Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Too bad they can hardly be seen, I said, and suggested that he come back in the summer. He said that he very much wanted to, especially to see the summer in my fjord to the east. But he never mentions visiting in his letters. I don’t know why. I think he has enough money.

He’s so wonderful, just like a ghost—

How can ghosts be wonderful? interrupts Heiður.

You’ll understand when I introduce you to him. He’s long and thin, with a matador’s physique, and he walks with a Seville swing, because he grew up in Seville. His father was French and his mother a Portuguese Jew, so, strictly speaking, he’s Jewish — it’s based on maternity. He’s fluent in French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

I need to practice and then show you how they walk in Seville, with a deep swing, leaning back. Gabriel Axel has such an air of grandeur, the kind of melancholy grandeur that doesn’t exist in the north. He isn’t married, but keeps company with a famous Catalan flamenco dancer named Elvira. She’s such an incredible character, with the widest smile I’ve ever seen. It reaches completely up to her nose and all the way out to her ears, and she has a gap in her front teeth. But her dark-brown eyes are sad, like the eyes of her boyfriend, full of sorrow but never dull. I saw her dancing once, but being well over sixty years old now, she mainly teaches. I’ve never understood the logic in flamenco. It’s one of the most difficult things that the body can undertake, yet it’s still possible to dance it until the day you die. Elvira was a total star, dancing throughout Europe and America. I saw clippings from Die Zeit, Corriere della Sera , the Times, Politiken, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Neue Zürcher Zeitung , the Washington Post .

How do you remember all this?

I’ve told you all this before, and you obviously don’t deserve to hear it again since you’re so horribly senile.

Heiður grins, and apparently not caring to listen anymore, she turns on the radio. We listen to rhythmic Bach, who gives us faith in glorious order and rule, faith in our existence. Faith in Sunday light, a fresh day over Hellisheiði Heath.

Which inches its way up along the beveled edge to its yellow sunstead.

Lends intense luminosity to the dense green moss-covered lava after the damp of night.

The white-flecked blueness of Mount Hekla and the enchanting ice cap of Eyjafjallajökull, promise of another land farther east, of what the travelers get to see up close:

Radiant mountain stars, from other angles.

The view from the crest of Kambar isn’t dependent on the season, or on any time for that matter; it’s unreal. The coldly gentle light overenhances naked contours, and a traveler thinks: This isn’t real, I’m not here.

If you venture beyond the shelter of a window — car, house, airplane — the land doesn’t become unreal, but rather, superreal. A cold gust of wind gets caught in your throat, enters the naked individual, chafes the ears, and you think: It shouldn’t exist, I shouldn’t be here.

Heiður, weren’t you scared of Kambar when you were little?

Me, scared? No, for me it was fun when the view opened up after the tedium of the heath.

I didn’t notice that you could see anything, because I was so terrified of the steepness and the narrow road. Plus my ears hurt or they got stopped up, which sometimes lasted for several hours.

But now I see

Hveragerði

billows of steam from dells and gorges behind the village

tongues of spruce trees stretching far up the mountain

the green plain cut by the Ölfusá River

silver sea

mountain glory and glacier

which pulls us in

Nothing at this moment tells us that the summer is retreating. Even the lone snowdrift on Mount Skálafell pretends to be something it’s not. It’s the only one that didn’t melt in the summer, and could actually be an April drift, with style. Nor do any birds reveal the season — they’re nowhere to be seen, gathering for departure over the seas. There’s no hint of autumn in the air, and it’s impossible to tell from the color of the sky and the light following dawn that summer is fading fast.

Behold the glory. Let’s breathe.

Breathe. We’ve forgotten to breathe in this car, which smells like a small pub, and no one’s had the sense to roll down a window.

Heiður pulls the parking brake after coming to an abrupt stop at the turnout. I thought we were going to go over the edge, but I kept my mouth shut. Maybe I hoped deep down that she’d let us fall. Then she dashes out and takes several spasmodic steps around the panoramic dial. Heiður certainly does lurch her way through life. She walks and talks in fits and starts. But everything changes when she plays her flute. When she walks onstage, she transforms. All of her hastiness and testiness vanish. She becomes peculiarly supple, as if harnessing her innate jerkiness in order to travel out to the very edge of fluidity and seesaw over the abyss just beyond the brink, balanced against an invisible weight.

And in the third row, her assistant-nurse best friend, who can neither play flute nor anything else, feels a little twinge of admiration and envy.

My daughter in the backseat has opened her eyes, and I dare to address her:

Would you like to get out and stretch a bit, Edda?

She arches her back aggressively and sticks out her tongue at me.

I cautiously hop out of the pickup as a nearsighted person would do. We small-statured folk carry ourselves like those who are nearsighted. It’s not surprising; the world’s so far from us. We’ve got to get right up close to it in order to function.

My daughter’s attitude hasn’t escaped Heiður’s notice, of course, and she asks whether Edda’s making any progress.

Not that I’ve noticed.

You’ve been far too kind to her. You let her walk all over you.

Remind me again that it’s all my fault.

Since when did you become so sensitive?

Don’t be so cross. Have you forgotten how miserable I am?

I never forget it, says Heiður, laughing. Look, not a single cloud over Eyjafjallajökull. And the Westmann Islands are so vividly blue, as if they’ve just stepped out of a deep-sea bath.

She stares at the sea, narrowing her eyes as if she intends to heave the Westmann Islands archipelago from it with mental energy. As her eyes grow smaller, her nose elevates and her chin grows longer.

I lean against the gleaming-white car, and the curtains of my mind draw shut as the sun itself bursts forth from its cloud-cage and long pale sunbeams point at the shimmering bends of the Ölfusá River all the way south to the coast, where they spread out before the sea takes over.

You’re so pale, says Heiður. Are you carsick?

No.

My nausea is none of her business. It’s a reminder of my stupid life’s work, child rearing that went down the drain, a single seriously ill infant of fifteen years. Is it true that she’s mine? How did I do this?

Maybe I’m making the next-biggest mistake of my life with this trip, though there have certainly been enough to choose from. I have to resign myself to the fact that I won’t discover anytime soon whether it was right to leave or stay, and that I might never discover it.

Look, they’re turning, I say.

Thank God, says Heiður.

The two cars that had kept us at thirty miles per hour across the length of Hellisheiði Heath had both turned into the town of Hveragerði. This Sunday morning the traffic eastward from Reykjavík consisted of three cars precisely, forming a little caravan. How incredibly skilled some Icelanders can be at holding up other cars on the road, and frugal. One single car is all they need for their caravan.