Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Not that I know of.

He smiles, and I say, I’m just an ordinary changeling.

He looks at me with a gleam in his eye, a sweet, playful gleam.

He adds a smile so wide that his green-blue eyes became narrow slits. It’s how a cat’s eyes can become when it purrs, if anyone should deign to stroke it. I’d seen him laugh, though it had never lasted long, and I’d seen his half smile. But I felt as if the smiles I’d seen had merely been practice for this special smile. Like a singer performing in concert, giving his all to the high C after having only hummed and warbled and half-sung it in practice. Not only is it an absolute smile, but it’s unusually long-lasting, unless my sense of time has become a bit messed up. The high C so drawn out that the audience holds its breath, a note that doesn’t stop all at once but dies out gradually.

The teeth in his bottom gum are slightly crooked, and he has warlike canines that he no doubt hates, without realizing that they’re charming. Maybe it’s because of his canines that these complete smiles of his are so rare. Or maybe they’re rare because he saves them for only the absolutely perfect occasions.

The smile leaves behind long streaks of shimmering silence. At first he looks a bit at my face, just a bit, next at my feet, which are in moccasins of nubuck lined with rabbit fur, embroidered with strips of colorful beads. A gift from Heiður after a Canadian tour. Warm and fuzzy shoes on the cold floor of the Norðurmýri basement. It’s unclear whether they increase my sex appeal or erase it altogether. Size four and a half. Plainly problematic to find a pair of fashionable women’s shoes. Poor woman. Always at risk of being caught in the children’s shoe department. Can you believe it?

I set the coffee down on the living room table.

Where’s the cottage, then? asks a voice from the backseat politely.

Yet another U-turn. It would actually be better if Edda were always sassy. It’s her bouts of politeness that really throw things out of whack. Because then you get the stupid idea that maybe the clouds are breaking, a hope that’s suffocated almost immediately. Which is never painless.

You can’t see the cottage until just before you come to it, Edda dear.

Dark spires and towers rise from the rock walls at Núpsstaður, like an illustration for a book of mysteries and fairy tales.

Numerous boulders cast long shadows at the green feet of Lómagnúpur, and sheep graze in the shelter of the shadows.

Where do we turn off the road?

It’s a little bit farther.

Eastward, over the vast expanse of sand, to the dullish glacier tongue with a black tire-tread pattern. The giant helmet of the glacier takes over from its creeping offspring and gleams yellowish and steely in the fading sunlight flickering behind the three female travelers in their little truck.

Sharp peaks rise here and there closer to the glacier.

A MONUMENT FOR SOMETHING THAT NEVER WAS.

THE FOGGY LAD in the Range Rover. The secret of Harpa Hernandezdóttir.

Roll down the window a crack, and the noise of the tangled courses of the Núpsvötn, Súla, and Skeiðará Rivers hits the ears in a rushing wave, like a repressed memory rising from the deep on the spout of a whale. The act of opening a car window on the Skeiðará sands could be called BREAKING THE SOUND BARRIER: A MEMORY RESURRECTED.

On the earth the sun shines on the piers of very long bridges, and in the sky is an elastic cloud pretending to be northern lights in the making.

Now we travel in the TIME OF HALF-SHADOW.

The last thing the eyes of many a seafarer beheld was the extensive sands of death on Iceland’s southeast coast. The eyes of drowning men. The eyes of those who reached land yet froze to death before anyone came to their rescue.

THE SANDS OF DROWNED SOULS. The sands that pummeled us today. It was today. Oh, that’s funny. The sands from a past life were today.

Added to the sky is the contrail of a jet that I wish I were in, no matter where it’s going — the only passenger, free from my daughter, my mother, free from the earth upon which I’m stuck.

That’s the road we turn onto, says Heiður.

You call that a road?

Maybe not.

I check the side mirrors and look over my shoulder, but no car is to be seen, not a single one. And definitely not a bright-yellow delivery van on a peculiar mission to pursue my child.

The nonroad running northward along the volcanic neck is an embankment of stone, and the car is no willing vehicle. The bumps could cause a miscarriage if something were kicking in the belly.

Rumbling along a road that’s not a road, but rather an embankment. Precipitance under confounded cliffs on the bastion’s murky side.

The cliff formations mutate in a blink of the passenger’s eye.

Where are we now?

And where are we now?

Uncertainty’s found in permanent variability.

The cliffs gleam black in a horrid wet that comes from within.

Cliffs of the very end.

It wouldn’t surprise me if one or all of us were to lose our lives in this faraway, fancy abode that I don’t recall having visited, though I have in fact been there before. Heiður’s threatening to use a rifle. Guns are for killing. I’m traveling with two people who are capable of anything.

I don’t understand how they think, don’t know what’s in their heads.

And Mom.

Mom, who doesn’t think. Just exists , unapologetically. Things would be a trifle more bearable if I could be free of her. If only I could break loose.

The circles around the little ponds in the light-gray gravel are very green.

The rivers of the wasteland are trimmed with robust rims of moss.

Aren’t you tired, Heiður dear?

When have I ever been tired?

Never. I remember now. This landscape is fantastic. Unfathomable, really.

You mean that? asks the driver, pointing.

Pointing at what wasn’t just a few minutes ago: a grassy slope that comes to the fore. It holds elf dwellings, berry hollows, light-green willows, birch shoots, dwarf rocks, little jets that dash down the mountainside, impatient to join a real stream.

Who could have imagined finding this secret place here, out of the blue?

Ruminating sheep with blubbery cushions for sides spring up in alarm. They bleat in unison with their thin-voiced offspring, panicked, as the white danger approaches, a hoarse and rumbling machine over rocks, more rocks, and even more rocks. If I look left, I see the opulence of the slope. To the right are bellowing streams, wasteland. Not a single blade of grass in the scree on our side, not a blade on the sands farther away, where the icy, rugged tongue takes over, rolling up out of the sand like a giant, fantastic beast, at the foot of the proud glacier.

You can’t say of the WASTES that they don’t BREATHE DEEPLY

I’ll join you in breathing

though imminent death might call.

The paper-thin moon, full to the brim, is impaled by one of the Súlutindar peaks.

It doesn’t bother the moon.

Nor should it bother anyone.

A long-nosed bird is perched on a mountain peak, like a small torpedo with wings, fully prepared to launch itself at the sound barrier and blast it to pieces.

What’s that? I ask.

The tower.

What tower?

Of the cottage.

A transparent cylindrical tower with a convex top breaks up and out between the gently pointed spruces, an unidentified object hardly flying, and yet, a free-floating tower.

It’s like an observatory, remarks Edda.

Yes, it was built especially for stargazing, says Heiður. There’s even a telescope in it, to bring you as close as possible to them.

Wow, exclaims the girl.

In a shrub-grown hollow by a stream cascading down a groove in the cliffs is the house , hidden from the world by spruce trees. Barbed wire protects it against people, vehicles, and creatures. On the iron gate is a sign reading PRIVATE DRIVE. But the birds of the air don’t know how to read, and two generations of wagtails sit by the dozens on the barbed wire and fence posts. The reception committee continues chirping without losing the thread, amplifying its song when the autumn visitors come rattling along in their vulgar vehicle.