“Tafa thu Islenzku?” she asked.
“What?” I said, staring at the phone. I didn’t remember picking it up.
“Do you speak Icelandic?”
“Who wants to know? Good God, it’s four in the morning.”
“Is this Axel Borgfjord? I’m calling on behalf of the Committee for Relationships with Canada.”
“Who are you?”
“Axel, who is it?” Helen mumbled. Her face was still in her pillow and her voice was muffled, softened with sleep.
The telephone crackled with static, and the faint woman’s voice added, “We would like you to visit Iceland as our guest. Have you been to Iceland?”
“Is it the babysitter?” When Helen stayed overnight, I paid for a sitter. Three of the four last times, her daughter had managed to get sick.
“No. It’s a prank.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you,” the voice said.
“What do you want me to do? Write an article?” I asked, playing along. I have some peculiar friends. As kids they used to phone up corner stores and ask if the store had Prince Albert in a tin, and when the owner said yes, they’d shriek with delight and say, “Then let him out.” Now their gags are more sophisticated, more complex, but their sense of humour just as juvenile.
“You do nothing. We know all about your writing. Your stories and plays. Now we want you learn about us.”
“If everything is paid for. Sure, I’ll come.”
“Yes. You pay nothing. We will take you to the farm from which your great-grandfather came.”
“What do you know about my great-grandfather?” I snapped, but simultaneously she said, “I’ll send you the ticket. Godan daginn,” and the phone went dead and I shouted, “Wait, I can’t come. Don’t… ” and then I stopped and sat staring at the phone. Sitting in the darkness, it was as though I could hear the distant surf of Iceland breaking on the skerries, shattering on the shingle beach my great-grandfather had described to me. The ice grinding itself to pieces at the foot of the home field.
I fell asleep to dream of hills. At first I thought I was alone, then, in the distance, against the horizon, a viking with a spear, then closer, on another hill, another viking, then another. I would have fled, but suddenly, appearing out of deep fissures in the lava behind me, looking like my father and grandfather, my brother and uncles, came other men, their weapons drawn, facing those who now thronged from the hills. One of those who confronted me raised his axe, and I shouted and struck out with my sword and battle was joined. My kinsmen and I fought unceasingly, but no matter how many we killed, there were always more. And then it was morning and the apple tree outside my window was drenched in bloom, and I reached out and plucked a sprig of blossoms and gave them to Helen. I wondered if I had only dreamt the phone call like I had dreamt the battle.
“No, you were quite rude to her. By the end you were shouting,” Helen said over coffee.
The battle faded away and I’d nearly forgotten about the phone call until two weeks later when an airplane ticket arrived by registered mail.
“I thought you were going to tell them you couldn’t come?” Helen said. She was helping me plant the garden.
“I forgot aboutit.”
“It’s for August first. A charter out of Winnipeg.”
“I can’t go. Anyway, why should I? Good God, my great-grandfather arrived in Sandy Bar in 1878. No one has ever gone back. It’s history.”
“Talk Icelandic to me,” Helen said.
“Forget it.”
“Come on,” she answered, holding up some marigolds. “How does an Icelander say ‘Let’s hop in the sack’?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Everybody can swear in their mother tongue.”
“English is my mother tongue. I was born here.”
“How do you say ‘grandma’?”
“Let’s drop it, okay?”
“Boy, are you touchy,” she said, her feelings hurt. She was vaguely WASP, but not in any connected way, no accent, no relatives in the British Isles, no Christmas customs except frantic shopping and paying too much for a tree imported from the U.S. She missed what I had, she said, belonging to a specific place. She loved going to the Multicultural Festival and drifting from booth to booth, eating langosh, satay, peroghis, and washing it all down with cappuccino and German beer. The folk dance costume she wore to parties was made up of pieces from India, Yugoslavia, Germany, Finland. People who didn’t know better thought it was authentic.
“Amma,” I offered. Her white blouse showed the tanned curve of her neck and a loop of dark hair had fallen over one eye. I reached up and brushed her hair back over her ear. Although she was thirty, there was something innocent about her. When she played about the yard with her daughter, it was like both of them were four. “That’s how you say ‘grandma.’”
We had planned a romantic afternoon together. The wine was in the fridge and the avocado and shrimp prepared for lunch, but the glow was off the day. I threw the ticket into a dresser and slammed the drawer shut.
What was Iceland to me? I was fourth-generation Canadian. That should have been the end of the matter, but every time I went out to cut the grass or weed the garden or trim the ivy, my great-grandfather’s face appeared. At times, I could smell his pipe tobacco. More than once I was certain he was standing behind me, watching, and I turned suddenly as if to catch him but there was never anyone there. At last, I gave up. Come on, I said out loud, let’s get this over with, and suddenly, it was like I was six again, dressed in my sailor’s uniform, standing in my great-grandfather’s back yard. He was wearing his black pants, suspenders and his long underwear but no shirt. He was splitting wood, and as he chopped, he and my father were talking.
“Are you going to come to Islindingadagurinn this year?” my father asked.
“Those who enjoy these things can go.”
“All your friends will be there.”
“If Einar from Vithir is still alive, or Hannes from Arborg, they know where to find my house.” All the time they talked, he split kindling from a round of birch.
“The Ladies Aid is serving coffee and rosettes. Fresh whipped cream.”
“Hreppsomagur don’t go to celebrations.” When he was fourteen, he had been given a one-way ticket to Canada. Five dollars in his pocket. He knew no English. During the trip eleven people had died. He had stolen a language text from one of the dead women. After that, when he had needed something, he pointed to a word in Icelandic and people would read the word beside it in English. Then they would point to a word in English and he’d read the Icelandic. “Let them choke on their rosettes and whipped cream.”
“That was sixty-seven years ago.”
“Do you know what they wrote in the paper after they kicked people like me out? They wrote that when times got tough, we were cowards and ran away. I think maybe they got it backwards. Pontius Pilate didn’t die. He just moved to Iceland and had lots of children.”
Stiff-necked, unforgiving, proud, Icelandic to the core. That was Ketil, my great-grandfather. At one time, his father had been bondi, a farmer, and his mother had been husmothir. They operated an independent farm, which they rented from the church. A volcanic eruption covered most of the hayfields with ash, and toxic gases poisoned the cattle so that their legs became disjointed and tumours grew on their bones. Rather than see them die in agony, Ketil and his father had slaughtered both cattle and sheep with an axe. To try to feed themselves and the five others still on the farm, they turned to the sea. They had an open boat suitable for four men. Each day, the two of them with their two hired men risked the surf, then rowed three miles to fish for cod. They might have survived, but the weather turned unseasonably cold, filling the bay with ice. They were reduced to scavenging along the beach for fish that were washed up in the ice. The women gathered lichens to make porridge.
When there was nothing but starvation, Ketil’s father, along with his family, was forced by law to return to the Snaefellsness Peninsula, to the hreppar, or district, where he was born. That made them hreppsomagur, beggarmen, welfare cases. Ketil’s father pleaded with the district council to let the family remain together. He was prepared to fix up an abandoned house, but the local farmers needed hired help. They insisted that the family be broken up, each going to work for a different farmer. The local council went further and got an order to seize everything except the clothes that the three of them were wearing. When Ketil’s father protested, he was told that poor men who could not look after their families did not need more than one set of clothes. They were worked from dawn to dusk, but the farmer responsible for Ketil, rather than face years of feeding him, paid his passage to Canada. Ketil had tried to resist, but two burly farmers had forcibly put him on a Danish fishing boat. Two weeks later he was in Scotland. Three weeks after that he was in Montreal. Once there was no hope of turning back, Ketil could think of only one destination. Nya Island. New Iceland.
It took him six months, but finally, he reached Winnipeg, and with wages he had earned as a labourer, purchased a ticket on a freight boat that was going to Icelandic River.
He stood on the narrow deck as the boat entered Lake Winnipeg. By this time he had a travelling companion, Gudmundur Einarsson. Einarsson had come by Halifax, and for three years had gradually made his way across Canada and so could understand English. However, he was quite shy because of his accent and pretended he could not speak anything but Icelandic. As Gudmundur and Ketil watched the thickly wooded shore pass by, an Englishwoman and her husband came out of their cabin, and the Englishwoman said, “Do you think these are Icelanders?” Gudmundur translated for Ketil. The resulting exchange became a family story.
“I don’t think so,” the husband replied, shaking his head. “Icelanders are short and dark like Eskimos.”
“No. No. There are a lot of Icelandic women working as domestics in Winnipeg. They wear those long black dresses and have blond hair.”
“Swedes, I would think, or Germans.”
“Ask them.”
“Are you Icelanders?” he said, raising his voice.
“Hvat?” my great-grandfather asked.
The Englishman shouted, spacing out his words, “Are you Germans? Deutsche?” and pulled himself to attention and moved about as if he were marching.
“Ert han vitless?” Ketil asked Gudmundur.
“Yow”
“I told you! That’s their way of saying yes,” the Englishwoman exclaimed. “I wrote to you about them. They had that terrible smallpox epidemic two years ago and they died like flies. The whole community was quarantined. No one allowed past Boundary Creek. When they let them back into Winnipeg, they didn’t have a penny. You could hire them for nothing. Emma says they’re excellent workers and clean. Another thing, they make their coffee in an old sock.”
Coffee made in an old sock. I’d forgotten about that. It wasn’t an old sock, actually. It was a linen bag sewed around a handle made of copper wire. The bag sat in the coffee all day. You just kept adding more grounds. And Ketil taking lump sugar between his teeth and sucking his coffee through it.
“But what did they call this old sock?” Helen asked when I told her about Ketil’s story. “They must have had a name for it.” She was always hunting for ethnic experience. Odd words, bits of information. Her previous boyfriend had been Russian and had given her a samovar and a marushka. She still made tea with the samovar. The boyfriend before that had been an Arab and had given her two Persian carpets she’d hung on her wall. She considered people with roots to be the most fortunate of creatures.
“I don’t know. I probably never heard it. My mother was Irish. I was a half-breed.”
Remembering was like digging up the dead, not whole people but bits and pieces, a fingerbone here, a vertebra there. Fragments of memory. Things forgotten or half-remembered. Ed-dyville, when I was a child, was still mostly swamp. People had built on the high ground, and the houses were separated by property that was never dry until the middle of summer. By then the grass would be head-high and the willows thick and tangled, the perfect place to play away from the prying eyes of adults. One day a dozen of us had been running the trails, playing cowboys and Indians, when we decided to build a fort we would call Valhalla. There was lumber we could steal from various yards and old blankets for a floor. Here, we were to be vikings. We would bring food and soft drinks and comic books and organize raids upon neighbourhood gardens and fruit trees.
We dispersed, then returned with our loot. When we had all gathered, Clarence pushed me back and said, “You can’t come to Valhalla.”
I had pinched a pocket full of my father’s nails and an old tablecloth.
“Why not?”
“You’re not Icelandic.”
“I am so.”
“My mother says you’re not. She says your mother is an utlander.”
“She is not!” I shouted, enraged, and Clarence and his brothers and sisters all began to shout, “Utlander. Utlander.”
“She is not. She is not,” I yelled back, but it did no good. The others took it up. Utlander. Foreigner, outsider, other than us. None of the English words do it justice. Not wanted, perhaps.
I remember that with absolute clarity. The bone-coloured grass, the clumps of willow, the yelling, my feeling of helpless rage. I remember the next day even more clearly because that was the day Ketil, still proud, still strong, his moustaches yellow from snuff, died on his living room floor. He had hoped, I’d heard him say to my father, to die in his boat or in a woman’s bed, but somehow, it was better that he’d died in his beloved house. It still stands today, nothing special now that houses are two thousand, four thousand square feet, even in Eddyvüle. It is small, wood frame, sits on a basement. Although I’ve not been in it in thirty years, I know it exactly. Back door entrance at ground level, stairs up and stairs to basement. When I think of the basement, I shiver, because he kept his coffin there on two sawhorses. To keep the dust off, he covered it with a white sheet. Once when my father and I came, Ketil was polishing the brass handles.
Upstairs, the kitchen, with a table in one corner. Two chairs. A washstand with a basin and a pitcher of water. Cupboards, but the colours escape me. Then the living room, but this is vague, the furniture uncertain, a couch, a trilight lamp, a front door and two bedroom doors, but these are dark holes behind cloth curtains. This house was his palace. It was his solace for failed dreams. His plan to bring his mother and father to join him. To pay their fare, to build a place for them. He worked like a madman. Taking anything that came his way—cutting wood, carrying mail, fishing, working on the railway, but by the time he had saved their fare, his mother was dead from starvation and overwork and his father too ill to make the journey. His mother had been buried without a coffin. He sent his father money so that he could escape from the farmers’ council. Then Ketil began to save for his property, for his house. He built it himself, sometimes buying the lumber a board at a time. He married and had three children and those children had children and those, too, had children. I was one of those, a great-grandchild of the hreppsomagur.
A month after Ketil’s death, his son, my grandfather, died. With that, two generations were buried in Canadian soil. Each of them was an Icelander. The man from Snaefellsness, the son of the man from Snaefellsness. My father, the next in line, was only twenty-eight. He was the grandson of the man from Snaefellsness. Then there was me. I was not the great-grandson of the man from Snaefellsness. I was utlander, not Icelandic but not Canadian either. No one was Canadian in those days.
At school, we aped the English. We sang “God Save the King” at the end of every school day. We learned to recite proudly Kipling and Wordsworth and Shelley. And we were taught to forget.
“What was that I heard you speaking? Was that English? It wasn’t, was it?” the grade one teacher demanded. And standing at the front of the class, she punctuated each word with the leather strap that always hung at the side of her desk. What, strap, was, strap, that, strap, until Clarence was screaming and crying and trying to pull away as she beat his hands red. Afterward, twisted in his desk, his voice a high-pitched whine of pain, he rocked back and forth.
We were taught no sagas. No eddas. No mention of Skarphedin or Njal, Iceland’s greatest hero, nor Thingvellir, the site of the oldest parliament in the world, nor Yggdrasill, the tree upon which the world is held, nor Ragnarok, the day of doom. Instead, we memorized the names and dates of English kings and queens. It did no good, of course. When the summertime came and the Winnipeg campers opened up their cottages, they protectively shut their children behind fences, on verandahs. Even if we stood on the Eddyville dock wrapped in the union jack and recited sentimental poems about wattles and daffodils and wanting to be in England, there was no disguising our foreignness.
In Iceland, the passion for reading and writing had survived natural disaster and human cruelty. Even the hreppsomagur brought books to Canada. There was nothing greater than to be skald, writer. In Ketil’s living room there were eight books in Icelandic. They were set on a small shelf above the couch, precisely where immigrants from other groups might have put an icon or a plaster saint. Unfortunately, in these books there were no instructions that would help him deal with Canada. The sagas and eddas dealt with family feuds, with honour and lineage. Nor did he have any practical experience. In Iceland he had never seen a forest, had only heard rumours of polar bears brought to land on drift ice. He had never eaten vegetables except potatoes and, until the day he died, refused all offers of vegetables with the words, “I don’t eat grass.”
Fishing is what the Icelanders knew and fishing is why they came to Manitoba. They tried other places, but they were fishermen and Lake Winnipeg was an inland ocean. Except it froze over in winter. They didn’t know what to do about that, but they figured it out. They chopped a hole and put down nets with poles and then they invented a jigger that pulled nets under the ice. And they left home and went north for fall fishing and winter fishing and went still farther north for white fishing. And the women, if they didn’t go north to cook for a gang of men, moved in together to save money on fuel and groceries and to keep each other company until the season was over. When Ketil arrived, the settlers were fishing for food, but a market soon developed in Winnipeg and from Winnipeg to Chicago.
Having arrived with nothing, they had nothing with which to buy equipment, but the fish companies, financed by Americans, were eager to lend them whatever they needed. Before the season began, each fisherman would go to Winnipeg, cap in hand. I need a new set of nets, he’d say, and the company owner would say, and corks and leads and bridles? And the fisherman would add, I’ll need credit for fuel, and the owner would say, and groceries for yourself and your family and how many men? And northwesters and woollen mittens and socks, the fisherman would say, and the owners would say, just remember you sell your fish to us and nobody else. Ketil borrowed from us but sold his fish to someone else. There’s no credit for him. Not here. Not anywhere. You tell him that. You tell him he’ll have to find some other work than fishing. And he did. He became a dairyman. He considered himself to be well out of it because when a fisherman came back after two months of shipping his fish to Winnipeg, the company informed him of the price they’d pay him. A cent a pound, two cents a pound, whatever they felt like. If he protested, there was no credit next year. Many years, a fisherman worked all season and owed more at the end than when he began. And their wives, our mothers, the ones who were brave enough, that is, would go to the hotel door and demand that the waiters send their husbands out so they could get part of the cheque to buy groceries and school clothes and a new dress and something decent for the house, and often what they got was a black eye.
Three days of Icelandic Celebration didn’t leave much. And then it’d be grovelling to the company for more credit and the women helping each other out and making do. It was the women who persevered, who held everything together, who pushed their children through school and away to the city, to university if humanly possible. My mother was one of those.
“I’ve arranged for you to go to Winnipeg to stay with your grandmother,” my mother said the August after I’d finished high school.
“I don’t want to go to Winnipeg,” I replied. “I’m getting a boat and going fishing.”
“I’ve taken my knitting money and given it to your grandmother. It will pay for your tuition to United College.”
“You can’t do this,” I protested. Her knitting money had been saved for years to buy a dining room suite.
“Your grandmother will keep you for no charge. I’ve got work for one day a week at the fish packers. I get five dollars a day. I’ll give you that. You’ll have to find the rest yourself. Your uncle says he can get you a job as a bus boy on the weekends at Eaton’s.”
“I’m going fishing with Dad. The company is going to give me credit.”
“If you do well, there are some scholarships for Icelandic Canadians. They’re all in Logberg.”
“Icelanders are fishermen.”
“Not in the West End of Winnipeg. If you go to First Lutheran, you’ll meet Icelanders who work in an office and get their fish from the store.”
“I’m not clearing dishes in Eaton’s.”
“Signy Eaton is Icelandic. It’ll get you a job, but it won’t keep it for you. Remember that.”
And that was that. I was off to Winnipeg a week later and sitting at the back of the class, arms crossed, listening to truth and beauty when I wanted to be ripping the guts out of fish, chopping off their heads and getting drunk in the Eddyville parlour and dancing polkas to Johnny and His Musical Mates and getting laid in the back seat of the car outside the Eddyville community hall, but by the time I managed to get back to fishing in the spring it was too late. I didn’t belong any more. At the beer parlour, when I sat down, everyone got quiet. It was like the minister had arrived. They were talking outboard motors and dirty nets and lousy fish inspectors, and when they asked me what I was learning and I tried to tell them about Rousseau or Hobbes or Shakespeare, it was like I was showing off. I tried a couple more times but it was no good, and after that I didn’t go back.
“Axel!” Helen said.
“What?”
“We came out for a walk. You’ve been standing there for five minutes staring across the marsh. Ever since you got that call from Iceland, you’ve been lost in a daze.”
“No!” I said, brushing off a mosquito.
“Yesterday, at the ballet, you sat like you were mesmerized. I don’t think you saw a thing.”
“What?”
“Oh, God,” she said, “I give up.”
Icelandic horses invaded my dreams. Shaggy Icelandic ponies, a long line of them climbing up a mountain of lava, black, convoluted, the horses outlined against the sky, short sturdy horses, with their shaggy manes, topping the crest and descending to a lava desert that went on as far as the horizon. Hestur. The word jumped unbidden into my mind. And with it the teacher screaming.
“What’s that? What did you call them?”
And I whispered, “Hestur.” It was what my great-grandfather had always called his horse with the white blaze on its forehead.
“What did I tell you? What kind of word is that? Show me what a hestur is. Here, this picture. What is this? Well, speak up. I can’t hear you.”
“Hestur.” The word was as thin and faint as monofilament.
“It is not,” she screamed. “It is a horse. Horse, you idiot. Class, here is a horse, and standing in front of the picture of a horse is an idiot. Hold out your hand!” She grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the desk, raised the strap above her shoulder.
“What is this?” she yelled, and when I wouldn’t open my hand brought the strap down on my clenched fingers.
“A horse,” I screamed. “A horse.”
“Again.”
“Horse.”
“Again.”
“Horse. Horse. Horse. Horse. Horse.”
I woke up in a terrible panic. Although it was thirty-four years earlier that I had been beaten, my hands were so stiff and swollen that I could barely move them. It was as if I had stored not only the memory but the actual physical experience. I sat in bed, holding my hands in front of me. The pain was so intense that I did not dare touch the light switch.
“Let’s have panacooker,” Helen said a few days later. She’d been rummaging around my kitchen cupboards and had found a cookbook. She held it up so I could see the cover. “The Lutheran Ladies Aid. Eddyville. Are you going to take me there sometime?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Vinarterta sounds interesting. And asta bolur.” She flipped through the pages. “And rosettes with fresh whipped cream. And hangikjot.” She couldn’t make any sense out of the k and j together. “And hardfisk.”
They used to make hardfish in Eddyville. They split saugers and small pickerel and hung them on wires above the fly line. They cured in the sun, curling as the skin shrank. I got a tapeworm that way. Stealing hardfish before it was ready, my cousin stealing butter from his mother’s kitchen. Then we put the fish skin-side down on the sidewalk and pounded it with a hammer until the flesh softened and we could tear off strips and drag them through the butter.
“It stinks,” I said.
“What does?”
“Hardfish. It smells like an outhouse on a hot day.”
“Skyr,” she said. “A milk product. That doesn’t tell you much, does it? Rullapilsa. That sounds vile.” She read the description. “A sheep’s flank rolled tightly, boiled, pickled, then sliced thin and served on brown bread. Did you eat this stuff?”
“With half a loaf and a tilted cup, I got myself a friend.” I replied, without thinking.
“What is that all about?” She was onto it in a flash.
“Nothing.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t be so chintzy with your life.”
“It was a saying of my great-grandfather’s. He got it from a book called Havamal.”
I’d probably have picked a fight with her for being so nosy, but just then the phone rang and Disa somebody-or-other’s daughter said, “Did your airplane ticket arrive?”
“Yes, but…”
“That is good. Someone will meet you at the airport. We have a very nice apartment for you at the university. I look forward to seeing you.”
And then she hung up. Icelanders are like that. Abrupt. Not much subtlety. No small talk. In the sagas they’re always saying, “Now I’m going to kill you,” or something similar, and then they proceed to do it.
“Wait,” I yelled. “You can’t do this to me. Wait. I can’t, I can’t.”
“What?” Helen said.
“Iceland.”
“You were yelling at Iceland?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“You might as well go. You haven’t been yourself for the last six weeks. I’ll drop by and take care of your cat every day. I promise. I’ll even water your plants. Just bring me back one of those Icelandic sweaters.”
“They can’t do this. They didn’t want us and now they’re going to shanghai me.”
“The people who didn’t want your family are all dead.”
“No, they’re not. If they were, I wouldn’t dream about them every night.”
“You’ve earned your way back.”
“With a couple of books of stories? You would think it would cost more than that.”
“Skald.”
“That’s a bad burn.”
“That’s a writer. It is a title of honour. That’s what they called you in their letter.”
“You’ve been learning a lot.”
“The flight from Winnipeg is a charter. It only takes five hours.”
“You’re one of them.”
“You can’t let her win.”
“Exactly. She can’t just phone up here…”
“Not her. The old bitch with the strap. You can’t, you know. It’s not over yet. Your great-grandfather couldn’t go back. Your grandfather couldn’t go back. You can go back for them.”
“He wouldn’t walk down the block. He wouldn’t watch the fjalkona lay the wreath at the monument. He split wood on Icelandic Celebration. All day.”
“It must have been hard. Staying away.”
The phone started to ring again. I let it ring, five, six times, then I said, “That’s her calling back. What am I going to say? Shit! I can’t do this. It’s too hard.” And then I grabbed the phone in a rage. “Yowl” I shouted. “Godan daginn. Thetta er Axel Borgfjord. Yow. Yow. Goddamn you, goddamn you, yes I’m coming.” But it wasn’t her, it was a wrong number.