The Souvenir Museum, Elizabeth McCracken [bill gates best books .txt] 📗

shakers. There was a density to the collection that felt like a headache, or the physical manifestation of dementia, where the simplest items had to be labeled for meaning: china Eiffel Towers marked PARIS, cheap metal London Bridges marked LONDON. It had clearly been somebody’s private collection, a problematic Dane’s hoard. Surely all the salt and pepper shakers had been made in one vast factory in Japan or China, then stamped with geographic locations and shipped off.

“After this,” she said, “we’ll go to the Viking village. Your grandfather would have hated this place. What’s the matter?”

I don’t want to see, he thought, but also he did.

He was stepping into Forbidden Souvenirs. It took him a moment to figure out what he was looking at: coral, ivory, alligator shoes, exotic game of all sorts, pillaged antiquities.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” he said.

A faceless mannequin wore a leopard jacket over nothing, its skinny white featureless body obscene. “Grandma had a mink stole,” Joanna said. “I can’t remember what we did with it.”

Some of the objects flaunted the original animal: the head of an alligator biting shut a pocketbook, the dangling back paws of a white fox on a stole. Was that better or worse than the elephant carved out of an elephant tusk, the tortoise incised into the tortoise shell?

“I thought there would be ears,” said Leo. “From the enemy.”

“What enemy?”

“I don’t know,” said Leo helplessly. “The enemy dead.”

“No ears,” said Joanna in an improbably cheery voice. She gestured at the glass case. “Nothing to worry about.”

“I wasn’t,” he said. But he had been, the worry was in him, the fear of seeing something he shouldn’t have, human, severed. The feeling was traumatic and precious.

“Anyhow,” she said.

“Do they pretend there?” he asked.

“Do they what where?”

“Pretend at the Viking village. Dress up and say they’re Vikings.”

“Oh. Not sure. Why?”

“The Renaissance Faire,” he said darkly.

They’d gone to a Ren Faire when Leo was four. He’d gotten lost in an iron maze built of child-sized cages and began to sob—she had a picture of him that she’d taken before she’d noticed the tears—and a man dressed as an executioner had to talk him out, gesturing with his plastic ax. Leo liked to bring it up from time to time, evidence of Joanna’s bad judgment. He liked history. He did not like grown-ups in fancy dress.

She said, “It’ll be great.”

“That’s what you said about Legoland.”

Had she? “Leo—”

“I said I didn’t want to go.”

“No, you—”

“Yes I did,” he said. The words were underlined, she heard it, and later she would understand it as the first sign of adolescence, and she would forgive him, but she didn’t forgive him now.

“Well,” she said, “we’re going.”

The eyes of a half dozen taxidermy animals were upon them, as though betting on who’d win the argument, and who’d end up in the museum. Then the humans turned and wordlessly went from the room.

In the morning they drove to Odin’s Odense, their bags packed in the trunk of the rented car. That night they would go on to Copenhagen, then fly back to the States. Joanna looked in the rearview mirror at sulking Leo. Next year he would be tall enough to ride up front, but for now he was in the back seat. You get to choose, she’d said, and she’d hoped to finagle him into believing that a trip to the Viking village had been his choice. What she’d endured for him! Three days of stultifying museums. They had traveled together beautifully, sleeping in the same room for the first time since his infancy. Ruined now. She knew the ruination she felt was her own treacherous heart.

The car’s built-in GPS brought them deeper into the suburbs, red-tiled roofs, no businesses. “This doesn’t look right,” said Leo from the back, hopefully. But the GPS knew what it was doing, and there they were. Odin’s Odense.

They had to pass through a little un-Viking modern building that housed admissions, a gift shop, and flush toilets. Joanna wondered whether she should ask after Aksel, but what if he had a Viking name? The old woman behind the counter thrust a map at her and frowned encouragingly. The museums of the world are filled with old women, angry that nobody will listen to them, their knowledge, their advice. Joanna hadn’t told Leo why they were here, in case it came to nothing.

She gave him the map. “Here. It’s in English.”

He consulted it and said casually, “There’s a sacrificial bog.”

“That might come in handy.”

They walked together into the Viking village on one of those days of bright sunshine, the sky so blue, the clouds so snowy white, everything looked fake. Though why was that? Why, when nature is its loveliest, do human beings think it looks most like the work of human beings?

Was her detection system still tuned to Aksel’s frequency? Once she could walk into any room and know he was there. She detected nothing.

The Viking huts were 89 percent thatched roof, like gnomes in oversized caps. A teenage boy in a tunic and laced boots ducked out of one, his arms laden with logs. He gave Joanna a dirty look, and she understood that he was mad at his mother, wherever she was, in whatever century, and therefore mad at all mothers.

Leo, too. He pointed to a small structure with no roof and said gloomily, “I think this is the old smithy.”

There was nothing smithish about the old smithy. Joanna put her hands on her hips as though she were interested in smithery, though all she could feel was her heart beating warrantless through her body. She knew she and Leo would forgive each other. She knew that it was her duty to solicit forgiveness from everyone, but just then she was tired of men whose feelings were bigger than hers. She felt as though she’d grown up in a cauldron of those feelings and had never gotten out.

“Okay. What’s next?”

“The medicine woman’s hut.”

Inside the medicine woman’s hut, a squinty, hardy-looking woman of about sixty sat