The Tricking of Freya Read online

  A front, Birdie declared, for more malevolent objectives. Different people we'd met on the trip entered Birdie's set, each with a role to play. Sveinn, the bearded publisher at Ulfur's dinner party who'd expressed an interest in publishing Olafur's letters once they were found, became a central figure in the plot. "How well Sveinn played his part that night," Birdie complained. "Feigning surprise at the existence of Olafur's lost letters! He probably has them typeset at his office in Reykjavik, ready for publication." Even Ulfur's father, the elderly near-blind Johann, was incriminated, accused of hiding the letters from the world all those years, secreting them among his thousands of books.

  Birdie's anxiety leaked onto me. I found myself unable to sleep at night on the little cot in the living room at Brekka, wracked with worries. Not Birdie's worries, not Ulfur and his various spies and agents, but my own. What if we returned to Gimli empty-handed? Would Sigga be disappointed in me? Who was walking Mama to Betel in the morning? Who was keeping track of her canes? Did Saemundur hate me now for stealing his jacket? When I finally slept, the sheep we'd struck and left for dead on the Ring Road appeared with bloodied wool and cracked horns, chiding me with plaintive bleats.

  A night of ruins and a ruined night.

  Our last evening at Brekka, Birdie yanked me from sleep, rushing me into jeans, sneakers, and a wool sweater topped by Saemundur's jacket, then snuck me out the front door and across the rubbled field to the old Brekka farmhouse. The moon was massively full, bursting silver bright, but the sun was a goner, not officially set but obscured by the cliff that towered over Brekka like a menacing giant.

  "My father's house," Birdie said, and took my hand.

  I thought that was all she wanted: for me to see it. Like the time she dragged me from sleep to my first orange-grinning sunrise on the lake in Gimli. This time we gazed not upon a morning lake but at the five conjoined wood-framed structures built into and dwarfed by the immense cliff. Long grasses fringed the boarded doors and windows, a green hump of earth formed the roof. The stone walls were crumbled, covered with moss and lichen. The wooden face of each structure weathered to the color of bone.

  It was a stunning sight by moonlight. I squeezed Birdie's hand. Sight seen. I yawned and turned away.

  "Where do you think you're going?" Her salmon coat hideous pink in the moonlight.

  "Back to bed?"

  In my dreams.

  Birdie's plan was for me to find a way inside the ruined farmhouse. I would be small enough to fit through a window. Once inside, I was to find a door and let her in too.

  "But why?"

  "The letters, little fool." Birdie hiss-whispered though no one could hear, our schoolteacher hosts, Hrefna and Eirikur, asleep in their homely farmhouse across the stone-littered field. Did Birdie really believe we might find Olafur's long-lost letters stored safe and sound in this rotted century-old farmhouse?

  She did.

  I mustered my courage. "Can't Eirikur open it for us in the daytime?"

  Birdie laughed. "You don't get it, do you? Eirikur is being paid off by Ulfur or the Arni Magnusson Institute or the university or the National Library or the government or Sveinn the publisher to guard the letters stashed in the old farmhouse. Once we leave the country, eureka! Ulfur `discovers' the letters; cameras and news teams and reporters and scholars and ordinary Icelanders flock to the scene; the letters get published; and Eirikur's farmhouse is restored and designated a national monument! All thanks to Ulfur, esteemed scholar and national hero, savior of Iceland's oh-soprecious literary heritage. What else is left in life for poor Ulfur? All the ancient manuscripts have been peaceably returned to Iceland by the Danish government and displayed under Ulfur's directorship at the Arni Magnusson Institute. Fanfare subsides, wife deserts, children rebel, nothing remains for poor Ulfur but to siphon our rightful fame-"

  I took the flashlight from Birdie's hand and started up the grassy slope that led to the roof of the farmhouse, preferring the unknown horrors of ghostly ruins to her rambling diatribe against Ulfur. When I reached the top, I looked down to see Birdie waving me onward, pink head scarf fluttering wildly in the wind. I knelt down and unlatched the one rooftop window that hadn't been boarded up. It creaked open and I shone my light through to a room down below. What if instead of landing on my feet I crashed right through rotten floorboards into a musty dank hellhole beneath the earth? Marna!

  I landed on my butt in a thud-puff of dust, but the floor held. I surveyed the room with my flashlight. Nothing but raw wooden-plank walls, floorboards, and ceiling beams. Nothing painted, every surface coated with dust. Eirikur had told us the building had been abandoned only thirty years earlier, after the War, but the air I breathed in, then coughed out, tasted centuries old.

  After a moment I realized I must be standing in the badstofa, the lofted living-sleeping quarters of Olafur's time. This was where Olafur's family had gathered for their evening readings, where Olafur had recited the poem Voluspa that fateful Easter night. For a brief moment I felt a thrill-I was standing where Olafur, Skald Nyja islands, had stood, maybe the exact spot! then remembered my task.

  The top edge of a steep staircase appeared under my light. Down below was where the sheep had been kept in the wintertime, to keep the humans warm above. I remembered that from Mama's bedtime story-sheep in the house?-and imagined falling asleep to the bleating of sheep. Then my dream-sheep rose woolen-bloody in my mind.

  A piercing "FREYA!!!" broke my nervous reverie, a scream that could raise the dead or at least our slumbering hosts across the field. Not Freyaare-you-okay-in-there? but a scary Gryla chin-teeth-sharp-and-glistening voice, an answer me or I'm coming after you voice.

  The stairs creaked but held solid as I crept down by flashlight. "Just a minute, Auntie!" I called out, like this was an ordinary house and I was answering an ordinary door. Except the door once I finally found it wouldn't open. Nailed and boarded shut from the outside, why would it open from the in? Why indeed? Birdie had tricked me, sent me in under false pretenses. The dirty work was mine alone in that creepy stone ruin that was nothing more than a cave minus Saemundur. Instead, Birdie stuck her head through a broken window and directed my search. "Look in that corner, Freya, try lifting those boards."

  "There's nothing here!" I kicked angrily at a pile of splintered wood, capsizing a rusted iron pot big enough to bathe in.

  "Keep looking. The next room."

  "How?"

  "Through the passageway. Olafur said the rooms connect through a passageway at the back."

  Tunnel more like it. I had to slouch my way through, and the rough stone walls snagged at the patches on Saemundur's jacket. Finally I emerged into another room, barren-dank as the first. What was Birdie thinking, that we'd find the letters safe and dry in a locked metal box labeled "Olafur's Lost Letters"? I called out my weary inventory of naught, not knowing or caring whether Birdie could hear me. "A broken loom. Leg of chair. Pile of bones, dog or fox." Then, "Stones." A wall crumbled into a pile of rocks, blocking the passageway that led to the remaining rooms. Happy day!-or night or whatever it was-there was nowhere left to look.

  I made my retreat, back through the passageway and up the rickety stairs to the badstofa. But how to hoist myself through the window? I had nothing to stand on. Yet I was tall, wasn't I, Freya the Tall Birdie had called me on our first meeting, and my arms were long enough to reach the sill, my legs strong enough to prop myself on a narrow ledge that ran horizontally around the room. From there I wriggled out through the window headfirst and stood for a moment on the turf roof, wheeze-breathing fresh air into my dust-irked lungs. Then I glared at Birdie down below and raised both my arms up in a gesture of empty-handedness: See, Birdie? Sweet failure. I saw it clearly: our whole mission, doomed from the start and inane to the core. Surely even Birdie understood that now?

  Nothing for it but going home. Gimli home.

  The sky was cloud-smudged and heavy the morning we departed Brekka, our spate of sun-sparkled days suddenly rescind
ed. Justly so, I decided. I felt ashamed as we said our good-byes to our hosts, Hrefna and Eirikur. For sneaking into their boarded-up farmhouse at night without permission. For using their beds and their food and their time and their telephone and giving nothing in return. Yet they seemed pleased by the visit. Daughter and Granddaughter of Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands, at Brekka! We signed the guest book, then Eirikur helped us pack up the jeep and we were off, jostling along the gravel road that followed the slinking Lagarfljot River. I was sullen. Our entire trip, as far as I was concerned, was no less ruined than the old Brekka farmhouse. A shambles. Now we faced a two-day drive to the airport in Keflavik. I stared bitterly out the window.

  "Cheer up, elskan. Why so glum?"

  "This isn't fun."

  "Fun? You want fun? Then we'll be tourists again, Freya min!"

  At first I thought she was being cheery-mean, sarcastic, but no, it was just another lightning-quick mood shift. All the places we hadn't seen on our drive east, she assured me, we'd see on the way back. We'd stay overnight in the spectacular harbor of Hofn, take a boat trip on the glacial lagoon, visit the magnificent beach at Vik and even the original Oddi, where great men of letters like Snorri Sturluson and Saemundur the Learned had lived.

  "Really?"

  "Really!"

  Fooled again. Birdie's promises not vows but bribes easily doled. Or maybe she did intend in that moment to take me to those places. Plans, realities shifted quickly now. Suddenly she veered off the road and down a driveway.

  "What ... ?"

  The Valthjofsstadir Church, Birdie explained impatiently. As if I should have known. Worth checking for Olafur's letters, but the pastor and his wife had been out of town the past week. Returned last evening, according to our Brekka hosts, who'd called ahead and made us an appointment.

  Valthjofsstadir was just downstream from Brekka and set against the same massive cliff. It was the very church, Birdie explained, that Olafur and his family had attended, and where Olafur's grandfather had served as pastor. It was not impossible that Olafur's letters could have found their way there.

  The pastor, a long-faced man with a dark beard and drooping eyes, was waiting for us at the gate to the churchyard. He took us inside the church and we stood talking in its chill, stale air. As in all the old churches of Iceland, the walls and ceilings were painted a bright and heavenly blue. I felt my spirits lifting from the defeated departure at Brekka. The pastor let me stand in the pulpit, and I giggle-preached in English, "We are gathered here today ..."

  At that Birdie lost whatever patience she had mustered. She had no time for church tours, much less childish shenanigans; she cut right to the chase, skipping the usual queries about Ulfur, my tired but perfected recital of Olafur's "New Iceland Song."

  "We're looking for some family letters," she began.

  "Yes, I've heard." The pastor paused, stroked his long beard, seeming to carefully formulate his words before speaking them. "In fact, after I learned you were coming today I put in a call to my old friend Ulfur Johannsson in Reykjavik. We were at university together. He takes quite an interest in Olaf ur's work. As you well know."

  From my perch in the pulpit I saw Birdie stiffen. The Wolf!

  "As you know," the pastor continued, "Ulfur is quite familiar with your quest. He mentioned that the two of you stayed with him at Thingvellir Lake. But he seemed to think that you had already left for Canada. I assured him that was not the case, that you were here at Brekka. He was quite disturbed. Upset, actually."

  The silence that followed grew so heavy it seemed that heavenly blue ceiling was pressing down upon us. Birdie quickly buttressed it with lies.

  "Oh, that Ulfur!" She laughed, high and girlish-squeaky, most un-Birdie. "He can get quite confused. The absentminded professor!" Then she took my hand and pulled me down from the pulpit and out the door with the pastor calling after us.

  "Get in the jeep!" She opened the door and shoved me in.

  According to Birdie, the pastor was calling Ulfur in Reykjavik that very moment. Telling him we had his jeep. Ulfur in turn would alert the police. The Wolf too would be on his way east in no time. We were being hunted, we were on the run.

  The funny thing, Cousin, is that out of all Birdie's cloak-and-dagger scenarios, this one proved true. As I found out later, the pastor did call Ulfur as soon as we left; Ulfur did call the police; the police did alert the entire island by radio and newspaper to keep an eye out for two Canadian fugitives. Not because we stole a car. No, the stolen property was more precious than an old jeep. KIDNAPPED CANADIAN CHILD IN ICELAND, read the headline of Morgunbladid. A policeman showed it to me a week later at the airport. You see, Birdie had left out one link in the chain of events she predicted that day: once Ulfur hung up with the Valthjofsstadir pastor, he called Sigga in Gimli. Birdie's house of lies collapsed. Everything blew open. The nearly three-week-long search for me and Birdie that had widened from Gimli to the entire Interlake region and Winnipeg and all of Manitoba now shifted exclusively to Iceland.

  In the jeep screeching away from Valthjofsstadir, I neither knew nor could have imagined any of that. Remember, I wasn't aware we were missing in the first place. In my mind our goal was simple: to get to the airport in Keflavik before we were discovered by the police in the stolen jeep. For once I shared Birdie's urgency, urging her faster and faster along the gravel road that followed the Lagarfljot River to the Ring Road. She needed no urging from me, pushing the jeep to demon speeds.

  Then out of the blue she slammed on the brakes in front of a run-down farm. We'd passed it many times in the previous days as we'd scurried around the East searching for Olafur's letters. It was a weathered gray cement building shedding scabs of plaster and topped by rusted corrugated tin. A stone slab served as front step. Abandoned-looking but inhabited; an unrusted car sat in the driveway. The truly strange thing about the house was its tree, grown astonishingly large by Icelandic standards, its branches scraping second-story windows. Now I saw there were things hanging from one of its lower limbs. Some kind of small, dead, furred animals hung by the neck with blue string. Tiny heads cocked, paws dangling, long dark bodies swaying in the wind. I watched in astonishment as Birdie stopped to stroke each one, then yanked a couple of them from the tree and tucked them under her arm. She continued around to the side of the house. There stood a drying rack, and like an escaped con stealing laundry from a clothesline, Birdie swiped the things she wanted, nimble-fingered and nimble-footed, racing lightly and silently back to the jeep. I was biting my lip nearly through. What if someone came out of the house? No one stirred. Whoever was inside must be old, I hoped, and sleeping.

  Birdie dropped the things on my lap and I screamed. Animal skins with gristly tendrils still clinging to the hides. Birdie took them from my lap and tossed them in back on top of the sleeping bags. Started up the jeep again laughing her loud raucous laugh. "Hush, elskan! That's enough fuss. Cat skin is called for, but I imagine seal hides and mink pelts will suffice."

  She was shifting again, into a state of what seemed to me pure nonsense, mumbling Odin the hanging god, sacrificing himself to himself, discerning runes from branches, humans strung from the World Tree, anything for inspiration until I thumb-plugged my ears and merged her words into engine-rumble and wheel-spin on gravel. Birdie's mad. The old Gimli rumors truer than true. Utterly vitlaus, crazy-stupid-wrong. Something broke in me then, a sickening shift of my own. Odd as it may seem to you, Cousin, up until that moment I had revered your mother; yes, she was moody, sometimes rageful, but she was also a charm-sparkling genius. I'd been enthralled in both the modern and ancient senses of the word: enchanted, enslaved. Now the spell had broken and I saw her as something sick and terrifying, hands trembling on the wheel, a tic I'd never seen before twitching the corner of her mouth, words rushing from her lips in a wide-ranging deranging torrent. No fanciful word-meadow but a nauseating word-spew. My lip was bleeding by the time we reached the town of Egilsstadir.

  Maybe it's grown by now,
but Egilsstadir then had nothing but a gas sta tion, grocery, post office, and a few stores. Birdie pulled into the Esso station, yanking the pink head scarf nearly over her face before approaching the attendant, an uninterested teenager who clearly did not know us from Egil. No one else was around. Tank full up, Birdie maneuvered the jeep over a sidewalk and behind a closed fish-packing plant, hidden from the road. She ordered me to lie down in the backseat and covered me with Saemundur's army green sleeping bag. Don't move. I did not. I lay panicstiffened under Saemundur's cover, inhaling its musk plus a stale stink of canned fish, worrying our fate. Jail in Reykjavik? Returning not only emptyhanded but handcuffed? Certain disgrace. Or maybe Birdie would lose control on the way back, wreck the jeep over a sheer cliff and into an icy fjord below .. .

  Birdie was back. Ordering me into the front seat while she loaded the back with two plastic jugs of water and a bag of groceries. Then she unfolded a map she'd bought in the gas station and studied it a long time before starting the engine. Time we didn't have. I should have understood then or at least suspected that we weren't headed for the Keflavik Airport. That trip required no consult with a map: it was a straight shot on the Ring Road. Soon Birdie was veering off the Ring Road onto a dirt track. A sign said F88. I reached for the Iceland Road Guide, began thumbing its pages frantically.

  "Don't bother," Birdie advised. "It's not listed."

  Then I understood the why of the new map. The place we were going was purposefully excluded from the Iceland Road Guide. It was not a place for tourists; it was not safe to drive.

  The next sign we saw read OSKJULEID.

  Askja Way.

  20

  Pause with me, Cousin, if you will, at these crossroads proverbial and literal, the juncture of the Ring Road and Askja Way. Don't worry, I promise not to hold up the story with cowardly tangents. Not for long, anyway. You want me to go on and I will. Though I can't say I don't resent you for it, you who dog me forward into the past. No fair, you protest, you don't even know I exist, may not even exist yourself? Granted. I write as much for me as for you; there's no point pretending otherwise. And I've vowed to keep nothing from you, you whose very birth was a state-sanctioned secret, you who were sent into this world swaddled in lies.