Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Home-butchering, on the road, says Heiður.

If it’s only that.

Edda suddenly appears next to me.

Are you crazy, Mom? Peeking in people’s windows, for fuck’s sake.

Sorry, darling, but it’s just a car, I say, terribly submissive out of old habit, and apologetic, as if I’ve played a nasty trick on her.

See what she gave me. She said she had another one.

Edda shows me the little statue of Christ from Erika’s window.

It looks to me as if my beast likes this gift. Who would have believed it?

And she gave me five thousand krónur.

God Almighty. Hopefully, you thanked her.

Of course, says Edda, highly insulted. You think I don’t have manners?

Down down down

all the way down to the field.

It goes quickly. Yet the wind is against me.

Not even the wind is with me.

A dead-tired woman

of a highly uncertain origin.

The odor of alcohol emanating from Edda has intensified. The old man must have given her one for the road.

Heiður grasps the steering wheel tightly as she navigates the curves down the slopes. She bites her thin lips as she works hard to counteract the wind.

MANY FACES are made in such a way that any one part of them can live an independent life that is unconnected to the face or the individual associated with it, like a part that has survived the death of the body and is now a ghost. These parts of the face are little used, more often than not — think of someone with glassy eyes or a frozen upper lip — and, with their lack of use, point either to death or a former life, despite their independence.

I don’t know what life Heiður Jensdóttir’s regal nose has come from, but it would fit just as perfectly on a falcon as a man, preferably an Arabian sheik. This falcon’s beak is little noticeable when Heiður speaks, laughs, or thinks, and she never wrinkles this piece of furniture. Instead, it sits like a stone somewhat in the middle of her face while her mouth moves and she narrows her quick eyes. Although her nose does nothing while awake, it certainly does in sleep. Heiður snores loudly, a fact she does not find humorous at all.

Heiður’s masculine nose transforms only under one circumstance as far as I know, and that’s when she plays her flute. Then this majestic nose stops ruling over everything as it’s put under the control of instrument and notes. It’s only when Heiður blows into her flute that her nose melds perfectly with her and acquires a life that’s connected to the rest of her.

Do you remember, Edda? That’s where Grandpa saw the monster, there on the slope where the footpath runs from the sand high up to the brink where he lived when he was a kid. The rest home is built right on top of the farmstead.

Dad was nine years old, and there was another boy of about the same age with him. They went down the slope, where the path turns, in order to fetch the cows. It’s called Kaplagarðar; you can see the track. It was midsummer, in calm, sunny weather, with unusually high temperatures. After coming halfway down, they saw a gray-white behemoth the length of two full-grown cows trying to climb up the bottom part of the slope, slow and cumbersome, murmuring as it inched its way up, legless, or so it seemed. It tumbled down several times and took a very long time regaining that ground. Dad says they weren’t afraid, because the creature wasn’t making any great speed. The boys ran up to the farm, and farmhands were sent to the scene, but they saw nothing. They went all the way down and fetched the cows, but it turned out to be impossible to drive them up the slope where the beast had been seen. The locals guessed that its odor or even slime frightened away the cows, though human noses could smell nothing.

The river’s right near there, says Edda. The monster must have gone into it.

Yes, the Múlakvísl River. That was one of the theories.

What can it have been? asks Heiður.

Nobody knows. Dad thought it resembled an elephant seal, but the creature didn’t have a balloon on its snout, as elephant seals do.

It was a walrus, says Edda.

They didn’t see any tusks.

It was a huge seal, says the girl.

A manatee, says Heiður.

A legless manatee?

You two sure can bullshit, says Edda Sólveig, in a voice that reminds me of both an old bitch and a bad actor playing a flamboyant gay man. She’s getting a very good grasp of this variant, which is newish and incredibly grating on the nerves. If she continues using this tone during our trip, I’ll throw myself out the window.

Hey, what’s this? Heiður asks, before answering her own question. We’ve come to sand.

She’s distracted once again, and the car veers toward the edge of the road. Yet crashing there wouldn’t be so swift a death, because the drop is no higher than a foot and a half, followed by level black sand.

Someone has a fake driver’s license, says Edda.

The sand’s starting to blow. Look at that bank there.

It’s some sort of dust cloud. I hardly think it could be a real sandstorm. But it’s quite windy.

I asked up at Efri-Hæðir, just to be sure, but was told there’s no sand.

Funny wording, that there’s no sand. This is an absolute desert.

Should we turn back?

No, damn it, says Heiður. But it wouldn’t be good to ruin the paint on Dad’s car. It costs more than a hundred thousand krónur to spray-paint a car.

The sand’s bad for the windows, too, says Edda. It dulls them.

It’s something, no question about it, says Heiður.

Maybe we should turn back, I say.

There’s plenty of time to turn back, replies the driver.

We continue halfheartedly. At least it’s halfheartedly that I continue. I’m careful not to say it out loud. I mustn’t make excuses for my own escape. Halfheartedly, like everything else I decide to do. HALFHEARTED — that would be the perfect title for my autobiography. Got pregnant as a teen, halfheartedly. Lived with a man, halfheartedly. Fled to the peace of the countryside, halfheartedly. Will die halfheartedly, and come back as a ghost, halfheartedly. Ugh.

All out of luck, little loner.

An only daughter, not even loved by her dead mother. You’d think Mom could at least have given me that.

Following us are sinister birds, a skua and great skua, sent from Mom with a message that I’m making this trip for nothing, to remind me that I’m doomed to lose. That Edda, the only thing I have, will end up destroying herself in a hell of her own making, which is my doing even though I don’t even know how I managed it.

The birds aren’t from me, little Eisa. It’s absolutely no use pinning them on me.

I’d certainly believe you to be capable of sending flying monsters my way.

Those noxious birds have nothing to do with me. I stand by that, you little nervous Nellie.

Mom, I know it’s difficult to cut the cord, almost impossible. Yet I beg you, let’s stop, instead of talking like this to each other.

I’ll think it over.

We’ve got to learn to reconcile if we’re going to survive.

I didn’t survive, my dear. That’s the whole point.

The route over the sand has shortened since I was a kid. Back then it seemed endless. On a bumpy road, in a big cloud of dust, and Harpa frightened as could be, worrying about the possibility of a devastating glacial flood from Katla. I tried to spy escape routes for us. Where the closest refuge might be now . On the other side of Hjörleifshöfði? On top of Mount Hafursey? On this trip over the sands there are serious difficulties — a mad sandstorm is a relief. To know what one should fear is so much easier than to fear everything and nothing, vaguely.

Blowing sand. A cause for fear that this little coward somehow missed back in the day.