Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

How’s it going with Edda?

The question catches me completely by surprise, and because I’m so unprepared for it, I can think of nothing better than to start crying. She seems to find it natural for me to shed a few tears and lays her hand on mine. After a brief moment I point at Edda’s door, which I’d shut, but I try not to say anything, because I know that nothing will emerge but a whimper.

Aunt Dýrfinna stands up, supports herself on the edge of the table, then on the doorjamb, and hobbles into Edda’s room. I continue sobbing in the living room like the most miserable crybaby. I can’t deal with anything, yet try to keep it quiet so that I don’t wake the monster.

In the middle of an onslaught of sobs, my curiosity kindles and I change chairs in order to see into Edda’s room. My aunt is kneeling by the bed, which her swollen knee-joints certainly can’t make easy. I’m worried about her trying to stand up unaided, so I drag myself in and stand next to the bed, fully prepared to help my aunt to her feet after she’s finished praying at the bedside of the battered girl. I’m careful to keep my eyes lowered, looking down at the blue-speckled vinyl tiles from IKEA that I laid myself, and not at the injured soul beneath the covers.

Aunt Dýrfinna heads back into the kitchen and sits down at the little round kitchen table.

It’s awful, she says. People are such beasts.

I don’t even know if someone beat her up or if she banged her head on something.

But they’re not just beasts. Some are angels at times. We must never forget that. Nor must we ever forget that light may kindle when all seems most hopeless, the darkness deepest. You and your daughter must come east and spend the winter there, you with me, and Edda in Andey. After that we’ll play it by ear.

No, Aunt, I can’t let you—

You’re both like my own daughters, though I never had any.

You mustn’t start—

It’s really nothing, my dear. You’ll stay in my attic. We might need to paint and lay new linoleum in one of the rooms. You know how to do that, I’m sure. And the girl will be perfect for helping out with the farmwork. She’s so well acquainted with Andey. You’ll see. The ridiculousness will drip off her like melted butter as soon as she gets up on a horse.

What about school?

She’ll just get a ride there, like the other kids in the area. It’s easy. Ingólfur drives the school bus.

I can’t imagine she’ll go for it. And anyway, how am I supposed to occupy myself?

They need people at the health center, my dear.

You’re pretty smooth.

There’s nothing else to do, my dear, but what’s obvious.

I’ll just keep going, says Heiður, driving on.

The sandstorm is no longer a storm. It’s transformed itself into little spurts that sweep stutteringly over the road at ground level, scratching powerlessly at the tires, not even reaching the hood to give it a poke. It’s the harmless remains of a natural disaster, nothing left but a little dabble in the sand, a little fiddling by the wind, which has grown tired of its own fury.

Behind us, the sandy cloud blocks our sight. No Hjörleifshöfði, no ocean. All that exists is what’s ahead. Maybe we’ve avoided the worst? Maybe time and wind direction have been favorable to us, the wind’s decided to side with us after all these years? Finally, after all these years.

And then what? asks Heiður.

Haven’t I told you all this before?

Not precisely.

Unless you’ve simply forgotten.

I got her with that one, because Heiður forgets everything I tell her. I’ve often been dreadfully hurt when things I’ve told her, things that are important to me, completely slip her mind. At those times I feel like an even smaller bug than usual, and I’m forced to remember how everything that Heiður does is much more important than what I do, that everything having to do with me is so damned insignificant that it doesn’t stay more than a moment in the head of my best friend. It just goes in one ear and out the other.

Okay, be upset if you want, Heiður says. I was just asking what happened next.

When Edda, with her deformed face, finally left her room and came into the kitchen dressed in pink paper-doll pajamas to find Dýrfinna sitting there mild and mighty on the kitchen stool, dressed in her Sunday best, the girl’s face was a true achievement in composition: both hostile and happy at once. You should have seen how my aunt handled the conversation at the kitchen table. She looked straight and firmly into Edda’s injured face and asked how she felt. And the girl said, Fine, thanks , and my aunt said that she would be herself again in ten days. Edda said triumphantly that she would have a scar on her cheek. The doctor had said so. Aunt Dýrfinna said that it would never even amount to a blemish. Edda growled: Like I could care.

Just before my aunt ordered a taxi, she handed Edda knitted socks and two thousand krónur and said: We need a winter farmhand in Andey. You should come out east, dear, with your mother. Ingólfur’s horses are in top form. You and Dreki didn’t make such a bad team there two years ago.

Had it actually been only two years since she was in the countryside? Those two years had taken as long to pass as an entire century.

Edda Sólveig Loftsdóttir’s expression of disapproval was so deep that it was clearly visible through her triple-sized lip, damaged cheek, and sunken eye.

It could be nice to get out of school, she said.

She has the tendency to be disgustingly crafty in her replies if there are others besides me within earshot. In place of giving a direct no, as she wanted to do, she came up with a cunning countermove. One might even be led to think she’d attended a training camp for slyness and duplicity.

Well, you’d still have to go to school, like everyone else your age. You’ve no choice but to finish the one year that you have left. Especially as intelligent as you are.

School’s a waste of time.

Don’t say such a thing. Everyone needs an education. You’re not going to spend your life scrubbing floors, Edda.

I can work in a fish factory.

What sort of a future is that? asked my aunt, looking directly at Edda. Plus, the cod are disappearing. Yes, I think a change will do you both good.

You’re fucking plotting something behind my back, said Edda after I’d helped Dýrfinna out to the taxi. It had become so difficult for Dýrfinna to walk that I could hardly believe she’d undertaken such a trip.

You know very well I would never have suggested such a plan. Aunt Dýrfinna simply sees that something’s really wrong.

Ings eally ong, mocked Edda. Yes, there’s something really wrong — you’re nuts with that silly poetry shit that you keep in the hamper. What do you do with it — use it for toilet paper? I’ve told Dúddi that you’re insane, that you keep poems in the bathroom. And that you hate me. Dúddi says so too, because you got pregnant so young—

No, it’s you who hates you, I interjected. That’s why you’re so awful to me.

You’re a damned whore. When I turn sixteen, I’m going to kill you.

Why put it off?

So that I can get into a real prison with genuine criminals and not some fucking juvie-nursery.

You wouldn’t get anywhere farther than Kleppur Psychiatric Hospital, where you’d sit and stew with all the genuine psychos.

She slapped my face hard enough for my ear to ring.

I stood still as stone, not moving, not blinking an eye.

You’re welcome to do away with me, little Edda. It’ll save me the trouble.

Kill yourself, you slut.

I stuck to my old method of retreating to my room, locking the door, and sitting in the rocking chair. I tried reading a book but I couldn’t concentrate. Instead, I thought about how much I didn’t want to live — the most useless thoughts in the world, because for the moment I was forced to continue living, sad to say. I realized that I was only just pretending to be about to swallow the pills before Dýrfinna came, and even if I had forced them down, I wouldn’t have managed to give up the ghost completely, because Edda would have found me before they did their job, or the couple upstairs would have come to check on me.