Iceland. I was not overly fond of the place. I knew almost as soon as we docked in Reykjavík that Helga would not be there. I’m not sure how I knew, but I knew. It simply didn’t feel like her sort of country.
It had its natural beauty, to be sure—bright Grimmia, shining water, and volcanic rock in every conceivable hue from black to rainbow rhyolite—and yet it was a punishing terrain, virtually untraversable with its lacerating lava fields and bloated rivers unhindered by vegetation. There was rarely enough snow to get around. Everything seemed to linger in a purgatorial state between freeze and thaw. I never would have imagined that any land could make Spitsbergen’s interior seem positively accessible, but so it was.
The Icelandic people were morose and resentful. They had been deeply offended when the British invaded, considering themselves friends and cousins of all enlightened folk, and the sting only increased when their management was handed over to the Americans. They felt, I think, like untrusted foster children. It was a slight that rankled at every turn, and here they were still reeling from a decade-long economic depression—depending almost solely on exports from their fishery, a notoriously fickle market—and a century or so of very bad weather. Also, the Americans were crude and obnoxious.
Skuld and I left Reykjavík as quickly as we were able to. She could no more tolerate city life than I could—perhaps less. We pursued one of MacIntyre’s contacts and moved to a cottage on the outskirts of Vík í Mýrdal, the southernmost point on the island. Skuld and I took jobs side by side at the docks. The dockworkers looked askance at us, for we were not Icelandic, and I was rather old, and Skuld a young woman. None of these would be acceptable qualifications at the best of times, but there was a scarcity of competent laborers, especially so far from the American naval base, so they took us on. I wore my furs and skins, for I was used to it and had no other. Skuld dressed as she always did—somewhat androgynously, with her hair tied up under a fox-fur hat, wearing seal-hide trousers and a heavy wax canvas jacket. We smoked as we worked—she had stolen a corncob pipe from the back pocket of an American serviceman—and this seemed to tip the scales against her for the typically reticent Icelanders. A woman dockworker was one thing; a woman pipe smoker quite another. Mutterings ensued. It grew into a source of derisive amusement for the men, but this only lasted a short while, stifled by her indifference to public opinion and her unparalleled skill at any task she was given.
When the foreman had the gall to ask how she had become so unladylike, and where she had picked up such a filthy habit, she looked down at her pipe as though seeing it for the first time, and laughed a short mirthless laugh. It sounded so much like Tapio that I had to look twice to make sure he hadn’t appeared from the mist, as was his habit.
“At this rate, you will have eating and drinking reserved as the province of men,” she said in her rough but perfectly intelligible Icelandic, which she’d picked up in a matter of months.
The foreman asked no more presumptuous questions after that. In fact, Skuld quickly became one of the most respected dockworkers in Vík. She was sought after whether tasks required a steady, competent hand or a calculating mind or both. It is entirely possible that I was kept on only as a favor to her.
Poor Sixten, on the other hand. He failed to adapt. I am still not certain how he survived the long voyages by boat, and the close proximity of so many other humans and dogs, but the old fellow had a will to live. The third trip—from Liverpool to Reykjavík—had been the worst. Initially he had been stowed below with all the other dogs, lined up in wire crates. But he swiftly learned how to unlatch his cell, and so he wandered at will, tormenting the cage-mad dogs by eating their food rations and skulking past their crates with his hackles up and his lips back. The Americans tried securing his crate door with rope, but he waited until they were gone and promptly chewed through it. It was all I could do to prevent them from throwing him overboard. His luck—and mine—was in finding favor with a few American farm boys. They knew the peculiar ways—the keen intelligence and fractious, stubborn temperament—of herding dogs. He reminded them of home, and they took him under their protection. Since dogs weren’t allowed in the tiny cabins reserved for civilian passengers, or in the general sleeping berth of the servicemen, Sixten was kept hidden, and very pleased with the arrangement, in the ship’s galley. The head cook was a young man from Montana named Corporal Wall, and the more idiosyncratic Sixten’s ways, the better the cook liked it. Wall would suffer no harm to come to him, and thus Sixten arrived in Iceland alive and intact.
But Iceland did him in. Commercial fishing I could always understand. Sheepherding I could not, and unfortunately Iceland’s interior is fit only for ruminants with agile feet, small frames, omnivorous appetite, and little self-respect. Sheep were everywhere. Sixten had the breed and the drive to herd them, but because he had not an ounce of training or experience, his natural obsession turned to menace. He was shot within four months of our settling in Vík. I never saw his body. A farmer’s wife took pity and was kind enough to find me and deliver the news herself—people around Vík knew who owned the half-wild old dog that regularly broke free, heeding no boundary or sensible word of command, and chased sheep. Sixten died as he lived, in thrall to an inner compass that sometimes swung true, and other times spun madly as though he were dancing upon the magnetic Pole itself.
So a dark time grew darker. I would have liked to leave, but could not thread the blockade. MacIntyre, who had divined our location almost before we knew it ourselves, wrote often. He’d received no word of Tapio, but assured us that it would take a good deal more than a catastrophic international bloodletting and the potential end of enlightened civilization to significantly impair our Finnish friend. Skuld wrote to Olga from Vík, and soon their letters flew back and forth in a veritable flurry. Sweden’s infamous neutrality, so long a source of irritation for Tapio, kept Olga and Wilmer relatively safe. Olga said our sister Freyja had died, but a casualty of pneumonia, not war. The truth is, I’d almost forgotten Freyja’s existence. The news washed over me with all the effect of a punctual tide.
MacIntyre had said we must ride out the war years, however long they lasted, and that is what we did. We dwelt in Iceland for nearly four years. Little else of note occurred—I passed the time in a deepening murk—except for one incident when Skuld journeyed to Reykjavík to procure something or other for the Vík fishery, and an American serviceman propositioned her. When she flatly refused, and he attempted to restrain her, she opened his palm from heel to thumb with a caping knife.
In 1945, the war over at last, MacIntyre wrote with strange news from Spitsbergen. It was by turns distressing and hopeful. Apparently the Germans had occupied the archipelago after our evacuation. In 1942, the Norwegians had attempted to liberate the place, and though they were assaulted by Nazi warplanes, they succeeded in occupying Barentsburg. Germany responded in 1943 with Operation Zitronella, in which nine Nazi destroyers and two battleships penetrated Isfjorden and utterly destroyed Longyear, Barentsburg, and Grumant. Pyramiden was too far out of the way and thus escaped their attention. The Germans also established weather stations in various places, including one on Reinsdyrflya.
Nazis on our hunting grounds. Tapio would be very displeased. I tried to imagine them taking shelter in one of my huts, and all I could think of was burning down any place so infected by hatred and rebuilding from clean new driftwood.
The good news was that people were returning. Reconstruction of settlements and mines was under way. MacIntyre had a mind to go back and see if anything remained of his cabin. He wondered if we would like to join him there. Skuld, naturally, was eager to comply. She wished to reclaim our grounds, and to rebuild. She wished to resume the life that had shaped her.
It was, I believe, a heavy blow for both of us when I informed Skuld of my plans. A return to Spitsbergen was not among them. “It occurs to me that Helga could have gone to Normandy,” I told her. “I thought I might journey there.” Of the many lands colonized and reshaped by our short-tempered forebears, northern France seemed as good a place as any to begin. I had no concept then of Normandy’s central role in the war.
“Papa, that is ridiculous! You’re too old to go on some foolish errand in search of Mother.”
“Not too old to hunt and trap in the frozen wastes?”
“Never too old for that,” she said. “Besides, you will hate Europe.”
“How do you know? Look, I have already traveled below the ice line. At least let me reap some benefit from the southern latitudes.”
“But I cannot go back without you. I don’t wish to.”
“You are nineteen years old. A grown woman. Or nearly. And so much stronger—infinitely more capable—than I was at thirty-two.”
“I know that,” she said in her direct way. “I mean that I would miss you too much. Bruceneset wouldn’t be the same without you, Papa. Spitsbergen wouldn’t be the same.”
“I imagine Spitsbergen would be the same if it calved off every last human and deposited them in the roiling sea. In any case, I must find your mother. I must keep looking.”
Skuld clenched her pipe pensively. Several months earlier the hardy little cob had suffered a burnout, which she repaired with some vile shipwright’s epoxy. Now it emitted a noxious odor when hot. This worried me. I reached into a pocket, produced my own pipe, and placed it in her palm.
“Your Charatan? From Uncle Illya? No, Papa, I couldn’t.”
“Am I not bound for a land of idle craftsmen?” I said. “Surely the same folk who produce such cheese and brandy cannot be hopelessly inept when it comes to making pipes.”
We stood together at Reykjavík harbor. Her journey would take her first to Oslo, then Tromsø, and from there to the ruins of Longyear City. She had with her a long letter I’d written to MacIntyre, and one for Tapio should she learn his whereabouts. My ship was bound for the battered northern coast of France. I had sworn to write as soon as I stopped for anything longer than a meal, and Skuld had done the same. Here was the daughter I had raised; who had raised herself. I thought if I didn’t leave soon I would break. Her eyes were so clear. Pride and sorrow filled my chest to brimming but remained discrete, like water and fuel. I could not tell which rose to the top.
I took her hand, as stout and calloused as any dockworker’s, and stared into it. She held a typewritten ticket that read Norway in English, and beneath that, the name she had given them: Skuld Svalbardsdottir.