Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

No. I didn’t know they were out.

If you stay awake long enough, the stars come out.

I lead Yves to the spiral staircase and up into the transparent tower that was going to be my private bedchamber this clear night between late summer and autumn.

I turn off the flashlight of my well-equipped traveler, yet we can still see each other in the gleam of the stars.

Icelandic stars certainly are bright.

No need for us to be ashamed of them.

Where are the northern lights?

They’re usually later in the autumn.

What color are they?

Sea green or rosy red. If I had some rocks from the east, sawed in half, I could show you. On the inside, some of them are the same color as northern lights, and the veins in them twist and turn like the northern lights in the sky.

Yves puts his hand on mine and says: You should have been a poet.

That’s just the way those rocks are. There’s nothing poetic about it.

Yves lies down on the floor, on his back, and gazes at the firmament, where the stars sparkle, plump and perky, endowed with new life, far from the noise of the world and the city lights. I lie down on my side, close against him, and lay my hand on his chest. He tells me I’m wonderful, that he’s never seen anyone more beautiful, never spoken to anyone so strange and amusing. I’m a heroine from the Icelandic sagas, a fairy-tale princess, with a Nefertiti mouth and nose. Never in his life had he expected to meet such a woman, in this northern hinterland, breasts as if taken from the Song of Songs, a body of glazed porcelain, movements like a gazelle.

He caresses my scarab and says that it lies on its front legs like a little sphinx. For a moment I think of telling him that one of his compatriots gave me the piece, but then I decide that it’s none of his business. There’s a great deal that’s none of this outsider’s business.

May I take it off?

If you remember to put it back on again. It’s my good-luck charm, and I’d never want to lose it.

I want you completely naked, says my French lover, and he finds new things to say about my body once the scarab has crawled off.

It’s a new experience to be loved with words, and I listen motionlessly, saying nothing in return. Odd to think how much of my life I’ve let go by without sleeping with anyone but Icelanders. I listen for a long time. When I start feeling bored with this delay, I inch my way toward his verbose mouth and dam the stream.

Yves is well on his way to unwrapping me from the frotté robe when I tell it like it is, how I shouldn’t be offering myself for such a nighttime task because I’m out of practice. He laughs awkwardly. My admission makes him nervous, throws him a bit off balance. I try to make amends for my offense with tiny kisses zigzagging from his right thigh to his left nipple, my destination being his right ear, with a long stop at his neck. The kisses fall on good soil, and soon it feels as if time in the transparent tower is going at such a ripping pace that it’s standing completely still. Years and centuries pass, and here in the tower the two of us sail on the most brilliant wind in the rushing waters of a second, the flood of a minute, the currents of an hour. No, we don’t sail. It’s the elements of time that creak and hammer around us, while our vessel lies anchored at the island of time, which is made of cloud veils, auroral coils, and sunbeams.

I’ll be gone when you wake in the morning, says Yves.

Constellations are born high above our harmonious faces, a satellite sails lazily along, and a rising moon travels trodden paths toward the distant verge of day. This is a well-built house, a summer cottage to the max, and the floorboards don’t creak. We play on the tower floor, both zestfully and placidly, and I whisper in his ear, incredibly softly.

You should have been a poet, says Yves once more.

I am one, I say, and he laughs, as expected.

Nothing disturbs us. The few sounds we hear are welcome to our ears. The whistling of streams flowing both forlorn and dangerous down along the sea of sand until the flooding ocean receives them, the tattletale tones of pink-footed geese in autumn moods, the farewell songs of birds I don’t recognize, the protracted journeys of planes, and the twitter of the plover saying it has just come to land though it knows very well that’s impossible.

Eventually, our bodies have played so much that drowsiness overcomes them and the Sleep Dance of the Soul takes over. I lean into his foreign heart, knowing that I must take good advantage of the short time I’ve been given to sleep tonight.

I float on a fiery-red wind blanket out beyond a little island in the middle of the Caribbean that I christen THE TRANSPARENT ISLAND, though it’s made of the same material as islands in general and nothing can actually be seen through it. I’m naked, but next to me on the wind blanket is a big towel that I can grab should a merman come. I shut my eyes.

The man from Ísafjörður, my lover from the supermarket, didn’t want to come with me into the sea. He waits for me in a hut on the broad white-sand beach. Columbus is known to have come ashore here. The seafarer’s prostitutes resided in a tower that’s now in ruins, Maggie’s Tower, on a hill that conveniently divides the beach. A group of finely shaped native boys is playing football, and I realize that the supermarket man is bored, that, having grown hungry, he awaits me inside the hut with a giant coral-red lobster and melons that are red on the inside. I swim to land, leaving the wind blanket to sail its own seas. It shouldn’t really be possible to glide in water, yet I do, having grown modest in my swimsuit and finding it better not to be naked any longer when I come to the beach, since there are strange boys there. The wind blanket is on its way out to the horizon, and I catch just a glimpse of a red spot. The man who went west welcomes me with a towel fit for a queen-sized bed. Strange to see this white Icelandic male so tanned. How well built he is. The soccer boys’ bursts of laughter are silenced. They’re sitting in the warm sand.

The cutlery drawer slams. There’s a clinking of spoons and knives. In other words: Wake up!

I stretch out my hand, and he’s gone. I pull a blanket over my head, the blanket that Yves must have brought from downstairs, after I’d fallen asleep, and spread carefully over me in farewell, because I was wrapped in it from head to toe. BLANKET MUMMY IN SKY CHAMBER 1B.

As I lie there in my down-blanket hut, I sense that the weather isn’t normal. There’s something about the light that doesn’t fit. When I opened my eyes earlier, there was a strange half-light resembling twilight, though it was morning already. One star was just barely visible. A fog star.

Plates are tossed onto the table.

Get up! shouts Heiður.

I’m coming.

In other words: the day has begun. Wake up, all the way.

But I didn’t sleep enough. Took on too big of a task.

Dreaming of someone other than the one who’s just left.

My dreams revolve around another besides the newly departed.

My dreams revolve around another who went all the way west.

That’s how it should be.

The supermarket man who privately called me the foreign girl when we were kids was standing by the bookcase when I came back to the living room carrying a boiling hot coffeepot. He was holding a French-language cookbook, about dishes from Provence.

I prepared to answer the question of whether I knew French, but I didn’t know the man well enough to realize that he usually takes his opponents by surprise, a trait he has in common with mischievous girls like Edda Sólveig. He’s had an astronomical premonition and he asks whether I write.

I’m terribly lazy about writing letters.