Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I’m going to walk up to Systravatn, says Heiður. I’ve always wanted to see it, and we have time now. We’ll be at the cottage early enough.

Early enough. Her wording is less than auspicious.

Radiant birch and spruce trees adorn the slope at Kirkjubæjarklaustur. Everything’s gleaming after the autumn cleaning, the landscape and the buildings. Could Icelanders, those kings of clutter, reside on this tidy set? No garbage anywhere, just picture-perfect houses and well-tended gardens. Everything one needs is here: an Agricultural Bank, a National Bank. For a hundred residents.

General appearance: un-Icelandic, unreal. It’s like a model in full size.

But not a single local is in sight. Where is everyone?

Stunned by the infusion of oxygen, the magnetism of Vatnajökull Glacier, and the unexpected delight of unseasonably warm weather for the last day of August, the three of us stand there, mesmerized travelers next to a white pickup truck. Even the wind is warm, the same wind that whipped the sand straight at the car but didn’t manage to scratch it. Not a single bit.

A young outdoorsman, the last backpacker of the year, appears without warning, from where, God knows, the sun reflecting off his fiery-red down jacket. He smiles, exposing first-rate teeth that have grown harder and whiter in more southerly cleansing fires than cod liver oil and hardfish. His smile lasts a surprisingly long time. It must be because of the incomparable trio that has tumbled out of the pickup: dwarf mother, scrawny daughter, stick woman.

In fact, this is the foreigner in the red coat who saw me stick out my tongue at Gerti Chicken back in Selfoss. Hence the prolonged smile. I smile back and nod as if he’s an old acquaintance.

At the start of the trail to Systravatn there are signs that I can’t decipher. One shows a man and woman holding hands, and the man is carrying a walking stick. Does this mean: BEWARE OF MEN WITH WALKING STICKS?

On another sign a person in some sort of skirt falls backward off a precipitous cliff, rocks tumbling behind. How is this to be interpreted: PRIME SPOT FOR PUSHING?

Heiður puts on the little backpack holding our lunches and heads up the slope to Systravatn, the lake on the heath at the top. Lakes like these have a strange magnetism. There’s a fundamental difference between mountain lakes and lowland lakes. In my experience, a hike to a mountain lake is always rewarding. You’re sure to find swans on them, under enchanting moving clouds, or an even more spectacular panorama than the book says.

A foaming stream runs down the long light-red bedrock alongside our path and branches out around a large lush islet where the birch grows out horizontally between moss-covered stones. A remarkably loud gushing comes from this forked waterfall, which I inform Heiður is named Systrafoss — Sisters’ Falls — and she looks at me and says: You know everything.

Heiður leads the way in her tracksuit and hiking boots. I’ve curbed my pretensions and put on sneakers in place of my moccasins, since this would be a real hike. The sneakers are brown, which means dirt on them blends in, and just as well, because it’s a dirt path in places. We’re the only ones hiking up along the stream’s steep route, between gnarled old birch trees with peeling bark.

There’s endless life on the verdant slope. Clusters of shiny red brambleberries grow by the trail, on heather that’s gradually turning red and blue. Honeybees buzz vigorously and alight on the blue blossoms of the wild vetch that stretches out in wide tangles at our feet, along with meadowsweet and fading woodland geraniums. Two black snails lie side by side on a rock, ink-black slime splotches with two tiny snouts sticking out of their pinheads.

Heiður stops just as we reach the rim of the slope and waves to Edda, who’s been following at a distance.

The lake up on the heath comes into view, puckishly twinkling waves dashing between its banks on a considerable breeze. Systravatn — Sisters’ Lake — was named after the nuns in Kirkjubæjarklaustur. They came here on fair-weathered days many hundreds of years ago, in full-length skirts and flapping headgear, always in groups of two or more. It’s said that they bathed in the lake. Maybe they thought about the same thing as me, at least some of them, about the one and only lover who is and always will be away. From good times — who knows.

The lover who lives in a secret place.

Yes, who lives in the secret dwelling place of the mind. One of the things that’s never spoken of, except to myself. The secret of the little un-poet.

The view from up here is a panorama of ocean and the estuaries of numerous lakes in a sand-haze and dust cloud, and the glacier, the colossus that somehow looks smaller. The heath before us, grassy, in numerous shades of green, is framed by the bluish line of mountains and a bunch of white sheep on the other side of the lake. Of course, it’s by an Icelandic heath lake that everyone should die. Yet who has a chance for such luxury these days?

Not a cloud is visible, though they could well be hidden behind the haze of the August sky. The last sky of the year by that name. I’m going to call it THE MISTY SKY OF UNCERTAINTY.

The sisters’ path to the lake would have been through a birch thicket and willow scrub, which once covered the entire area. At that time it was called Skógahverfi — Woodland District. Grazing sheep, poor people, and falling ash ensured the trees’ disappearance. These days not a single self-sown shoot is to be seen anywhere but in little niches by the glacier, besides the thick brake out east by Lómagnúpur, so tenacious that diligent sheep haven’t managed to finish it off. Jens Kaaber, Heiður’s dad, has a fancy cottage there, where we drifters can spend the night.

DRIFTERS I

Once upon a time there were two Icelandic women, one short and the other tall, plus one delinquent teenager, who were heading east. The trip was intended as an escape from a barbarous gang of coarse youths, as well as a search for the father of one of the women, the grandfather of the little drug addict. The mother was certain, due to her highly unusual appearance, that she couldn’t be a purebred Icelander, even though that’s what her birth certificate and upbringing indicated. There was no suggestion that her genetic father was none other than Axel Óðinsson, a former handicrafts teacher at Laugarnes School, now residing at the Grund rest home.

The three women’s vehicle was a white pickup truck, owned by the father of the driver, Heiður, a flutist and friend of the protagonist. Beneath a tarp in the pickup’s little bed were the most essential household appliances that belonged to the poor mother and her daughter, who had little financial means but were well disposed for the most part, at least the mother, who had the unique and intriguing name Harpa Eir. Her mother, who also had a unique and intriguing name, Eva Sólgerður, chose her daughter’s name because she had wanted to learn to play the harp among other things. Eva Sólgerður, who little Edda called Grandma Sól, had even more aspirations, but appears to have pursued few of them and been terrifically suppressed. She had a job serving coffee at the Marine Research Institute until her strength failed her, quite prematurely.

Are you seeing what I’m seeing?

Edda is sitting on a rock at the edge of the slope. Her back is turned to us and she’s damming up a little streamlet. Ten summers ago I spent half a day sitting with her in Grandma’s Grove as she, in her sunny yellow rain pants, worked on changing the course of the stream that runs into the Andá River. Mommy sat by to make sure the child didn’t put herself in danger. This was during the Book of Verses years: