Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Stuck in a car with the tragedy of my life.

Back to the defensive mechanisms of childhood. I’m well trained for survival in a car. I survive by not existing. By considering the fluctuations of the speedometer as a Buddhist monk does a bowstring, by entering the rumbling of the engine as a dead Icelander does a mountain, by not existing in a way that the two in the front seat will never understand. Nor do my fellow travelers in the front seat exist, but their nonexistence is different from mine.

Different from the nonexistence of the light-gray bird loitering by the road, lost in existence. Soon dead under some car, my dear fat fulmar chick, unable to fly.

When my brother, Sibbi, was in the countryside during the summer, he amused himself by poking fulmars with a stick long enough so that the bird’s vomit wouldn’t reach him. Emptying out their vomit made it much easier to kill them.

Fulmar chicks are killed by biting them in the neck, grinding the neckbone between your teeth. Crack. A phlegmatic farmer, with a bitten bird in his mouth. That I’d rather not envisage.

Isn’t it better for the nestlings to end up beneath car wheels than between a person’s teeth?

It’s all the same. All of it is just the same.

Heiður slips in a cassette tape, Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony , which she knows pleases me.

All the beauty that man has created, in musical notes, language, images, buildings. The same species that uses its creative gifts to come up with innovative tortures and more efficient weapons, in the name of fighting against those who are almost like him, but not quite. Those who don’t quite belong to the same tribe, but almost. Those who have a slightly different religion, those who don’t think quite the same. Man wants to eliminate those who resemble him, if they aren’t exactly like him. I don’t understand man. It’s no wonder. I don’t even understand the people next to me, my own dead mother, my best friend, my daughter. As for myself, never mind. There’s something disgusting about people wallowing in thoughts about themselves, like weltering in a bathtub full of innards.

In a bathtub full of dead fulmars.

This bloody overturned bundle at the edge of the road isn’t necessarily dead, but its brother with the tattered wing on the other side of the road is most definitely dead.

A dead bird across the highway.

It doesn’t bode well.

I want to go home.

Nowhere is home.

Yet, oh, María, I want to go home.

Heiður puts the car in neutral and pulls the parking brake before taking off her sweater. Beneath it she’s wearing a short-sleeved white T-shirt adorned with the Nike logo. She looks back at me and smiles. I shake my head and return her smile.

Heiður’s arms, resting awkwardly on the steering wheel, are one of her most peculiar features. They’re muscled like a man’s, as if accustomed to intensive labor or weightlifting, but they end in the hands of a little girl, with slender, soft fingers that have hardly ever been subjected to manual labor of any kind. Yet it’s strangely bulky where her wrists meet her hands. Someone should suggest to her old boyfriend, Plastic Tóti, that he should make a sculpture of Heiður’s hands and arms holding a flute. This malformation of hers obviously hasn’t escaped Heiður’s notice either, because she always has the sense to wear long sleeves, preferably cuffed, when she steps onstage before an audience and raises her flute to her lips.

Once there was a master flutist who couldn’t follow the score at the wheel of a pickup truck, or play it by ear. This remarkable female musician was a TONE-DEAF DRIVER, yet she drove anyway.

Edda Sólveig Loftsdóttir, my daughter, is snoring ever so softly, with her head leaning against the door. Her snores are like prissy maiden snuffles. A deceased elf-maiden with a golden band around her waist breathes through her.

The car rattles alarmingly on the potholes in the gravel road. This questionable staccato is the complete opposite of a supple, swift, hypnotizing dance.

The lovers’ dance on the third day of the New Year was a series of continuous movements in which each movement was a preparation for the next, when an inkling of the one that came afterward was hidden in the movement that came before. A clearly formed dance from beginning until end. The dance following intermission was a logical continuation of the dance preceding intermission.

Lesser prophets may also have beautiful movements, but they don’t harmonize. Each individual movement is separate and distinct.

No snow covers the dance of lovers in January. It emerges green from the snow in every season, and this movement will be there while the lovers live. My lover gave himself entirely to the heart-propelled dance, and his extremities danced accordingly. From then on, the man was mine. Wherever he goes, he’s mine, but I keep this information carefully guarded.

How might that be, my friend in the west? Might happiness really exist? A man and a woman in love throughout time, a bit shy, slightly innocent — might it exist? A man and woman together for ages after starting off with a great love.

I think I know the answer. Years together with someone you love more than life itself is intolerable. A constant fear of not complying to his or her wishes, a never-ending anxiety that he or she will leave you. I think it’s truly best to be with someone you care about, a good person who wishes you well, a pleasant person. Isn’t love the most tedious thing of all? If grand, intimate love exists in the long run, it must surely kill off its lovers. Isn’t love best in the form of an acute madness that seizes the soul and body? A madness that we must choke to death as soon as it’s born, but that we’re then allowed to remember for the rest of our lives, whether they’re long or short.

Secret love. That’s something for me, maybe for everyone. It costs nothing to desire in silence and stick to my own thoughts about things. There’s something elegant about desiring what can’t be had. Who was it that said he wished none such ill that his wishes were fulfilled? Could it be that the fulfillment of wishes in affairs of the heart is the slyest punishment meted out by the gods? How might it be to have desired a person for years, waited for him, fought for him, and in the end be granted the wish? To continue to love and be always in the red, because the other loves less. To discover latent defects, unworthiness. Not to be able to stop loving, not to be allowed to stop — because then life’s purpose would disappear.

To be able to formulate your own thoughts is the greatest privilege. TO HAVE YOUR OWN THOUGHTS ABOUT THINGS, until death, undisturbed by the everyday: low-fat curds topped with skimmed milk, sour dishcloths. It’s vulgar to compel dreams to come true. Am I really to devalue the winter night in Norðurmýri by battening it down to a double bed in the same bedroom for seasons on end? I should say not. Rather, it ought to be about extending the night, lap after lap on the racetrack of time. In any case, it’s impossible to repeat it. Nights shouldn’t be bound to particular locales.

To desire in peace. That’s about it.

Like a doomed fulmar on the road.

Heiður swerves past an unfledged lump to avoid squashing it. The next car will surely tear a hole in the newly feathered skin and rip off a wing. For a young, obese fulmar on the road, about the only passable route is the one to heaven. I predict a rough end for it. Its fate won’t be to fly up there, except in spirit.

The way east is marked with shredded, bloody fledglings. It would take a bulldozer to remove all these carcasses, hundreds of horrid carcasses. A carcass-dozer would be most useful and welcome on these roads in autumn.