The Icelandic Canadian - 01.09.2003, Síða 25

Vol. 58 #1
THE ICELANDIC CANADIAN
23
Reykjavik, and Oli had yet to encounter a
farmer in the district who could not recite
Pall’s verses from memory. To be related to
such a poet was an honour; to be trained by
him a dream. Each afternoon, Pall stole a
few minutes to show Oli a new poem, or
listen to one of the boy’s. Most of Oli’s
poems weren’t even written down - paper
was too scarce on this treeless island - so
Oli would recite his latest effort from
memory. Pall listened thoughtfully, then
helped the boy correct the metre.
As long as Oli kept up with his reli-
gious studies Petur made no objection to
the poetry lessons. It was, afterall, Pall’s
homestead. Here it was all Petur could do
to prevent his sons from believing every
ghost, troll, and elf story by which their
grandmother frightened them to sleep each
night. And even Petur could see that by the
end of Oli’s first year at Brekka he was less
prone to tantrums, less in need of punish-
ment, even, most of the time, more willing
to apply himself to the course of religious
study his father prepared for him each
week.
As far as Oli was concerned, Brekka
was meant to be his home. It was the place
he was born and he would be happy to
never leave it again.
Mt. Askja, however, had other things
in mind.
Askja’s first tremors reached Brekka
on a winter day like any other, if day it
could be called: a few scant hours of light,
most of it obscured by falling snow. Now
it was four o’clock in an afternoon that
looked like midnight. Outside, the wind
shrieked and flailed as if it had lost its mind.
Inside, the household gathered around the
fire and waited for the vaka - the evening
reading - to begin, to take them through
the long dark night. Vaka means to wake;
in Iceland in winter words took the place of
light.
In a mood as black as the sky, Oli
stood at the window, palm to glass, melting
clear a circle in the frost. It was long past
time for the vaka to start, but the others
were too preoccupied to notice. From
where Oli stood he could watch the entire
household, gathered in a rough circle
around the fire. In one corner, straddling a
wooden stool, his grandfather carved a toy
horse from the bone of a whale that had
beached in the East Fjords this past spring,
the meat of which the family ate for
months, its fat melted to oil that lit the
room this evening. Despite Afi’s swollen
knuckles his fingers were deft, and flakes of
bone flew from knife to floor like snow. In
another corner, Oli’s Amma, his mother’s
mother who had pulled him into this
world, sat astride the spinning wheel
whirring sheeps wool into yarn. On the
floor between their grandparents knelt
Oli’s two younger brothers, Stefan and
Magnus, each sailing a seashell - warring
Viking ships - over the floorboards. Across
from Amma was Oli’s mother, gazing into
the fire as if the steady click of her knitting
needles had thrown her into a trance. Oli
admired the chestnut brown hair coiled on
her head, the exact shade of the mane of his
horse, Sleipnir. Next to his mother the ser-
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