The Tricking of Freya (11 page)

The book was small enough to fit in one hand, to slip into a pocket, and
Olafur decided to carry it with him everywhere. The spine was frayed at the
top and bottom, exposing the yellowed binding, and the leather cover was
worn soft as the underbelly of a newborn lamb.

"How could the pagans know how the world would end if it hadn't
ended yet?"

"You know what Voluspa means?"

Olafur shook his head.

"It means Prophecy of the Volva. A volva was a woman who could see
the future. It was she who looked back in time and told how the world began, then looked forward to foretell its end. But enough questions for now.
Once you can recite for me the first verse without any mistakes, then you
can ask more questions."

Over the next week Olafur memorized the first verses. He learned about
the beginning of time, when there was no sand or sea or surging waves, no
earth, no heaven, nothing but the vast chasm called Ginnungagap. When
Olafur lay awake at night, the nothingness of Ginnungagap terrified him,
impossible to envision. But standing outside on a day when the entire sky
was the same shade of white-gray as the snow-covered valley, it was easier
to conjure such nothingness, the earth forming itself from the body of a
frost-giant.

The memorizing of Voluspa became Olafur's secret pleasure. He whispered whole verses to indifferent sheep and into the ears of the
winter-furred horses. In bed at night he started from the beginning and
went through the poem entire up to that day's verse. To keep himself
awake he moved his lips, a light whisper he hoped the others would mistake for prayer.

Of course his favorite parts were the verses about Ragnarok, when the
volva shifts into a deep trance and recounts for the god Odin the menacing
events that would one day bring about the end of the world:

Arm-rings and necklaces, Odin, you gave me
To learn my lore, to learn my magic:
Wider and wider through all the worlds I see.

The volva goes on to predict that the ferocious Fenris Wolf will break its
fetters and devour the sun, the fire giant Surtr will consume the wondrous
world tree Yggdrasil, and the Midgard Serpent that has lain undersea tail in
mouth, encircling the entire earth, will rise from the water, spewing poison
and whipping up tidal waves of terror. All day long Olafur hears the haunting words as he goes about his chores, and at night as he tries to fall asleep.

Earth sinks in the sea, the Sun turns black,
Cast down from Heaven are the hot stars,
Fumes reek, into f ernes burst,
The sky itself is scorched with fire.

Is that the end, then, of everything? No, it is not, the volva says.

And Olafur now feels as if he himself were in a trance. It is Easter, and he
is reciting, just as his uncle Pall promised he would, the Voluspa entire for
his family during the evening reading. He is beginning the final section,
reciting with great passion the volva's vision of the world's rebirth:

I see Earth rising a second time
Out of the foam, fair and green:
Down from the fells, fish to capture
Wings the eagle; waters f low.

And finally little Olafur he was just eleven at the time-comes to the
end of the poem. He stands in the murky whale-light, in front of his entire
family, and recites from memory (astonishingly, he has made no mistakes
so far) the volva's last line, the end of the great poem:

I sink now.

"But the volva was wrong, wasn't she?" Olafur asked his uncle Pall that
night before bed.

"Wrong how?"

"The world never came to an end as she predicted."

"Not yet, my boy," Pall said with a wink. "Not yet."

It was the very next morning, the day after Easter 1875, that Olafur
woke to the rain of ash, the obliterated sun and blackened sky. "Ragnarok!"
he screamed, convinced the wolf had swallowed the sun. And who could
blame him? What else was he to think? True, it was not the end of the
world as the volva foresaw it so many centuries ago. But it was certainly
the end of the world as Olafur knew it. The volcano Askja's ashfall poisoned the entire East of Iceland in a wide swath all the way to the coast. A
year later, Olafur and his mother and father and brothers were on a ship
bound for a New Iceland in Canada.

"Did Uncle Pall go too?" I asked Birdie.

"He stayed behind," Birdie said sadly. "Olafur never saw his uncle Pall
again. But he wrote him many letters over the years, and mailed him the
poems he began composing in New Iceland. But that's another story altogether."

Wider and wider through all the worlds I see ... That first summer in
Gimli I began to think of Birdie as a kind of volva when she told me bedtime stories, an enchantress folding me into her wings with words, soaring
us far from the scene of my cartwheel crime. I loved her for that.

Pardon me, Cousin. The Olafur story was a diversion, then and now, distracting me from my mother's fall. The truth is I've been dreading this next
part. About how Mama never got much better again, never uncurled completely from the comma. The doctors said the symptoms might go away in
time, or not. In Mama's case it was not.

Vertigo was one symptom. Ver-ti-go. I couldn't help loving saying that
word. What it was and what it did I hated. It was that eggbeater inside
Mama's head making her feel like she was a lawn-spinning two-year-oldwhen she was standing still. She had to walk with a cane to keep her balance. For the rest of her life, she walked with a cane. Different canes. She
was always losing them. She'd prop one up in the soup aisle at the supermarket deciding between Campbell's Chicken Noodle and Campbell's
Chicken with Rice, and then she'd walk out of the store without the cane.
By the time she discovered it was gone, she couldn't remember where she'd
left it.

And her blond hair turned white, in just two months. She didn't seem to
notice, but I did. Back in Connecticut, kids at school thought she was my
grandmother. And I let them.

Plus she stopped reading. She could still understand the words, but the
movement of her eyes on the page, scanning back and forth and back and
forth, brought on the vertigo. When we returned to Connecticut, she had to give up her job as a copy editor. For a while she didn't work at all. She just
sat home handcrafting. Then she started selling her pieces at a couple of
boutiques in town. Hand-knitted Icelandic sweaters and scarves and caps
and slipper-socks that go halfway to your knees, made from real Icelandic
wool she ordered from Iceland. Scratchy, yes, but warm enough to keep a
sheep through a long Icelandic winter. People bought it up. That's what we
lived on: sweater money, and my father's life insurance and pension.

It meant Mama couldn't read to me at night anymore. It meant I read to
her instead.

Light became a bad thing. Migraines. In Connecticut we pulled the venetian blinds down to the sills and tilted the slats so no light could get in,
and at Oddi in Gimli, Mama sewed heavy curtains for the parlor windows
that matched the moss green couch. And whenever she went out in Gimli
or Connecticut or anywhere else she had to wear sunglasses, even if it was
cloudy, even if it was raining.

Even snow. Especially snow.

Worst was how she stayed curled in on herself. I'd have to call her name
three times-Mama. Marna. Mama!-before she'd answer. She had a distracted look, like a person always on the verge of remembering a dream that
keeps slipping away. She'd forget stuff a lot. Her keys, where she parked the
car in the supermarket parking lot, what day it was. I had to remember
things for her. I kept track of her for her. When we left the house, I checked
her purse: sunglasses keys wallet Kleenex brush. Sunglasses keys wallet
Kleenex brush.

About the accident itself Mama remembered zero. Sigga said that was
best. Let her think she slipped and fell. (And not that I turned a cartwheel
in the parlor at her welcome-home-to-Gimli party and smashed the china
cabinet and she found me lying in a pile of broken glass and shards of china
and fainted and cracked her head on the way down.) Slipped and fell,
Mama would say if she had to explain the accident to someone.

I hated to hear Mama lie like that, even though she didn't know it was a
lie.

Sigga said it was best for Mama not to know, but I believed Sigga
thought I was the one it was best for. Because if Mama knew it was my
fault she broke her head, she might decide to never talk to me again. She might not want me for a daughter anymore. In the back of my mind lurked
the worry that Mama might remember, that one morning she might wake
up with her pillow-mussed hair and sleep-sanded eyes and that dreamremembering look on her face. Cartwheel ... she'd say, rubbing her eyes
with the heels of her hands. Crash ... ? And then her eyes would sharpen
to hard points and she'd say, It was you, Frey. You did this to me.

I had to prepare for that day by being good. Gooder than good. So even
if she did remember, she might decide to keep me anyway. That's why I
took such good care of her, acting like a mother even though I was the
child. Draping cold washcloths over her eyes during migraines. Running all
over town looking for lost canes. I told myself it was because I loved her,
but inside I knew it was because I wanted her to keep me.

Sometimes all the not-telling-Mama piled up inside me. Sometimes I
thought I might burst the truth. Say It was me. And have her pull me on her
lap and stroke my hair and gaze at me with her spruce green eyes and say,
It doesn't matter, elskan, I'll always love you anyway. But what if she didn't?
So I kept it secret. And blamed myself double, to make up for Mama not
knowing.

No, she never found out. And so I never got punished for my crime.
That's why I had to get busy and punish myself, so I would never do anything that bad ever again. In those first few weeks after Mama got back
from the hospital, I would sit quietly with her in the parlor in the daytime
with the drapes pulled and figure out my punishment. I considered my options. Like Never speak again, which only lasted halfway through breakfast
until Sigga said, Enough of that nonsense, child. Another one I tried was
Never smile again, but Mama kept wanting to know if I was sad over and
over until I got so sad I almost started crying. Then she tickled me and I
rolled off the couch giggling. It wasn't until I was at the beach one day with
Birdie that I figured out the perfect punishment. Birdie was trying to read
and I kept asking her to tell me a story about Freyja the goddess or Egil the
poet or anyone but me. Finally she looked up from her book to a group of
kids playing catch with a blue-and-yellow beach ball, and three girls racing
in the sand, and a girl and a boy doing handstands, and she said, "Go play.
Go play, damn it, like a regular kid."

Never play again!

It made perfect sense: Only children played. And I'd done something so
bad I didn't deserve to be a child anymore. So I would be a not-kid and notplay with other kids. At school back in Connecticut during recess, I would
stand on the edge of the playground and not-play jump rope and not-play
tetherball and not-play hand-slapping rhyming games like Miss Mary Mack
Mack Mack. In Gimli summers it meant that I didn't race girls or even boys
on the beach even though I was a long-legged egret and could have beat
most of them. Or build rafts out of driftwood and pretend to be Indians canoeing. I could watch other kids doing those things, but I couldn't do them
myself. Even if they asked me. Which they stopped doing pretty quickly.

No thanks. I don't like to play.

You don't like to play?

You'd think someone would have noticed that I wasn't being myself, but
the thing is no one in Gimli really knew me. I'd only been there one day
before the accident. Only Mama knew the old me, but she wasn't herself
anymore either. There was the Before-Mama and the After-Mama. The
Before-Freya and the After-Freya. There was Before and there was After.

Even Mama's eyes seemed to change, from crisp spruce green to the
fuzzy color of an algae-choked pond.

After Birdie ran away and came back bearing meanie-gifts, she shaped up
for the rest of the summer. That's what Sigga told her to do, and Sigga was
the only one with any influence over Birdie. It was the day after Mama got
home from Winnipeg, and Sigga was sitting at the kitchen table packaging
all the meanie-gifts to send back to Eaton's department store. The silverand-black rooster pin for she who rules the roost. The miniature dog statue
for our ever-loyal Stefan. And the beautiful silk acrobat scarf for our little
gymnast. (The chocolates for the sweetest sister a girl could have Birdie devoured herself. I found the wrappers under her bed.) I was standing behind
the kitchen door peeking through a crack. Birdie was sitting across from
Sigga with her elbows on the table and her forehead pressed into her hands.
After she was done repackaging, Sigga put all the gifts into a cardboard box
and taped it up. That's when she said it. "You either shape up, Ingibjorg. Or
you ship out."