I'm not buying it. I've got nothing against revisionism per se. New facts
come to light and require consideration, accommodation even. As you can
imagine, I've had to engage in quite of bit of revisionism myself, since that
day when I flung myself into the void of a freak June blizzard.
And I do see their point-it's all a bit too neat. Yet I find myself oddly
loath to discard the handy birth-death-rebirth framework. True, it's ridiculously ubiquitous. Take the poem Voluspa, for example, the volva's prophecy.
It begins with the miraculous creation of the world in a fusion of fire and
ice, followed by a golden age of the gods, who built the glorious Gimli,
where they played chess and fashioned treasures from gold. Upon this
sunny scene soon rumbled the battle of the gods, the doom of the earth,
stars falling from the skies, and the sun turning black. And yet, when all
hope seems lost, the volva sees the earth rising a second time, fair and
green.... Christianity, of course, also has plenty to say on the subject of
resurrection. And Buddhism: We're born, we live, we die, we live again.
Bud bloom rot germinate.
Once you start looking, the archetype pops up everywhere: it's the cycle
that spins history, love, narrative, life itself. Take my own story: the golden age
of my Gimli summers, followed by the dark ages of my darkroom years, and
now? Now I'm in some sort of rebirth born of dissolution. Or so I would like
to believe. Living in Iceland is a way to start over, begin at the beginning again.
And what better place than one of the newest landmasses on the planet?
When I walk on a lava field, I'm stepping on brand-new earth, the planet is being born beneath my feet. It does great service to my self-mythologizing.
When did I start knowing so much about meta-theories of Icelandic history? When I went back to school. I'm enrolled at the University of Iceland,
majoring in Icelandic literature with a minor in history.
I've lived in Iceland three years now; I'm due to graduate this spring.
Both my mothers would be very proud.
The Icelanders have an expression, hvalreki, which is equivalent to windfall.
An unexpected gift of good fortune. It means whale wreck, or stranding of whales. In the old days, if a whale washed up on the beach, it was considered nearly unbelievable good luck. Whale blubber to light lanterns with,
meat for food, bones for carving utensils and toys ...
Sometimes I think of Saemundur as my hvalreki. Other times not. What
did his ex-wife say? That he was selfish, erratic, and arrogant? I second that.
We live together in a small flat in downtown Reykjavik. It hasn't been easy
with Saemundur, and whether we'll be together forever, who can say? I
doubt we'll marry. Marriage has lost its popularity in Iceland. Other than
that, I've promised to say little. There are limits to what I can reveal about
Saemundur in this book, limits he himself prescribed, and I don't blame
him. He's no fictional character. You can look him up in the Reykjavik phone
book under S: Saemundur Ulfursson, leidsogurnadur. Road-story-man. Sign
up for one of his tours, if it pleases you.
And it is Saemundur you can thank for this book, if you wish to thank
anyone at all. After I'd recovered from my collapse and moved in with him,
I took all these pages-the ones I'd typed in New York on Birdie's old Underwood, plus the red-and-blue notebooks-and stuffed them in a box at
the back of a closet. I could never bring myself to read over them again, but
neither did I burn them. I was determined not to go down Birdie's path of
self-destruction.
One day about a year ago Saemundur was cleaning out the closet, came
across the box, and discovered inside a jumble of typewritten pages and
notebooks. When he asked if he could read them, I said yes. I keep no more
secrets.
When Saemundur was done reading he asked, "What are you going to
do with this book?"
I know what you're thinking, that on some level I must have known all along.
Maybe so. Yet I tell you it was the biggest shock of my life, worse than
Birdie's suicide or even my mother's death. It unraveled me. For a time I believed I was dead. When you can't talk or sleep or eat you might as well be. I
stayed at Thorunn's for several days after her farmer friend plucked me from
the snowbank, until she telephoned Ulfur, who arranged for Saemundur to
pick me up and drive me back to Ulfur's house in Reykjavik. It was a time of
nothingness. Nothingness felt good to me, compared with knowledge.
Ulfur wasted no time in getting me to a psychiatrist. It was had enough,
in his view, to have the suicide of the daughter of Olafur, Skald Nyja islands,
on his conscience. He would not allow a granddaughter to be added to the
list. My depression was so severe there was even talk of admitting me to a
hospital. Luckily for me, Dr. Bjornsdottir was a keen diagnostician.
It was obvious that I was depressed, curled into a comma, but through
interviews with Saemundur and Ulfur, she pieced together my family history of bipolar disorder and my own recent bout of mania, or hypomania, as
she eventually determined. It was Dr. Bjornsdottir who gave me the diagnosis of cyclothymia. I call it manic depression lite.
I asked Saemundur once what I'd been like on the Ring Road trip.
"Like yourself," he replied. "But multiplied. Excessively."
Self-multiplied inventor of spin.
In addition to checking up on me every few months to assess my progress
and fine-tune my medications, Dr. Bjornsdottir makes me sit in front of a
light box every morning during the winter months, and gives strict orders to
regulate my intake of sunlight in the summer evenings. Light, she reminds
me, is my zeitgeber, the force that in my case most easily meddles with the
brain clock that regulates mood. At all costs, prevent circadian rhythm disruption.
And I do, I have. I'm terrified of ending up like Birdie. A sadglad bird, a
madmad bird. I fear ending up like my mother. Will it confuse you if I start
calling Birdie my mother? It confuses me, still. It took me a while to sort
everything out. Call me gullible, but I'd actually spent my whole life believing I'd emerged from Mama's womb.
The Tricking of Freya.
After my nothingness period-after the medications began kicking in-I
started feeling and thinking again. It wasn't pretty. I wandered the streets of
Reykjavik in perpetual rage. Everything began making sense. Why Mama
didn't take me to Gimli the first seven years of my life. Why Birdie took such
an obsessive interest in me. Even why she kidnapped me, why she killed herself on my birthday. For a time, I hated them all Birdie, Sigga, Mama.
Birdie, always complaining about being conspired against, while it was I who
was truly the victim of conspiracy, a conspiracy that stole my very identity, then covered it up with lies. Mama, sweet Mama! Who would have thought
her capable of such deceit! Sigga, of course, had not traveled to Connecticut
to help with my birth I had already been born, back in the Selkirk Asylumbut rather to hand me over to my new mother. Sigga the peacekeeper, vainly
attempting to placate the two sisters, pretending their rift was nothing more
than sibling rivalry. Birdie, somehow, I blamed the least. I'd spent years blaming Birdie. I was done blaming Birdie.
Halldora, of course, had lied to me outright, claiming Birdie's child was
born in 1962, not 1965, feigning ignorance over the child's gender, all so I
wouldn't suspect the truth. How Halldora insisted the infant had been
given away to a good home. (That last part was true. Mama was my good
home, and even at my lowest point I never regretted that she raised me.)
Was Halldora protecting me from a truth she thought I might find too awful to bear? I don't think that for a moment. It was Sigga she was protecting;
Sigga was all Halldora had left in this world.
And what about Stefan? I still suspected he knew more than he was saying, and I confronted him the first chance I got. By early August I was well
enough to leave Iceland. I had nowhere to return to in New York; Gimli
seemed my inevitable destination. I arrived in time for the annual Islendingadagurinn festival. All the hotel rooms were booked and Sigga's house had
been sold by then -I had no choice but to stay with Stefan. He picked me
up at the airport, and I badgered him the entire drive from Winnipeg to
Gimli, barely noticing the scrubby landscape unfolding out the window, the
appearance of the long flat lake of my childhood.
"I was right," I began. "Birdie did have a child."
"Yes."
"It was me, Stefan."
"I know that now."
Of course he knew, I'd written him a letter. But I wanted it said out
loud. It was not as satisfying as I'd hoped.
"You knew," I continued. "You knew from the very beginning!"
"I didn't, Freya, I swear to you. It seems unlikely, I know, impossible
even, but I honestly had no idea. Your family kept its secrets well."
"I guess they all had strong motivations. Birdie was terrified that if she
let the secret slip, she'd never be allowed to see me again. And of course my mother feared nothing worse than being exposed, afraid she would lose me
to Birdie if I found out the truth."
I thought about Mama, all those years keeping her big secret from me,
while I was keeping my big secret from her. I never had a chance to tell her,
before she died so suddenly, that it was I who'd caused her fall, her coma, and
all the miseries that followed.
"I'm sorry, Freya. I'm sorry for all of it."
"Sorry is the story of my whole sorry life, isn't it?"
Stefan had nothing to say to that. It was dark when we pulled into
Gimli, and I was grateful. I was still adjusting to seeing things in their true
light.
I couldn't bring myself to attend the Islendingadagurinn festivities-the parade, the crowning of the Fjallkona, the silly contests and games and
dances-but I did manage to make an appearance at the opening of the
New Iceland Heritage Museum. Sigga had been scheduled to speak during
a ceremony honoring her donation of items from Olafur's study to the museum. But she was feeling too frail, or so she said, and insisted I take her
place. I think she was just preparing me for my new role as spokesperson of
the poet's estate, the only living family member of Olafur, Skald Nyja Islands. Since then, I've spoken several times at various literary events in Iceland, but that evening was my first venture into public speaking, and to say
I was nervous would be an understatement. Sigga and Stefan assured me
I'd done a wonderful job.
And I'm sure both my mothers were very proud.
Sigga was still my grandmother at least, and she seemed for the most
part cognizant of that fact. I never told her that I had learned about the
Tricking of Freya. I was afraid it would trigger some sort of mental decline
from which she might never emerge.
One huge piece still remained unsolved. Whose name belonged in the
other half circle of the genealogy chart Thorunn had prepared for me? Who
was my father? I'd run into nothing but dead ends in Iceland, and certainly
didn't expect to find the answer in Gimli. Yet that is exactly where I learned
the truth. It happened when I showed Stefan the letter Birdie had written to Thorunn, after they had taken the newborn-me away from her. There
were parts of it I'd never been able to understand, no matter how many
times I reread it. Either Birdie's handwriting was too erratic or my Icelandic
too poor, or both. Stefan was the only one I could possibly consider showing it to. I gave it to him one night after dinner, and the next morning a
neatly typed translation was sitting on the kitchen table. It was dated February 20, 1965, two days after my birthday.
My Dearest Thorunn,
Brace yourself for some terrible news. I've been locked up in the
Selkirk Asylum ever since I returned from Iceland last summer. I haven't
written you because what was the point? They are censoring my mail,
I'm certain of that.
They say I'm mad, Thorunn. And I suppose I am.
A terrible thing has been done to me. They're all saying it's for the
best, the doctors and nurses, my mother and my sister.
I've given birth to a little girl. And now they've taken her away from
me and given her to Anna, to keep and raise forever! I'm supposed to
pretend she isn't mine. This is the arrangement they've devised: I'll be
pushed aside like some dotty spinsterish aunt, and dull Anna and her
dull accountant husband will raise my daughter in their dull American
suburb! Anna will bring her to Gimli every summer from Connecticut.
On one condition: I'm never to reveal my identity to the child.
To be fair, they gave me two so-called choices: to give my child up to
strangers in what is called a Blind Adoption. I would never see her
again and she would never be able to learn who I am. Or, I can give her
to Anna to raise. Under the condition that she never knows who her real
mother is!
And they say I'm the crazy one.
All of this they've decided without even offering me a chance to
prove myself as a mother. Unfit!
Poor Anna, they say. She's always wanted a child. Can't you give her
this?
And they call this a choice!!!
But I have promised to abide by this arrangement. Because I know what will happen if I don't: Anna will simply stop bringing the child to
Gimli. She'll keep me away from her. Besides, even if I tell the little
girl, they'll all deny it. Say it's some crazy idea of crazy Birdie's, and who
would believe me against upstanding Sigga and respectable Anna the
American?
My closest relatives have plotted against me.
She is gone, Thorunn, gone.
She arrived a whole month early. But isn't that like me, always the
speedy one, always ahead of the game?
Think of it as the greatest gift one sister can give to another. That's
what one of the nurses here actually said to me. A terrible woman named
Halldora Bjarnason, a skinny little bitch, but not to be underestimated.
She's in thick with Sigga on this, in fact I believe she came up with the
idea. Sigga would never have thought of such a thing herself! It's not the
way our people do things, is it, Thorunn? You know that. You told me
three of your siblings were given away to families in the district who
couldn't have children of their own, but they always knew who their
parents were, who their brothers and sisters and grandparents were!
There was no secrecy involved, no government cover-up.