Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Please excuse me for a moment, I say.

You know the way, don’t you? asks Bettý.

Yes, I say, and walk through the laundry room, which is adjacent to the kitchen, to the bathroom just beyond. I remember the unusual arrangement of the rooms at Útheimar from my childhood.

I feel queasy from my gluttony by the time I get to the bathroom, ever so tidy, without even a hint of the smell of cows. If anything, a scent of perfume hangs in the air. Madame Rochas.

Is that you, Mom, or is this just an earthly perfume scent, from a bottle?

I sit down limply on the edge of the bathtub and wish I could take a boiling hot bubble bath to alleviate my soreness. There are various methods for acquiring sore muscles; the method that I used last night is painless, and much more.

Oh, a nice soak in the tub would take too long. Hot baths are one of the things that aren’t available on this long, long journey. We’d be unduly late to Andey, and end up spending the night with Dýrfinna.

My chin is more swollen and red now than when I looked in the mirror this morning. I haven’t used a trace of makeup to cover over evidence of my nocturnal pleasures. I want to bear my war injuries like a man.

I fix my eye on the big, elaborate white-and-gold medicine cabinet hanging above the massive sink. Completely stuffed, I get up from the edge of the tub and open the cabinet. Despite its vastness, it turns out to be empty, apart from a brown pharmaceutical vial labeled Peanut Oil , as well as one bottle of Madame Rochas perfume.

I knew you were a fake, dear aunt, spraying the area with perfume and pretending that it’s evidence of the afterlife.

At the same moment I realize who she reminds me of. She’s nearly identical to my generous friend Gabriel Axel, a living, revenant replica. They’re similar in height, similar in posture. They speak exceptionally quietly, and both have adopted the mannerisms and gait of the deceased.

When I return to the kitchen, I feel a bit sad seeing the three ruined gourmet cakes, devoured by three hungry female wolves from the wild roads of Iceland. At the same time I also notice that Edda Sólveig Loftsdóttir has almost completed what she set out to do: finish one and a half liters of Coke in ten minutes.

Small and full, stiff in all my joints, I don’t want to sit down, because I might not be able to stand up again. I lean on the edge of the table like a drunken woman, and have half a mind to ask, in a drawling voice: Spirit of the glass…

Instead I say, trying to speak clearly through my sugar shock: I don’t mean to be rude, but we really need to keep track of the time.

Heiður and Edda react astonishingly quickly, jumping up from the table. Bettý says that she fully understands our need to press on.

You’re always welcome here, she says to Edda.

Maybe I’ll come back, says the girl.

Think about it. There’s plenty of time. You’re also welcome, Harpa, if you need a break. It’s not such a long drive.

I don’t see myself in Dýrfinna’s Israeli Willys jeep on the steep, icy slopes of Hvalnes.

It doesn’t generally snow appreciably until January, and some winters there’s very little snow at all. Time is on your side.

Maybe we’ll come visit you if we can get a ride. I wouldn’t dare to go far in the jalopy, even if the weather’s good.

You’d attract attention on the road, says Bettý, with a slow, swelling laugh.

Edda bids farewell to her aunt with a kiss and says she’ll come back soon. She skips off ahead of us into the garden and disappears between the rowan trees standing in a ring around the tent from my youth.

NIGHT QUARTERS OF MY DECEASED MOTHER. Yet not her grave.

Heiður and I silently plod along in Edda’s track. On the rise, I turn around to see Bettý still standing by her door. I wave to her, but she doesn’t wave back. I’m now less than certain that she’s there, even though it looks like she is.

The murmur of voices grows louder in the hollow, mixed with outbursts of laughter. Once the drizzle stopped, the tent people started moving about.

I don’t feel like talking to anyone, I say softly to Heiður. Let’s just get to the car, quickly.

Stupid of us not to have taken the road, she says. We could have avoided this completely.

From the top of the rise, we see four thickset men in creaking nankeen overalls approaching us, carrying a little piano. They’re followed by three others, two musclemen with mottled headbands carrying a piano stool with a little redheaded woman sitting on it. She’s wearing a beige all-weather coat and flat-soled black shoes with laces. She laughs in a chiming soprano with a slow vibrato, like an old prima donna. The men who carry her and the stool laugh in a pulsating tenor, hohohoho-ho, their necks short and their thighs bulging. Just as the piano movers reach the crest of the rise, the two of us take a detour in order to avoid crossing paths with them, and whether it’s because of that or something else, they start laughing even louder, in bumptious tones. The one who laughs longest drops into a baritone that dies out beneath the superbright soprano of the little woman. This is followed by a brief silence, but finally this choir is shaken together into a filigree of tenors, sopranos, and baritones. This booming prankster-symphony is like an eastern gale springing up out of the blue in the late-afternoon stillness of the first day of September.

Why are they carrying her? asks Heiður.

Maybe she can’t walk.

Is she a relative of yours?

Not that I know.

The little woman whose legs might be paralyzed plays the patriotic song “Iceland Scored with Inlets.” Individual members of the side of the family from Dylgja, along with unrelated spouses and poorly behaved children in good-quality coats, arrange themselves around the instrument on the rise. The porters are the backbone of the choir, and the razor-sharp soprano of the accompanist slices through all other vocal ranges. The clan croons… who have carried me at your breast …children whine, a teenager puffs on a cigarette, and the swan couple on the pond has had enough of it. They take off and, flying low, join in the chorus… as the Creator deems …with a churlish honking and noisy flapping right over the clan’s heads… be blessed, Iceland, bless you …

No one gives us so much as a glance as we walk off, except the mother and son from the yellow Bronco, as they stand there in nearly identical orange-and-bright-green rainwear, and wink at us as a two-year-old might. I don’t wave in return, surprised that they see through the cloak of invisibility that Bettý the conjurer or someone else must have wrapped around us.

Guess what I spotted in Bettý’s bathroom? An entire container of the perfume that my mom used. She sprayed the damned tent with Madame Rochas and acted as if it were convincing evidence of Mom’s presence.

Heiður laughs, saying: The old lady sure is incredible.

Leave Bettý alone, demands Edda. You know nothing about Bettý. She misses Grandma Sól. They were such great friends.

They were always the best of friends. Both completely nuts. I always imagine them together with Seadevil. You remember that story.

I’ve never heard it, says Heiður.

Yes, you have. It’s the most amazing story. Grandma told it to me every summer; I told it to Edda and, God willing, she’ll tell it to her children.

I don’t want anything to do with kids! screeches Edda.

Not yet.

Never, you old crow.

Well, it all started when people on farms to the east thought it a sensible idea to raise puppies to give to the French fishermen when they came in the spring. Bettý took a liking to a black puppy that was intended for the sailors and named it Seadevil. Then came spring. Grandpa Helgi and Great-grandpa Antoníus rowed out to one of the French fishing smacks with the puppy, in order to trade it for cognac and biscuits. Mom and Bettý had gotten to go with them to the village, and they were waiting on the pier, half whimpering and holding hands. Father and son remained aboard for some time, before rowing away a bit tipsier than when they arrived. They’d only taken two or three oar-strokes when a splitting howl came from the French vessel, and a pitch-black lump cast itself overboard and made a beeline toward land, reached the shore where the sisters were waiting, and wrapped its wet paws around Bettý’s neck. When Grandpa reached land he said, Seadevil will stay with us. The puppy became the greatest of sea dogs — it had human wits about it. And it left behind a lot of tales worth telling.