The Tricking of Freya (15 page)

Several times she threatened to kill herself if we left. Sigga said it was
because Birdie never got over her father dying when she was just a girl.
Mama said Birdie was trying to grab the limelight as usual. I didn't say anything. I was too scared to speak. What if I said the wrong thing and she
killed herself? What if I said nothing and she killed herself anyway?

One time Mama arranged for Stefan to secretly fetch us a day early, at six
o'clock in the morning, just so we could avoid Birdie's god-awful scene. I tiptoed past Birdie's bedroom with my cherry red suitcase. The plan was for Stefan to meet us around the corner so the rumble of his aging Rambler wouldn't
wake Birdie up. But somehow she knew. Mama and Sigga and I were almost
to the comer when Birdie came flying down the driveway screaming, "Plotters! Schemers! Traitors!"

"Please," Mama begged. "You'll wake the neighbors."

The last day of my last Gimli summer was different. It was quiet. No
screaming, no god-awful scene. That's because Birdie wasn't there. She'd
been committed. To Selkirk Asylum. For kidnapping me.

No, it wasn't really a kidnapping. It was just a vacation. Except no one
believed us.

Your mother would be very proud.

Of me, that is. Of the way I've been writing: on the subway in my head,
in the darkroom illegibly on the backs of discarded test strips, in my apartment through the night on Birdie's old Underwood. Now I keep myself
awake with the same raining type that percussed my Gimli summer nights.

If I don't write to you, I dream. Silly dreams: Birdie rising up out of Lake
Winnipeg, strands of wet hair knotted around her neck like blond seaweed.
The truth is that things haven't been going well for me since I found out
about you. Screwups at the Sub. I stay up late writing you, then oversleep in
the morning. It's no easy feat, waking up in a basement apartment. Each
morning, I have to trick my brain awake, make it believe day when all my
senses register night. I show up to work late and bleary-eyed, and my prints
keep turning out flat. Flat trash! my boss, Klaus, calls them. Flat means lack
of distinction between shades of gray. In other words, mud. Klaus is a hottempered old man, ex-officer in the Prussian army. He is rarely kind, but
lately he has been especially harsh. Today he went so far as to rip up one of
my prints. Says I'm losing my eye. I've already lost my ear, my tongue. What's
next?

The summer Birdie kidnapped me was the same summer Mama's friend
Vera was chosen to be Fjallkona. What's a Fjallkona, you ask? In a minute. The more important question is what's a kidnapping. Know this: your
mother did not steal me from my bed in the night. I was not bound and
blindfolded. There was no ransom note collaged with letters cut from newspapers. I vanished voluntarily, if unwittingly. Birdie called it a surprise vacation, just the two of us, and I believed her. I chose to believe her. I could
claim in my defense that I was only a child, simply being a good girl, doing
what I was told. That I didn't know any better.

The truth is I'd turned thirteen. My wings itched. It was my first chance
to fly and I took it.

Birdie and I set off for Iceland in the middle of Vera's speech at Islendingadagurinn. That's eece-len-ding-a-dagur-inn. Quite a word, I agree. Except
it's not one word but three: Icelandic words are sticky. Islendingadagurinn = Icelanders-Day-The. A kind of St. Patrick's Day for Icelanders.
Each year, a different Fjallkona reigned over the festival. The Fjallkona was
supposed to represent an upstanding matron of Canadian Icelandichood
and was selected by committee each spring. The costume remained the
same over the years: the white peaked headdress for Iceland's snowcapped
mountains; the green cape for her verdant slopes. It was the same costume
Sigga wore in her own Fjallkona portrait, which adorned our mantel back in
Connecticut. Back then, in the years before I made my first visit to Gimli,
I'd believed Sigga to be a queen. I was not so far off. The title of Fjallkona
in our little Gimli world imbued only slightly less than regal status. So
when Mama's dear friend Vera was chosen to be Fjallkona for Islendingadagurinn 1978, Mama was thrilled. "Our very own Vera," she kept repeating. I was thrilled too-even if I didn't exactly like Vera, even though I
sensed she disapproved of me, I couldn't help getting drawn into the preparations, watching Vera try on her green cape and white headdress, listening
to her practice her speech. Sigga too seemed pleased and passed along various practical tips to Vera for her coming reign.

And then there was Birdie.

Sometimes I wonder if the whole kidnapping escapade would have occurred if it hadn't been for Vera being chosen Fjallkona. It irked Birdie so
terribly. (Other times I'm convinced she'd been planning our surprise vacation for years.) Vera, Birdie insisted, had about as much right to be Fjallkona
as a seagull. It demeaned the position, to choose someone like Vera. Now your amnia Sigga, Birdie went on, she deserved to be Fjallkona. But Vera?
Vera, who never taught her boys a single word of Icelandic? Who can barely
speak the language herself, and proud of it? What does Vera represent?
Eaton's, that's what. The Ladies Aid. A do-gooder. Why they might as well
have picked Anna!

"What's wrong with Mama?"

"Nothing's wrong with her. It's just that she's not exactly qualified to be
Fjallkona."

"Why not?"

"She's an American housewife, that's why not!"

"What about you? Could you be Fjallkona?"

"Never in a million years, baby. Never in a million years would they pick
someone like me to be Fjallkona. Someone who spends every single day of
her life perpetuating our ancestors' literary heritage. Someone who actually
speaks the language. Someone who actually studies our history! Oh no, baby.
Not me."

"Why not?"

"Because I'm not a pillar of the community. Because I'm not married to
the manager of Eaton's, with two boys on the Winnipeg High School
hockey team."

"But Amma Sigga was chosen, and she wasn't married to the manager of
Eaton's."

"You don't understand, do you? They'll never choose a crazy spinster."

"What's a spinster?"

"A woman who never marries."

"Are you really crazy?"

"So they say, elskan. So they say."

Usually Birdie thrived at Islendingadagurinn, the yearly infusion of visitors
enlivening our insular Gimli existence. By the hundreds they came, maybe
thousands, pouring into Gimli from Winnipeg and all the little towns throughout the Interlake region (some of which had their own Icelandic festivals,
though none as big as Gimli's): Lundar, Hnausa, Hecla, Selkirk, Riverton,
Arborg, even little Reykjavik on the next lake over. And from beyond Manitoba, from anywhere Icelanders had settled and their descendants still lived, towns in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. Small towns just over
the border in North Dakota: Cavalier and Akra, Gardar and Mountain. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Washington State. Even Iceland.

If only you had been there, Cousin! I imagine you almost as an older
brother or sister, sitting by my side at the harbor forking up syrup-soaked
pancakes, the great days of the festival unfurling before us like a colorful
Viking sail. Together we'd have watched the kite-flying contests and raft
races, horse shows and fireworks, performances by the Icelandic National
Theatre Troupe flown in from Reykjavik, not to mention the New Iceland
Music and Poetry Society. The glima wrestling, the sailing displays in the
harbor, the poetry contest (I won three years in a row, children twelve and
under). Kinsmen barbecues and beer gardens. We'd eat sausages called
rullupylsa and brown bread (to think you've never tasted our aroma's brown
bread!), even sneak out of the house to spy on the grown-ups at their
drunken midnight dances. Maybe tie two of our legs into one and enter the
three-legged race.

But you weren't there.

Mostly I tagged along with Birdie. It was one big family reunion of the
Icelandic diaspora, such as it was. The kind of occasion where Birdie
shone: the daughter of the great Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands. (Yes, my mother
too was the poet's daughter, but she hated attention and kept a low profile,
especially after the accident.) Birdie milked the occasion for all its worth,
leading tours of the poet's study, showing off his library, consorting with visiting dignitaries from Iceland, even the president himself. But Birdie was no
snob; she talked to everyone, and listened too. Of course, what Birdie said
to people's faces and about them behind their backs varied considerably.
Like Icelandic grammar, it was all in the prepositions.

Islendingadagurinn was the one time of year when Birdie could reliably
obtain all the attention she craved-that's why it was so shocking on that
Saturday morning in 1978, the first day of the festival, when Birdie announced she was staying home. If she'd been depressed, her absence would
have seemed plausible. When she was depressed she wanted nothing to do
with anything human. Or if she'd seemed bitter and resentful, I would have
known she was brooding about Vera being chosen Fjallkona. But if anything she seemed happier, more excited than usual.

"You're not coming?"

"I'm staying home this year. I've got work to do."

And so Birdie holed up in her bedroom churning out her Word Meadow.
Or so she claimed. Now I know she was doing nothing of the sort. As soon
as Mama and Sigga and I left the house on the last day of the Islendingadagurinn festival, Birdie began her preparations, packing one suitcase for
me and one for her. Checking our airline tickets and passports one last
time. Arranging the cab that would take us to the airport. Then setting off
to find me, pluck me out of the crowds, out of my Gimli summer, out of my
life as I knew it, and as it would never be again.

Islendingadagurinn hadn't been much fun for me without Birdie. The beach
was so crowded with visitors you could hardly find a place to lay your blanket,
plus it was hot that year, and unusually buggy. I hung around with Mama and
Sigga, scratching my mosquito bites while they chatted with every degree of
cousin you could possibly imagine. Cousins a thousand times removed. Until
you had to wonder if they were even cousins anymore.

It was Monday morning, the last day of the festival, that Birdie finally
made her appearance. The sky was dark, heavy with clouds, and I was
standing on the curb at the corner of First Avenue and Centre Street waiting for the parade to make its way across town, from Johnson Memorial
Hospital to Gimli Park, wondering which would come first, the rain or the
parade, when I felt a hand slip into mine. Birdie! She was wearing a coat I'd
never seen before, a lightweight salmon pink raincoat belted at the waist
(one of several items, I learned later, purchased in her pre-Iceland shopping
spree at Eaton's). The color highlighted the pink of her cheeks, and over her
perfectly coifed blond curls was a matching head scarf. How fashionable
Birdie seemed to me, and beautiful, despite the fact that she was then
nearly fifty. I squeezed her hand in excitement. The sounds of the brass band
drifted down the street. The crowd murmured and I strained to see the beginning of the parade.

"There's Vera!" I shouted. She looked resplendent in her emerald robe,
waving to the crowd from a shiny white car. I jumped up and down, waving
my own hands over my head. Birdie seemed not to see. "Where is Anna?"
she wanted to know. "And your amnia?"

"They're at Gimli Park. Sigga needed to sit down. She's eighty-three, you
know."

"I know," Birdie said. "Believe me, I know."

"Vera's going to lay the wreath down at the pioneer memorial. And then
later she's going to give her speech. I heard her practice it last night. Are
you going?"

"Why bother? It's the same every year, those speeches. The glories of the
homeland, the glories of the new land. It's bullshit."

"Bull ?"

"Yes, bullshit. A farce. A fraud, a mockery of all we hold truly dear. Oh,
once it meant something, I suppose. But now it's just a big hoo-ha. The real
culture of New Iceland is dying. The older generation will die off, and soon
hardly anyone will be left who speaks the language." She held up the
printed festival program. "It's not even written in Icelandic anymore. It's
coming to an end, this little world. It's coming to an end. Not that it has to,
of course. But it takes more than holding a cheesy festival once a year to
keep a culture alive. Skip the ponnukokur, people!" She was yelling now, at
the backs of the crowd that was breaking up, drifting toward Gimli Park.
"Skip the rullupylsa, the brown bread! Skip Islendingadagurinn!" People
turned their heads and stared. Luckily I saw no one we knew. "Teach your
children Icelandic! Let them learn it from their grandparents. Our language
is our culture. Make them read the Sagas. Take them to Iceland, damn it!"

I shrank back in embarrassment, but Birdie grabbed my hand and began
leading me away from the parade-in the opposite direction from Gimli Park.