Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I walk barefoot into the room and watch how Yves from Bordeaux moves in the flickering candlelight as his cook appears, wearing nothing underneath her robe. The bathrobe wraps one and a half times around little Harpa, and it’s not easy to say how a man will take such a getup.

I sit and wiggle my piggy-pink toes and keep my trap tightly shut.

Heiður stands up to get a bowl and spoon for me. That can be classified as an unexpected occurrence. Yves is nervous and doesn’t know what to say. I enjoy staring emptily at him, without a smile, enhancing my silence, then eating blueberries as if I’ve made an art form out of chewing every little berry a hundred times. In between, I put a dollop of cream on the spoon and lick it slowly.

I hope he sees me in the same light as he would have this morning — the woman who stuck out her long tongue in Selfoss.

Yves clears his throat awkwardly, and Heiður starts asking about his trip, in order to say something. These are topics that we’ve already been through, and I play the ugly trick of letting loose a big yawn.

After answering one of the questions, Yves gets up and goes to the bathroom. I hope my underwear will amaze him, hanging there on a hook, mysteriously illuminated. PANTIES IN MOONLIGHT. That’s a fitting sight for interlopers.

I munch loudly on stupid blueberries, decide to get out of here, stand up and bid Heiður good night, and ask her to say good night to Yves. She replies as if all is normal. I pick up one of the violet candles that Edda lit. Heiður offers me a flashlight, which I decline, saying that the stars and moon will provide more than enough light in the tower.

Yves bumps into me at the foot of the spiral staircase. I allow myself the luxury of smiling, though I’m skeptical of how it comes out in the ghostly gleam of the flashlight that he points at my face.

In the tower I breathe light as a feather, all alone with the heavenly bodies, the east wind, the constant murmur of the streams. There are no bedclothes here, but I’d hate to go down to fetch woolen blankets. I lie down on the mattress and wrap the robe tighter around me. I take the towel turban off my head and use it for a pillow. I don’t remember having gone to sleep with wet hair since I was a kid. It’ll be quite the sight tomorrow. Fuck it. From here on, I’m done with all vanity. It takes too much time. Who the hell would I be dressing up for, anyway?

I blow out the candle that Edda lit for me earlier this evening and I think of her lighting two candles as a hope for hope. One candle for me and the other for her.

There are no doors to my sleep tower. If someone wants to come to me, he can do it directly, without opening a door or closing one after him when he leaves.

Like sleeping outside beneath a warm sky.

I no longer look up into the firmament but pull the red frotté canopy over my head, a nomad of the steppe, and start to glide into the dance of sleep. Slowly, among the stars.

Inviting the man who occupies my mind.

A burst of laughter from the depths of the living room. The cheerful berry pickers are washing the dishes and arranging the pots and pans.

My sleep-intoxicated soul is dancing back into the fine-meshed net of oblivion when I hear a tramping on the stairs, and I sense that he who moved west has found his way all the way to me.

Heiður shines her flashlight into the room. She’s hooked the fingers of her other hand around two glasses and a bag, whose contents I’m sure of immediately.

More alcohol — yippee, I say, propping myself on my elbow.

This wretch of a Frenchman is completely useless when it comes to drinking, she says.

I wonder if he’s useful for something else.

It wouldn’t surprise me. You should take this opportunity.

Are you afraid I have a long, lonely winter ahead of me?

It’s hard to say. Better a bird in hand than two in the bush.

I’ve never understood before how indecent that saying is.

Heiður laughs and pours us wine.

Harpa, I really need to apologize for what I said to you and Edda.

Not unless you forgive me in return. Actually, I’ve never really understood forgiveness. I don’t think it exists. Someone does something to you, and you either remember it or forget it. I understand how people can let sleeping dogs lie, avoid rummaging around in old offenses, ignore things. Anything beyond that, I don’t understand. Do you really feel I’m torn up with jealousy and hatred?

Oh, I don’t know, I just said that. Of course it upsets you to think that you haven’t done enough of what you wanted to do.

It is true that I envy you. It’s unfair of me. You haven’t done anything to deserve it. But I do anyway. I can’t help it.

Jealousy is such a common feeling that it doesn’t pay to worry about it.

Funny thing for you to say. You don’t have it in you.

Of course I do. You just don’t notice it.

Not as much as most.

I was always lucky, so I had no reason to be jealous. I can become awfully jealous if someone plays the flute better than me. But my admiration is stronger, as well as the sly certainty that I could beat them next time just by changing one small thing or another. Even when a master plays, I know that I can play at least one or two lines better than they can.

That’s because you’re a master. But when I see you play the flute like an angel, it makes me feel horrible that I don’t know anything except how to make a fucking bed.

Stop torturing yourself, says Heiður. You have lots of talent. You can write — you have a gift for languages — but it was your choice to let your kid take priority.

I never chose anything. I just did what I had to do. We both know, Heiður dear, that all this talk about freedom of choice is more or less nonsense. If you wind up in a bad enough situation, there’s no freedom. After I had Edda, there was no way out for me.

Wait a minute.

Mom wasn’t about to quit her job at the Marine Research Institute. Looking back, I think she did the right thing. I didn’t really want her helping me take care of the girl anyway.

You still haven’t stopped blaming others for your failures? You’re in your thirties.

I’m not blaming Mom for my pregnancy. Then again, maybe it was her fault, in fact.

Well, that’s certainly an original way of looking at things.

Real mothers protect their daughters from becoming pregnant at fifteen years old.

Come on, Harpa. Everyone who does it runs the risk of becoming pregnant, until they reach menopause. No protection is one hundred percent.

Mothers who are whores deep-down make their daughters vulnerable.

Whores deep-down? Seriously? How deep is it to our inner whores, do you think?

Mom was a different sort of whore. She ruined things for people, and still does.

Man, I can’t believe how much you pity yourself.

No one else will pity me. You know, Heiður, a girl who has a child when she’s sixteen never recovers. Something in her dies when the child is born.

You mean she stops aging.

Thanks for the compliment.

That wasn’t what I meant.

Something died in me when Edda was born. Not like leaves in autumn, but forever, amen.

Not a single damn thing died. You just say that because you like the way it sounds.

No, I mean it. When a child has a child, the child in the mother dies.

It’s supposed to die. People are supposed to grow up.

Those who don’t preserve something of the child in them are damaged.

You’ve never said anything like this before. You were so happy with your little girl.

I’ve never said anything like this before because I didn’t want to admit it. And I’ll admit that I was also happy on some level. Your hormones ensure that you raise the child, that you fall in love with your little one, that you’d rather die than let anything happen to your child. But that doesn’t change the fact that the soul slowly perishes while a little vampire sucks the milk from a mother who’s only a suckling infant herself. It’s actually disgusting.