Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Heiður holds down the wire, and I clamber over with the utmost caution. Still, I barely avoid getting caught on the barbs — these are no legs at all, these stubs of mine — and ripping my newly ironed snow-white trousers, which go so well with my fuchsia-colored cotton V-neck sweater. My white jacket, the other half of my pantsuit, I’ve left behind in the car, choosing instead to bring my rain jacket.

You look absolutely stunning, says Heiður, as if she’d read my thoughts about how tremendously chic I am. In freshly brushed moccasins and all the rest, on a stroll through the cow dung. As if you’re on a yacht.

Heiður swings the picnic basket, many yards ahead of me, the woman with the long legs. How good she has it — and then there’s poor me, short and faint-hearted. It’s a grand shame being so petite, and just so hard. Life would have been different for me if I’d been over five foot three. At five two, oh, I hardly can be called a person, damn it, not lengthwise, anyway. At least I’m all woman crosswise. At my worst moments I think of my fellow sufferers, short men like Sammy Davis Jr. and Napoleon, and I remind myself that it’s twice as bad for a man to be small.

Heiður’s walking slowly up the slope, past the corral. Her gait’s steady now, and she’s stopped swinging the picnic basket. It’s as if she’s playing her flute but fluteless. Such is the effect the calm weather can have on a jerky person between a belt of cliffs and the sea.

After the early-morning jump start on the bliss, the landscape now looks worn-out, like it’s taking a Sunday nap. The seagulls screech softer than usual, slightly hoarse, and sail lazily over a black cliff, which in the summer is embroidered with herbal-dyed yarn. Now the green yarn has become somewhat frayed and reddish beneath the diligent sun, which was at work all day and all night at its peak. The final day of August has arrived. The feast of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist and the birthday of little Harpa, August 29, has passed, and the angelica has already yellowed here and there. Otherwise, autumn shows few signs that it has already begun. The grass is vibrant green in the morning sun, brighter and more aggressive than it ought to be right now.

A black cow snuffles ahead of its sisters, coughs loudly, looks us over, takes two cautious steps, stops. The one nearest it looks at us and tilts its head shyly. Its belly is black and white and gray, patterned and textured like a glacier tongue. Its female friends stretch their snouts toward us and swing their heavy heads in unison.

The racket deepens. The seagulls branch out on their cliff-carousel, and the echo of their chatter travels far, while the poor flies buzz slowly over the open picnic basket, so languid that it wouldn’t surprise me if their wings stopped beating and they plopped straight into the smoked salmon.

Now I put on sunglasses, as is suitable in so much light, and start arranging our provisions on a little tablecloth that I embroidered with care in home economics class, before putting it aside for a time, and finally finishing it just before Edda was born. ONCE THERE WAS A PREGNANT CHILD WHO KEPT STITCHING A FULLY STITCHED TABLECLOTH.

You sure are taking your time with this, Heiður says.

Just making sure everyone’s going to be happy, I reply. These are yours, dear; no butter.

A real picnic! exclaims Heiður.

All we need are the woods. Typical, don’t you think?

Is that silly girl just going to mope there in the car?

Heiður, let’s pretend the girl doesn’t exist for the time being. The only way to survive her is to eliminate her from your mind at regular intervals.

In calmness and sun, we sink our teeth into the salmon-topped bread and stop existing except as consumers of precious open-face sandwiches.

Then after a break of forty-five seconds or so, the car door slams shut, and we become participants in life once more.

Edda Sólveig has thought better of it and is on her way up the picnic slope. She clambers straight over the barbed wire, without bothering to hold it down. Those who do so usually end up tearing holes in their pants, and that’s what Edda does. Her demeanor is far from inviting as she strides up to us, stepping in a cow pie along the way, naturally.

I’m bleeding, whines the girl piteously as she approaches, in the same tone of voice she used after scraping herself when she was little.

I have a Band-Aid, I say, reaching into my pocket.

Always prepared for everything, says the flutist. There’s no one like you.

No one like me but my dad, to whom I don’t belong. He’s my model for always having a Band-Aid in my pocket.

The girl has to take off her pants in order for me to put on the Band-Aid. Blood oozes in two thin lines from a cut on her inner thigh. It reminds me of horrible things, and I feel faintness spreading through me, from the small of my back, first down and then up, all the way to the crown of my head, with a slight tingling from my temples to my forehead.

Heiður smiles at me, and I absorb her reassuring currents, gather strength, buck up, put my foot down. There’s so much that I mustn’t think about on the way east. I mustn’t let the bad things that Edda and I have encountered this past year get hold of me now. I would be lost. It’s true what they say, that life’s struggle is the struggle to gain control over our thoughts. Control them according to our own traffic signals. Green: think. Red: don’t think. I’m here to enjoy a picnic, not to recall the worst.

My injured wretch in torn stretch pants is eating a salmon sandwich.

Does it hurt, Edda?

Yes, a bit, she says miserably, like a little girl trying to pull herself together.

Flies still hang over their potential catches, but they seem to be suffering sunstroke, because they make no attempt to get hold of anything.

These are absolutely delectable, dear, says Heiður.

Then try to behave like a civilized person and eat with your little finger raised, I say, and Heiður laughs.

Edda looks at us like we’re unbearable old maids making fun of her. She stands up and hurls away a piece of her sandwich. A bird shoots up where the slice comes down. Just as well it wasn’t a rock.

I notice Heiður’s temper flare. It’s clear what she wants to do. Punch the girl. I want to, too.

What a sorry excuse for a mother I am. To want to work over this pathetic figure who’s walking as if one leg were shorter than the other. The bad mother’s conscience stings me, knowing that somewhere inside the sorry soul before me is the adorable red-haired stripling who gathered dandelions in Grandma’s Grove and kissed dogs on the lips to the displeasure of three generations. It’s impossible to hate her for real, except briefly. She’s so ill, this monster, and so young.

Oh. I can never feel any feelings undivided, not even anger at myself. Everything is mixed and intertwined, half persons, half a life, one quarter from something else, maybe not from life. Not even my pessimism is unpolluted. Even if everything looks hopeless, you can still experience, well, I wouldn’t say happy days, but good moments. I’m not pessimistic enough not to go east, though I have no hope — or, should I say, little hope. I have to try something; I refuse to see the only thing that’s mine fall to ruin.

The cows stand huddled together, alternately mooing softly and staring moist-eyed at their female friends from the capital. I feel as if they’re focusing on me, a dark-skinned woman in white pants out in the wilderness, with her rain jacket conscientiously spread on the ground so that she won’t soil her clothes. The mottled lead cow sets off, heading toward the little woman, very slowly yet steadfastly, and the others follow at a distance. They walk lazily, giddy in the voluminous warmth, their recently emptied udders swinging. They sniff at me and the last drops of Chanel No. 5 that I splashed on before we left. It’s just like me to squander the final fragrant whiffs on beasts of the field.