Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

The roses in the flower bed by my arched window in the Bollagata basement have started to bloom, early and with exceptional vigor. When I sit on the couch, I have a clear and direct view of these violet briar roses with beautiful leaves and thick stems. Sometimes they’ve lasted until November, because I nurture them well, calling myself THE STEPMOTHER OF ROSES, but they actually belong to the fat woman upstairs. She’s their true mother. I can’t imagine many such noble views of roses from the windows of the city, and arched basement windows are rare pearls. Yet Edda and I have these, at least, though we’re wanting other things. She comes and sits close to me on the couch, cuddles her bony ten-year-old body up to me and says that she’s looking forward to going east. I am too, my darling, I say, as I stroke her fiery-red hair.

That was the trip when my brother, Sibbi, drove us in the big jeep. He’d taken out a loan for it, like everything else, and ended up bankrupting both himself and our father, sweeping away my modest future dreams of returning to France and visiting my friend in Perpignan. A true Icelander, my brother. Heiður had planned on going east with us, taking a little break. She felt she deserved it, having just won second prize in a flute competition in Montreal. I was jealous, though happy for her in a distant corner of my heart. At the last minute, however, she decided not to go, because she’d been offered a project that she wanted to take on. Same old story. Everything had to give way to eternal projects that couldn’t wait. An annoying word, project , for those who don’t have any major ones, and instead are bound to plod on with their lousy menial tasks. In my selfishness, I felt she’d betrayed me.

I wasn’t going to bother about this too much, though. I had other things on my mind, having just left Alli the mental midget and feeling relieved to have done so. The burden gone, along with its fat dick. Things were different then, entirely different, though only a few years have passed since. Then, I had a normal child who cuddled with me in the evenings. I still felt as if I could restart my life, and though it might not happen right away, I could wait. Edda and I, daughter and mother, got along well, and we enjoyed many a good day together in our poverty. We lived as it must be pleasing to God. I toiled away, and Edda did her homework at the kitchen table in the evenings as I washed the dishes and tidied. Two evenings a week I baked bread, having calculated that by doing so I would save around 10,400 krónur per year. I helped Edda with her homework as best I could, and brought her a glass of milk and a home-baked slice of sand cake or a crepe before she brushed her teeth and went to bed, no later than ten thirty. We had no television but always listened to the evening news on the radio at seven o’clock as we ate, as long as I wasn’t on duty. If I was at work, I left something in the fridge for Edda to eat and when the clock struck seven at work, I knew that she’d taken out her dinner, heated what was necessary, and was sitting at the table, listening to the news like a big girl. Sometimes Dad looked in on his granddaughter. Occasionally, we made a deal that he would buy some food and cook dinner himself. Normally, however, I would have already prepared something and then there would be two servings in the fridge, in sealed jars, or bowls with plastic wrap covering them tightly.

Now I feel, no matter what I thought then, that during those years after we moved into the Bollagata basement, out of the fat embrace of the debt collector, Edda and I lived a decent regular-old life, though we had little space and not much variety, aside from an unnamed man who came to visit, albeit rarely. He took up a considerable amount of the time available to me in my private thoughts and was a thorn in Edda’s side. But there was no imprudence except in my affairs of the heart, if you could call them that. Sufficiency and efficiency were practiced in all respects. Handsome old garments from the market benefiting the Cat Friends Society were stitched up anew, modified, and improved; fish chowder was made from leftovers; sweaters were knitted at home, from remainders when possible. Ironed and neatly folded linen was placed carefully in the closet. The odor of Ajax hung in the air, dust from scouring agents. You could see your reflection in the toilet bowl, and the floors were scrubbed thoroughly. I was also careful to polish the windows regularly, not least the “rose window,” as I called it. I was lucky that the windowpanes at Bollagata had been replaced just before Edda and I rented the apartment. It makes all the difference to have a clear view. This winter I can expect to have hazy windowpanes.

Edda helped with the housework. She had specific tasks and was conscientious about performing them. When I came home from my evening shifts, my child would be sleeping beneath clean sheets, an edifying book beside her, most often from the City Library on Þingholtsstræti. If her cold toes peeked out from under the blanket, Mommy came and covered them and stroked her child’s cheek.

As if a hand were waved, everything changed. No child in bed when Mother came home from work in the evening, food untouched in the fridge, the living room smelling of cigarette smoke, butts in ashtrays all over the house, the odor of moonshine hanging over everything, glasses on windowsills, in the bathroom, on top of the fridge. Then the night shift began for the worn-out assistant nurse, after her evening shift at work. The wait, perhaps until five or seven in the morning, or later, for that matter. And when the changeling finally stumbled in, the home nursing began. Sometimes it was necessary to help her to the bathroom, to hold the forehead of my vomiting child, or bandage wounds from the downtown battleground, at times from broken bottles or cigarettes. The poor mother never got a sound night’s sleep. She’d wake with a start after a short slumber and go into the child’s room to check whether she was breathing, to turn her over if she were lying on her back. Many a dissolute person has died from choking on their own vomit.

The acrid taste of vomit is still in my mouth. I have an Ópal breath refresher. It’s a cure-all.

As are images in the lava, endlessly new — moss to sink in, deep down and sideways. The moss is a cradle of the soul. Now a green cradle, because it has rained.

Transparent butterflies and angels in colorful raiment soar above the lava to the Carousel Symphony.

New lava fields are hostile territory and razor-sharp to traverse. They’re too hot to walk on in some places, and may emit lethal fumes. Old lava fields , like the two-hundred-year-old Skaftáreldar lava field surrounding us, are blissful places with piles of moss, hollows and overhangs where pale-green bracken grows, and all sorts of grasses, butterwort, and broad-leaved willows. The willow leads by example, growing from nothing, the very picture of tenacity, this gnarly gray-brown plant. Before I die — if I live — the trees standing here and there by the road will have formed a corridor, a low Icelandic willow allée.

We’ll never drive through it in your four-by-four, you who used to call me the foreign girl . That’s just the way it is.

You ran off from Esja, he’d said the next time we met, between the cloves and the apricots in the supermarket, past the cured lamb rolls and flare fat. Easter was approaching.

Did we make some sort of deal? I said, tossing two packets of dried apples into my cart, though I never ate that at home, then or at any other time. I hate dried fruit. It’s probably the result of all the prune compote I was forced to eat as a child, which caused me major digestive problems.

It isn’t easy to decipher this man’s expression, but it seems to me to be both derisive and hurt, which isn’t such an easy combination.