Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Yves and I picked berries, says Heiður, waving a plastic bag. We can have blueberry crumble topped with whipped cream, an incredibly appropriate dessert for a summer cottage.

Dinner got cold while you were picking berries.

Sorry. I see you two have eaten.

No need to apologize. I’ll just warm it up.

I have no idea how I can be so disgustingly yielding. Where did I learn it? Have I always been like that? Of course these people should warm up their own dinners, but naturally, I feel guilty, because I dishonored my savior with help from my rude daughter, driving my savior away. The least I could do was try to make up for it by warming the dinner I cooked, for her and this foreigner.

Heiður lights the candles in the multiarmed chandelier of forged iron over the dinner table and then lights two oil lamps hanging on the walls, resembling a ship’s lanterns.

One bright star has appeared over the tower, and it’s twinkling as if it’s playing a prank, though I don’t really get the joke. I know — maybe it wants to shine back at the lights we’ve lit inside. The cottage is changing into an illuminated elf-city. If only I were in a good mood and could appreciate it, instead of fumbling with lighting the oven and reheating dinner for a complete outsider.

How can I help? asks Yves softly, uncontrollably French and obliging as I crouch by the oven, my behind sticking out.

You could clear the dirty dishes from the table, and when that’s done you can wash the berries. How about that?

Very good.

The tourist puts his all into clearing and resetting the table neatly, all the while gazing with his foreign eyes at the bottle of red wine, but of course he says nothing. My friend, on the other hand, has noticed it in a flash, the old scanner, because she grabs a new bottle, this time from her parents’ wine cabinet, and uncorks it. She utters not a word about the wine consumption of her little friend. This sophisticated daughter of the stately benefactress, Saga Kaaber, knows better than to make comments.

Yves is now at the sink, cleaning the berries. Has this nasty catfight been resolved thanks to berry picking? Heiður had driven off alone, badly offended. Where’d she been headed? To Reykjavík, of course. But she returned before dark and started picking berries, just like that.

Berrying berrying

the ogress is away from home.

Her huff is finished. No, never finished — it’s there somewhere, waiting to be utilized at the right opportunity. The words that were uttered aren’t like snow, which melts. For the rest of my life the ugly thing I said will be remembered. But what Heiður said about my hatred won’t melt away either. It’ll be stored in my memory like hard stone. It might become a bit weathered, but it’ll never disappear.

Now Heiður’s sitting on the couch with her legs up, sipping red wine. After all that driving, she certainly deserves to take a break.

Then I bring dinner to the table like a little waitress, fetch napkins, tell the two of them to take a seat, and serve them an expanded and improved salad.

Man, this looks unbelievably delicious, says Heiður.

Oh, you think so?

Please join us, says the Frenchman.

I need to whip cream for the berries.

Allow me to do that afterward, says Yves.

I give him a wondrously feminine smile and make no objection, but I go out onto the deck and take cream from the cooler, find the necessary utensils, and turn my back on the pair as the mixer spins by the substantial strength of my assistant nurse’s hands. They chat like a little couple.

How I wish I weren’t doing this. But for the single mother of a delinquent child, life doesn’t even offer the luxury of going to bed early — not even after a difficult day of fits of tears and vomiting and conflict and fleeing from petty criminals on the highway. If I go to bed now, it would be taken in the worst way. Maybe I’ll do it anyway. I’ll simply wait for the jolly giggles of the little berry-picking duo to subside.

I put the whipped cream in an elegant bowl that looks as if it’s made of stained glass, like a church window from the Middle Ages, sprinkle nutmeg over it, and lay a silver spoon next to it. Then I go to the bathroom to kill time, so that I don’t have to carry on a conversation. A ferocious teenager, a French tourist, and a terribly pushy flutist: what company for an ordinary person who toils the year round, on duty caring for the sick and the dying.

Not even the bathroom is a refuge from the jollity of my dinner guests, with whom I don’t deign to sit down at the table. Nor are they free of me and my ramblings, because I keep running into one thing and another in the darkness. The dim light from the candle on the sink creates a peculiar ambience here among the deep-blue bathroom furnishings and rococo faucets, in a fluffy forest of thick red towels and frotté bathrobes with big hoods. In this light, even in honest-to-goodness daylight, this could be the dressing room of a new type of pervert.

Only now do I glimpse a flashlight, placed at the end of a marble shelf by the mirror above the sink. I take great pains putting on lipstick by the gleam of the flashlight, ghostly shadows under my eyes. Finally, I’m in the mirror, I who haven’t been there, despite my looking.

Would you mind lending me your lipstick?

This one’s metallic, brownish pink. It’s not your color, Mom. You always wear bright red.

Let me try it, dear. Maybe it’ll suit me.

I give in to Mom’s nagging, and she applies lipstick like a happy institutionalized woman, and I remark that she should have discovered this color earlier because it suits her very nicely.

I can see that.

It’s good to have a color analysis done, Mom.

I don’t know what that is, dear.

No, I’m not surprised. It had hardly come into fashion.

It wouldn’t be worthwhile doing such a thing here. We’re all so clear, sort of.

No way I’m going back out there yet. I’ll take a shower. Why didn’t I think of that before? Take my time, shower by flashlight and candlelight. That’s original. Kill two birds with one stone: wash off the journey’s grime and avoid the oppressive company.

Hot water warms me deep inside, to the roots of my heart. Rich scents reach me through the steam — sandalwood soaps and high-end shampoo from Guerlain, fragrances from another world.

In the shower, the middle part of my bare body is illuminated by the atmospheric light: an elf woman’s abdomen, a mermaid’s breasts, a changeling’s thighs. I feel sorry for this utilitarian body, for how so few hands have run over it lately, and for how seldom it’s been in the spotlight of other eyes besides mine in recent years. No hands to stroke it but my own when I wash myself, and life is short. If it continues like this, I’ll return to the state of a pristine maiden very, very soon, swiftly and surely, and no one will even notice.

He isn’t likely to prevent it, my lover who moved to the west.

This entire night I’ll dream of him, of the night we made love in so many ways.

There’s certainly an abundance of fragrant ointments here — Heavenly Violet’s a corny name, completely unsuitable in the shadowy luxury of a bathroom off the beaten path, but the smell of the ointment isn’t in harmony with its name. It’s terribly seductive, and I take no fewer than five minutes to smear it on, before putting on the biggest and reddest frotté bathrobe that I’ve ever seen, without a clue as to what sort of chieftain it’s intended for, because everyone in Heiður’s family is medium-sized. Around my head I wrap a matching towel, creating an enormous red turban, and go out. These people will just have to deal with it.

Come and have dessert, Harpa Eir, invites Heiður, as soon as she hears me.