Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

It’s happened before, says Heiður. Two fully grown women scraping together money for a trip to more southerly climes.

The sands are a museum of many different time periods, to which no one has access except worms. There are human bones in the stomach of this sand, shipwrecks of the centuries, a Viking ship or two, of which no stories are told.

Few have gotten to know the sands up close, other than travelers of old and their horses, those who forded the rivers, who gathered driftwood, clubbed seals, who searched for gold in shipwrecks, who built bridges. If I could choose one of these roles, I would be a treasure hunter — searching for Chinese porcelain, diamonds, and gold bars in the flagship of the Dutch fleet from the seventeenth century. Its mast was still visible at the turn of the twentieth century, before farmers sawed it off and used it to panel their living rooms. Thereby destroying a clue for those who later tried to find the ship.

My life is a sunken ship, isn’t it? Off which mischievous boys sawed the mast to use as fuel for a bonfire.

Sleep is what I yearn for. What I do not get.

Correctly used frustration is probably the most powerful pleasure by far.

Properly handled lovelessness, for example.

But insomnia is no pleasure, no matter how it’s dealt with.

Ahead is a wall of fog rising between us and the glacier, between us and the sea, between us and everything that is in the here and now. This milky, soft wall in our path looks like a wall of silence. Beyond it, silence must reign supreme. I think it’ll be useless for me to open my mouth once we reach it. Neither words would be heard nor sounds. A car crash would sound like colliding cotton balls.

The foremost layer in the wall is composed of loose wisps that condense and meet in a haze that thickens before our eyes, like simmering milk. Once there, nothing else is visible but a piece of the road ahead. To a tired mother it’s a relief not to have to worry about missing a magnificent view. The view sails its own sea, like the sins that I’ve cast onto the highway behind me, to the west.

Heiður turns on the yellow fog lights, and we inch our way onward in the extensive blaze where there’s no flame, just smoke, and the smoke isn’t even harmful. The fog is like steam from a hot spring, though there’s no hot spring. It won’t harm the body, but it inspires claustrophobia. I don’t dare say anything in this silent world, because I don’t want to test whether it’ll be heard. And I don’t need to say anything. I close my eyes in defense against the unreliable external world, which is still not as unreliable as the internal human world. There’s even more risk of becoming lost and perishing in there than out in what’s called the big world. The biggest world is the internal world, the universe in a single person, the most horrifying of worlds, the least known.

A bird on its way to its next country has flown off course and flutters dangerously close to our headlight. It’s so indistinct that it could be a tern or even a plover. Yet it is a bird, an unexpected bird, in the midst of white fog, like the fancy pigeon I saw in the pure white world of Laugardalur last New Year’s Eve, a pigeon for which a black cat sat in ambush behind a snowdrift. A frozen cat that had probably lost its way, as cats do when it snows over their scent marks. It couldn’t find its way home, or didn’t want to go home.

The helm of fog is shaped like the snowfall was then, on New Year’s Eve, which I spent walking home alone to Bollagata, from Heiður’s place in Laugarás, not a taxi to be had at four in the morning. A woman walking in the night in rubber boots, thick tights, a wool sweater over a tulle dress. I’d brought my walking outfit in a backpack. I kept my dress shoes in it as I straddled fences in Laugardalur, a dwarf in a long coat on a dark night whose every corner couldn’t be illuminated by the lights of the city, as the steam from the swimming pool ascended to the sky. There was no one out and about in Laugardalur except for me, and the silence was deep. But suddenly a record player was turned up. I didn’t know where the music was coming from — maybe the house of the Botanical Garden’s superintendent. It was Janis Joplin, the one and only, singing “Me and Bobby McGee.”

I’d trade all of my tomorrows for one single yesterday.

Others would do so, too, dear Janis, if it were possible.

I gave my temporary freedom my full attention at Heiður’s party. In unison with the united housewives of all countries, I’d finished the year by standing bent over pots and pans half the day. Dad had slipped me money for food, so I hadn’t scrimped in that department. Edda didn’t come home until eight o’clock, though I’d pleaded with her not to come later than six because her grandfather was coming for dinner. She was smelling a bit ripe, thanks to not having bathed or changed her clothes for many days and the stench of alcohol. Dad had grown agitated and distracted by the girl’s absence, and it was difficult to carry on a conversation with him. I poured him a little wine and tried to get him to talk about the good old days, but I couldn’t cheer him up.

The evening got better after Edda arrived, though she didn’t stay for more than two hours. Apparently she wasn’t granted leave from the gang for any longer than that. Gerti Chicken came to pick her up in the yellow van. Who knows, maybe Teddi wanted to take her along on a special project. I was thankful that she’d stopped in at all, because of Dad, since it cheered him up. My brother, Sibbi, picked him up around eleven, and when I was alone I went and stood in front of the mirror until the New Year, at which point the sculptor Tóti, Heiður’s old boyfriend, stopped by to take me to her party. Heiður’s one of those who keeps her old lovers handy, but that’s a scheme I’ve never understood. I have my suspicions about it, and I imagine that Dietrich Bacon, her current boyfriend, would feel the same, if he bothered to think about it.

I had two dresses to choose from, a stretch dress and a chiffon dress, and after I’d tried both of them on five times each, I tossed a coin. The black chiffon dress, with its excessively plunging neckline, won. This dress, which is drawn in at the chest with sparkling black stones, had always looked surprisingly good on me, and I knew it. The tulle at the back slightly resembles little wings, but there’s a certain humor in that. I took out Mom’s emerald earrings, for which Dad had saved up to give her on her thirtieth birthday. The color of the stones perfectly suits my eyes and hair.

After the decision concerning the dress was made, I carefully applied my makeup, concealing the rings under my eyes, applying eyeliner, and mixing two lipstick colors to create a garnet-red shade. I put up my hair in a high bun to appear taller and more elegant, and finally I took my high-heeled black suede shoes with the golden clasps from the top shelf of the bedroom closet and removed them from their cloth bag.

Happy with Heiður’s party, but feeling strangely regretful for reasons I didn’t know, I left and took a shortcut home, through the Botanical Gardens. The snow came to my aid as I climbed over fences, leveling things for my short coat-enwrapped legs. The music grew louder, and hoarse drunken screaming could be heard through the large-flaked snowfall that settled on thickening trees and bushes. There was no one to be seen, but beneath a tall spruce tree standing alone in the middle of the gardens loitered a black cat, which cried out as I approached. It shouldn’t have been out alone in the deep snow, the forlorn beast.

The cat, most likely a tom, followed me, mewing piteously at times, but I found its company better than none. For this was a sober and reasonable cat, if nothing else. And I decided to rejoice in it as I had rejoiced in the handshake and glance of Dietrich Bacon when I, all decked up, walked into Laugarás Hall. The handshake that warmed my soul and body, and which betrayed itself by lasting a few seconds longer than it was supposed to do. The highlight of that particular evening was the duet that he and Heiður performed: fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance. The most beautiful love song in the world , said Heiður, who played her gold flute as Dietrich sang in his silver voice. He repeated the word cara while looking at me, ever so gently and subtly.