Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I meant fiction.

You rascal, how dare you. I say: I recite ballads to patients at work.

Then it happens. A mighty crash. I had put down the hot espresso pot on a little triangular glass table beside the couch. At the first sound, I don’t know what’s happening. Then the noise intensifies and the glass plate splits along its entire length with a resounding crack. It now looks like an icy puddle after being hit with a stone, fissures branching everywhere.

This is a godsend. The man’s thrown off balance and can’t continue with his interrogation. I hope he’ll just go home.

Can you get tables like this someplace?

How sympathetic he is about this silly, idiotic, ridiculous accident that nobody except Harpa Eir could have caused.

I hope not.

Oh?

It was an ugly little table.

He stares at the broken monstrosity, which is actually more beautiful all cracked. I could put it on display as an art object, giving it various titles. How about: LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL.

Too bad I’d just brought the coffee. Now it’ll be impossible to get the supermarket guy off my hands, swiftly and surely. I’m almost inclined to turn off the Jacques Brel as a sign that the conversation’s over, as a sign that I shouldn’t have accepted a ride in his noble SUV.

A new godsend. The doorbell. It’s Edda Sólveig. No one but Edda rings the doorbell like that. I see that the Range Rover man is taken aback, yet again, just as if he’d been caught in the act. Maybe it is being caught in the act, on his sensitive bookkeeping scale.

The man tries to conceal his astonishment when a teenager walks into the room, a lanky girl, bad tempered, and slightly shabby-looking. Yet you’ve got to give it to her. She takes the visitor’s hand and introduces herself. And he actually stands up to greet her but neglects to say his name. It’s a wonderful joke. Who knows, maybe he’s wanted. THE KIDNAPPER OF WOMEN IN THE SUPERMARKET. How rude not to introduce himself in return. Edda wasn’t interested in company, and I sympathize completely. She goes to the fridge. What an incredible eater. It certainly doesn’t help decrease the destitution in Bollagata.

You have such a grown-up daughter?

Why didn’t he just ask straight-out how old I was when I started doing it? Maybe he’s going to wait to ask until he’s well into his planned journey, into my bed with the black crocheted blanket.

I reply with a simple yes , and Edda saves me again by sticking in her head and asking what bowl she can use for milk for Björn. The neighborhood cat has slipped in with her and now struts cockily to the living room as if he’s been invited to give a speech.

The visitor is just over halfway done with his cup, when he suddenly stands up and says good-bye. He tosses another good-bye into the kitchen, and in his modesty doesn’t step in over that sacred threshold. He receives a response, though a lackluster one, from all the way inside the fridge, perhaps.

For fun, I help my coffee guest into his light-colored jacket of thick suede. Casual and elegant. I need to stand on tiptoe to slip the jacket onto his shoulders. He’s standing directly in front of me in the sea-green foyer that’s so short and narrow that the two of us fill it. He’s no longer in a rush. Not at all. When was he ever in a rush? He puts his hand on my shoulder, leans toward me, a long way down, and kisses me on the forehead. Maybe that’s all the farther he can bend. The kiss is slow, incisive, made with wonderful lips, loose at first and then with a little more pressure the longer it goes on.

This long and thorough forehead kiss shows me that my guest has strong nerves. Which means everything when it comes down to it. Nervous lovers who have ants in their pants do little for building up lust. But why does the man kiss me on the forehead? Is such a thing ever done except to small children and corpses in coffins? It was a mistake for me to put on those childish Indian moccasins with fur trim and plastic beads.

Maxwell House as strong as train oil, bacon and eggs, yogurt for your digestion, chocolate muesli, bananas, orange juice.

Chocolate muesli, my very favorite, shouts Edda, marching across the summerhouse’s parquet floor.

I apologize for what I said yesterday, she says so loud and clear that I hear it all the way up in the Sky Chamber.

I’m sorry, too, says Heiður. Are we settled, then?

Yes, for now , says Edda, and Heiður breaks into explosive laughter that ends in a deep wheeze.

Rain is falling on the glass tower. I look up at it, listen to it. Such a cozy drip-drop.

From the sky drip big drops, wetting hill and field.

Each drop follows its own course, creating a great many courses, which overlap, spread, disperse. New ones are born, others die out; some are in adjacent lanes that turn into one. Now it would be good to continue napping. Nap for most of the day, nap many days, for long stretches at a time. The odor of bacon wafts up to the freaky structure where I spent a night with a stranger. Let it go and forget it. There’s no more space in my head to remember. Have a piece of crispy bacon.

You’ve got nerve, little Eisa. You want to have a foreign bastard, like I did?

So you admit it, finally. I am a foreign bastard, just as I suspected.

I admit nothing of the sort. I was talking about you and your risky sex life.

I don’t have what you could call a sex life, and the risk is none, because I’ve taken the utmost care ever since I accidentally had Edda. It’s you who have no excuse. I know that there were fully reliable contraceptives on the market thirty years ago. You were a full-fledged adult, and you cheated on a true Icelander with some southern oaf.

Don’t make me laugh. People need change, Harpa, a little fluctuation. Life shouldn’t be so dull, so tightwaddish. People should be left alone to do what they want.

And doing what they want while left alone leaves behind nothing less than a child.

Oh, Harpa, I want some bacon. We never have any bacon. It’s only human to want a little slice on a new day.

I put on some clothes and plunk down the stairs to a three-woman breakfast beneath the glacier. My muscles are sore after the night’s activity. What does that matter, since I get to sit in a car the livelong day and pretend to be asleep. But maybe I’ll just stay awake. As with a lot of other things, I’ll see.

The two of them look at me suspiciously.

Edda asks, cheekily: How did you sleep?

I answer, cheekily: Well, but not long.

Edda: And the foreigner has fled.

Heiður comes to my aid: He left a note.

Edda: Suicide?

Heiður: It’s a thank-you note.

Edda: For the nighttime service.

I keep myself out of this duet, eat my eggs and bacon, declare it a real feast.

A FEAST AT DAWN.

Damn, you’re looking rough, Mom.

Yes, now she actually can poke fun at me, my dear Edda, because she looks as if she’s been plunged in a sheep dip. She’d snuck off to clean herself, the darling, when no one was looking. Brushed her hair as well. A new life, in the shelter of Lómagnúpur, on the first day of September. She looks at me and smiles like a real person. That’s my dream, for my child to be like a real person . I have none other. And yet. To dreams, dreams may be endlessly added.

Overcast weather is my favorite, and that’s how it is now, the sky cozy and dim, drooping clouds shrouding the glacier, revealing nothing but the foundation of a superstructure that I quickly build. I enlarge the glacier, though it’s big as it is, and make an egg out of it, an upright one. A speckled egg almost all the way up, snow white on top. There’s endless space to shape the land at my will as it leans behind a blanket of clouds, and it’s a very pleasant feeling to have betrayed a lover to whom you have no access anyway and can perhaps stop thinking about if you continue betraying. To stop thinking about something is the greatest relief. The feeling of giving up a secret love is comparable to that of pain ceasing. The best feeling in the world, someone said.