by Tory Bilski
Then during a time of famine, Hallgerd orders her slave to steal food from a neighbor. Her husband Gunnar catches wind of the plan, and steps in to make financial amends to the neighbor for his wife’s behavior. Later, when he gets into an argument with Hallgerd over her plans to steal the food, he . . . slaps her face. In public. People witness her humiliation. She vows she will repay him for that. And, as we know by now, it never ends well for slapping husbands.
The women in this saga only account for a minor fraction of the violence, and all of it is hired or incited, while the men go on to personally commit a dizzying number of revenge killings. Toward the end of the saga, we catch up with Gunnar and Hallgerd. Their house is surrounded by enemies and Gunnar is valiantly making every attempt to withstand the attacks. He has wounded eight, killed two. He is armed with arrows, and he asks his wife for a few strands of her famous hair to fix his broken bowstring. She refuses, saying, “I call to mind that slap you gave me.” He dies soon afterward from battle exhaustion.
It’s hard to reconcile those sagas with modern day people. The country consistently rates high as one of the most peaceful. Icelanders are quiet people in general. Daily conversations are more whispered than spoken. I never hear the Icelandic language shouted, though I don’t go to their soccer games. Since modern Icelandic is pretty close to the old Norse spoken by the Viking settlers 1,200 years ago, one expects the language to be brutally harsh and guttural, an invader’s pugilistic rampage baked into its DNA. But the language has a lilting Scandinavian brogue with variations of “th.” It has lifts and falls and breathiness. It’s a lullaby language with nursery tale tonality, and the general sentence pattern often ends in an up-phrase.
Of course, I don’t understand a word of it. It’s not an easy language to learn. Not that I have a flair for languages anyway. I suffer from typical American foreign language disability. I speak high school Spanish, restaurant French, and now my newly acquired Icelandic place-names, which are built on compound nouns. So I know that stadir means farmstead and hvoll is a mound; a nes ending indicates a peninsula, an a at the end means it’s a river. Dalur means dale, vatn means water, a foss is a waterfall, falla a mountain, jokull a glacier, hraun a lava field, and laugur steamy water.
Meaning is one challenge, pronunciation is another. One must beware of treacherous blended consonants. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. When I say a place name like “Hvammstangi” to an Icelander, they look quizzically at me. I have to explain, “It’s in Iceland. It’s a town around here.” Oh, no, no, and they repeat the town’s name back to me. The “Hvamm” is said in a way my tongue won’t curl, with a “pwhoo,” a “vrrrm,” and a lilt and a whisper that confirms the futility of my ever really learning to speak the language.
But at home . . . no one knows that. I can fake it. It’s a neat trick and I sort of sound like I’m speaking the elf language from Middle Earth. At parties, I sometimes throw out wicked Icelandic place names, just for the fun of the reaction I can get. “When I was in Hafnarfjörður. . .” I slip in casually while dipping into my mother-in-law’s canapés.
Invariably, someone will ask me, “What, where? Say that again?”
Well, okay, if I must. “Hafnarfjörður, it’s a town near Reykjanesbaer.” I like to toss in Helga’s place, “Thingeyrar.” Thanks to my high school Spanish, I can roll the “r.” And if I am really trying to impress, I do the whole “Thingeyrarkirja,” which simply means the church at Thingeyrar. It’s not like they can correct me.
Place name obsession is like a mildly pleasant compulsive disorder. I can’t pass a road sign without mumbling it to myself. I share it with the people in the car. “Hvalfjörður. That means whale’s fjord. They must have done some whale hunting around here, or maybe it is where whales breed.”
“Listen to you, you’re getting good at Icelandic,” Sylvie says. She’s humoring me.
Brittany, now fifteen, is in the back seat with me. She is doe-eyed and quiet, as usual. I am at the stage in life where I think about other kids in relation to my own children. My son is a year older than Britt. Maybe they could date? She would be good for him—a horse-loving, sensible, thoughtful, independent girl. And he? One-fifth of a wolf pack who has perfected this teenage guy thing of not moving his lips when he talks. It could work. It is never too early to start planning your child’s future. But Britt has other plans.
“Britt is interested in attending Holar when she graduates high school,” Sylvie says.
“Oooh, Holar,” I say, which is the only appropriate remark when someone mentions Holar. In some crowds, you mention Harvard or the Sorbonne to signify life’s glories and achievement. In this crowd—the Icelandic horse crowd, which when I travel becomes my crowd—you mention Holar.
“If I get in,” Britt offers up.
“It’s very hard to get in,” Sylvie explains. “And you have to know Icelandic pretty well. Everything is taught in Icelandic. But Britt here is our best hope.”
“You will be only the second American ever to go to Holar,” I toss out, tapping into my limited knowledge of the Holar horse world, even though she knows it. Everyone knows that there is only one person, a young woman from California, who has ever gotten into and graduated from Holar. And in this crowd, this very small Icelandic horse community from the States, she has become a legend, inspiring awe.
“I have Icelandic language tapes you should start with,” Sylvie tells her.
“There’s a couple of online programs to learn Icelandic, too.” I offer this up, though I have tried them and doubt their efficacy.
Sylvie says, “The language has more declensions than Latin. For instance, the word for horse is hestar. But there are nine variations of it according to case, gender, number, and whether you put an article in front of it.”
“It’s impossible to learn unless you live in the country,” Eve says.
“Let’s face it, it’s an aggravating language,” Sylvie says, putting the matter to rest.
Britt remains mute as we barrage her with all our advice only to end on a disparaging note about the Icelandic language. When she’s sure we are done talking, she pulls out her iPod and pops in her earbuds.
Eve’s Life
Since my first visit to Iceland a year ago, I have made an effort to visit Sylvie and Eve in the Berkshires. I have stayed overnight at Sylvie’s. I have had my morning coffee with rice milk at her house. I have ridden on the trails with her and others at Eve’s farm, though hardly ever with Eve, who usually says that she has too much work to do. She and her husband, Jack, run their business out of their house, though their business is a mystery to me. From what I can tell, they appear to be entrepreneurs who sell? distribute? produce? spa products and exercise cycles that sell on QVC. They have a New York apartment, an office in London, business partners in Atlanta, and Chinese investors. And they have their Berkshire horse farm.
If Helga’s farm at Thingeyrar is the dream farm of Iceland, Eve’s farm is idyllic by American standards, though on a completely different scale. Helga has hundreds of horses on her farm, hundreds of acres of land; Eve has only a dozen Icelandic horses and forty acres. Yet Eve has a brand-new barn, several paddocks, an outside tölting track, and an indoor arena with the latest high-tech surface: geotextile footing for the horse—a mixture of ground-up leather, recycled tires, wax, and silica sand. A horsey version of Astroturf.
When I visit the farm, Eve and Jack are the consummate hosts. They gather everyone into their fold, offering you a place to stay, horses to ride, an “in” to their ever-growing crowd of friends. Neither Eve nor Jack comes from money and their relationship to it is nouveau riche spiritual. Eve says, “It’s there to spend, to give away, otherwise I have no reason to want to make money in the first place. I make it to give it away.” Though that will eventually get her and Jack into some financial difficulties.
Their house and farm is upscale communal. They hire lots of people: gardeners, house cleaners, barn help, pet-sitters, and secretaries
who keep it all running. They also take in strays—people who push their hosting generosity and stay for months. Visiting the farm feels like living in a sitcom with characters coming and going. The fire in the kitchen hearth is always lit in cold weather. The kitchen counter seats twelve on high saddle-shaped barstools. The bar is stocked with single malts and Patrón tequila, and drinks are generously poured. They have five dogs (three on purpose, two that happened to be left there), numerous cats, birds in cages. Not surprisingly, there is always a pet commotion happening, some crisis where one is either sick, missing, or thieving food from the table.
Jack is a roaring type of New Yorker, Bronx born, a large presence: he’s tall, loud, uninhibited, and flagrantly libertine, whose oft-repeated line is, “I’m a heterosexual nymphomaniac.” To which Eve says, “Oh, honey, we know you are.” I know her first marriage at twenty-two was to a closeted gay man, so maybe this time around she doesn’t want any ambiguity. But I also know that couples always have a deal going on: what one puts up with, what one gets, what one ignores, where the boundaries are, and when they’re permitted to shift. Jack’s a wild ride, but Eve is exactly where she wants to be.
Jack has a soft side, too: he does all the cooking and entertaining. Like an Italian grandmother, he will make sure you’re well-fed. He makes soups and roast chicken, puts out pasta salads and sandwiches, cooks up eggs and pancakes. Sylvie sums it up by saying, “Despite his alpha maleness, he has a maternal quality to him because he lost his mother at a young age. He expresses it mostly by feeding you and yelling at the horses.”
We stop at Borgarnes to fuel up. The other Jeepful of women we are traveling with are wandering around the N1, too, hunting snacks. I don’t know any of them and was only briefly introduced to them outside the hotel. When I find Sylvie between the candy counter and ice cream stand, she doesn’t seem too happy the other car is with us.
“You know Eve. Everyone she bumps into at the Great Barrington co-op she says, ‘oh come to Iceland with us.’ I keep telling her that we need to limit it to five people. Five. Helga doesn’t run a farm stay bed and breakfast. That’s not her business. Her business is the horses. She doesn’t open her farm up to anyone but us.”
Sylvie gives me a quick overview of who’s who: There’s Viv, who is a friend of a friend. “She seems to be having a hard time with her sons. Oh, you know how sons can be, don’t you? I certainly do with my two sons.”
I do. My son has two more years of high school and I try not to let his behavior get to me, but our relationship has taken an odd turn and I can’t seem to find him. Part of me is relieved. He was a colicky baby I could never put down, a shy kid who would never drop my hand when I walked him into a birthday party. So the separation is healthy and I approve of his independence, but it is also extreme. He’s developed an apathy toward everything except his guitar and friend group.
“And then there is eighteen-year-old Melody, who likes to be called Mel—she sometimes keeps her horse at Eve’s barn,” Sylvie says. “And there’s Mel’s mother.”
Mel’s mother is dressed in big heavy cloaks that drag to the ground, covering her Birkenstock sandals that she wears with socks. My first take is that her clothes are a statement of religious modesty. And sure enough, when they sit down to a bowl of soup at the cafe, she grips Mel’s hand, bows her head, and whispers a prayer that ends with “In Jesus’s name we pray.”
Sylvie says, “I don’t know where Eve finds these people.“
“Remember Dora last year?”
“Oh Dora. Eve was furious when she found out Dora was secretly drinking and mixing it with Klonopin the whole trip.”
“No wonder she spent so much time in her room.”
“We’re lucky she didn’t overdose in her bedroom.” Sylvie loudly takes in air. “How would we have explained that to Helga?”
I notice Viv zipping around the aisles of the N1. She’s a fast walker, doing laps around me and Sylvie. She doesn’t seem depressed, she seems caffeinated. She buys yogurt drinks, chips, chocolate covered raisins, donuts. She eats quickly, nibbling like a rabbit, stopping briefly to tell us, “I have low blood sugar. I need to eat every hour.”
While driving between Borgarnes and Hvammstangi, we pass a desert of brown sand hills and lava fields, but very few horses or green fields to brighten the mood. We’re inland—away from any mesmerizing fjords. There are no towns to speak of and only a few farms off in the hills. A cold fierce wind shakes our Jeep, and snow flurries momentarily appear.
“What’s the story with Mel’s mother?” Sylvie prods Eve to divulge, as soon as Eve is alone with us. I’m sensing that Mel’s mother was a last-minute addition.
Eve says, “I think she’s religious. She was looking for a church to attend in Reykjavík this morning before we left.”
“Yep, she was saying grace over the fish soup in the cafeteria.”
“She’s a born-again Christian or something like that. At least she won’t be popping pills and drinking alone in her room,” Eve says.
“Oh, okay,” Sylvie says, but it’s clearly not okay. “I grew up in Catholic schools and the nuns told me my red hair spelled trouble.” Sylvie conflates all religious affiliation with her Catholic school upbringing.
“Mel is very sweet but she never gets always from her family. I thought it would be good for Mel to come with us to Iceland, as an act of independence, but then her mother booked a trip, too.”
“In other words,” Sylvie says, “you didn’t invite the mother.”
“I think she misconstrued my invite to Mel. Or maybe she didn’t trust us. Maybe she thinks we will be a bad influence.”
Sylvie groans. “Oh, I see, so we’re loose women. And I’ve got red hair.”
“The mom doesn’t ride, so she won’t be with us out on the trail. And, Sylvie, Mel needs this. Let’s give everyone a chance.”
“You know me, I give everyone a chance,” Sylvie says.
It‘s difficult for people who consider themselves secular liberals to accept the other, the religious conservative in this case, Christians. It’s the great divide: we get riled up about it before we vote, and we socially self-segregate for fear of offending and being offended. It’s funny how Mel’s mother and her quiet prayer over food is hair-triggering and associative for some of us: we fear being judged, while at the same time, we judge her. I know how this feels on both sides.
I tend to forget my own history with a religious sect. It is personal archeology I keep deeply buried within, an inconvenient story, inconsistent with who I am, and who I became, so I put the memories in little trash bins marked: no room for this, spam, junk, delete, delete, delete. If asked, I gloss over the details, as “my crazy first marriage” at 23. If I have to dig deeper, I toss it out lightly as “my brief, ill-begotten, impulsive first marriage.” If pressed, I might admit he was religious, or if I’m feeling honest, I might add that he was a religious fanatic. Dig deeper, though, and my story falls apart: I was young, I was lost, and I was looking for something to save me.
So I know too well how this story would be socially unacceptable in my usual circles where revelations of misspent youth are somewhat rare to begin with, and definitely do not center on fundamentalist religious reformations.
It is liberating, therefore, to be traveling with Eve and Sylvie. I trust them with stuff I don’t normally tell people at home (and Britt has her earphones in).
“So here’s a story . . . it’s about my first marriage,” I begin.
Tern, Tern, Tern
Viv knocks on my door. “Do you want to go for a walk with me?” Something about the way she asks, hesitantly, as if afraid I’ll say no, and the way I am lying on my bunk bed in a desultory mood half reading a book I’m not that interested in, reminds me of my college days. It’s like the unexpected request from the girl down the hall who wants to make friends with you. And Viv is like the girl down the hall I would never have noticed in college, like an upstate or Southern girl who wears bright colors and full makeup
while my favorite color is charcoal gray and the extent of my makeup a tinted lip balm. Viv is from Maryland originally, and she never goes out of the house without her “face on.” It takes an hour for her to put on full makeup and blow out her hair in the morning to got out and ride a horse on sheep trails in northern Iceland.
“Sure, I’m not sleeping anyway.” I have chosen the smallest, darkest bedroom in the house this year. It was Dora’s room last year, and the walls are paneled wood, a rarity in Iceland where wood has been scarce since the settlement days. It fits one bunk bed and a bedside table. It has only one window that’s covered with a dark plaid curtain to keep the sunlight out. I still can’t sleep. Viv is a welcome distraction.
“This light is charging me with energy. But everyone in my room is asleep and snoring,” she says.
Viv’s in the big bunk room where the teenage girls slept last year, along with Eve and Sylvie. The mother and daughter team are in the room I slept in last year.
Viv is dressed for the Arctic: parka, hat, ski gloves, lined rain pants. I refuse to bring my parka to Iceland at the end of June. I bring a fleece and a few sweaters. But outside, the wind is fierce—it cuts through my sweater and fleece—but Viv is walking so fast, that to keep up I need to trot beside her. This warms me up, but my eyes are tearing from the wind. Even my ears are filling with it, and everything she says bounces around in the air and then straggles into my ears with a few seconds delay.
Viv talks about one of her sons who is dropping out of college for the third time or maybe it’s the third college. She got him help and they told her that he has ADD or, maybe she says OCD. I’m nodding eagerly to tell her I’m listening, though I’m not exactly hearing everything. But I’m interested in her mother-son relationship, as it might mirror mine.