Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I do. Go east.

It occurred to me sitting there next to Jói that the counsel of doomed men hasn’t always been considered lucky. At least it wasn’t in Njál’s Saga .

Jói, Dýrfinna, Heiður, and Dad led me to this road, which lies over deathly sands from the netherworld. Jói showed me even more roads, and he taught me. He reconciled me with the fact that there are more un-poets than me, and what’s more, I came to understand that the worst lot is to want to compose poetry but not be able to because you’ve ceased to exist. Then I felt lucky, having the chance to continue to exist and breathe and capture experiences in order to create a poem or not a poem, a little mood that I scribbled down so that I wouldn’t forget it.

After Jói died I sometimes felt that I loved him, although he was dead. Or because he was dead. I recited my poems in order to feel his presence, and sometimes I felt that he was closer to me than the living, breathing beings around me, beings I spoke to with words and saw with my own eyes and smelled and touched. Sometimes I felt he’d become part of me, and I still feel it. It’s hard to explain.

You dream me only as darkness

in a narrow corridor.

You do not hear my words.

Speak, then, and make your words mine.

Whence I come no light shines

no word is heard.

Because I am in the light, and in the word itself,

as in the beginning, before it became.

I was on duty when Jói died. His family had been with him for his last few days and nights, but his mother happened to leave for a few moments. He was sleeping when I came to take his food tray. I put the tray on the cart, and when I turned back to his bed I saw that he was going. I rang his bell, pulled the curtain shut, and said to Herbert, a patient in the bed by the door: Go to the duty station and tell a doctor to come immediately. I looked into the brown eyes of my friend, for the last time, hugged him firmly, and whispered in his ear, My darling Jói , because I know that hearing is the last thing to go. He whispered something back, which I thought sounded like, Harpa and Jói . I thought I heard him laugh, but it must have been something else. He would be the first person I knew to have died laughing. When the doctor arrived, Jói was gone. I stopped hugging him, but continued to hold his hand, just in case. This was around the end of my shift. When I got home, I went to my room without saying anything to Edda, locked the door, and cried myself to sleep before dinner. It might be shameful to admit it, but my behavior was more out of self-pity for my own loss than Jói’s lost life, combined with jealous sorrow for not being dead like him.

Jói imposed an obligation on me. He implicitly demanded that I remember him, keep him in mind in a way that only I could do. It was his way to stick around and keep his presence alive, even if only in one soul — in the mind of the assistant nurse who some comedian of a doctor called Black Florence. I thought of him with all my heart when he was gone — I felt it served me right to love a dead boy — and I still raise him to life, my life, in his own words. I don’t understand how to reconcile longing for both that damned man who moved to Ísafjörður — his body, anyway — and the soul of this dear boy who dwells beyond the darkness.

I would do right to remind myself more often that some people have better reasons than I not to write poems. Some people are simply dead.

That’s at least less than what I am.

A raggedy-winged raven dives toward our car, as if planning to perch on the hood. It’s not a sinister bird, but rather a black envoy of those who are going to determine my fate, some of them palpably at my heels. Gerti Chicken and company in a yellow van. Naturally, my fate was determined long ago — the raven over the margin of the sands is just one little link in a long chain of defeats, a chain of dreams. Harpa Eir, a descendant of dreams that are never fulfilled — it’s passed down in the maternal line — who had a grandma who was going to travel and never traveled, who had a mom who longed to travel and to be more than she was, different than she was, yet who never became anything but notorious, though not any more widely than among her closest relatives. A mom who gave birth to a little runt of suspicious appearance, and who indifferently attributed it to the wrong father. Let me tell you, it’s no joke not to know who your father is. It must be incomprehensible to anyone but those who’ve experienced it. It’s the recipe for half a man. That’s it, I’ll call my autobiography HALF A MAN. It would be appropriate for a little woman, as well.

Another raven flies in an arc before the car. It seems almost as if it’s pulling a strip of sand behind it, the final grains that the wind can haul up at the end of the desert.

The sand-lion on the road that stretched out on its front paws and was going to growl us back, back to square one, has changed into a cuddly house cat.

Making it out of a sandstorm feels similar to pain subsiding.

When you’re in pain, it’s difficult to imagine it ever stopping.

When you end up in the darkness of a sand eclipse, you can’t see that the darkness will eventually sink, flatten, and lie down where it belongs.

You can’t imagine a stripe of light being born along the edge of darkness.

Dust receives us where the sandstorm leaves off. One car coming toward us is all it takes to create an extended plume. I envision myself blowing black stuff from my nose for the next three days. The vehicle rattles terribly on this bad dirt road, the sort that Heiður’s not used to driving on. Granted, she is driving slower than usual, afraid of losing control of the car on the loose gravel.

Damn, I’m hungry, says Heiður. Can’t we stop near that thicket and eat?

It’s too windy. We’ll have coffee at Arnbjartur’s.

Recluses never bother with coffee.

Sure they do, I say. Arnbjartur bakes sand cakes.

Maybe mud pies as well.

With this joke, Heiður gets her revenge. But before she can say anything more, she veers sharply toward the side of the road, where the car skids on the gravel. I hadn’t noticed the speeding car barreling up the road behind us. It passes us with such violence that Heiður has only a perilous instant to get out of the way. The cream-yellow Bronco — none other. Gravel shoots out from under its tires and pops loudly against our windshield.

We barely missed being smashed, says Heiður, braking abruptly in shock.

Then the dames would have been in trouble.

Look, there’s a nick on the windshield.

Fucking rude of them not to slow down on the loose gravel. It’s dangerous. What’s wrong with those people?

The Bronco reverses at high speed, heading straight toward us.

He’s really trying to hit us, says Heiður, furious.

Looking like a child’s drawing of a remarkably square soapbox car, the Bronco stops just in front of us. The driver steps out and examines our windshield, his face ruddy and taut, with bulging eyes and rosy lips. From a distance he seems a handsome man, but he awakens a slight apprehension upon closer inspection.

Heiður rolls down her window.

I felt gravel go flying, says the driver, and was a bit scared when you stopped. I thought maybe your windshield had shattered.

We’re lucky it didn’t, says Heiður, pissed off. You couldn’t slow down?

We’re late for a baptism in Kirkjubæjarklaustur. We were delayed by the sand.

I see, says Heiður.

Bye, dear, and sorry about this.

Bye.

The farmer jumps into his Bronco, energetic as a foal, and tears off, once again spraying gravel against our car.

The silver-haired woman in the front seat, the one I still believe to be the driver’s mother, looks over her shoulder to see where the pebbles and stones land. I’d swear she smiles. Heiður slams her hands on the wheel and lets loose with a mighty string of profanity, mixing in words such as goddamn hillbilly, namby-pamby , and motherfucking psycho fit for the grave , as she drives off into the brown cloud left in the Bronco’s wake. Her language brings joy to the backseat. The monster has woken from its dreams — less than beautiful, I should think. But the bizarre noise it makes isn’t laughter, isn’t human; it’s a surly growl that stops when it’s high but not low, abruptly, as if its engine has broken down.