Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

It’s like her to ask about my poems, my friend who encourages me to shine and wants me to feel that I’m something. But she needs to be careful not to take her praise to the point of flattery, which is something other than what it is. Her enthusiasm also becomes laughable when she says that I ought to gather my poems into a book or publish them in magazines. I don’t want to be a demented assistant nurse who publishes poetry.

When I was a kid, I didn’t need to be ashamed of my verses, which I composed especially for Dad and sometimes Heiður. She encouraged me immediately and said that it was terrific and that she wished she could do the same. Even today she still remembers my prize poem from the Laugarnes School paper and sometimes recites it when least expected, in order to promote Harpa Eir’s boundless talents.

The butterfly jumps off the edge of the day,

swims the butterfly stroke in the pool of the sky.

Then say the kids with the yellow ball: Now day fills the air.

When the ball sinks

to the bottom of the pool,

the kids get out and dry off.

They chase the butterfly through the night

and sing in children’s choir: Fun is the darkness.

Even my brother, Sibbi, praised me. He wasn’t all bad, the poor boy. But it was impossible to draw Mom’s attention, whether with prize-winning poetry or anything else. She was on her original saunter in weightlessness and had no points of contact with reality as she floated out of reach, standing on her head or lying on her side.

She thought that whatever I undertook would never amount to anything. Sibbi was her baby; she pampered him in secret, behind Dad’s back, and stood up for him no matter how absurd it was. She even stood up for him when she found out he’d been teasing me and he’d been the one to start it.

Dad was extremely careful not to show favoritism and tried to hide the fact that I was his favorite. Occasionally, however, it happened that poor Dad couldn’t control himself. He was so proud of the prize-winning poem that he had me recite it to his bridge-club friends. I’ll never forget the embarrassed look on the face of Ingi the barber. He was apparently not a man who understands poetry.

Whether Mom understood poetry, I don’t know, but every time Dad mentioned my gift for poetry, Mom interrupted him in midsentence and changed the subject, a conversational technique that she’d developed so thoroughly that it verged on being a new art genre.

Mom, how can I make sense of you?

You can’t, my dear Eisa.

Stop twisting up my name. You’ve done more than enough damage by twisting up my paternity. You’re going to get quite the shock tomorrow night when Dýrfinna lets the cat out of the bag and I find out what lout you were carrying on with behind Dad’s back.

You and Prescient Finna can scheme together until you’re blue. I’m not afraid of that.

Of course you’re afraid. The unveiling of the century is at hand. The truth about my paternity will echo over the entire fjord.

Are you planning to get a bullhorn?

Don’t try to pretend you don’t care.

I suppose it’s not going to affect me much, as things stand.

It never has, if I remember you correctly.

A great victory will be won the day that you remember me correctly.

Let me out, I need to pee, Edda says, thrusting her head toward the front seat, as if she thinks that otherwise she won’t be listened to.

We’ll soon be at a shop, says Heiður.

I’ll just pee out here.

You can’t wait five minutes?

Damn this long trip. I’ll go out of my head.

This isn’t that difficult of a trip, says Heiður. Your mother had to travel to the countryside by boat when she was little, before they built bridges over the sands.

I even went alone when I was just six years old, with no one special to take care of me. Some woman at the wharf was asked to look after me. Not as much fuss was made over me as over you. You who have two of your own ladies-in-waiting.

I turn around to check whether the girl sees something funny in this, but she replies with an elaborate grimace.

Didn’t you feel insecure about going alone? asks Heiður.

Not a bit. It was fantastic to get cookies from strangers who asked where I was going. I looked forward to it for months, starting at Christmas, to get to sail east and be a big person on my own. Those who see the land from the sea when they’re children gain a different perspective on it from those who only get to travel over horrific bridges spanning ravines and on dusty horse-tracks, after which they blow black dust from their noses for three days. The most fun was going in May, as soon as school was over. The countryside had such different shades of green — greenest under the Eyjafjöll Range and at Dyrhólaey, on the southernmost plain. If the weather was clear, the glacial caps lorded it over the landscape. In many places the ice overflowed, nearly spilling into the sea.

I can’t believe I never went with you.

Things were much stricter when we were little.

We arrive at the shop at the crossroads of Rangárvellir, with a row of stately mountains as a backdrop on this clear and calm day. There’s snow on Mount Hekla’s northwestern slope, but not the cloud that some say is a fixture. The Tindfjöll Peaks, Mount Þríhyrningur, and Eyjafjallajökull Glacier make a resolute landscape. All of nature promises a brighter journey ahead, all the way east to my old refuge.

Heiður extends her leg from the high door and immediately has solid ground beneath her feet. Despite her clunkiness, she tries to look sporty, wearing a light-green tracksuit with violet stripes, and aggressive sports shoes. She has on a blue headband that makes her look even sharper and emphasizes her high nose. Over her shoulder, she’s draped the strap of a terribly expensive sports bag, where she keeps her hair spray and gold flute. In this guise, the flute player Heiður Jensdóttir could very well be an undernourished long-distance runner on her way to a race.

Inside the shop, Heiður scurries here and there to examine the goods: prunes, balaclavas, rye flour, screwdrivers, window varnish, cat litter, potatoes from the new harvest in Þykkvibær. Near the back, behind a pitch-black pot holder, protrudes the corner of a picture that I nearly drop when I pull it out. It turns out to be Weighing of the Heart in Egyptian style, from The Book of the Dead . The same sort of picture hung on the wall of my faithful friend Gabriel Axel in Perpignan. When he explained what the picture was supposed to represent, I thought that Monsieur Axel didn’t need to fear his heart ending up on a scale. I didn’t know then how well I had understood his heart. If the beautiful letters from Gabriel Axel and his nice gifts hadn’t been part of the equation, it isn’t certain that I would have made it in one piece through the Year of the Changeling. To know that someone cares about you without having to, someone who doesn’t need to pretend to care about you and doesn’t require anything in return, is magnificent and can be lifesaving.

I’m paying for the picture when Edda comes from the bathroom, jabbering about how I can’t afford it, that I can’t afford buying some piece of art junk and always claiming to be dead broke.

You never stop nagging, do you? I say, even though the salesclerk can hear.

Edda glares at me with her spiteful yellow eyes and stomps out.

Heiður comes to the cash register to pay for a ceramic mug decorated with a picture of a fisherman from Lofoten. He’s wearing a yellow slicker with a long sou’wester hat and holds a huge cod, closely resembling Gunnlaugur Scheving’s portrait of a true Icelandic fisherman.