Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I longed to witness the sunrise on the mudflats here in the south. When the entirety of the streams, the sand, the glacier, the sky, and the sea form a whole, it isn’t possible to distinguish between air or water, because everything becomes a mirror in reflection.

Today, no sun rises where we are. Fog curtains of various lengths hang down Lómagnúpur.

Well-fed terns screech, preparing themselves for the world’s longest flight. They raise their young, and then they’re gone. A bird doesn’t recognize interim states. It’s where it is, takes care of its business where it is, and then goes where it goes. It doesn’t wait for years as people do, people like me, for permission to travel nowhere.

Edda eats eagerly, but I just nibble, not exactly all there after my spiritual and physical confrontations with women and men. The wagtails are listless in the low pressure of the autumn weather, fearful of flight. One of them sits on the deck railing, a dejected bird at eight thirty on a Monday morning. The first day of September. Does anyone know whether migratory birds sing as they cross the sea? If so, how have those songs been heard?

Though she’s limping, Edda helps carry our things to the car. She holds open the door, shuts the door. All of a sudden, she’s started making her own journey.

I don’t ask her how her leg is. The well-being of others is not my concern today. My own is more than enough for me to think about.

The lusty spruce trees shielding the unusual building are preparing themselves for winter. The damp evergreen branches glow with inner energy in the sunlessness. The smell of pine and birch reminds me of summers as a kid when everything went my way. When the world was me, one dog, and the sun. When the world was my mother pointing out at the fjord where the fishing smacks lay. And later, when the world was me, a little girl that I gave birth to, and the limpid bobbing of the spring-fed streams that we drank from in very gentle breezes.

The grass is moist and the three of us make streaks in it as we walk out to the car. Six long streaks. Today I’m wearing fierce sneakers rubberized all the way up to the ankle, not my moccasins.

THE DAY OF THE VAIN GOOSE is one of the titles I’ve come up with, I don’t know for what.

My days as a vain goose are numbered, however.

Last check, says Heiður, turning around. Whereas I was already out on the sands, my mind carrying me away. Nothing else carries me.

I must make a point of not running into the French traveler after what’s happened. Lucky there’s no room in the car. If we should catch a glimpse of the backpacker, I’ll give Heiður a sign to gun it. I have nothing to fear, though. He’s an aesthetic man who’s well aware of the boundaries between night and day. He takes one night at a time and won’t be seen chatting over cups of coffee in the morning, instead letting himself disappear like a tactful brownie after his impeccably performed job, before the residents rise and shine.

You just can’t get rid of the creature.

Which one?

This one. Heiður swings the scarab on its gold chain, making it oscillate before my face like a pendulum.

It was under the mattress in the attic.

So you call the tower an attic? How clever. But thank you for finding this — it’s my good-luck charm.

So you said. Such high housekeeping, by the way, taking off your necklace when you spend one night in a summer cottage.

Too true.

Perhaps it was high housekeeping for a Japanese Frenchman to have plucked off me this gilded blue stone animal. Which he forgot to put back on my neck, as he promised.

It’ll be a good feeling to bury my foreign lover when we drive into the wall of fog. I’ll then be a sleeping person with stiff muscles after a hard night, and a scraped chin from rubbing against his stubble.

Scarab lost, scarab found, scarab lost, scarab found. The days on this journey start in the same manner. What does this mean? Nothing. It’s just the way things go.

Good thing you found the scarab, Heiður. I wouldn’t have wanted to wake up in the east and realize that I’d lost it again.

What did I tell you, Mom? You’re one big bundle of superstitions.

I admit that I put faith in the creature. It’ll do good things for me someday.

That’s completely absurd, Edda says.

It was so special how the beast came to me. It was in a golden heart-shaped box inside a big brown leather bag that Gabriel Axel gave me as a going-away present. When I saw the box, I thought: Good Lord, he has a crush on me. But I corrected myself immediately, because he absolutely does not and never has.

No, says Heiður, wrinkling her forehead unusually sharply. It was something else.

You just can’t believe how delightful it was to visit him. His apartment above The Art of Sailing is one big fantasy world. It’s packed full of antiques, and there’s a lamp in every corner; some are art nouveau with chrome leaves that stretch up along the lampstand, and he has an old Japanese silk print, and Indian miniatures. The curtains are made of pale-yellow silk with hand-embroidered flowers, and all over the place are Chinese pots containing strange plants. One is called Passiflora caerula , which means something like “passionflower of the heart.” It’s an odd blue color, like it’s made of plastic, and squirming over half of his wall. He has a Louis the Fifteenth bureau with pictures painted on the wood. He has an antique chaise lounge where we sometimes sat like little cousins, including on the day I left. It was on my birthday, in fact, on the Feast of the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, and he remembered it; he had asked me once when it was. We drank champagne from old Swiss crystal glasses, extremely fine, with grapevines coiling up their stems, and I got pâté de foie gras with it, served on square Japanese dishes.

You should have been a secondhand dealer, Harpa.

Yes, a poet and secondhand dealer. Gabriel Axel and I got to know each other so well that I told him everything there was to tell about myself. He was really shocked when he heard that I had a five-year-old girl, as young as I was. He started talking about how difficult it must be, and I told him at once that such things weren’t uncommon in Iceland, but he still got a tear in his eye. It was always his left eye that got teary. He asked where Edda was. I said that she was in good hands with relatives she knew well in East Iceland, and that this would be the one summer in a long, long time that I could count myself free, because I would always have to provide for us. I told him that my father had helped me go to France, he who never travels except in National Geographic , because he knew that I had this dream to spend time there and learn more French. Then he asked whether I had a good dad, and I said he was the best dad in the world and that my dad was called Axel, just like him. And then he became so seriously teary-eyed that a little brooklet ran down his left cheek, and my eyes moistened in polite sympathy, though I actually didn’t find it sad to have the best dad in the world.

Sheesh, is he so sentimental?

He’s really one for atmosphere. His place is just full of atmosphere. And it’s always so fun as soon as you go there — you just can’t believe it. It’s kind of magical.

Why don’t we visit him if it’s so fun? says Edda.

What’s that?

Are you deaf?

No, I heard you. We’d certainly be given a warm welcome. But I can’t really see how we could, at the moment.

I’m being careful not to say that we can’t afford it.

We’ll just work in a fish factory and save up.

I’m so surprised that I can’t emit as much as a peep. Edda’s planning trips abroad with her little mom. The child must have picked some magic mushrooms this morning.