Two days before she left, she searched the used bookstalls on the Potsdamer Platz until she found a German-Icelandic dictionary.
"Came in a box from a student flat," the bookseller said.
She took it gratefully.
"I have something else," he said.
He thumbed through books about early film stars until he came to a large one with a cover depicting rocks with lichens and a boxy man, shoulders to his ears. The title read, The Tundra Painter. He'd studied art in Paris and Rome. But in his Montmartre studio, he painted from memory—wildflowers, lichens, rocks. Turning the pages, she saw the faces hiding in the flowers, orange and gold lichens that resembled humans embracing. Max had hidden Lena's face among the flowers.
Charlotte reached for her purse.
III - Henrik
Rooted in Strange Soil
Henrik had always been a dreamer, forever losing his place, forgetting now to finish undressing. At last, he flapped his arms into his nightshirt until his thin wrists emerged through the sleeves. A finger at the small of his back, Charlotte prodded him toward the bed.
She kissed him goodnight, but he held her arm. "I took all my bones out to the hillocks."
What would her mother say if she knew Henrik played with bones? Lena had had dolls from Bernstein's and the expensive teddy bear. For Henrik the sheep bones were people, the cow's jawbone a horse and its rider. Siena and Jon Skafti, he called them.
In the late summer light, his sober face resembled that of a dwarf born before his own mother. Suddenly, he spun around the room dancing to music that lived in his head.
"Yesterday, my bones found wood. They built a fire and hopped around it. Clack. They killed each other."
She knew his armies of sheep bones advanced over daisy fields, shot the enemy until it bled onto the chickweed. His eyes glistened.
"Tell me about the war," he said.
Her playmates had waged miniature wars, mostly in Berlin courtyards, boys digging like moles to recreate the trenches of the Great War, ruining the landlord's chances to grow bushes.
"They screamed when they went over the top and killed the British," she said.
He climbed into her lap, placed his hand over her mouth.
"The other war—your war," he said.
She pinched her thigh, a reminder.
Careful now. Don't ever tell the boy about the day Max came back with his shirt stuck in the bloody furrows on his back.
Henrik was right. It was her war, her own personal problem—Hitler's plan to ruin her life. All those people killed. But only one mattered. Henrik's arms were warm on her neck. Without the war, she and Ragnar wouldn't have come together in the night to make this boy. She wouldn't have needed to replace Lena. Taking his arm from her neck, she nudged him toward the bed.
"Slowpoke," a hard young voice said.
Tryggvi stood in the door, his lip curled, like Ragnar's when he talked of clumsy farmers who ruined a sheep's ear at the branding. She envisioned Tryggvi wearing that look at the sheep sorting. He would swagger among the tents, sipping from a bottle, bragging how the hillside farmers dug their own outhouses.
"Tell me the story, not him," Henrik said, cuddling against her, cupping his hands over his mouth. She could tell by the tiny movement of the muscles in his cheeks that he was sucking his thumb. His hair smelled like moss campion.
"Baby," Tryggvi hissed.
"I am the baby," Henrik said. "Tryggvi picks the story tonight," she said.
He'd choose a scene from the Iliad, the kind that would put Henrik right to sleep, leaving her to discuss military strategy with him long after the story was done. But he surprised her.
"The frogs and the three princes," he said.
His eye lacked its customary coolness. She'd told Tryggvi that story before Henrik was born, during the days when she was still struggling to make sentences. Back then, Tryggvi had been hers alone. When he cried at night, Ragnar had asked her to pick him up. And when Tryggvi grew older, she'd walked with him among the rocks, naming birds.
Later she sent him to school in the village. She'd left baby Henrik with the old woman and walked Tryggvi to the main road each morning. Nonni from Butterdale had picked him up and driven him with his own boy to school. Returning to the farmhouse, her heart beating fast, Charlotte had often found the old woman rocking the baby, singing songs of flashing swords and bloody battles. At the beginning of Tryggvi's first school year, Charlotte had come to a crossroads. She tried to express the feeling in a letter to her mother.
It's been 9 years since the war ended. And still no word of Lena. Don't you think perhaps you should give up the search? You could visit here. Tryggvi's a big boy now.
In the afternoon, she'd met the boys at the foot of the hillside, she walking briskly, they dawdling to trade worms and stones. On days when the wind nearly blew Nonni's car off the road, Tryggvi had stayed home. Secretly, Charlotte rejoiced over his company, letting him trail behind her while she did her chores.
But these days Tryggvi talked about horses, saddles, and mutton prices. He could finish Ragnar's sentences. The distance grew between her and this big-toothed youth the summer he learned to use the scythe. He stayed just beyond the tip of Ragnar's blade. She'd watched from the steps, shading her eyes, wincing when he caught the blade in the tussock and saw how Ragnar eased it out for him. Evenings, father and son sat at the kitchen table, chewing dog sour leaves and studying advertisements for hay-drying machines.
It wasn't that she didn't want him to become a farmer. The cost of not succeeding on the hillside was high. Hadn't they locked Magga of Butterdale in the shed overnight because she couldn't hold a rake? But Charlotte missed her talkative older son, now a shorter version of Ragnar, nodding his head, muttering yup-yup it'll rain for sure.
Henrik was different. He was all hers. She tucked him in and sat on the three-legged stool between the beds. He reached out and rubbed her thigh.
"Start the story."
She focused on Maizie, the frog who smoked Camels and wore a red garter.
"There was a king who had three sons. Two were smart, but the third was a simpleton. When it was time for the king to appoint an heir, he told his sons, 'The one who brings me the finest ring, the best carpet, the prettiest daughter in law, will inherit my kingdom.'
"Each of the brothers had a feather. The first one's feather blew east. The second one's blew west. But poor Simpleton's feather went straight down. Simpleton scratched the ground until the toe of his boot knocked against wood. A door. He opened it. Steps led down into the earth."
From Tryggvi's bed came a croaking sound. Henrik jumped out of bed and punched his brother's arm, then slipped back under his own covers. "At the bottom of the steps, he saw the gleaming eyes of a big frog and the sparkling eyes of a little one. Her name was Maizie. 'Dear frogs, I need a ring, a carpet, and a beautiful girl,' Simpleton said.
"'Take Maizie,' the big frog said." Henrik turned his lips inside out. "A frog. Ahhg. Tell how he kisses her."
Tryggvi was out of bed now. He placed his lips against Henrik's cheek and made a sucking sound. Henrik cried.
Her voice thinning out, she resumed the story.
"Maizie was transformed into a beautiful girl. The big, old frog gave Simpleton a fine ring and a beautiful carpet. And Simpleton inherited his father's kingdom."
At the end of the story neither boy spoke. Henrik stared up at the ceiling.
"If we had a brother or a sister, would it be Simpleton?" he asked.
"No, she'd be smarter than both of you." "She?"
Charlotte wondered why she'd said "she," then sensed Henrik's shaping the idea to fit his own fantasy.
"I could pull her around in my cart."
She smoothed the sheets, first on Henrik's bed, then on Tryggvi's, in a rhythmic, purposeless way. Henrik's eyes were closed, but Tryggvi was watching her. She stood up quickly, feeling a moment's dizziness and his eyes on her when she left the room.
In the kitchen, she sa
t on the bench and hung her head between her knees. The old woman would soon be brewing petals and roots. After several cups, Charlotte would be running to the outhouse.
Staring at the worn spot in the linoleum between her knees, she strove for a sense of being in a particular place on the earth. Dizziness wasn't the real problem. It was more that she'd come loose from what held her. It had happened in Berlin too—her mother's badgering her with secretarial school, then refusing to accept Max.
A Jew in the family won't help your father's career.
Sometimes the dizziness went away for years. Now she sat down hard on the kitchen chair. The window framed the green heath. She took out her colored pencils, sketched the carpet of moss that softened the lava rocks into a landscape that resembled a billowing green sea. Finally, she felt peaceful again, ready to make slow love to Ragnar, then sleep through the night.
A small hand that smelled of fresh earth touched the back of her neck. The old woman massaged her neck and shoulders, until the blood rushed through her veins.
The Juice of an Orange
The chilly air stung Charlotte's hands as she staggered up the hill from the outhouse, carrying a bucket of urine. Behind her, Ragnar balanced a bucket in each hand.
"Pray we don't have a spring blizzard. It'll freeze the sheep," he said.
It had happened more than once. They'd found the sheep frozen, standing in their tracks like statues, heads erect, facing forward, proudly heading for richer pastures. Up ahead, she saw the old woman wearing a canvas fisherman's jacket and feeding manure wedges into the glowing fire. The wind off the ocean billowed her skirt. Below, lambs frisked in the meadow. The sheep had spent all winter shifting their weight in a small dark shed, chewing and defecating, dreaming of spring while their woolly coats grew. Now the fleeces lay in a pile next to the iron pot, partially obscured by the smoke from the fire.
"Water's boiling," the old woman shouted, waving her paddle.
Charlotte's fingers ached under the bucket handle. She tipped the bucket and emptied it into the boiling pot of water.
The old woman held up two fingers, then one, to signify two buckets of water–one of pee.
"If the count's off, the wool won't clean."
She placed a hand on Tryggvi's arm before he emptied his whole bucket.
"Take the rest to the shed."
He staggered down the hill in an exaggerated fashion.
The old woman stirred the mixture, singing A horse without its rider walked along the sand. She lowered her face to the boiling mixture. When the steam curled around her chin, she rubbed her cheeks with her fingertips.
"Makes your skin young," she said, raising her skirt hem to wipe her face.
Charlotte leaned over the pot, drew in the ammoniac smell, and stepped back quickly. Liquid hissed on the hot manure wedges. She didn't want to be young again. Reliving her youth was chore enough. She fed the fleece, sticky with lanolin, into the bubbling mixture. The old woman prodded the fleece until it lay submerged like a drowned animal.
Standing high on the hill, overlooking the ocean, Charlotte felt her place in time, right behind the medieval women who had stood here, breathing in the muttony steam, seeking the longship that carried their men on the ocean. The wind shifted again, and the sharp sea smell—full of the past—cut the air. The old woman looked at Charlotte.
"My man didn't have the Viking blood. He was seasick, chewed kelp to keep down the bile. Still, he vomited green over the side of the boat."
Charlotte lifted the first fleece out of the pot and laid it on a wooden rack in the grass next to the glowing fire. The old woman dipped her tongs into the murky stew and raised a second sopping black and gray fleece. A pile of steaming fleeces lay dripping on the rack.
The wind had died down, and the smoke rose straight into the air. The old woman leaned her head back and stared at the sky, then looked at Charlotte. Her gaze contained something wild.
"It can make you crazy," she said.
Anything could make you crazy, Charlotte thought—the sheep, the poop, the fleeces—the lack of strangers to break the monotony of constant family. Besides that, beyond the hillside lay nothing but ocean. Last time she'd embraced the ocean, her lover had nearly been lethal.
"Soldiers went crazy just looking at the sky."
Charlotte found it hard to believe that these legendary creatures—English and American soldiers—had ever come near the hillside. But one morning in May 1940, three British ships had risen like rocks out of the sea and sailed into the Reykjavík harbor. A year later, Americans arrived. They'd stayed the entire war to defend Iceland against people like her—the Germans. But hillside people were polite to her. They didn't call her a Nazi.
"They had a radar station right over there," the old woman said, tipping her chin to indicate a place beyond the hillside. "All day they sat around those disks."
"Looking for Germans?"
"Yes, but all they ever saw was thrushes, fulmars, guillemots."
"Our life's exciting by comparison."
The old woman glanced at her the way she might look at a cow who no longer milked.
"Three of them took turns staring up at the sky. I could see them from the meadow at the edge of our land. One day, I heard a scream, thought it was a fulmar chasing an intruder from her nest. But the scream went wobbly, like a human's. I ran to the overlook and saw him over on the ridge, standing next to the disk, staring up into the sky, screaming his lungs out, like a woman in childbirth. The other two grabbed him and threw him to the ground. He couldn't stop screaming."
"What did he see?" Charlotte asked.
"Nothing but his own mind cracking apart. That sky was full of boredom. Soldiers like to kill people, not stand in a pasture waiting for something to happen."
Hands on her hips, the old woman straightened her back. Charlotte caught a glimpse of how she must have looked in those days. They would have noticed her—even if she wasn't the youngest woman in the county.
"My man was long gone then."
Charlotte recalled the Russian soldiers after the war in Berlin. The age of the woman hadn't mattered.
"'Stay away from soldiers,' they said. But I'd never been inside a car, not a real one. I'd ridden the bus. We had two cars in the village then. Doctor had one. Manager of the cooperative had the other. Crossroads at the village looked like a postcard from a foreign city. Vehicles went in both directions."
The cars took turns stopping, Charlotte thought.
"Soldier comes riding around the corner in a jeep, calls to me, Hallo girl, stops the jeep, opens the door. I jump in. He drives and drives. I loved sitting up by the window with the windshield wipers going. Click. Click. After a while, I started waving at the other soldiers along the road. My soldier began singing. It's a long way to Tipperary. It's a long way to go. Finally, I got the words, and we both sang at the top of our lungs."
Charlotte closed her eyes, but couldn't quite picture it.
"Know what he gave me?"
Russian soldiers. Screams. Splayed legs. Uniformed men thrusting into women on the street in broad daylight. Others smoking and laughing, waiting their turn.
"An orange," the old woman said gleefully. "I'd never had one, saved it to share with Ragnar, but I really wanted it for myself."
The old woman and Ragnar must have closed the door to the sick woman's room—lichen milk for her—the woman who'd never caused trouble except for dying. Then they'd sat down with two plates and solemnly peeled the orange, pulling it apart slowly, placing each section ceremoniously on a plate, eating it over the course of a whole evening, talking about it next day, recalling how juicy it had been.
She and her mother had shared an orange after the war. The bond it created between them lasted for days.
"Did you see the soldier again?"
The old woman shook her head.
"The girls in the village had read magazines, knew some English words. Went dancing in the half-moon huts. Fisherman's widow going out with
a soldier—ridiculous."
"What happened to him?"
The old woman frowned, stirred the liquid, probed for a fleece, came up with nothing.
"He'd been kind to me, so I kept up with him, asked the other women, the ones who went to the dances. Turned out he was stupid. Eleven of them hiked to the glacier—to test their endurance. Didn't know about chasms and crevices—or storms, how it snows so hard you can't see, how you slip, fall so deep into the earth that nobody knows where you went. Five of them came back. My soldier didn't."
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