Around the World in 80 Dates (10 page)

That was me—a Pulitzer just waiting to happen.

Happily, Ny Bjórn didn't seem to think the question too idiotic. “The famous ones, absolutely. You just need to look at the Icelandic sagas to see that: Gretty the Strong—”

“Ohhh, I like the sound of Gretty the Strong,” I cooed, all pretense of dignity completely abandoned. “It sounds like the lead singer in a heavy metal band.”

“Oh, yes,” Ny Bjórn replied with equal enthusiasm, clearly warming to the subject. “He lived in the early eleventh century, and although he was finally killed, he was outlawed for eighteen years and seen as the superstar of his days.”

“Really?” I swooned, knowing absolutely nothing about him, but instantly having a huge crush on him anyway. “What did he do that was so great?”

“Well,” said Ny Bjórn excitedly, suggesting that if he wasn't a man and a Viking and a thousand years too late, maybe he would have had a bit of a crush on Gretty too, “he did a lot of things: He was a great warrior, he was really strong, and he was a good wrestler.”

The idea of wrestling cooled my ardor for a moment, conjuring up images of bouffanted fools basted in baby oil working the WWF circuit, but then I had a mental picture of huge leather jerkins being ripped off broad, sweaty chests, as muddy warriors grunted and rolled around on the ground for real. I could barely contain myself. This was great: Vikings were every bit as sexy as I had imagined.

“He even killed a ghost once….” Ny Bjórn boasted, like a kid getting carried away in front of a playground audience and saying his dad could beat up all of theirs.

“Huh?” Dragged from my daydreaming, I picked up on Ny Bjórn saying something about ghosts. Ghosts? I wasn't interested in “ghosts.” Ghosts weren't sexy.

“Oh, yes, he was the idol for people back then,” Ny Bjórn continued unabashed. He was on a roll, delighted to have an audience for a subject that he clearly lived and breathed. “People who were ‘good at the trade' of being a Viking were pretty much the role model of what men should be back then. There was deep resentment about the Vikings who came to settle around York, or Yorvik, for example, because they took away all the women from the Englishmen there. And the reason was that the Vikings washed every Saturday and combed their hair, etcetera. They were really well-groomed by the standards of the times.”

Back on safer ground and feeling that we shared an appreciation, albeit for different reasons, I summed up: “So can I just clarify, the Vikings wore leather and washed?”

“Yes, yes,” Ny Bjórn replied.

I gave a big happy sigh. “This just gets better and better.”

We both laughed.

I knew why I was into Vikings, but what about Ny Bjórn? What was the appeal for him? The leather? The machismo? The beards?

“No, no…” he spluttered. “It's…”

“Oh, come on,” I persisted, determined not to let him off the hook.

“Well, okay, yes,” he admitted sheepishly. “But the real attraction is I'm totally into artifacts. I really like ‘things' and gizmos and how they were made. This is a great way for me to increase my understanding of things made by the Vikings.”

All my instincts went on “geek alert” when Ny Bjórn said this, but I suppose you don't live on a cold, wet island for the summer unless you are seriously passionate about the place, and who was I to judge? I was passionate about Vikings; Ny Bjórn was passionate about Vikings' “things,” that's all.

“I mean, cooking fish over an open fire in an enamel pot,” he continued, now lost in a romantic reverie of his own, “it worked back then. If we can make it work here, we can learn from it, that's one of the main reasons I do this.”

I was proving myself to be superficial and shallow: I wanted to go back to hearing about strong men wrestling, not how to cook fish over a fire. I guess that was the thing, though—the guys who were satisfied with leather and machismo were the ones who'd been gathering for the Metallica concert in Stockholm the night before. Here on the island, the fascination was with the life behind the myth. I'd arrived a thousand years too late.

Frozen to the core, I stood up and gently massaged some blood back into my hands and feet. The ferry back to the mainland had just docked and it was time for me to go. I had loved meeting Ny Bjórn, even if he hadn't turned out to be the Viking of my dreams. I was interested to see how immersed he was in his work—even if my Designer Date didn't end up proving my
you look like your job
theory, Ny Bjórn certainly did.

I wished him luck building the cookhouse and for the summer ahead, then walked woodenly back to the warmth of the boat and the challenge of the next seventy-three dates.

 

Sailing back, it was so cold and wet I had to sit below deck. There was one spare seat at a coffee table, where two women leaned toward one another, deep in conversation. They invited me to join them and I did, but although busying myself with my book, I found it impossible to ignore their conversation.

Sarah was in her thirties, from London but working for the EU in Brussels. Katia was in her fifties, living and working in Stockholm. She was a part-time therapist who also made money selling diets over the Internet. They were several hours into a conversation about their love lives.

Sarah was torn between a relationship with a cute commitment-phobe in Brussels and a safe-bet/dull-as-ditchwater back home in London. The thing she was really struggling with, though, was, as she put it: “We are all born alone and die alone.”

I could see how that would put a damper on the evening.

Katia only had the one relationship to contend with, but it was more than enough by the sound of it. She was in love with an ex–Soviet general and was unresolved as to if and how she could accept or change his fierce anti-Semitic views.

The places, faces, and details changed, but I had had these conversations a million times on the road over the years. Wherever you travel, there will be women struggling to come to terms with the big, emotional issues in their lives. I liked to think I was less desperate and better dressed about it, but I had been that woman over the years, too. Who knew, maybe I was that woman now. As I watched Katia pick up her copy of
The Answer Within: Learning to Love Yourself
and disembark with Sarah, I knew I would never discover how their dilemmas worked out. But maybe that wasn't the point. Having the chance to think and talk about your issues was what was important. Perhaps that was where the idea for my Dating Odyssey had come from, except I didn't want to talk about my past, I wanted to be talked into my future.

 

When I got back to the hotel, I called Thomas in Russia. We agreed I would email him my impression of him and he would email me back his response, so, in a way, our date would have taken place in spite of his absence. I got to work immediately:

The next morning I walked to RÃ¥dmansgatan Station and caught the Tunnelbana metro to Gamla Stan, Stockholm's medieval center. It was built on an island and was good for lazy sightseers, as the charismatic castle, cathedral, parliament buildings, and museums were all within spitting distance of each other.

It also meant that it had the highest concentration of tourists, expensive ice creams, and customer-only toilets of anywhere in Sweden. I bypassed all of these and headed straight for the Nobel Museum and my 10:30 with William.

William was a student here. He was also the brother of my friend Lorna from Australia. I had more than enough Swedish dates already, but Lorna had begged me to meet up with him:

To be told someone will “owe you big-time” means you're pretty much being told to expect the worst but for noble reasons. It wasn't the Nobel Date I wanted, but “it's just coffee,” I told myself firmly as I hiked up the steps outside the Nobel Museum. “It's one morning out of my life.” Get in, date him, and boom—I could be heading out of the country and on to the next date in under four hours.

It had just gone 10 a.m. as I walked into the entrance hall. I wanted the chance to have a look around before I met William. The Nobel Museum honored the 743 laureates who had tirelessly devoted themselves to the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics, and, of course, peace.

The museum was wonderful: As you entered, a huge Orwellian tract ran around the ceiling of the entire building, laminated portraits of the laureates rattling along it on hangers. At various points the track dipped down so you could read the profiles.

The museum was divided into sections by solid screens of what looked like chicken wire covered in Plexiglas, white fiber-optic lights glowing inside. I bumped into the publicist, Anna, who pointed me in the direction of the electronic museum, where I wanted to surf the online database of the laureates' acceptance speeches.

Martin Luther King Jr., Marie Curie, Samuel Beckett, Kofi Annan, Mother Teresa…Reading them, I was struck by how much passion these people had poured into the ideals they championed. Out of curiosity, I entered the word “love” and searched for references to it among the speeches.

The screen filled and I scrolled down. The laureates' love of ideas; their love of humanity, freedom, God, science and discovery, home; even their love of cars. It struck me very powerfully that this kind of love was a dedication: a devotional love, abstract, not interpersonal. There was no mention of romantic love; no real celebration of people other than as concepts or ideals.

Clearly the laureates were accomplished, unique people. But was being accomplished and unique at the expense of something more everyday and vital to our happiness? In short, to be a great idealist, did you need to be pretty self-centered and emotionally unavailable? Were they just a smarter, more noble version of me, choosing a job over a partner? But since they were making the world a better place rather than writing about where to go on holiday, did that make it okay?

Another thing that really struck me was how few of the laureates were women: only 31 out of a total of 743. What did that say about gender roles and the pursuit of ideals? Were women more interested in people, and men in ideas, or was the judging system just crap?

But it was time to meet William. As I walked back out to the lobby, I bumped into Anna again. I asked her if she thought it was true the laureates didn't value romantic or personal love.

Anna smiled wryly. “You know, when I started working at the Nobel Museum, I was told: ‘Here you are not loved for being witty or beautiful, you are loved for your ideas.' Most of the people associated with the Nobel Prizes—winners and staff—give up their families and well-paid jobs so that they might explore and prove their ideas. It takes a certain type of selfishness to be so dedicated.”

So it was as true for Nobel Prize winners as it was for guidebook publicists: Too much work wrecks your love life.

 

William and I had arranged to meet at the Kafé Satir. Modeled on Café Museum, the Viennese intellectuals' hang-out in the early 1900s, it was where the Nobel Museum encouraged you to debate and reflect. I figured if William didn't have much to say for himself, at least there'd be enough going on around to distract us. The café was small; I should have no problem spotting William: brown collar-length hair, bookish, and “normal-looking,” according to Lorna.