Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

tepid sadness that I swallow like boiled milk.

It’s the cold shiver of grief that I fear.

Which is why I held your funeral at thirteen.

A funeral at the eleventh hour, before disaster struck.

My former pride and joy, Edda in her element.

Sweet-smelling nursling

a two-year-old whirlwind who spoke in tongues

a three-year-old strict and sweet mother of dolls

a five-year-old philosopher

a seven-year-old dusting girl

a nine-year-old principal of cows

an eleven-year-old devourer of books

Mommy’s girl, Grandpa’s girl.

After thirteen years, Edda S was sucked into a black hole.

Edda S,

take your quilt and go

back to your single mother

she needs you

she has nothing but you.

Don’t cheat me of a daughter, my daughter.

Who will walk to the store for me on slippery sidewalks when the time comes?

Don’t cheat me of a granddaughter, my daughter.

Entertainer, helper, soul mate.

Granddaughter who will inherit the cocotte Cosette.

Don’t cheat me of a grandson.

A vindictive baby

who slurps down mother’s milk with loud moans.

A swaddling infant who changes into an impertinent schoolboy.

I’ll tell him about Great-grandma Una, less about poor Grandma Sól.

I’ll tell him and his sister about Dýrfinna, less about Bettý

and about my lethally obscure paternity when they’re grown up. Maybe.

I’ll tell them of our flight to the east, three female refugees in a pickup truck.

They were chased by little pricks in a pathetic yellow delivery van.

A nocturnal adventure in a transparent tower will not be included in the narrative.

That’s a private affair by a volcanic neck.

I’ve got to be able to talk about how it was

when Edda S was little

the clever things she said

the good things she did

the curse words she combined.

With whom should I talk

single, old

if not with my own daughter, Edda,

my only daughter.

I want to talk to you then

I should talk to you.

For this, you’ll have to be Edda S

there won’t be others for it. They won’t be here.

Sit by me on the edge of the tub

spread a blanket over me softly

like a doll in a stroller when you were little

In the desert of sand and desert of stone, colors thrive in remarkable cohabitation.

Blue-gray sand with same-colored sea.

Giant light-red rocks with a violet tinge.

We’ve come to the kingdom of stones. The house by the sea is our destination, and around it is a wall of blossoming stones, which Dýrfinna has gathered during the long life she’s been granted. Some I gathered myself. Others Edda gathered. It was she who found the stone that’s shaped like a cow pie, russet and green. It was too heavy for her to carry it down from Slembigil Ravine. She stacked stones into a little marker so that we’d be sure to find it again. It took two of us to stagger back with it, and it was Edda who decided to give it to Dýrfinna, because, as she declared, she’s the best in the world.

Dýrfinna is the kind caretaker in the kingdom of stones, and she knows where every single one of these thousand stones comes from, where it was gathered, and who found it. But it is I who own the stone of stones in this kingdom, the zeolite that I found up in a ravine when I was twelve. I’d climbed higher than I’d ever done before, when suddenly I saw the gleaming white opening, the sun due south and shining directly on it, and I clambered up and managed to tear loose one of the stones. As I pulled, I lost my balance and nearly fell on my back with the shining stone in my grasp. Yet I didn’t drop it and somehow regained my balance. Didn’t die. Not then.

A nimble-footed, erect-headed sheep struts slowly across the road, right in front of the car. It’s this sheep who rules the roads. We can just slow down, thank you very much. An ankle-length fleece, carefully carded, tidy horns. An aristocratic gray sheep with a black-faced, a dusky-bellied prince, outside the sheeps’ normal paths, on its way to rocky slopes

like us

up

to the brink of a precipice. They’ve left it unpaved, the rascals, and Heiður doesn’t know how to drive it. Thrusts her nose forward, a terrified daredevil. A precipice that the fog partly envelops is worse than a precipice that can be seen. The mind’s eye beholds an abyss even larger than it really is. The mind plays at harassing and frightening.

My solace and protection is the sea.

The presence of the sea can always be felt even if something blocks the view. It’s the nature of the sea to make its presence known. The sensors of the inner ear feel it. The auditory canal picks it up remotely.

Two voluminous trucks bear down on our modest pickup at the most difficult point. I’m the one in the car sitting nearest the edge of the precipice. I’ll be the first one to hit if we should plunge.

Heiður has the sense to stop.

I have the sense not to look down.

I’m frightened and cold. Now it’s all going to roll. The agonizing cold comes from within and can’t be lessened with wool sweaters, Álafoss wool blankets, down coats. This island is one universal peril. If she survives, little Harpa Eir will move away, after never really having belonged here for real. Harpa Eir belongs in Perpignan, where no one views her as a dubious intruder. Not there in the city where her friend for life, Gabriel Axel, lives, where people drink chilled white wine on a cherry square in ample sunlight. Harpa will return. As soon as she has the chance.

The chance to sail. It’ll be a gentler cruise than the one today, taken by an unlucky woman who has to bounce through half the country with a sore body after having stretched herself quite far in various poses. Muscles made sore in the game of love are much more obstinate and cumbersome than muscles made sore by regular calisthenics.

I would wish to lose consciousness on the way down from the precipice, a precipice where rocks might fall headlong and kill people in cars, where a steering wheel might slip, where a car might plunge straight into the sea.

Oh, what did it did it did it matter if it fell?

I don’t know. Act as if I’m sleeping. Yet I yet I yet I might

wake up on the shore road where gentle sea licks red beach.

Seventeen swans saunter on the isthmus in the company of sheep that appreciate the vegetation of the sea.

Sea sheep.

Eva Sólgerður was exceptionally good at distinguishing sheep.

My late mother’s chief asset, according to the obituaries.

The chief asset of a person no one understood is how incredibly good she was at distinguishing sheep.

I wonder if I’ll have finished putting together the puzzle of my mother by the time my progress on earth comes to an end.

My soul to keep.

She who believed in nothing prayed with me and Sibbi at night, like a truly devout individual. During the day she pontificated about how religion was piffle. It was one of her most effective methods for hurting Dad. To her credit, however, she had choice words for all religions, whether it was Germanic neo-paganism, Zen Buddhism, or Christianity. She said it was all pure bunk, no matter where you looked. Fiction, in other words. Good literature in places — the Bible, for example, contains some very interesting bits — but that anyone should believe literally in what’s found in these religious texts, by whatever name they were called, was incomprehensible, and was living proof of man’s dreadfully primitive thinking. Even if he could get people to the moon and destroy the world several times over in an even shorter time than it took to create it.

She remained inveterate on her deathbed, never shaken in her conviction that religion was wishful thinking and gibberish, including the belief in an afterlife. If I were a poet, I would write about the time the hospital chaplain came to my mother to try to convince her about the afterlife. Yes, you priests, you know more than I do, Mom said. What I know is that I have only one heart, and when it stops beating no reserve generator takes over. Otherwise, suit yourselves. I also prefer to suit myself.