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

“Hi, hi,” said the woman. This was the jaunty way some Danish people said hello, and Joanna always felt exhilarated and frightened saying it back, as though she might pass for Danish a few seconds more. Which was worse, being found out as American, or as a fraud? It was a big space, illuminated by the fire and the sunlight coming through the front and back doors. The fire was directly underneath the highest part of the thatched ceiling: Viking fire safety. “Say hello,” said Joanna to Leo.

A preposterous command. He didn’t.

The medicine woman gestured to a low long bench across from her. In English, in the voice of the iron age, the woman said, “Welcome. Where do you stay?”

Were they supposed to be ancient, too?

Leo tried to feel it. Before Denmark, he hadn’t realized how much he wished to be ancient. To be Danish. To be, he thought now, otherwise for a reason.

His mother said, “Last night, near Svendborg.”

The medicine woman nodded, as though approving of this wisdom. “It is beautiful there.” She withdrew her stick, inspected the end, stuck it back in. “You have been to Langeland? The ‘big island,’ you would call it?”

“No.”

She nodded again. “You must.”

She was the medicine woman: everything she said had the feel of a cure and a curse. Yes: they would go to the big island. It was inevitable.

On the big island, thought Joanna, she might forget her big mistakes; on the big island, they would scatter their memories, if not her father’s ashes. They had not brought his ashes. There were too many of them.

“There is an excellent cold war museum,” the medicine woman said.

What was a cold war, in the land of the Vikings?

“It has a submarine,” the medicine woman said to Leo. “It is the largest in Europe, I believe. I took my son. Also minigolf close by. A good place to holiday, if you do not come here. Wouldn’t you like to come to holiday here someday? That is what we do. We put on the clothes and—puh!—we are Vikings.”

“Yes!” Leo said. “You mean, you stay here? You sleep here?”

“Of course!” She turned to the corner of the hut and said a sentence or two to a pile of blankets. Perhaps it was an ancient incantation. Nothing happened. She said it again. They could not find a single English cognate among the syllables.

The pile of blankets shifted. An animal? No. The blankets assembled themselves into a shadow of a man.

The shadow became an actual man, sitting up.

The actual man was Aksel.

He was eleven years older and much thinner and he had shaved his beard, even though he was now a Viking. He’d always had long, squintish eyes; they had acquired luggage. He yawned like a bear, working all the muscles of his jaw; that is, he yawned like Joanna’s long-ago love, the foreigner she’d fallen for when they had worked together on a college production of True West. Joanna had been prop mistress, and had collected twenty-seven working toasters from yard sales and Goodwills. Aksel directed, and had broken every one of those toasters in a single impassioned speech to the actors, sweeping them off a table while declaring, “I don’t want you to act, I want you to react, I want you to get mad.”

The medicine woman said, “Aksel’s mother told us you were coming here with the boy.”

Joanna nodded. She still didn’t know what millennium they were supposed to be in. “You get mail here?”

“She texted.” The medicine woman mimed with her thumbs.

“Johanna,” said Aksel. That needless, endearing h.

How many time frames was she in? College, mid-twenties, the Iron Age, the turn of the last century. He was recognizable to her—she’d worried he wouldn’t be—and beloved to her, too.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, in a serious voice.

It was a good question. He didn’t look like her father. That might have been what brought her here. The watch could be mailed; Legolands were legion; but where in the world was a man like the man she’d just lost?

Her actual heart found the door behind which her metaphorical heart hid; heart dragged heart from its bed and pummeled it. Years ago she’d wondered what, exactly, constituted love: the state of emergency she felt all ten years of their life together? Not that the building was on fire; not that the ship was about to sink; not that the hurricane was just off shore, pulling at the palm trees: the knowledge that, should the worst happen, she had no plan of escape, not a single safety measure, she was flammable, sinkable, rickety, liable to be scrubbed from the map. That feeling was love, she’d thought then, and she thought it now, too.

“My father died,” she said.

“Ah, Walter,” said Aksel, and he rubbed his jaw dolefully. “I am sorry. Recently?”

“A year ago. I have something for you. We decided—this is Leo—we decided it was a good time to come to Denmark, to deliver it.”

“Hello, Leo,” said Aksel, who looked half in dreamland, populated as it was by Ancient Danes, long-ago girlfriends, and preteen American boys. “I am very glad to meet you.”

“You know my mom?” said Leo.

“That friend I mentioned.” Then to Aksel: “I Facebooked your mom, but I guess you’re off the grid.”

“I am very much upon,” he said. “You just don’t know my coordinates.” He looked again at Leo and nudged the medicine woman’s back with his knee. “This is Johanna,” he said of Joanna. “This is Flora,” he said of the medicine woman. “Shall we go for a walk, Johanna? Just for a moment.”

The medicine woman turned to Leo. “Do you want to play a game? My son is doing so. Come, he will teach you.” She got up and ushered Leo through the front door, and Joanna and Aksel went out the back, the fire smoking, a hazard, but the Vikings must have known what they were doing.

“I’ve thought of you often, Johanna,” said