Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Lamebrained beast, says Heiður, hammering on the wheel and unintentionally honking the horn again.

Are you losing it? howls Edda, scandalized. How easily she’s scandalized, this scandalous girl.

Wasn’t it Bettý who foresaw your mom’s death in her dream? asks Heiður, regrouping.

She sees everything in dreams. She should do live broadcasts from dreamland. There’s so much going on.

Does it all happen?

Everything happens in retrospect, naturally.

Poor Grandma Sól, to die so early, says Edda. She was always so good to me.

What she means is: Not like you, Mom. You’re always so awful. Which is an out-and-out lie. It’s also a lie that her grandmother was always so good to her. The truth is that her grandmother was indifferent to her, albeit not as much as she was to me.

The indifference wasn’t even the worst of it; the worst was her lack of constraint. She had so little control over herself that she clearly chose favorites between Sibbi and me, paid much more attention to him than me, spoiled him behind Dad’s back. This she did so well that in the end my brother became an utterly spoiled mama’s boy. Sibbi ruined his father, destroyed his life’s work, financially speaking, put him in a rest home prematurely. I can hardly stand to think of it.

Dad: victim of my mother, victim of his son. He doesn’t even get to have his own daughter, THE APPLE OF HIS EYE. She’s taken from him as well. No, she was never his. My father’s life, a tragedy that I can’t bear thinking of.

Turn off the road there.

What kind of person is Bettý? asks Heiður. More like Dýrfinna or your mom?

Hmm, I don’t know, but she’s really quite a show. That much I can promise.

Your mother was quite a show too.

Yes, but she was an evening show. This one’s more like a matinee. It’s absolutely astounding what she comes up with.

Strangely enough, I’m looking forward to visiting this aunt of mine, despite the circumstances. I’ve never really known her. In fact, I haven’t had any interest in her before, except as a UFO that would best be kept above the clouds.

Aw, slow down, Heiður, you’re breaking my back. Is this a road or a giant pothole?

Harpa, look! Oh my God!

A person dressed in a skirt and boots strides along the road with a big blue bag over his or her shoulder.

Is that a man or a woman?

I’m not surprised you ask.

Woman’s skirt, man’s haircut.

Now I see. It’s Hrikka. Hrikka Kontaratandis, delivering the mail. She’s from Lithuania or one of those countries. She’s just had her hair cut.

Huh?

She came here after the war. She’s married to an Icelander. Rumor was she had an affair with Valdi.

Bettý’s Valdi?

Yes. He was a handsome man.

I don’t doubt it.

Postperson Hrikka waves as we drive past her. Her bulging blue bag must be heavy.

Why is she walking?

Don’t ask me why people walk, I say. By the way, Bettý apparently didn’t care that Valdi was sleeping with someone else. I guess she’s so busy with her contacts from beyond that it didn’t matter to her.

A tidy, well-constructed barred gate appears on a road between lava formations. A road that leads nowhere, to no visible destination.

At turnouts on both sides of the road are numerous cars. Not the shells of them as at Arnbjartur’s, but rather, real cars.

A party, says Heiður.

Let’s leave, says Edda. The place is packed with people.

It can’t be a party. The cars would be closer to the house.

It must be a family reunion, then.

Good Lord, it’s the yellow Bronco.

Dead right, and they’re tailing us.

May I point out to you that they obviously arrived before us.

At least I’ll have the chance to ask Bettý who on earth these people are.

I wouldn’t bother.

As I walk past the yellow Bronco, I take a quick peek in its window. The farmer’s lying on the backseat, with a russet sheepskin over him.

What did you see? asks Heiður.

Nothing.

I can tell that you saw something.

On a moss-covered lava rock by the side of the road sits a man I can’t quite place, though I know he’s a distant relative. He’s gesticulating, talking to himself.

Is that guy insane? asks Edda.

Maybe he’s an amateur actor from Höfn rehearsing a part.

How come I’m not connecting with you? says the man sitting on the rock, tearfully. Can’t I make any impression on you at all?

This relative of mine is all set to break down. I hurry past him, with Edda and Heiður close behind.

In the hollow to the north of the farm stands a cluster of tents: blue cabin tents with extensions, rescue-squad-red one-man dome tents, old Scout tents.

So it is a family reunion after all.

There’s no one in view, but boisterous gossiping resounds from the tents. A jabbering monologue in my mother’s style can be heard from a grand-looking cabin tent near the rise between the hollow and the farm.

I stop when I hear something said about Teitur, my great-uncle. Heiður listens with me, but Edda rushes up the rise.

This is the only existing photo of him, says a strong male voice. A handsome man until he was thirty, and enormously intelligent. Born and bred in Dylgja. He had a child with each of his two wives, Sabína the Younger and Sabína the Older. Their fathers’ families were both from Kirkjubæjarklaustur, and it turned out that they were first cousins three times removed, so they were more closely related than it seemed at first.

Did the sisters have the same mother?

So they did.

Half sisters, then?

They were much more than that, of course, because the fathers were so closely related to each other. But this about the fathers’ relationship wasn’t discovered until later, because the paternity of one of them was misattributed.

But Teitur himself?

He had three children, and a fourth who died young, whom he had with Sabína, who later became his wife, and the wife of the two brothers the years that they lived at Litla-Klaustur. They had plenty of rough-hewn descendants, folks notorious for their scandalous verses, unscrupulousness, drunkenness, and bookishness, who couldn’t wear green except when the moon was full because of the minuscule family ghost.

What was Teitur’s first wife called?

She was called Sabína, the niece of his second wife, also Sabína, who died giving birth to their second child.

Oh, I thought they had three children together.

No, the third child had its own mother. He had that child with Regína when he was between female relatives, but he and Regína were half cousins, which wasn’t exactly looked upon favorably by all. But no degeneration was observed in the child, who was named Ketill, although Yngvi, his son, was born lame in his right leg. Regína then married Teitur’s brother Þorsteinn and had seven sons by him, all but six of whom died young. All of them worked clearing new hayfields in Suðursveit, including two twins…

The tent falls silent. Heiður trots off, and I follow her example. As we leave the hollow and head up the rise, a female voice in the tent asks: Identical?

When we reach the top, Heiður and I take a breather, smiling widely as we look down at sharp lava projections sticking up decoratively from the ground. In their shelter grow numerous foreign flowers, red-orange with yellow centers — even up here — and the grass is so vivid and so hardy that I foresee a green life for it through the winter and into spring. We can see straight down into Bettý’s garden — an orchard and vegetable garden and flower garden, which is remarkably colorful on the first day of September. In chubby red-currant bushes, thrushes pilfer red berries until they’re full to bursting, their every peep stifled by gluttony.