Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Keep your barking to yourself, you poor thing, says Heiður.

You’re both completely nuts, says Edda. I’m going to catch a ride back with them.

It’s not going to happen, I say. I’ll have the cops arrest them.

Ha ha. How are you going to do that? They’re ahead of us, cackles Edda in her most loathsome tone.

I reach for my phone and there is a sudden ambush from the back: a blow to my shoulder, which slings me against the driver.

Always fucking sticking your nose in, you filthy old bitch, growls Edda, pulling my hair and jerking my head back.

Are you completely insane, kid? shrieks Heiður, fighting to keep the car on the road.

Now’s the time. The accident that had to happen. A rash and fateful voyage leads to a fatal accident. What else?

Just stick to driving, bitch. Eat shit!

We hit a dip, nearly throwing Edda into the front seat. The car, now off the road, is tilted at such an angle that it’s bound to flip as it joggles forward on the sloping bank.

No one says a word. Heiður and I jump out of the car. Even she, with her long shanks, has to resort to this method, since the door is high above the ground on her side. In the midst of all this, it strikes me that now she gets a chance to put herself in the shoes of Little Shortlegs.

Heiður waddles around in the gleam of the fog lights, kicking away a few rocks, and I try making a show of doing so as well, though I’m completely useless compared to her. I try imitating her, try not to be useless. She vanishes from sight, then ends up back within reach of the yellow gleam. The two fog-shadows, childhood friends, don’t say a word, doing road construction bare-handed, without tools. Position: in the middle of nowhere.

Heiður suddenly leaps to the side of the car where Edda’s sitting, or rather, half lying, and yanks open the door, which the girl barely manages to grab with one hand before she slides all the way out. Heiður, however, grabs the girl’s free hand and jerks her out, causing her to fall and land on her side.

Are you nuts? My leg’s injured.

Heiður steps on Edda’s sprained ankle.

This is your very last chance. If you fuck up one more time, I’ll leave you out on the road somewhere. If you’re going to stay with us, you’re going to sit in the front seat and get out of your mother’s hair.

Just watch yourself, you old brute.

I really hope that you never realize what sort of burden you are on your mother, because if you ever did, you’d be wrecked .

Heiður takes her place behind the wheel. I sit in the back, terribly obedient. This time the dwarf doesn’t have such a hard time getting in the car, which is lying almost on its side. A listing car, it’s perfect for girls with short legs, if they’re able to get in on the right side. But it’s difficult to shut the door upward, toward oneself, and I’m a hair’s breadth from falling out when I try.

A fumbling sound from out in the veiled world. The teenager in the fog. As forlorn as a dead girl buried in a nearby cemetery, with me given the task of looking after her grave because the family’s nowhere near.

Heiður presses down on the gas pedal extremely cautiously, and the car crawls slowly up the incline on all four wheels. I’m still terrified it will overturn, but it rights itself on the road with a final jolt. Mission accomplished.

Well done, I say.

We barely avoided rolling over, says Heiður. If I’d turned the wheel to try to keep the car on the road, it would have flipped and we could have been killed. But I had the sense to turn the wheel in the same direction the car was going, which is why it stayed on its wheels.

No need to brag, says Edda. I’ve never come across such a rotten driver.

You have no shame, says Heiður. We nearly wrecked the car and died, and it’s all your fault. You’re like a wild beast.

Better than what you’re like, says Edda, with a provocative laugh.

Listen, girls, I say from the backseat. Can’t we make an agreement that you two not speak to each other?

I’ve got nothing to say to this old idiot. She’s totally cuckoo.

I know you’re used to better from your circle of friends. Maybe they’re only slightly cuckoo, says Heiður. Cuckooed-out junkies who chase you out to the boonies. Let me tell you something. I’ve got a rifle, and if those damned fools come near us one more time, I’m going to use it.

Heiður, I say, that’s not funny .

I’ll shoot out their tires, and we’ll see how far they go after that.

For God’s sake, stop it. Both of you. One, two, and three.

Edda leans against the wool sweater that I’d been using as a pillow.

She glances askance at Heiður, with what seems to me fearful respect. That stands to reason. The only way to keep her under control was to trump her with violence, mental and physical.

I lean my head on a bag stuffed with bed linen and spread Heiður’s down jacket over me. Yes, this will end with someone being killed. Maybe it’ll be me. But I’m supposed to survive until then, thank you very much.

Oh, the mercy of being able to sit in the backseat, away from the bickering of the front seat. The grace of being free from Edda’s supercritical eyes on the back of my head. Yes, shut up now, you bastards, and let me be.

For me, the trick to surviving has always been connected to car trips. The hum of the engine, the chance to be in your own world. Survival. Listening to the hum-humming, and not to Sibbi and Mom squabbling over opening the window a crack, Dad trying to pacify them. Mom’s grinding soliloquies about rites of passage among primitive peoples or the dysentery that killed Kamala the wolf-girl, interwoven with verses by her grandfather, the comic versifier and stalwart Antoníus, as well as her musings on the lives of the French fishermen in Icelandic waters. I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that a person is largely what he or she hears in childhood. Vulnerable to the rhetoric of others, unable to pick and choose.

Still hanging in the Andey living room is a photograph of Mom’s surgeon, Martin, from the French hospital ship Lodestar , but there’s no photo of the French fishermen who stood huddled by a stream, washing their clothing, their hands glacier-cold. The sea treated their poor hands so badly that they become swollen and cracked and bluish red, until they resembled vegetables and were called Iceland cabbages. The poor men never experienced summer warmth in their native lands, only the cold of the supremely bright Icelandic summer. They lived down south in little white houses by the sea, and in autumn when finally they were able to return home from the rough Icelandic fishing grounds, kids in wooden clogs ran to meet them, while bunches of blue flowers stretched up to their windows. When I was a kid, I drew pictures of all of this from stories told by Mom and Grandma and Dýrfinna. I understood that they all had their dream places where there was warmth and sunshine and great amounts of all kinds of fragrant herbs that didn’t particularly need any special care to grow. I was sad that Grandma and Mom never made it to their dream places.

When I finally get to go see my dream place again, after three years’ absence, it isn’t by my own eager will, but rather as part of a desperate flight with my changeling from a host of phantoms and ghouls that wait in ambush for us on the Ring Road, planning to extinguish the little that’s left of any spark of life within us. My dream place has become a destination to be dreaded. That’s how it rolls if life is to continue, if we don’t die early, before IT crashes over us. In my not-so-long life, I’ve experienced becoming a mother, as a child myself. I’ve seen my gentle child change into a new species that I don’t recognize, and I’ve seen my dream place become a destination to be dreaded. PROGRESSION lets nothing alone if life continues; it grinds gemstones into dust, breaks people mentally and cripples souls, plows over pastures of plenty.