Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I need to remember that there are children who have broken free of the net.

Although he’s fearfully unreliable, God is still good to let me sit here and see the vault of the glacier draped in golden silk, paling beneath the violet-colored haze of the sky. He’s good to allow me to see the light-red-and-blue string of clouds cut across the moon. I get to listen to the streams by myself, sit in an oasis in an evening breeze in steeply declining summer, not a house, not a person, not a car in sight. Instead, only a thrush, a spider, some geese preparing to leave, a blowfly, as I look out over wasteland that isn’t empty. That’s more than many get their entire lives. I must not take it for granted.

My plan is born. I’ll go east and stop only briefly, but I don’t say it out loud. It’s called GIVING THE SLIP.

Are you going to keep running away, little Eisa?

You’re one to talk, Mother dear. You were certainly a great one for escaping, too, in your time.

You don’t know the first thing about it, says Mom, laughing vulgarly.

Put on something to keep warm now, Mom, you’ll be chilled to the bone in your robe.

There’s no such thing as a cold in the beyond.

Mom’s voice becomes cloying, and she jabbers on in a sanctimonious tone that doesn’t suit her at all: Luckily, the general state of health in the next life is extremely good. Modern diseases are unknown. No cancer or osteoporosis. Colds are unheard of, as is the flu. No one needs to blow his nose in the next life, which is a huge relief and amounts to considerable savings. What’s strange is that sometimes there are incidences of obsolete diseases that the modern world has eliminated, such as black death, tuberculosis, and leprosy. Yet God has arranged things so that there will never be an epidemic on the astral plane. The poor souls who are struck so awfully receive extremely good care and a great deal of attention from the highest levels. And by that I mean the highest levels.

Mom, you’re not playing with a full deck. But come on. I really want to know. Who is my father?

You know the answer.

The time really has come for you to lift this veil of lies under which I’ve been raised. Of course it’s plain to everyone that I’m not Axelsdóttir.

Mom laughs singularly waggish, smoky laughter: You couldn’t be Axelsdóttir?

Not unless I’m a mutant.

No one can predict when a mutation will occur. It’s a scientific fact. All sorts of things are born under the sun.

Mom starts coughing and tries to suppress it by trying to light a Pall Mall that she fishes out of her bathrobe pocket. But it won’t light out on the deck.

We’ll have to go inside to light my cigarette, she says.

Damn, you’re crafty, Mom, trying to weasel your way into the house.

Well then, girl, stand here and block the wind for me.

I do as she says, so she’s able to light her cigarette and suppress her cough.

Mom, your lungs are no good. You should have them checked.

It doesn’t really matter, things being as they are, she says, in a martyr-like tone.

Do people really go on feeling sorry for themselves in the next life?

Self-pity is the most persistent emotion. It’s not so strange. It’s no good to be born and baptized without having any choice in the matter, the way things are in this world. There’s so much cruelty, and it really doesn’t seem to be getting any better. When the official cruelty slackened for the most part, at least on the surface, when they stopped burning people at the stake, drowning them, and flogging them, private enterprise took over, and now people see to depriving each other of life, all by themselves, often in a horrendous manner. No, Harpa dear, we have no business being in the world.

Should we go and hang ourselves, then?

Wait until Axel’s dead, as well.

All right, then.

I want some wine, too.

I won’t get drunk with my mother.

Mom puffs, and the cigarette smoke swirls into rings. When I was a kid, I requested that Mama blow smoke rings. Those rings are one of the first things that I remember, how they vanished and were replaced by new ones. But somehow I managed to get the wrong idea in my head that smoke rings were called YEAR RINGS.

What about Edda, Mom? What should I do?

Mom wraps her bathrobe tighter around herself and creates more white rings with her fiery-red pouting lips. I don’t know, Harpa dear.

How do you think it will turn out?

How am I supposed to know? Don’t ask me. I’m no Prescient Finna.

Sit and watch with me, Mom. For once.

Now the moon hangs unfragmented over the violet edge of the glacier, a moon of white opal, with a pattern similar to the imprint of a coin rubbing.

I go in and shut the door behind me. An aroma wafts from the oven. Dinner will be ready soon. I look forward to eating. There’ll be no more chopping vegetables for the time being. What I’ve already chopped is plenty for me. To eat alone after this damned day is a great mercy. I’m not going to bother about the monster with the elastic bandage. It can look after itself, this time.

I pour myself more wine. What do you know? Almost halfway through the bottle.

I take a seat on the couch and watch two ravens glide in unison down the slope above the cottage, down to the stream as if in search of something at the bottom. Maybe they use the stream as a refrigerator and keep eggs there, like Dad’s raven at Höfðabrekka. Suddenly the two black creatures part company. One flies toward the sea, the other toward the glacier, croaking loudly in turn. I nod off. I dream that I’m wearing pointy-toed ankle boots with sugar skin; I bite into the toes and munch.

When I wake, dinner is ready. I’ve neglected to baste one side of the leg of lamb in the oven, but what does that matter when the chef will be the only one to taste it?

DELIGHTS FOR HER ALONE SHE’LL LAY

THE TRUE GOURMET

UPON HER TRAY

As if it’s on fire, Hvannadalshnúkur, 6,952 feet high, flaming fuchsia.

Strange that one of the country’s highest peaks, up in the middle of a glacier, should be named after a plant: Hvannadalur. Valley of Angelica. It’s nice to imagine the glacier as fertile, bright, with a hint of green in its blue cracks. But there is fertility in the shelter of the glacier — lush vegetation and genuine glacial warmth — here in the wonderland of Skaftafell.

THE GLACIAL WARMTH.

The moon in the fuchsia haze has drawn in the color of the glacier. The mighty moon, jealous, with great attractive force, full, on the final August evening of the year.

I lay the table handsomely, cover it with a white tablecloth, place the leg of lamb in a porcelain dish decorated with embossed oranges. Five wagtails see to the dinner music on the deck railing.

The table is missing flowers, so I go out and pick dropwort, couch-grass blades, and forget-me-not, and arrange them in a square vase upon which fly royal-blue English butterflies.

I’ve done an excellent job with the food. I’m a gourmet chef. There’s no denying it.

Redwings, the best singers of all the birds, have taken over from the wagtails, and reel off Renaissance trills to accompany the one-person wilderness banquet.

Doesn’t the birthday girl get anything to eat?

Oh, poor soul, it’s your birthday today. Have a seat, then.

Submissively, Mom sits down opposite me, and I get a plate, knife, fork, and glass for her. I slice meat, dish out potatoes, pour wine.

It would even have been a decade birthday. How dreary.

Don’t you find it immensely tiresome in the next life, Mom?

No more than in life itself.

You poor thing. Why was everything always like that with you?

I think it’s congenital. Just look at my sister Dýrfinna. She was born under a lucky star.