Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I pat his shriveled paw and say that I don’t know what would have become of me if I hadn’t had such a good dad.

You can tell me that as often as you like, says Dad, laughing with his young voice, the same that laughed at Pippi Longstocking’s shenanigans after I’d crawled into bed on Sunday mornings and said, Read, Daddy , driving my ice-cold toes into the backs of his knees. Dad’s grown old now, prematurely, old in every respect except for his voice. Sometimes I shut my eyes and listen to it and imagine that time stopped before everything came pouring over.

DAMNED SLOW-ASS! shouts Heiður.

To be on our way is all that matters, and the indigenous Icelandic art of holding up traffic doesn’t bother me at all today. But my friend at the wheel can’t restrain the impatience that’s in her blood. How this impatient person can stand practicing the flute hour after hour, year after year, the same notes, the same lifeless scales, is a mystery to me. I’ve questioned her — asked her straight-out — and even read up on the lives and working methods of musicians, but I still don’t get it.

Heiður leans on the horn. I glance over my shoulder, startled, to see whether the passenger in the backseat’s going to rain curse words down on us from her hungover trap, but she doesn’t stir.

Just ahead of us is a rusty Land Rover, and in front of it an ultralong American car.

Please don’t honk the horn like that.

Heiður hammers the dashboard with a clenched fist, bellowing: These people don’t know how to drive! They’re like damned cows out on the moors!

It’s not car number one, but car number two that’s the slow-ass, I say. It should pass. The trouble always starts when car number two hangs on the tail of car number one.

Huh.

It’s a beautiful day, Heiður. Let’s go slowly and enjoy the scenery.

Near and far.

Neat rows of midsummer-yellow dandelions line the edge of the road, defying the blowballs, the future that they don’t know awaits them.

Spread over the banks of the small Sandskeið pools is the sedge that all children think is cotton but isn’t.

Nothing is as it seems. Neither before nor since, neither near nor far.

In the complex massif of Hengill are secret green valleys and white clouds of steam.

Soon the white patches on the Bláfjöll Range will expand, transforming into glistening snowfields accented with skiers in outfits of all colors. Last winter, it was in fact one of my escapes. On cross-country ski trails I would forget my overwhelming concerns while chatting with apple-cheeked, oxygen-deprived people, some with sleds and warmly dressed children in tow. It made me recall little Edda tearing down the toboggan slopes with me.

Heiður, far from happy with the slow progress of traffic, keeps honking into the wind, while the slow-ass drives his Land Rover at a steady pace down the middle of the road. Maybe he’s hard of hearing and unaware of us, or maybe he’s just being obstinate. It’s all the same to me, but my driver, her long chin topped with a vigorous frown, says nothing as I explain my sudden realization, after all my trips east, that the broad mountain Skjaldbreiður can be seen for just a brief moment from this road, even though it seems as if it ought to be invisible from here at the Svínahraun lava field. I feel like an explorer of an unknown territory, and I shiver with joy at seeing one of my favorite mountains make an unexpected cameo on this frequently traveled route.

I add that she can even see the summit of Snæfellsjökull if she looks in the rearview mirror.

As if I didn’t know that, she says, irritated, before changing the subject. How did you manage to conjure up a necklace during a brief stop at an empty apartment?

Heiður is extremely dangerous in the way that she notices everything. Even before I did, she saw what was happening with Edda Sólveig. It’s antisocial behavior, she said, and she was right. One sign, in retrospect, was how the girl stopped greeting visitors. She would just go straight to her room and shut the door. When Edda started hanging out downtown or who knows where until dawn and came home either smashed or stoned, it was Heiður who realized right away that it was something more than normal teen drinking and attitude.

Edda’s nickname for Heiður is The Scanner . “I can’t stand that damned Scanner” has been a common refrain from my daughter the last few months. Heiður had rented a movie with this name, about a man with X-ray vision who used his amazing psychic powers to explode people’s heads.

Wouldn’t you know — Edda found the creature behind the radiator. It had been lost for more than a year.

What is it?

Don’t you remember? I always wore it after I came back from my summer in Perpignan.

Yes, of course. What is it again?

It’s a kind of beetle that was sacred in Egypt, called a scarab. It symbolizes rebirth. Gabriel Axel gave it to me.

Is that the guy who’s always sending you and Edda things?

Only for Christmas and birthdays.

Weird. You just sort of randomly met him that summer in Perpignan and he can’t forget you?

The man is close to seventy. We’re pen pals. Maybe he took to me because he doesn’t have kids.

And gives you a good-luck charm in parting?

Seems logical to me. A lucky charm for an unlucky creature. The funniest thing he’s sent me so far is a large compass, from his shop, which is called The Art of Sailing. He sells everything you can imagine for people who own boats, big or small. Ship’s bells, sea charts, pilot wheels, books about sailing and repairs, stories and novels of sea voyages: Moby-Dick, The Old Man and the Sea .

How did you meet him?

I’ve told you that seven times.

Tell me eight times.

Every morning, as a favor for my landlady, Widow Dumont, I went to the bakery to buy croissants for breakfast and, on Sunday mornings, petits pains au chocolat . One Sunday I had to find somewhere new, because the bakery on the corner was closed for the summer. As I walked past the sailing shop, I happened to drop the glass bottle of mineral water I was holding. It shattered on the street, and as I gathered up the pieces, I cut my finger. Gabriel Axel saw this from his apartment, which is above the shop, and he invited me in and bandaged me up. I was in a rush, because I knew Widow Dumont wouldn’t be happy if she had to wait too long for her petits pains au chocolat , which would no longer be warm, not to mention the Sunday edition of Le Figaro . But Gabriel Axel asked where I came from. You should have seen his face when I said Iceland.

He threw up his hands and said: Yes, but you don’t look like it!

I know, I said, but it’s not my fault.

Then this noble man laughed and invited me for coffee or a drink next time I was off work. I didn’t hesitate to accept, though Dad had warned me about the white slave trade. I figured no one in the white slave trade would want dark little me, anyway.

When I paid Gabriel Axel a formal visit, it turned out he’d been to Iceland — isn’t the world small and strange? Naturally, I was surprised that he hadn’t told me that right away. You didn’t mention that the other day, I said. He gave me a peculiar look before replying: I suppose I’d just forgotten it.

Were you bored by Iceland? I asked.

I wouldn’t say that, he answered.

I was curious to know why he’d gone, and he said he’d gotten lost.

Oh, where were you planning to go? I asked.

That’s just a way of putting it, he said.

He’d sailed over on the Gullfoss at Christmas, and I said that visiting at that time of year was absurd; it’s so dark that you can’t see anything. But he said he’d wanted to see the dark days, those renowned northern days of darkness that are more like night.