleating of sheep who didn’t know what millennium they were in, either. Or perhaps they were goats. She couldn’t always tell the difference.
“What didn’t you want?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “A fuss.”
“Jesus. I want the watch back.”
“We might have married,” he said. “But then it seemed as though we should have done it at the start.”
“Give me the watch. I’ll sacrifice it to the bog.”
“It’s worth rather a lot.”
“Then Leo should have it. My son. I mean, we spent four hours at the railway museum. I don’t know what I was thinking, giving it to you.”
He retrieved the watch from his pouch, his Viking pocketbook, and weighed it in his hand as though he himself would throw it bogward. Instead he wound it up—later, when Leo did become interested in old watches, she would discover this was the worst thing you could do, wind a dormant watch—and displayed it. First he popped open the front to exhibit the handsome porcelain face, the elegant black numbers. “Works,” he remarked. Then he turned it over and opened the back.
There, in his palm, a tiny animated scene, a man in a powdered wig, a woman in a milkmaid’s costume, her legs open, his pants down, his tiny pink enamel penis with its red tip tick-tock-ticking at her crotch, also pink and white and red. It was ridiculous what passed for arousing in the old days. She was aroused.
“Old Walter,” said Aksel. “He lasted awhile, then. He started taking care of himself?”
“No. He got worse and worse. He was eighty.”
“He never wanted to be,” said Aksel in a sympathetic voice.
“I know it.”
He offered the watch. “In four years, perhaps your boy will be interested.”
Ah, no: it was ruined. Not because of the ticking genitalia, but because it was somebody else’s private joke, and she the cartoon wife wanting in, in a robe and curlers and brandishing a rolling pin. Even a cartoon wife might love her rascal husband. She did.
“He wanted you to have it for a reason,” she said.
Flora’s son and Leo played a Viking game that involved rolling iron hoops down a hill. Flora’s son was sullen and handsome, with green eyes and licorice breath, terrible at mime, and so he put his hands on Leo’s to show how to hold the hoop and send it off, then looked Leo in the eyes to see if he’d gotten it, all with a kind of stymied intimacy that Leo understood as a precursor to grown-up love.
I will learn Danish, thought Leo. I will never learn Danish.
He turned to let the hoop go, and there was his mother, striding up the hill. Bowl her over for ten more minutes with this boy, ten more minutes in the Iron Age—where they had no concept of minutes—ten more minutes of this boy scratching his nose with the back of his wrist then touching the back of Leo’s wrist with his Viking fingers. Bowl her down and stay.
No, of course not. The stride told him that they were leaving.
Would he have wished her away? Only if he could wish her back later.
And would she, Joanna, have wished her beloved Leo away? Only if she could also wish away his memory. To long for him forever would be terrible.
“See you later,” said the Viking boy, who spoke English all along, and ran to gather the hoops.
Nothing, Darling, Only Darling, Darling
“Who died and made you boss,” Sadie asked Jack, and he answered, “Nobody. Everybody. How do you make somebody boss when you’re dead, anyhow?”
Not everybody was dead, just a handful of significant people. Sadie’s parents, Jack’s sister, most recently Jack’s nephew, blond Thomas of the passions, who’d gone to study piano in Poland and had stepped off a building at ten thirty in the morning. He’d been twenty-seven.
It was Thomas’s death that convinced Sadie that she and Jack should finally marry. Without marriage, what was Thomas to her? She’d known him since childhood, a wiggling, insinuating, wonderful boy, a puppy, a darling; she’d known and loved him in every incarnation since. As a small child he liked to be tickled; as a teenager he’d hated haircuts and had worn his daffodil hair like a veil he intended to never lift; as a young man he developed a love of organized runs in which you had to crawl through mud and allow yourself to be shocked with live wires. It was not so much to know about a person, though enough to recognize a taste for obliteration. But without marriage he was, at his death, Jack’s nephew, not hers. So they would marry at last, and Jack would arrange everything, because Sadie, while not a reluctant wife, was at thirty-nine a very reluctant bride.
Twenty years, or nearly. She had grown stout and he furious, but to be fair they’d tended in those directions all their lives. She would have been happy to marry at city hall, but Jack’s parents, Michael and Irene Valert, astonishingly alive in their grief in Sussex, had suggested they marry in the church at the end of their drive. “Does your family have money?” Sadie had asked the first time she’d seen the former rectory his parents lived in. “Used to,” Jack answered. But this was more than residual money. In America if you used to have money you probably had a relative or a former accountant in jail, and you lived in a two-bedroom apartment miles from the city of your dreams. The Valerts’ house was the sort of place you’d rent in Ameri
ca for a single day in order to have that vulgar thing, a storybook wedding, to prepare yourself for the reality of married life.
Why not? Sadie had no relatives left to horrify with a church wedding. The Valerts had lost a child and lost a grandchild, and this was something that could be given. She thought of the wedding as a practical thing—she didn’t even plan to invite friends to come over from the States—not knowing how Jack would take to it, the sentimental asshole, how much he wanted an English wedding himself. His parents had lived seventeen years in America, during which time they’d had him, their last child, and had developed a hatred of the country. Not developed, it wasn’t brand-new, but now their hatred was expert. They’d repatriated when Jack went to college, and seemed like zoo animals stymied by the offspring they’d had in captivity.
She always forgot how some aspects of England were so English, so very Masterpiece Theatre: in order to get married in the village church, Sadie had to live with the elder Valerts for three weeks so that she might be registered as a spinster of the parish. Then the banns would be read, whatever that meant. Jack, on the other hand, could be where he pleased. What pleased him—“I have to,” he said apologetically—was to go to Coventry, to an academic conference on puppetry in medieval mystery plays. So for the first week of Sadie’s parish spinsterhood, she slept alone on one of the twin beds of the Valerts’ guest room and was woken every day at three thirty a.m., which was, perversely, when dawn broke in Sussex in July. It wasn’t the light that woke her, but the birds who saw the light and began laughing. Screeching. Saying in avian syllables designed to lacerate the eardrum, Well, you wanted to get married!
By the time Jack got back, his father was not speaking to Sadie for obscure reasons. Or not obscure: she didn’t plan to change her name, or to wear a white dress, or to promise (as the outdated copy of the Book of Common Prayer he gave her suggested) to be “sober, quiet, and obedient.”
The Souvenir Museum Page 17