Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

The man must have been clairvoyant, says Heiður.

To see Alexis Papas’s rest home rise from the hills after a steep and winding journey is unlike any other sight in human history. I squeeze my eyes partway shut and squint toward a monster of an old-fashioned turf farmhouse in the middle of a potato and vegetable field. The field’s fenced with sky-blue filigree-like wire mesh, high above the plain. There’s a wide view over the sand, as far as the eye can see, across the sea and out to the horizon, where the sky begins, and from the middle of the sea of sand rises the checkered-green island Hjörleifshöfði.

Go-od , who had this awful thing built? Heiður wonders aloud.

Alexis Papas, the old Greek. Don’t you remember? So much was written about it when he bought the farm and had this replica of an old-fashioned gabled farmhouse built.

I must have been overseas.

Alexis Papas was a shipping magnate who lost his family. Not one single gene of it is left. His son was murdered, his wife took her own life, and I don’t remember any more except that the old man gave almost all of his possessions to help the needy in India, and a sizeable part went to Mother Teresa. With the little he kept, he built this three-story farmhouse on an Icelandic heath. It can accommodate forty residents, but it’s never had more than twenty or so. Alexis Papas set admission requirements. The old folks must have an interest in organic farming, and work at it if they have the strength. Apparently, however, Icelandic senior citizens are just so headstrong that they’d rather hang around helplessly at home than pretend to have an interest in organic farming. Erika, on the other hand, didn’t need to pretend. She was bitten by the biodynamics bug long before it became fashionable in Iceland. I recall having seen her in my childhood with a copy of Biodynamics Journal that had photos of bright-yellow potatoes and phosphorescent carrots.

Pointing at a picture, she said: Zev has not been poison zo fahr.

Edda remains behind in the car, and I have the good sense not to utter a peep. Though it’s tempting to remind my daughter how well Erika has always treated her.

A lively gust of wind blows us along to the high iron gate. EFRI-HÆÐIR is spelled out in chrome letters swinging beneath the gate’s arch. UPPER HEIGHTS.

God, the rest home is called Upper Heights? What a hoot! says Heiður.

Yes, didn’t you know that? Alexis Papas got a nutty Icelandic language scholar to help him, and this was the result.

And what is that ?

Heiður points to a tiny building way back in a corner of the vegetable garden. It looks like a turf-roofed dollhouse, with a cross on top. It reminds me of something that Dad put together at some point, but I can’t remember what.

I think it’s a replica of the chapel at Núpsstaður, the smallest house of worship in the country. I heard about Alexis creating this replica, but I thought it was a joke.

Sheesh.

He liked that little cemetery over there so much that he bought it as well.

What’s he going to do with a cemetery?

Just own it, I think.

So does he own the people in it, too?

I hope not. My grandma and grandpa are buried there.

A long gravel lane leads to the house. On a sign next to the lane, the image of a car is crossed out.

How do they get the things they need? asks Heiður.

Everything’s brought by horse-drawn wagon up the last bit.

Organic home delivery, says Heiður, gasping with laughter at her own joke.

Didn’t the fellow check how damned windy it gets up here before he went and built his rest home? Here it just blows and blows. When Dad was a kid the church blew away. One morning people woke to find nothing but debris strewn around the property. Pieces of the organ were scattered all over the hayfield. It was a gold mine for the children and provided raw material for all sorts of workmanship for a few years afterward, especially the pipes. Some had been blown up into the hills. Half the instrument was stuck in the stream, and the keyboard lay on the bank, split in two yet hanging together. Like half a rib cage from an unknown creature that maybe went to get a drink a hundred years ago but then, like Lati Geir in the poem, lay there lazily until it died. Sheet music with hymns and funeral marches was cast across the slopes, while on the grave of Great-grandpa and Great-grandma lay an open hymnal, as if someone had placed it there neatly.

We’ve just come to a black-lacquered door when a short man with thick glasses appears from around the corner of the house. He’s wearing a tan cobbler’s apron over a checkered work shirt and is carrying a spade. A patch hides one of his eyes.

Did you say magnate or pirate? says Heiður.

He’s a war hero, my dear. He’s one of the Greek heroes who blew Nazis to bits during the war.

God, he looks like Onassis.

They’re related, as well.

That’s a damn lie.

They’re something like second or third cousins.

You’re joking.

Ask Erika if you don’t believe me. We’re lucky to catch a glimpse of him. You almost never see him except when he’s puttering in the garden. He even eats alone and never really speaks to anyone but Erika. They both speak German.

The doorbell at Efri-Hæðir is a golden convex apparatus that you hesitate to touch. It resembles a little breast with an exaggerated nipple.

A gray-haired woman in a white bathrobe, her shoulders bent, opens the door. Right next to her stands a man with angel hair and a baby face. They’re both the age of people who live in rest homes, but the woman has a nursing symbol on the lapel of her robe, so she must be on staff. Unless there’s a special arrangement here that the residents act as staff members on a rotating basis.

I’ve come to see Erika, I say.

She’s up on the second floor, says the woman, pointing at a golden elevator door. The final piece of the puzzle — an elevator in a traditional gabled farm.

The man with the angel hair tilts his head toward the gray-haired woman’s chest, and calls out softly: Mommy, Mommy, hello. He’s wearing a light-yellow tracksuit, and together he and Heiður are like an avant-garde advertisement for these overused garments.

Tracksuits are one of the most appalling inventions of recent decades, belonging only on tracks and in gyms. Yet entire rest homes, rehab centers, and all sorts of other asylums are chock-full of people in these uniforms. There’s no better way to shear people of their individuality than to put them in rustling, shiny tracksuits. I prefer good old bathrobes: checkered English wool robes with a belt around the middle, colorful velour robes with abstract patterns from Finnish designers, electric-blue nylon bathrobes with tasseled belts, short robes over spindly legs, wide American terry-cloth robes that make people look like little bears, Chinese silk robes with coloring-book flowers. I forbade Sibbi and his wife, Bagga, from giving Dad a tracksuit. He’ll be allowed to maintain his dignity, in polyester trousers and a blue-gray vest, with morbid-yellow elbow patches from the psychedelic mind of his dead wife.

Erika’s room is remarkably small compared to the size of the building. There’s nothing in it but one bed, one chair, and a transparent box in place of a nightstand: the seismograph itself. Adorning the bedroom are the white, pink, and purple flowers of African violets that fill the window, and beyond them shines the green ecosystem of the broad-leaved vegetable garden that sits almost under the clouds, while sand and sea lie far down below on the earth. Erika, small and slim, in her snow-white tracksuit that’s too wide at the shoulders, tends to the seismograph. The dear woman’s begun to lose her hearing and doesn’t notice me until I touch her shoulder.