Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

How silly I am. These winged creatures can fly out of this disaster. Winged creatures, as I am in spirit. It’s been a game of mine through everything that’s come my way to imagine myself with wings, to imagine that I can ascend above all of this after a prolonged takeoff, like a swan taking off from water, dragging its black feet along the surface a long way, coming to full steam like an airplane along a runway, and driving itself into the blue in order to view the earth from the sky on wide wings, from a lofty distance.

More often than a swan, though, I’m a martyr, an angel with one wing.

You inherited it from me, little Eisa.

Is that you, ghost Mom?

You can’t fly far on your one wing, my dear.

Well, I just sort of flutter and flap it a bit.

You’ve always looked slightly lopsided.

I use my wing rather infrequently. It’s mostly ornamental.

Maybe being caught in a sandstorm isn’t such a bad thing, Mom says. It’s exciting to find oneself in a bad place in life, feeling claustrophobic and suffocated.

To move along the road, a reprobate hussy in a movable cage of roaring sand?

To be defenseless against a sandstorm, she says. There’s worse defenselessness than that.

I’d rather be defenseless against the sand than against people. With all that they entail.

Although the storm has let up a bit, Heiður stops on a bridge, and I’m not about to interfere.

To think that all these greening measures still can’t prevent the sand from blowing, I say.

Conservationists are always protesting the planting of foliage in the black sands. They say the sands are a natural wonder, existing nowhere else.

Lucky they exist nowhere else. They’re a horror.

I check the backseat to make sure Edda has her headphones on.

Hey, guess what? I say to Heiður quietly. I could swear I thought I saw the Little Yellow Hen dash past us earlier.

You think they’ve chased us all the way here?

If it’s the Hen, then they’re chasing us.

Do you think the sand has you seeing things?

I don’t think so.

Those assholes.

Gerti’s always in the middle of it. He’s the one who brought Edda home, with her arm broken and her face all beat up.

But he still had the sense to take her to the emergency room?

A man of his intellect couldn’t have come up with that himself. Someone must have sent him.

And no one knows what happened to the child?

Maybe the person who attacked her.

Could she have fallen?

It looked more like she’d been beaten.

And in the middle of all of it, Dýrfinna arrived.

She arrived the day that I was going to kill myself. For three days straight Edda had been playing Guns N’ Roses at full blast. Then she attacked me when I offered to give her headphones. My leg still isn’t quite right.

Heiður is silent. It’s not a good sign if she says nothing after my repartee. She’s so impatient that she usually doesn’t even let me finish what I’m saying — she’s very bad about interrupting. With her there’s no pausing for effect, except when absolutely necessary. In other words, when she’s onstage.

She’s crazy, of course, says Heiður softly, breaking this unusual silence.

That’s not what my doctor says.

Your doctor? What does her doctor say?

You don’t remember? She stopped seeing her psychiatrist, that guy named Dúddi. In her mind, he’s so stupid and idiotic and dresses so lame and uses such ridiculous words that she absolutely can’t see him.

Too bad I was abroad. Tell me again exactly what happened.

The third evening that Edda was at home recuperating, a soft knock came on the inner door just before midnight. It was the noisemaker from upstairs, my landlord, who loomed over me like a natural disaster what with his constant commotion. I stared expectantly at his limpid, flabby cheeks, his blubbery neck, and the sloughy red eczema that flourished at the boundary between his baldness and his tufty hair. He said in a ministerial voice that things couldn’t go on like this any longer. The loud music had prevented him and his wife from catching a wink of sleep the last few nights. I said: Me too, and took one step back from this physically repulsive yet courteous man. I apologized to him and confessed that I had no control over it. The girl kept herself in her room with her broken arm and beat-up face, and she was so stressed or something that she couldn’t sleep. I sighed this out, on the verge of tears. My landlord saw how I felt and laid his scaly hand on my shoulder. That sorted me out for the moment, since his physical disgustingness was stronger than my tears. I think I more or less shook the man’s hand off me as I came up with the clever statement that I ought to have thought of long before:

I really should buy her headphones, because I’ll never get her to stop playing her music at full blast.

Would it have more impact if I spoke to her? asked the poor man.

She doesn’t want anyone to see her in such a condition. But of course I’ll let her know that you came.

I went into Edda’s room. She was sitting in the lotus position on the crappy bed that her mother, the assistant nurse, hadn’t been allowed to make, despite considerable pressure. Along with the blanket and pillow, the bed was cluttered with a sweater, an orange-juice carton, a plastic bag from the Hagkaup supermarket, a hairbrush, cassette tapes, and slippers. Edda was staring at the heap, looking terribly pitiable, her face damaged, her arm in a cast, wearing too-small pajamas and holding a brightly smiling teddy bear.

I’d thought about how to speak to her without upsetting her. My dear Edda, I began. I’ll buy you headphones first thing tomorrow, but will you please turn down the music? The landlord stopped by and said they haven’t been able to sleep the past couple of nights.

Where are you going to get the money for headphones, you famished whore?

I’ll borrow it.

My daughter replied by reaching over to the stereo and turning it up.

Edda, I’m begging you, this can’t go on. The people upstairs will end up calling the police.

No, you’ll do it yourself, if I know you right, you loose bitch.

However she managed it, she lifted herself quick as a flash from the lotus position and kicked my kneecap with all her might, causing me to drop to the floor with a wail. She hit me on the shoulder with her cast as I cowered on the floor, making me cry out again. I completely lost it — from pain, anger, despair, I don’t know what to call it — and screamed with all the powers of my life and soul, drowning out that infernal music.

Then the man from upstairs appeared. I tried to stop wailing but couldn’t, and I also found that wailing helped me withstand the pain. But I shed not one single tear, no more than the foster daughter of wolves would have done. The poor man looked like a fish out of water, but he offered me his hand to help me to my feet. I waved him off, but suddenly I realized that it felt really good to scream, and I made a game of continuing to do so. I tried to change the scream into a genuine howl that I would have been completely content with during the heyday of Kamala the wolf-girl.

In the midst of all this, I was deadly calm inside and I thought of a comment a certain doctor made: I would rather that the patient let me know I’m hurting him than for him to start crying after everything’s done.

The man from upstairs changed his focus to Edda and looked thunderstruck at her scarred cheeks and swollen lips, and one eye sunken behind a frame of dark blue and red. She stared back hard. After several minutes of taking in Edda’s face and my cries, the man turned down the music and said: For the love of God, what’s going on?