Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

We didn’t dare move the man for fear that he was injured. The woman got a wool blanket decorated with the national insignia’s four guardian spirits and spread it over him. It was strange to see him lying there like that, with a blanket up to his ears. An overturned doorstep ghost on New Year’s Eve.

The woman put on a fur coat and high-heeled patent leather boots, and we hovered over the man and waited for the ambulance. A two-person wake, out in the cold. All we needed was for the bells of Háteig Church to ring. I started recalling old stories about corpses that couldn’t be buried until spring, and I hoped that the frozen man would come to no harm, because when the paramedics wiped the snow from his face he turned out to be young and beautiful. Maybe he had a wife and child.

They asked me if I was coming, and I was on the verge of getting in the ambulance and accompanying him to the emergency room before I decided that it bordered on intrusiveness and abandoned the idea.

I hurried the rest of the way home to Bollagata. I felt as though I’d been delayed, that I had to hurry. That Edda needed me. I had a nagging feeling that I ought to be there, though it was uncertain whether my child would come home in an hour or three days from now.

Flókagata Street was littered with traces of the festivities: singed cylindrical stubs protruding from the snow on the sidewalks and yards; burned-out sparkler rods hanging from fences; black genever, champagne, and liqueur bottles from which fireworks had been shot standing or lying here and there. These pieces of evidence would remain as they were until spring, when the earth would start to turn green. Until May, when enterprising individuals and teenage work-groups would take to gathering the decaying remains of New Year’s Eve.

In front of a house opposite Kjarvalsstaðir, two people were kissing. I found something mysterious about the couple, so I snuck over to have a look and saw that it was two women, one with a crew cut. Once there were two lesbians on Flókagata Street, kissing outside while doctors thawed a frozen man who was found on a doorstep on Háteigsvegur Street by a short-statured assistant nurse.

It had sometimes crossed my mind to try out a woman, but I felt it would be too much of an undertaking, and maybe show a certain disrespect for the male sex, about which I had no complaints, so to speak. It would have been impossible to complain about my most recent adventure, with Yves, if I hadn’t simply forgotten about the man already.

On the one hand, the sun is shining, the sea is bright. On the other, there’s fog, toward the land, which is a glacier. Fog that condenses and disperses according to a fast-paced pattern that no one can decipher.

Many a time I’ve watched my fjord to the east emerge from fog, but I’ve never seen the earth around my fjord emerge from snow from the very start. I know no season in my dream-fjord except for late spring and then summer, a hint of autumn. Next spring I’m going to document all of it: the coming of the migratory birds, one after another, the growth of the buds on the trees.

Ingólfshöfði is the headland of the settler Ingólfur Arnarson, said Dad as we sailed by on our way back to Reykjavík, or on our way east.

It isn’t a headland; it’s an island, I said.

No, it’s a headland. I’m certain of it, said Dad, with a gentle smile.

Saga Kaaber, Heiður’s mom, once said to me: You inherited your dad’s beautiful, gentle smile. Was she trying to be beastly, or was she consoling me? Saying, Of course he’s your father.

Fortunately, we can’t read minds.

I stir when the hum of the car engine stops, when the movement ceases. Heiður has parked as close as possible to an otherworldly lagoon. Turkish-blue icebergs glow with inner fluorescent light on water of the same color. Sunlight gleams on the ice cap, and smoky-black clouds hover behind dusky-blue peaks. The sky has taken on the color of the bergs and water, making everything equally blue: icebergs, sky, lagoon. A boat is moored, ready to sail between icebergs and rub shoulders with them. A seal pokes its head up, imitating a sea-beaten rock, and promptly dives down again.

A smoky-white cloud over the sea. Between us and the sea is a narrow strip of sand. Spanning it is a bridge, beneath which runs the glacial river.

Time to get some fresh air, sleepyheads, says Heiður. You really make great traveling companions. I wish I got to sleep.

You knew what you were getting into when you volunteered to drive us.

Get a move on, Edda. Be sure to stretch.

Leave me alone, says Edda, pulling a sleeping bag up over her head.

I make it to the ground through carefully planned maneuvers. I’m even stiffer than yesterday, and my inner-thigh muscles are sore, after my intense deed in the dark with a man I don’t know. I’m going to try everything I can not to remember his name. It was nice while it lasted, and that’s that.

The final tour group of the summer, wearing international headgear — headbands, ski caps, balaclavas, red tasseled hats — focuses multiple eyes on me from the windows of a minibus parked in front of a shop that wasn’t here the last time I traveled the Ring Road. Even foreigners find me outlandish. They forget themselves and gape at me like tried-and-true Icelanders, even though they all know that staring is impolite. I’m not even in my white pants and moccasins any longer — just sneakers and light-blue jeans, like an ordinary person.

I rush down to the lagoon’s beach as quickly as the state of my lower extremities allows. The sand-bearing icebergs are half-submerged and have the texture of foam. The ice chunks crack loudly as they split from the mother glacier. The cracking is amplified in the stillness of the wilderness, creating music to accompany the nearby ocean, which is as tactful and mannered as the inhabitants of the Skaftafell area.

The glacial air could easily drive my lungs mad. They rise and fall in sheer joy. If I could get Edda out of the car, her supple blood-rich lungs would suck in the glacier oxygen and refresh her liver and kidneys, prompting them to filter out the poison and the madness on the spot. The outcome would be a teenager who’d gone on a spiritual kidney machine, leaving no further need to worry about her.

I heed the demonic sorcery of the lagoon and transform myself into an elegant feminine arc diving in to swim among frolicking icebergs. Just as I’m about to hit the enticing surface, I feel the urge to pee, surprisingly abruptly, and I tear off stiffly to the shop’s restroom before an accident occurs.

When I’m done, the last minibus of the year is gone, along with the international headwear. Parked here now are only our car and one other: the staff car, no doubt. If I hadn’t had to pee so badly, I’d now be swimming in the lagoon like all the other bergs that calved from the mother glacier. The glacier is of course female, whether it crawls along or soars to the sky. I’m not sure whether everyone’s aware of this.

A sign in front of me says BLACK DEATH AND SHARK, 400 KRÓNUR. I like that. A hot-dog-less shop at the foot of the largest glacier in Europe. I’m going to have a snack of these national delicacies without asking my overlords from the car. Have a schnapps though it’s not yet noon. It hasn’t happened often in my life, maybe never. That’s fine. Ideally, as much as possible should happen that hasn’t happened before.

When Heiður comes into the shop after a little stroll along the shores of the lagoon, I’m sitting at a table, staring out the window at the glacial fog, a gray vapor that plays around the luminous blue bergs at the glacier’s edge. I’m finishing my schnapps and have two cubes of shark to go. Heiður plunks onto a stool and asks, astonished: What’s that you’ve got there?