Better Than Fiction 2 (2 page)

We had a beautifully smooth landing. When we debarked, the runway was lined with sobbing Irish. They seized and hugged us. ‘You had the best pilot in the world!’ they said. They shook their hands heavenward. ‘The best pilot in the world!’ The best pilot in the world had completely persuaded me that we were in no danger; this was my first understanding otherwise. I turned to watch him come down the stairs. His hands were shaking; his face was drained of color. Someone handed him a bottle of whisky. He stood and drank it right there on the tarmac while people cheered him and cried.

Again, there were compensations. A cute boy from another high school who’d never said a word to me before asked if I was all right. Saturn Airways was forced to buy us all a lovely supper and put us up for the night. I remember this as one of the most amazing meals of my life. Roast chicken. Rhubarb pie. We had hotel rooms with feather beds. And also this – a whole new plane sent from Germany.

We finally arrived in New York in the middle of the great airline strike of 1966. We spent a night at the airport, which was crammed with people sleeping on the chairs and floors. If our parents ever wanted to see us again, they were going to have to pony up for first class. This remains the only time in my life I have ever flown first class and I slept through the whole thing. Janice told me they served frogs’ legs.

But these final adventures, dramatic as they were, are not what I think of first when I remember my trip to Italy. Instead, I remember how it rained every day during siesta, but stopped politely when we wished to go out. I remember the pantomimed amazement of the nuns that we could sleep in the large curlers
we wore to bed. I remember our British guide singing ‘Strangers in the Night’ and our English teacher telling me I should write it all down, because I would be a writer someday. (I did write it all down. I lost that diary decades ago.)

And all this is still not what I think of first. The very first thing I remember, and with enormous pleasure, is the great battle at the convent. The boys on the walls, the nuns with their brooms. The four of us watching from above, just sixteen years old and already that epic struggle below, waged for us and only us.

I
showed up in Oslo with a suitcase and the name of one man. Arnulf Egeland, I’d been told, directed research at the National Library of Norway and could possibly award me a writing station of some kind, where I could work on my novel in one of the library’s corners. The trouble was, Arnulf wasn’t at the library, and he wouldn’t be for a few months. He was in a cabin, on a rock, in the middle of a fjord, as all Norwegians are during the summer.

Arnulf’s cabin had been built two generations before on an island off Norway’s southeastern coast. It was a genuine example of Norwegian carpentry and Arnulf suggested I join him there, to discuss my work. If I rode the Sørlandsekspressen bus for four hours, I would reach a town named Tvedestrand, where he’d be waiting with his boat. The bus stop, he said, was steps away from the dock. He’d be wearing a green hat.

The bus traced Norway’s shoreline as we drove west from Oslo and then south, past Tønsberg and Sandefjord and Porsgrunn, past Bamble and Kragerø and Gjerstad, towns with red and yellow station houses. I sat on the east side of the bus, where I could look out the window and see the water that separated Norway from Denmark, a strait with a dragon’s name: Skagerrak. In the Tvedestrand harbor, I found Arnulf wearing a lime green beanie, waving to me from his speedboat. ‘Let’s get some bread’, he said with a smile, as I boarded.

We shot out into the fjord. Arnulf’s zigzag steering seemed like pure enthusiasm, but he soon explained that we were dodging underwater rocks – the bed of the fjord was a maze of threatening, invisible boulders the locations of which he knew by heart. The water was full of visible rocks too – small islands like gray cupcakes with the strangest toppings: one entirely covered with white goats, one sporting a gasoline pump, one bare except for a one-room house that served as a general store.

The store was out of bread. The fjordwater had been choppy overnight and the late shipment hadn’t come. We zoomed on to the next rock, where another little house sold household essentials. Arnulf bought a loaf of dark, unsliced bread and a tube of mayonnaise. We hit the water again, only briefly this time, before Arnulf slowed the boat and we pulled into a narrow cove. A long-legged, red-headed child stood at the top of the nearest cliff, completely still and expressionless, a spaniel alert beside her.

Arnulf hopped out onto one of the lower boulders, helped me out of the boat, and then pulled the boat into a wooden shack. I’d be sleeping in the boat shack, he explained. The girl on the cliff came to meet us and the dog licked Arnulf desperately. We climbed from the shack to the main cabin, over a jagged
rock formation that offered no clear path – the girl’s feet had memorized its contours and she didn’t need to look down as she floated over it, fleet as the dog. My feet had never felt rocks this hard and spiky – I’d grown up in Manhattan – and my ankles gave out over and over again. The girl waited for me at the cabin door, patient and confused by my needless stumbling. Eventually she climbed back onto the rocks and gave me her hand. She said her name was Vilde, the Norwegian word for ‘wild.’

Vilde led me to the family cabin and it was beautiful – white wood, red trim, large windows reflecting blue – but before we had taken a seat, Arnulf suggested we go for a swim. He’d already put on his goggles, somehow, and Vilde removed her sweater to reveal a bathing suit. I hurried to change and we marched out, back over the rocks, to the water. The water, he announced, was full of jellyfish. The poisonous kind?
Ja
. Arnulf’s eyes blinked enormous behind his goggle lenses. He dove, without hesitation, into the mess of tentacles.

The creatures dispersed momentarily, and Vilde jumped into the clearing. I followed her in, as the orange vines began to reassemble around us. Arnulf led us in a loop: we circumnavigated the jelly family as they hovered, wiggling in place, swam out to a small white buoy, and soon returned to the rock where we’d started. This mandatory splashing lasted less than a minute. But now that we’d done our lap, we dried off and sliced our loaf of bread. All questions about where I would go, or how I would get there, subsided for a few hours, under the weight of being right where I was. I’d come to Norway to be nourished by its clear Nordic light, to let one of the earth’s farthest corners energize my writing. Here was the far place I’d craved. After a quiet dinner of open-faced sandwiches, I ventured back across the rocky hill – even more path-less in the dark – and went to
sleep in the boat shack.

The next day, Arnulf’s wife, Hilde, and eldest daughter, Marthe, arrived. Arnulf, Vilde, and I rode back to the Tvedestrand harbor and watched the bus pull up. The passengers exited. Arnulf’s wife, from my sea-level perspective, appeared over 6 feet tall and, in terms of species, somewhere between horse, wolf, and woman. Arnulf’s dog jumped out to greet her and she began bounding up and down the dock in great big strides that impressed and intimidated me, crouched as I was in the speedboat. The dog loved the exercise and soon left Hilde to lick Marthe’s face – an older, stronger, more befreckled version of Vilde’s. In the context of this family, I was a measly, miniature thing. It took the entire ride back to explain to Hilde and Marthe, in stumbling English, why and from where I had come.

Still, I
had
come, and I stayed a week. After a few nightless days, Marthe and Vilde became my sisters, the dog became my dog. We swam with the jellyfish every day. Every night, after dinner, we’d wash the dishes outdoors, and let them air-dry like laundry. The island was in bloom and multicolored flowers grew everywhere. If photographed, the scenery would have resembled the set of Munchkin Land. The sun set at midnight and rose again at two. During those two darker hours, the fjord retained a milky glow. Arnulf was a talented guitarist and loved to play jazz standards, the same songs I’d been raised on in New York. Before bed, we’d sing ‘Don’t Worry ‘Bout Me.’

I felt I no longer needed a destination. The world had crystallized into one island, and its landscape and inhabitants served as an endlessly vivid setting and characters – a book spun into action. Still, eight days after my arrival, I returned to the Tvedestrand bus stop and retraced the shoreline route. Arnulf had found me a writing station after all: a desk in the Arctic, on
the Lofoten Islands, in a community building where his uncle developed photographs. His wife and daughters would soon leave the cabin and return to their non-summer lives. Arnulf would return to the National Library, but I’d do my writing in a far wilder place. In Oslo, I boarded a train that would take me straight up the length of the country to the edge of land, and at that edge I would cross one final fjord. I pictured Vilde standing on the distant cliffs, beckoning the ferry. But only the islands waited for me in their freezing water, under their monarch sun.

T
he thing you want to remember most about going to Iceland is all the hiking you did – up the hills and across the dales, wind, rain, and sunshine pouring over you and through you. You were always facing down the elements, maybe with the aid of a little hat and a poncho. You will have knitted your own socks from oily (but natural) Icelandic wool, and your own gloves, too. Your backpack will have contained dried reindeer meat for sustenance, a few containers of
skyr
(like yogurt), and, because you were so adventurous, some
hákarl
, which is shark meat allegedly buried in the sand, and then preserved by fishermen who urinate on it as they go by every day for a few months, until it is truly inedible to everyone but Icelanders. You will not have had even a sliver of
rjomaterta
(cream cake) in your backpack because you were too sturdy for that, and your only reading matter will have been by medieval saga writers (Halldór Laxness
being way too modern for you).

But I am unlike you – my main memory from my eight months in Iceland is sleeping. My favorite dream was of myself swimming in the waters of the north Atlantic (unrealistically warm and bright), and being approached by a pod of dolphins, who lifted me out of the water as they leapt into the blue sky, then let me down gently to float again in the waves. Almost all of my dreams there were more vivid than any I had ever had, and from them I understood some of the incidents in the Icelandic Sagas – for example, the monster who sits astride the roof of a house in 
Grettis Saga
, and rides it until the roof beams crack.

As the nights grew longer and the days shorter (down to two hours in December), I remained on American East Coast time – I would go to sleep around 4am and get up at dawn (which was 1pm in the afternoon), go swimming at the local pool (hail and ice on the concrete between the locker room and the hot tub – the hotter one, not the hottest one, where the old men were boiling themselves and talking), then walk home in the dusk, stopping at the American consulate to take out a book from the library, something that I had never read
(The Grapes of Wrath)
or never heard of (
The Man Who Loved Children
by Christina Stead) or that was long enough to require many dark hours of concentration (
Anna Karenina
).

Iceland made me.

I was always a traveler. I do not remember my earliest journey – my mother and father driving from LA to Michigan when I was a year old – but I think I remember all of them after that, from St. Louis to Chicago on the train with my grandmother to visit cousins when I was three; to Grand Rapids around the same time to visit the other grandparents; down to the Current River in southern Missouri when I was nine and ten;
camp in northern Wisconsin and Vermont when I was eleven, twelve, and thirteen. I was always staring out the window of the plane or the train or the back seat of the car, fascinated by the landscape, listening to people around me talk. When I was a senior in high school my parents let me go to England for two weeks during spring vacation, and that’s where Iceland was planted, right there in those cathedrals and those dialects that my very saintly hosts exposed me to, day after day.

After college there were no jobs, so my first husband, John, and I scraped together three thousand dollars and went to Europe for a year, first working on an archeological dig in Winchester, England, then hitchhiking through France, Italy, Greece, Crete, Yugoslavia, Austria, Switzerland, France again, Denmark, and back to England. He was six-foot-ten, my mentor and protector. We met other travelers who had been scammed and robbed and frightened. The closest we came to being taken advantage of was in an Italian train station, where we fell asleep on some benches, and my husband woke up just as a man was attempting to steal his shoes from under his head. Much more typical was our experience at an outdoor bazaar, where we ponied up the asking price for some item, and the seller took pity on us. He taught us how to bargain, then gave us the item half off. In grad school, after my husband and I had parted ways, my new boyfriend and I thought nothing of heading out from Iowa to California, Oregon, Idaho, New York, and Martha’s Vineyard, by car or motorcycle.

But until I went to Iceland, I had never traveled alone.

There were seven or eight of us – my fellow Fulbright recipient, Elizabeth, and other students from England, Denmark, Norway, and even the Soviet Union (he said his father was in the KGB, which was why he was allowed to leave; he also knew how
to knit, thanks to his grandmother, so he fit right in). Elizabeth had gone to Radcliffe and graduated
summa cum laude
. She had grown up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and read 
War and Peace
 when she was ten. We got along well. While I was catching up on classics, she was plowing through Barbara Cartland. The Danish boy (four years younger than I was) was Knud. He was handsome and personable, with blond hair and a square, open face. He was a whiz at Icelandic – not all the Danes were. There was one woman in my class who knitted in the lobby before class and who was rumored to be stuck between the liquid pronunciation of Danish and the harsher, multi-consonantal pronunciation of Icelandic, unable to go either back or forward. She knitted like a whiz, though – the whole front of a baby’s sweater in twenty minutes.

Elizabeth and I lived in a dorm on the campus of Háskóli Íslands, the country’s largest university. From the front door you could see the mountains beyond Reykjavik rearing into the sky, crusty and barren. Once I was sitting at my desk and three swans flew by outside the window, close enough to touch, it seemed. An American professor was in Iceland on a teaching Fulbright. His name was Oscar, and he hosted informal parties every Sunday, where we ate the food he liked to cook, chatted, and played hearts or whist. What was eerie and alluring was the walk to his house, along the dark beach at night (it was always night), listening to the water lap the sand, to the wind slithering here and there.

It was an easy walk to downtown Reykjavík, and I loved to observe the Icelanders, who spoke loudly and stood closer to one another than New Yorkers. My favorite episode was at the local grocery store. I was walking past the meat counter. A woman customer and the woman butcher were looking at
a plate sitting on top of the butcher case that contained two stalks of celery. The butcher said, very clearly, ‘SELL-ER-EE’. Then the two women shook their heads slightly and shrugged. No idea what that green thing was for. The greatest difficulty when I went to the grocery store was bringing home eggs – there were no cartons, just plastic bags. I could never get more than three or four home intact. But the
skyr
was great, the granola was great, the precious oranges from somewhere far, far away were great, and there were other vegetables, too, grown in Iceland, in thermally heated greenhouses. My fellow students were more gustatorily adventurous than I was, and even ate whale meat (which was cheap).

Occasionally, we went to the movies, if only to test our Icelandic, and many Fridays we went to the philharmonic hall, which was within walking distance, where we listened to the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra. At Christmas I went to New York, where I stayed with a friend on the Upper West Side. The first morning I sat up in bed, wide awake, thinking it was noon. The sun was pouring through the windows and it was eight in the morning. After Christmas in New York, I went back to Iowa for a few days, where my boyfriend broke up with me (not unexpected).

Now I didn’t even have a reason to write letters. When I got back to Reykjavík the days were getting longer, but I didn’t notice. All I did was read and read and walk. In late January I got so depressed that the only book that could help me was a collection of humorous essays by S.J. Perelman that made me laugh in the bathtub while I was hiding out from the darkness and my shirked responsibilities toward my language class and my dissertation. At some point, one of those points that are so sunk in the endless passing of time, I started writing a novel,
always from about 11 at night until about 4, when I fell onto my couch/bed and continued to dream of what I was writing. It was set in Idaho, and concerned my grandparents and my grandfather’s brother trying to start a ranch with a little money my great-grandmother had given them, and their winnings from as many poker games as they could get into. The best episode was very Icelandic – they were caught in a blizzard and had to dig a hole in the snow. They saved themselves by lying in each other’s arms until the blizzard covered them over and then subsided. My Idaho had no trees.

I wrote and read, read and wrote, went once a week to the best hotel in Reykjavik where I did eat
rjomaterta
, a six-inch-tall wedge of layer cake, all the layers made of cream flavored with different liqueurs. The other meal I remember was a traditional Icelandic end-of-winter feast,
Þorrablót
, consisting of everything that traditional Icelanders would have found in their frozen storerooms at about the time when the grass greened up and the sheep were allowed out into the pastures. The most startling thing on the plate, to me, was the singed sheep’s head
(Svið)
– eyes restfully closed. I took one look and opted for one of the alternatives, maybe a roast chicken. Elizabeth ate everything on her traditional plate with relish, including the liver sausage and the
Súrsaðir hrútspungar
, which were lambs’ testicles cured in lactic acid. 

The days got longer. The Fulbright Committee packed Elizabeth and me onto a plane and sent us to Berlin for a meeting with all of the European grantees. The hosts showed us around and invited us to appreciate the difference between West Berlin and East Berlin, then still behind the Wall. I did appreciate the difference, but not as they wanted me to – what I saw in East Berlin was some kind of patience, letting the ruins from the war
sit there until someone came up with a better idea than replacing everything with chrome and neon lights. We were taken to Dahlem, where we visited the Botanic Gardens and a few of the museums. The best piece of art I saw was a Japanese scroll painting that ran along the entire wall of one of the galleries, the story of a single journey up mountains and through forests that unfolded as you walked past it, peering carefully at the trees and the rocks and the tiny figures. The principal difficulty of solitary travel, I decided, was not being able to turn to your companion, to say, ‘Look at that! I love that!’ Whatever revelations were pouring into you and out of you, they were yours alone.

I felt this the following week, too, when I hiked in the southwest of England, a region John and I had missed in our months spent in Winchester, York, and the Lake District. Exeter, Dartmoor (which reminded me of
The Hound of the Baskervilles
), Newton Abbot, Dawlish – the place names, the wide landscape, the grass and blossoming trees and the wealth of flowers seemed to sink into me and disappear, escaping all of my attempts to capture the view, the fragrance, the warm feel of the air in letters or diary entries. When I read the old letters now, I am embarrassed at how desperately they grasp at the things I was seeing and try to push them into the minds of my recipients. When we returned to Iceland we had five weeks left, the sun was everywhere, and I went back to work, this time relating the tale of my grandfather winning a diamond ring in a poker game, giving it to my grandmother, who had no wedding ring, and then my grandmother losing it down the drain of the kitchen sink when she was washing the dishes.

I began preparing to go back to Iowa City. I would move into my ex-boyfriend’s apartment, I would work on my dissertation, applying modern theories of literary criticism to the Icelandic
Sagas; I would continue my solitary existence and come to enjoy it as well as rely upon it. Then Duncan asked me to go driving with him.

Duncan was an oboe player from Edinburgh who had by that time been in the Icelandic Symphony for two or three years, though he was a year younger than I was. He was maybe the only person I knew then who was gainfully employed. He was also handy (he did, after all, have to make his own reeds, and they had to be good). He was outdoorsy, he was adventurous, and he had a car. In the last three weeks (now April and May, sun up at 4, down at 9 or 10), we drove to Dritvik, Laugarfell, Hlíðarendi (the setting of
Njáls Saga
), and Eyjafjallajökull. We saw Skógafoss, and stayed in a youth hostel near Bergþórshvoll. The grass in every valley was brilliantly green. On our second morning in the hostel, another Brit arrived – a sailor taking a break, as I remember. The two men talked all day about sailing and life on the ocean, and never once acknowledged my presence, which was an illuminating experience, the first time in my life as a six-foot-two American woman that I was entirely overlooked. Which is not to say that Duncan was unkind. Every time we met during those three weeks, he had a plan or an idea about something that might be fun to do. He also had a lot to say about Scotland, the oboe, the orchestral life, music, nature, haggis, his former plan to sail from Scotland to Iceland to Greenland to America by himself. He wore glasses, his hair was red, he was as easygoing as any man I had ever known.