Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

See how fond my spiritual sisters are of me?

It’s not normal. They arrange themselves in an orderly semicircle around me and moo softly. They don’t even blink an eye at Heiður, as if she doesn’t exist. Maybe they feel a real connection with me, or maybe they’re just disoriented by the muggy weather, chewing their cuds sluggishly.

The cream-colored Bronco comes driving by.

I’m relieved to see it, even if it’s just that old lady and her son, says Heiður. I was starting to get a bit of a “last person in the world” feeling.

If only we were dreaming, as the last person in the world might wake to discover he was doing.

It’s not that bad, Harpa.

As I put everything back in the picnic basket, folding the tablecloth and the napkins, I’m engulfed by the desire to wet them with a flood of tears. To blow my nose in them, my face swollen, and lie down to sleep on this slope without ever, ever having to wake up again.

The jumble of cows retreats when I stand up. I call it a touch of respect, something that hardly anyone else shows me. Heiður takes the basket from me and rushes ahead down the slope. It’s typical of her to want to lead the group, whether it consists of one or more. She waits for me on the other side of the fence to help me cross over accident-free, and for a moment the consideration shown by this impatient person makes me feel so small and weak that a little tear slips out into the world.

How fleeting were our good times in the grass just now. After I’d bandaged Edda, after she’d sat down with her snack, before she sprang up violently and flung food at an innocent curlew. They’d lasted only two or three minutes.

Can the secret to life be to prolong the good moments? As they’re being experienced, if possible; otherwise in memory.

Moments experienced in the blink of an eye. Two minutes in the grass. If only we could continue to live in those moments as we move on.

The art of turning back on the journey into the murky woods, reining in the darkness, sharpening it into the bright point that it originally was, and focusing our attention on it like a yogi. TO REMEMBER THE GOOD, that will be the title of one chapter of my autobiography, as well as a suggestion to others as to how we should perform that task. If we’re able to gaze at the bright spot , life will become as wholesome as it possibly can. It’s the only way to make a bit of sense of it. In that point is crystallized a fragment of the wholesomeness, the good that was, at least at one time. That could possibly be again. I focus on it and call on the clouds as my witnesses that it was so, as I remember it, all the clouds in the skies of the world that never return in the same form.

I’ll be damned if Edda isn’t looking shamefaced in the backseat, still sipping from her Pripps can.

Do you remember the raven at Andey? I ask her.

Huh?

It laid its eggs on the cliff above Grandma’s Grove and did all sorts of damage. It even attacked the lambs as they were being born.

As they were being born? Gross, says Heiður.

Yes, my dear. Ravens are villains. My cousin Ingólfur tried to destroy its nest. The raven made air raids against him, flew over him with rocks in its claws and dropped them on him. Ingólfur returned looking none the better and on the next trip took his shotgun with him. He hates no creature as much as the raven. When he was a kid, he played at being the mother of thrush chicks in their nest, putting butter on blades of grass and giving it to them to eat. But one morning when Ingólfur came out, a raven had killed all the thrush chicks.

I think ravens are awesome, says Edda. I’d like to be a pitch-black raven.

They’re cruel, Edda, I say.

I’m cruel, too.

Edda pops on her headphones to indicate that this communication is finished — over and out — and closes her eyes.

I do too, tired after our déjeuner sur l’herbe , tired after having removed everything from our Bollagata hole, having scrubbed my hands sore, tired from everything that’s occurred, before and since, especially since. TIRED OF LIVING, the subtitle of my autobiography. Tired of living, YET I SHALL STILL STRUGGLE.

Struggle on, avoid the pits into which I’m always stumbling.

I must not allow myself to eliminate the bright point, cover it, and expand into outermost darkness, mourning the beautiful and good that once was, wishing that it had never happened because the regret is so deep.

Regret for the man in the January night whose private name for me as a child was The Foreign Girl . A man who’s nowhere—Ísafjörður wiped off the map.

It was Heiður’s fault that we met again, after never even having spoken to each other since the damned swimming lesson twenty years ago. My prima donna friend had spent an entire day practicing an unusually complicated modern flute piece and said that she deserved a Campari with a view. After a considerable amount of persuasion, she dragged me along to the bar at Hotel Esja on a brilliant June evening.

Heiður had ordered her drink in her usual way: I’d like something strong, for five hundred krónur , and on the basis of this lively opener ended up in an energetic conversation with a childish fellow with frighteningly light-blue eyes.

Drunk people of both sexes were giving me attitude when the top dog walked in the room with some foreigners, the center of attention as always, without even trying.

I retreated to the window with a Campari and soda and was looking over the snow-white places of my youth in the Laugarnes neighborhood, the concrete domed building and the former Dock Wood. Suddenly, someone laid his hand on my behind and said: You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

It was a pencil-thin old man with leathery dark-brown skin, his hair dyed blue-black, curly and glossy with Brilliantine. He was wearing a striped suit, a white shirt with a red-and-black silk tie, a clunky silver tie-clip with a red ruby — the kind that Icelandic boys got as confirmation gifts around 1960—and a red carnation at his breast. This elderly gigolo smelled strongly of aftershave that I didn’t recognize, but the smell was good. He moved closer, put his arm around my waist, smiled straight into my face, and made himself ready for a cinematic kiss. He had false teeth and had forgotten to trim his nose hair.

I retreated from his death-kiss, bumping backward into the nearest person and apologizing over my shoulder before I saw that I’d splashed the drink from the top dog’s glass and drenched his lapel. I felt awful, so I took out a newly ironed cotton handkerchief and tried to dry off this man. Luckily, he’d only been drinking water.

The man stared with great interest at the handkerchief, since modern women always carry tissues. Then he pointed at the gigolo and asked: Is that your dad?

Yes, we always drink together, I said. At the same time I recognized the water man, although our acquaintanceship had begun and ended almost two decades ago.

Hi, he said.

Hi, I said.

Do you still swim?

Not at the same pool.

We’d both taken swimming lessons from Jón Ingi at Austurbæjar School one spring. I wasn’t more than ten years old, and he something similar. It was a particular trial for me to take those detestable lessons, but Mom forced me. I was suffering the misfortune of having my breasts develop far too prematurely. The left one was a sight larger, and the asymmetry caused me added shame. I went around slightly bent to draw attention away from these embarrassing bumps and developed complex strategies to make them less noticeable — for instance, wearing baggy sweaters though they weren’t in fashion, and trying to keep my arms crossed over my breasts and hide both of them behind anything available, such as schoolbags, pillars, posts, and even light poles when handy. It wasn’t exactly high on my wish list to display myself in a swimsuit or take showers in public. I still find it a shock to see photos of myself from that time. I look like an eight-year-old in overall appearance and height, but my chest is noticeably developed. A big-breasted little girl. What a perverse sight.