by Tory Bilski
Sylvie and I find a bar near the wharves without giving it a whole lot of thought. It’s four in the afternoon and it’s open—that’s good enough for us. The place is dimly lit, cavernous, and empty, except for the bartender, who is drying glasses and stacking them on mirrored shelves. The bar has floor-to-ceiling smoky glass windows that make the overcast Reykjavík skies look even dimmer. Almost all of Reykjavík’s buildings are modest two stories. Because wood is scarce and expensive, the buildings are almost all made of cement, with a rough finish and painted gray, beige, or mushroom brown. It seems as if in every window I pass, the same eyelet white curtains hang, with plastic flowers and a cat lazing on the windowsill. Though the city is said to be getting popular, it’s hard to see how or where. True, I’m not up late enough to witness the music scene or the unbridled pub crawls that end in the wee hours of the morning. During the annual music festival, the place is apparently crawling with New York A&R agents looking for new talent.
The bartender motions for us to sit anywhere, and we take a tall table with stools at the front window and order Thule beer. On medieval European maps, “Thule” signified a distant place “beyond the borders of the known world,” and it specifically referred to the far northern regions hanging off the edge of the map: Orkney, Shetland, Iceland, and Greenland.
And Reykjavík in 2004 still has vestiges of that version of Thule. It has an edge-of-the-world feel to it, that gull-crying mourn of desolation. The minute you roam away from downtown you are reminded you are in a port town on the northern tip of the world, facing Greenland. Here be dragons.
After a week up north riding on Helga’s farm, Sylvie and I are happy and self-satisfied. We rode for miles through dunes to the Greenland Sea, through fields of lupine to a place called “the valley of the horses.” We raise our beer glasses and say, “Cheers.”
“Those horses were fast.”
“Yeah, and we rode them.”
“Do you believe it?” she squeals.
“We outdid ourselves.”
“It was beyond my expectations.”
“There is nothing like riding in Iceland.”
The bartender puts on music and I’d like to think he did so for us, that he notices we are there and that he has found this way to communicate with us.
A manly baritone voice whisper-sings in my ear:
“The ponies run, the girls are young, the odds are there to beat.
You win a while and then it’s done, your little winning streak.”
The voice is familiar, yet I can’t place it. “Who is this?” I ask Sylvie.
“It’s, it’s . . . oh, it’s . . .” But she can’t come up with the name, either.
I interrupt the bartender, who is reading a book behind the bar. “Who is this singing?”
He puts his book down, ducks under the bar, and holds up the CD case for me to see. “Leonard Cohen,” he says. “Ten New Songs.”
I haven’t listened to Leonard Cohen in years; I know him mainly through my guitar-playing husband and his guitar-playing friends who often pick out his earlier classics. It’s been so long since I’ve heard Cohen sing Cohen that I forget how subversively seductive his voice is, and now that he is older it is even more so.
“I remember reading that Cohen became a Buddhist monk and spent years in a monastery. I wonder if this is his first album out after that.”
Sylvie tells me about her forays into yoga and meditation, traveling to Asia–Bhutan, India, Bali. She goes with a yoga group, but once she went alone for a month to study under a guru in northern India. “There’s something over there that you can’t get here in the West. It has to do with how one lives believing in fatalism. The West has lost that. In the Middle Ages, they had the Wheel of Fortune. You spun the wheel and the goddess Fortuna decided your random fate.”
I know only a little about one small slice of early medieval history, the two hundred years of Viking attacks and settlements in England. “The Vikings had what they called the three ‘wyrds’: That which we can see, that which we can become, that which we should become. ‘Wyrd’ was synonymous with fate, destiny. Maybe the unexpected outcome of our destinies is how ‘wyrd’ became the word ‘weird.’”
“So is that your first connection to Iceland, Viking history?” Sylvie asks me. “I figured it was the sagas.”
“No, I have only read the Vinland sagas, and only because they’re short.”
“You’ll wind up reading them all.”
“My first connection was finding a picture of an Icelandic horse on Google. I looked at it every day and I couldn’t think of anything else.”
“You had that immediate connection, that deep horse love. It’s so powerful.”
There is one side of Sylvie that plays to the audience as the queen bee, always the center of attention, hamming it up with her zaniness. During the week at Helga’s farm, Sylvie somehow created an atmosphere where everyone wound up making sure she was happy, where nothing got done without her approval. One night Helga brought in a layer cake for dessert, and Sylvie said, “For me? I guessed you figured it out—I like to be treated especially special.”
Helga considered all of this with friendly bemusement. “You do, don’t you? You are like a queen, I suppose.”
But we all have multiple selves. Sylvie flutters from one self to another, deftly and interestingly. She is much different away from the group, at least with me at the bar down on the wharves. When she quiets down, she is thoughtful and wise. She listens closely to what you say and then thinks more about it and how it applies to who you are. Friendships demand not only equality of interest or flattering mutual self-reflection, but also new expectations of self. So much of the time we are too wrapped up in our own narrative, the same old story in our head, that we need new people to break through the fog, and show us a new story of ourselves, one that is slightly different and one that we have to live up to.
I’m watching two boats in the harbor: a whale watching boat and a cruise ship to Greenland, the idea of which excites me. Imagine a place even more farther north, more desolate, more Thule-like.
“Do you have any desire to go to Greenland?” I ask Sylvie.
“I might be up for that someday,” Sylvie says.
This brings up my current literary obsession, Jane Smiley’s book, The Greenlanders, which to my surprise Sylvie has read. “I’ve read it three times,” I admit, “and I’m just waiting a little while before I start it again.”
“I get that,” she says. “It’s my favorite Jane Smiley book, and in my mind, it’s an underrated masterpiece.”
In my mind, people who have read this book and love it are my spiritual kin.
I am cautious with people and don’t open myself up too quickly. At heart, I am a solitary soul, perfectly able and at peace to spend time alone, even to travel alone. My husband is the extrovert who does all the social planning in our family. I sometimes think I got married and had children so I would have people to love on this earth to act as ballast to keep me from floating away, to save me from going from a solitary soul to a lonely soul. And because I have my family and am grounded in my own worth and importance to them, I don’t seek the love or approval of many others. I don’t make friendships fast and I don’t make them easily. Most of my friendships have been hard earned, and as a result I don’t take them for granted.
I want to cultivate Sylvie’s friendship. Eve’s, too, but Eve has a busier life. And from what I can tell from the few visits I’ve made to the Berkshires, Eve’s horse farm creates a hub, and Sylvie keeps it buzzing. Eve provides the space and activity; Sylvie provides the connectivity. Sylvie is nearly twenty years my senior and her grandchildren are my children’s age. So often we segregate into friend groups by age, but Sylvie attracts a multigenerational following, as does Eve.
I’ve never been clubby, or a joiner, a member of a tribe. The one and only time I belonged to a clique were those brief years when I belonged to that roaming band of preteen girls who ran in the woods
, those years that bridged the freedom of childhood to the rumored glories of puberty.
But now I want to belong to Sylvie’s group—the women who run with Icelandic horses. I want in with Sylvie and Eve and their quirky Icelandic horse club back home, and also to be able to return to what I’ve seen and experienced with Helga and Iceland. This is the club I want to be a member of, the perfect complement, or foil, to my ordinary life.
When the bartender comes by to pick up our empty glasses, we ask for a second round. He is like so many Icelandic men I have met: emotionally low-key, not unfriendly exactly, but not warm and welcoming, either. I don’t mind that. I can live without that cringeworthy bartender line: “What can I get you ladies next?” And I’d prefer for him to get back to his book.
Over our second beer, Sylvie says, “She invited us back for next year . . . Helga. She thought maybe a smaller number of us, like five or six. I need to make a list of the people who I really want to come, not just the ones Eve feels she has to save.”
I knew Dora was the primary tension between Eve and Sylvie during the week, though in her own way Dora came around. She joined us for dinner one night, albeit a bit wobbly at the table as if she had spent too much time lying down. She even took a short ride with us one day, though she fell off her horse while standing still and claimed the horse had slipped. Before we left, she wrote in the farm’s guestbook an effusive, heartfelt note bestowing praise on Helga, the horses, and the life-changing restorative power of the Icelandic lavender skies that put my “thanks for your hospitality” note in the guestbook to shame. Eve summed it up by saying, “See, we all bring something different to the trip. We all take away something else.”
“So I am making my A-list. The selected few. Are you interested in coming next year?”
“Absolutely. Put me on the list.” I say this calmly, belying a growing excitement that I am having difficulty containing. I want to return as many times as Helga will have us. But I don’t want to appear too needy to Sylvie, too take-me, take-me, as if I am a stray that needs to be saved. I don’t want to invite myself along every year, I want to be invited. This is where I belong.
Staring out at the boats on the harbor, Sylvie says, “This is what I want to do for now, this is where I want to be, what I’m drawn to do. I don’t know for how long, but this is the place for now.”
“I feel the same.”
Our conversation pauses as we let Leonard Cohen’s voice caress us. His pull is hypnotic, and we go silent to listen more fully to him:
“So come, my friends, be not afraid, we are so lightly here.”
Over the years, I will never tire of listening to this CD. While driving up to the Berkshires, it becomes my Route 8 soundtrack. If I were to form a religion, I would base it on Leonard Cohen’s songbook. I heard it’s a cult. Through constant repetition of the CD, I wind up committing the entire album to memory—every word, every note, every balalaika beginning and every balalaika ending. And without fail it brings me back to that bar down by the wharves, back to the beginning of our twelve-year sojourn.
We finish our beers at about the same time Leonard Cohen stops singing. The bartender puts on some other music that breaks the spell. More people come in and he’s forced to put his book under the bar. We get up to leave.
Outside again, we walk aimlessly. We’re done talking. We’re lost in our own thoughts that we no longer have an urge to share. She waves me off, saying she is going to do a bit more exploring on her own. Like me, she is comfortable traveling alone. Like me, there are times when she probably prefers it.
I walk down to the piers, close to all the large vessels with their engines thrumming, pumping bilge out of their sterns. Kittiwakes mob the fish being hauled in and fulmars fret over the garbage. It only takes two beers in the afternoon to make me deliriously happy, but also I’m exactly where I want to be—on the coast of Iceland, east of Greenland, and facing the fathomless North Atlantic. I’m hanging off the northern edge of a medieval map: the geographies of Thule.
2005
Repeat after Me: Hvammstangi
It’s raining when I land in Keflavík. The light is tin-colored from the cloud cover. It’s six thirty A.M. Iceland time, two thirty A.M. New York time. Since my flight from New York gets in before the Boston flight, I have to wait for my traveling companions. Keflavik is tiny for an international airport, so small and efficient that my luggage is on the belt by the time I get to the baggage claim. In 2005, the airport serves only Icelandair flights; other airlines are allowed to land at the airport only in the summer months. It is also a popular landing spot for planes in trouble. My mother was once on a flight back from Greece when the pilot had to make an emergency landing in Keflavík. She stayed overnight at the airport and I’d like to think Iceland saved her life by letting the plane land.
My mother was fiscally cheap, the kind that made you pay her back $3.39 when she picked up a box of tampons for you (pennies counted). Her only indulgence was travel, and she always brought me numerous and expensive gifts from her trips. From Greece, she brought me a gold chain necklace and pearl-drop earrings. From Iceland, she brought two Icelandic sweaters from the airport store, the most luxurious sweaters I’d ever seen: one, a silk-lined zip up jacket of white angora wool with a geometric brown band, and the other, also white angora, a pullover of even whiter wool and a petal softness. I wore them both for many winters, and when I’d meet up with a boyfriend on a snowy evening, I’d put up the loose hoods to frame my twenty-year-old face. At that age, I couldn’t pass a mirror without marveling at myself. (“Vanity, vanity,” my mother would say, “thy name is Victoria.” She liked to use my full name when pointing out my flaws.) But the way the wool fell over my body and draped my head, the thought of the wintry island and the sweet lamb that shed its wool for me, the happenstance or higher power that brought my mother to land there, transformed me into a fairy snow princess with magical power. I thought, with all the surety of youth, who could not fall in love with me?
That was my first introduction to Iceland: those two sweaters that I wore for a few years and then eventually lost in the dozen or so moves I made in my twenties, amidst falling in and out of love.
Iceland and its people are still a novelty for me. While waiting for the plane from Boston to arrive, I watch a couple greet each other. I had already noticed her on the flight from New York, because she is a young woman who knows how to draw attention to herself, another version of myself in a different time and different place, and instead of being an American wearing Icelandic sweaters, she is an Icelander wearing American clothes. She has on a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, a short green skirt, and a black leather bomber jacket. Along with her regular luggage, she carries a DKNY shopping bag.
Her boyfriend, who’s been waiting among the twelve people in the arrivals section, springs forward upon seeing her and the two of them fall on each other, playful as puppies. They kiss extravagantly and intimately, diving into each other’s mouths like adolescents, though they are probably in their late twenties. He’s dressed like a rock musician, skinny jeans and short sweatshirt jacket, piercings, tattoos. His hair is a crested wave that must be held up with gel. He kisses her so much he kisses her cowboy hat off her head. She has to hold it in place for some one-handed kissing. They stop kissing only to talk quietly and to press far enough back from each other so they can stare at each other’s face. But not for long. They dive into each other again, kissing, nuzzling, whispering, two bodies in symbiosis in the middle of the airport, either oblivious or uncaring about the people passing by them. Their physical attraction is like a force field no one else can enter but everyone can watch. Or at least I can. No one else bothers.
This is not the first time I’ve seen such an open display of a couple’s intimate fondness for each other—I’m thinking of Jonki and his girlfriend snogging on the trail as they left me haphazardly wrangling the reins of three horses. Maybe passionate public affection is the cultural norm. Though Iceland has had a thous
and years of Christianity, most of it typically sexually repressive, I can’t help but wonder if this public display doesn’t contain the vestiges of the earlier pagan days where, all things considered for era and place, women had more equitable status, and sexuality was forthright and did not evolve from original sin.
The Sagas of Icelanders are like the Bible of Iceland, oral history written down, and no doubt interpreted, by monks in the thirteenth century two or three hundred years after the events. The eight-hundred-year-old tales are taught in Icelandic schools as literature, with modern interpretations of characters’ personalities, moralities, and power struggles, and also as a look into the historical social structure of the times they relate. Some sagas are blood-soaked revenge tales, not all that different from video games where a modern kid wracks up points for kills. And in some sagas, the women take on an equally vengeful role.
Njal’s saga features the particularly interesting Hallgerd. She is tall and beautiful with a voluminous head of hair: “so much hair she could hide herself in it.” She is also, fortunately for her, “hard-tempered.” Her first two marriages are arranged with her initial consent, but they go quickly awry. Her first husband slaps her when she talks back to him, so she incites her axe-wielding foster father to kill him. Ditto with her second husband—he slaps her and . . . he’s a dead man.
She chooses her third husband, Gunnar, for his good looks and fighting prowess. He is a lifelong friend of Njal’s, after whom the saga is named. But Hallgerd is no friend of Njal’s wife, Bergthora. At a winter feast they fight over a prime spot on the cross bench—it’s a you-can’t-sit-here, this-seat-is-taken scene—and Hallgerd is incensed. She and Bergthora hurl insults at each other. Thus begins a long trail of killings. Hallgerd sends a servant to kill Bergthora’s servant—Bergthora then retaliates by having another servant kill one of Hallgerd’s servants. They go at each other this way, avenging each household death, always making their servants do the killing and dying, until they’ve made a severe dent in the local servant population. Hallgerd’s mother-in-law wryly notes: “Hallgerd does not let our servants die of old age.” After each ordered hit, their husbands settle the deaths by paying compensation in court (the Althing).