Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Heiður looked around my room respectfully and said it was awfully nice, making me feel proud that the richest girl in the school should feel that way. She was in awe of the little church on my desk, which Dad had crafted as a Christmas ornament for me. It resembled Laugarnes Church and was lit up electrically. In the sparkling snow surrounding it were Yule Lads out for a stroll under the guidance of their mother, the ogress Grýla. One had a candle made of a match, with wax melted over it, its wick made of superfine crocheted twine. Heiður had never seen anything so cute as that miniature candle. Yet what she liked best were the embossed shelves that Dad had made for me, full of books, even foreign picture books.

She said that there were no pictures on the walls of her room, so I gave her one that I’d cut out of National Geographic , of black monkeys with white stripes, which we called zebra-monkeys, and another of parrots in rainbow colors that Dad and I had pasted on cardboard and framed.

Sibbi was hovering outside my room, warbling one of his songs: There goes Harpa-larpa-lo. She’s ugly from head to toe. Heiður slammed the door in Sibbi’s face, already defending her dark little friend.

Damn, she snorted, I’m lucky I don’t have brothers or sisters.

I started feeling sorry for Heiður, the rich, spunky girl who had no pictures to put on the walls of her room. Setting up shelves for her was always on the back burner, so her books were kept in wardrobes or drawers. I began to realize that just because you’re an only child with a rich dad doesn’t mean you get everything you want.

Yet this nouveau-riche dad of Heiður’s certainly has been incredibly helpful to her, and to me as well. I almost certainly wouldn’t have taken this trip, this salvage expedition to the east, if I didn’t have a friend whose dad owned a pickup truck. Or the country’s most isolated villa, the summer palace at the foot of the volcanic neck Lómagnúpur where Jens Kaaber and his wife, Saga, are providing us accommodation.

I don’t want to remember the real reasons for this trip. Heiður and I are just out for a lazy jaunt through the countryside.

Over the fresh green Eyjafjöll fields

the eastern sky with a little jar of cloud puree

the ruins of sheds on rugged cliffs, stoutly built barns and silos that I call ICELAND’S CASTLES

calves on steep slopes

dog-lazy ewes dragging their lambs behind them in the rust-red brush at the feet of slopes

patches of green

millions of rocks on the road to the south.

The Moonlight Sonata soft and dark. In sharp Sunday light.

Now my friend should play something happier.

A sunlight sonata.

Dad played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata over and over, on the piano as much as on the record player. Mom couldn’t bear it, calling it the wail of ghost, like that of an infant left out to die. Dad’s eyes would then turn red and his chin would twitch vulnerably. Everything was used against Dad. What was dearest to him was used most against him.

Do you remember how you acted toward Dad when he played his favorite song? I ask Mom. You must regret it.

A new month in your life starts tomorrow. September, after August. Stop talking about the past and focus on what’s to come.

Strange that you should say that, as someone who stopped existing ages ago and refuses to leave.

Mom’s behind the wheel of the pickup truck now, wearing her traveling outfit from my childhood. Light-brown moleskin pants and a sweater the colors of the Icelandic flag, with a Norwegian pattern and fancy metal buttons. It figures that she and Teddi, the chief evildoer in Edda’s gang, dress in a similar vein. Norwegian ski sweaters are something all evildoers share in common.

Why do you want to drive, Mom? You never learned to drive. Have you forgotten that?

Don’t think that we sit idly in the beyond. I’ve earned my driver’s license, dear. I really could use the practice. It’s good to be able to take the wheel down here on earth.

Are all your roads paved?

Yes, they just put permanent surfaces on all the roads. It was a huge project and they had to take an unfavorable loan, but it’s a completely different life on our roads now.

There’s one thing that I’ve always wanted to talk to you about, Mom.

Don’t start talking about Dad now. I’m not in the mood.

It has nothing to do with Dad. It’s something that I’ve never mentioned to anyone. Sometimes I think I dreamed it, but I know it was real.

Oh, please don’t hassle me with your nonsense.

Once, just after I’d returned from the hospital after the boys attacked me in Dock Wood, I woke in your arms like a baby wrapped in a blanket, and you were crying and upset and you rocked in your seat and wailed and you were saying: What have I done?

You must have been feverish.

I was almost nine and you held me like a dead infant in the blanket and you hurt my broken arm.

Once you had a high fever when you were that age. You’re talking about that.

You know that’s not true. I’d like to understand why you broke down like that.

You’ll understand it if you think long enough, and warmly enough. When you’ve finally understood that, you’ll understand everything. I’ve never told Dad about it.

You’re a good girl in some respects.

It’s here, our picnic spot, I say to Heiður. Stop, stop.

Where?

Here on the left, by the corral.

Ugh, look at all the cows, says Edda, like a city girl who’s never visited the countryside.

Heiður brakes so abruptly it’s like being rear-ended.

You’re going to kill us all, says Edda from the backseat, in a deep doomsday voice. Sometimes, it really does sound as if her voice is changing.

Did you doze off, my little chick? I ask, thinking immediately that I shouldn’t have said something that might make her think of Gerti.

None of your business.

Aren’t you hungry, ladies? I ask, as the keeper of our provisions.

Not me. I’ll wait in the car.

Says she who was complaining about being hungry.

Heiður and I step out, two slightly stiff dames, and fetch the picnic basket from beneath the tarp, where it sat at the base of my slim Electrolux refrigerator. It’s not just all the sitting in the car that makes it hard to move now, but also the density of the calm air, like a palpable material that we have to break through, preferably with a jungle machete, like explorers. Mom called this type of weather murderous mildness . Was that supposed to be funny?

The sky is calm along the Eyjafjöll Range, the gusty region where sheep are blown up onto cliffs and end up starving or having to be shot. I can’t help it, but sometimes I remind myself of a sheep that’s been blown onto a cliff and doesn’t know whether it should let itself fall or wait for someone to be so kind as to come and put a bullet through it.

Barbed-wire fence. An obstacle that I’ve struggled against since my very first days in the countryside, like Don Quixote in the guise of a girl fighting with fences. THE GIRL WHO DIDN’T GROW UP. I still have to struggle, come up with a strategy, locate a suitable place to clamber over — from a tussock, for example — or move a rock to stand upon.

Now everything’s easier because there are two of us. Heiður goes first, swings her legs over, one after the other, without needing me to hold down the barbed wire, but I do so anyway with one hand, holding the picnic basket in the other. It’s a sophisticated container of the English variety, wicker on the outside, lined and partitioned on the inside, with straps to hold down the crockery and cutlery with rosewood shafts. It was intended more for trips to the forest in the Lake District of England than in the Icelandic countryside, where everything is endlessly being blown away. One of the few things left from my relationship with Alli. He gave it to me as a birthday present but intended it mainly for himself, because he found it so fun to have me prepare the food for countryside picnics, during which he’d get drunk. He preferred to crown such outings by doing it out in nature under various weather conditions, after bothering to find level ground, of course.