Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

This dandy of a doll was also a symbol of the treatment Dad received, Mom’s practical method for torturing him. She acted as if she and the doll belonged together, so elegant and distinguished, while Dad was just Icelandic scum. Dad was of course far too good for Mom. His was a beautiful soul, which Mom abused.

Do you ever see Alli the dwarf?

The few times that Heiður breaks the wall of silence, she’s careful to choose unpleasant topics. It irritates me to no end how nosy she is about the men in my life, maybe because there’s not so much to be nosy about, but I forgive her privately by thinking that she just envies my options. She’s well set now with the incredible German baritone Dietrich Bacon. He was mine from the start, backstage after the concert at the Old Theater; it couldn’t have been more obvious even if it completely escaped Heiður. I let her have him out of sheer obtuseness, or general stupidity.

I go out of my way to avoid little Alli if I see him on the street, I reply. The man is so boring he could put a slug to sleep.

Is he still in contact with Edda?

He calls her now and then and occasionally gives her money. If he happens to run into her, he invites her to go for a hamburger, even if he’s terribly busy. Terribly busy. His wording never changes. He always brings her a Christmas gift in person, something nice.

Can’t that be called loyalty? Hasn’t it been five years since you quit living together? He’s not even her father.

Even mental dwarves have their qualities.

Don’t be saying bad things about Alli, Edda chimes in. You were awful to him and then left him.

Have it your way, Edda.

What does Alli do now?

Alfredo Bibelinni is a debt collector and a binge drinker, as he was when we were together. Imagine taking a five-year college-degree program to become certified to collect debts. Wouldn’t it be more economical for society to shorten such a degree to half a year at a vocational school? But no matter how many televisions Alli collects from pensioners and the crying mothers of reprobates, he never has enough money for alcohol, fashionable jackets in increasing sizes, sports cars, and complicated gadgets. Too bad no female ever sticks around for long in those furnishings of his, nor in those excellent negligees that he collects. They’re usually out of their negligees after about a month, then leave fully dressed and never again show themselves in the Seltjarnarnes suburbs.

Well, says Heiður, it’s been no more than a month since he cried on my shoulder for half an evening and said that he loved Harpa, the magical creature. Couldn’t forget her.

I know. You’ve told me that. Do you really think we can take such people seriously? He was probably so drunk that he meant it at that moment, but after half an hour had already changed the love of his life. He’s a sentimental bastard, and that is, let me tell you, a poisonous combination.

Aren’t you saying this just because he made fun of your poems, Harpa? Heiður asks.

You think it’s just because of that?

No, of course not.

There were so many other things as well — and each of them in itself would have been enough to make him unbearable.

His response to your poetry was extremely ugly, of course.

He was truly adroit at finding a weak spot. Maybe there’s a class called WEAK SPOTS in the debt-collections program at the university. There’s no more certain weak spot than the poems of nonpoets.

She kept them in the crotch of her dirty panties in the laundry basket. It’s no wonder he found it funny, says Edda, squeezing out a little bleat of laughter.

The laundry basket was the new hiding place after he stumbled on some lines of poetry under the dish towels in a kitchen drawer and read them aloud, to my disgrace, to the drunks he dragged home from Gaukur Bar, smashed on low-alcohol beer mixed with vodka. Unfortunately, I hadn’t gone to bed when the troops showed up. I was watching a video in the living room, in one of those precious kimonos he gave me, wouldn’t you know it. Alli drawled out the poems in a loud voice, punctuated by a little trail of spittle, and laughed loudest at the poem about the heart and death.

I remember it, says Heiður. I found it a very interesting poem, although it wasn’t long.

Fucking bullshit, that poetry crap, says Edda.

She doesn’t mince words, your daughter.

Something’s sifted in from all the books that were read to her.

Close to my heart, death,

bright death of the heart,

beating life.

No wonder Alli found it funny. But he could have skipped reading it to the drunks from Gaukur, bursting with so much laughter that he could hardly get out the words and sputtering over his drinking buddies. Then he asked who wrote this through me, and I said it was the sister of the man who drank through him.

I slunk away from this sophisticated party and went to bed. Edda came into my room, because she’d woken to the entertainment and asked whether I wanted to come and sleep in her bed. It didn’t strike me as the stupidest thing I could do in this situation. At least her room was far from the drinking ruckus.

When Alli decided to hit the sack early the next morning, he grabbed at empty air in the king-sized bed with its built-in stereo system. He went to Edda’s room to look for me, and to his credit didn’t try to wake the child; instead he poked at my shoulder and asked in a low voice what I was doing there. I dragged myself out of the room so as not to disturb the girl any more than she’d already been disturbed, and crawled without a fuss into the broad upholstered bed, where the lunk threw himself on me in a beer-vodka haze and drove his short, broad dick into me — a tireless creature, and quite nimble.

It was the last straw. Not officially, but in my little artificial heart. I stepped up my devious operations to rid myself of the mental dwarf and strengthened myself by coming up with many different starts to stories, such as: ONCE THERE WERE TWO LITTLE DWARVES in a heterosexual relationship sharing a magnificent home at Undragrandi in Reykjavík, along with the woman’s daughter. The man was a mental dwarf but the woman a physical one, so to speak.

Alli never got to know what it was that I could least forgive him for. It was part of my revenge. He, who has wandered into my private sphere in filthy shoes, will never be given any explanation, though I have a very detailed one, with a long register of sins; he’ll get nothing but a “just because,” and I hope it’s true that he loves me to distraction, incessantly.

There’s a trick to getting rid of a man who thinks he’s in love, and maybe even is, to get rid of him without his noticing it, gradually. One day you leave, just because . And it was inevitable, just because. And the way that you’ve behaved makes him feel incredibly relieved, and he can hardly hide his relief that you’re gone, just because. And you’ve behaved in such a way that it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what was so unbearable, just because.

There’ll never be any closure — you’re just done, though it’s never said straight-out. Instead of a pop and a bang, a dead hand is laid over the relationship. I made life miserable for the dwarf, no problem . He roamed around devastated and didn’t know why, exactly, and counted himself lucky to be rid of us when Edda and I hired the moving van, no problem, and moved to the basement apartment on Bollagata that was ready and waiting for us and that I’d even painted in my favorite colors, no problem.

The peculiar thing was that I continued to hide the poems at the bottom of the laundry basket after I moved from the penthouse to the Bollagata dump, and what was even more peculiar was that as time passed, Edda took over the role of Alli the dwarf, and once when I least expected it, she snatched the shreds from beneath the dirty socks and underwear and read them out loud, to my shame. I felt as if it were clear that I shouldn’t exist, neither in Iceland nor on earth in general. I simply couldn’t, when I wasn’t even allowed to scribble my more or less stupid poems in peace. Poems that I wasn’t planning to publish anywhere, or show to anyone but Heiður at most, and then only if she asked or demanded to see them.