Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

A downpour. The windshield wipers at full speed can’t keep up with it. The raindrops reverberate on the metal roof like hail. Rain streams down the windows.

ADDA AND HRÓI

VOPNAFJÖRĐUR

is written in bright-red letters on a tractor-trailer that we encounter. Heiður swerves at five miles per hour, and a liquid, muddy curtain splashes over us.

ONCE UPON A TIME WERE ADDA AND HRÓI. They lived in a little house and were initially poor but good. Then they got a lucky break and became considerably worse people by buying a big truck that ladled thick sewage over little cars that had done nothing wrong but drive along the road. The cars’ drivers could see nothing and were in danger of ending up in a ditch.

Where the low-lying fog extends farthest up the mountainside it combines with its brother, the snow, in hollows here and there. It cuts the mountains with white lines, having settled in gullies for the summer, a year-round gorge-dweller that should have disappeared in summer but refused to go.

There’s something beneficial in half missing the journey you’re in fact taking — to miss it because of fog and drizzle, soft and gentle friends I enwrap myself in.

To creep into Harpa Hernandezdóttir’s den. To rest after eighteen months of conflict. IN GLORIOUS HIBERNATION. Dreaming in my hide both covertly and overtly.

This winter I’m going to make love with my land, the land that is unknown to me. Out east there’s not a man who loves me. Probably not out west, either, though sometimes I imagine it’s so. How should I treat this matter? Think about it? My loveless lot. It’s not even zero love. It’s love below zero, and my one memory of a January night in the Norðurmýri basement, a memory of something that hardly seems as if it happened.

I should write at least one page about LOVESICKNESS when I’m done painting out east. It’s high time that I write a report on this universal indisposition.

Are those who receive a lot of love when they’re little, such as I did from my dad, better or worse equipped to deal with lovelessness than others? Do those who’ve received a lot of love search harder for it than those who’ve received little? Or are they better at accepting having little of it?

Mom didn’t love me, or was bad at showing it. It was my father who took care of me. Can fatherly love substitute for motherly love?

Oh, how little I desire to spend my life as a lovesick assistant nurse. It’s best to mourn and write a bit of poetry, cease to desire any man. Easier said than done. I should be content with my one and only time . Not everyone gets so much as that.

It’s a crisp fourteen degrees, and there’s brand-new snow, just before midnight on the second day of the New Year. It’s been a half an hour or so since I heard anyone out on the street, the snow crunching beneath slow steps. Most people would hurry in the cold. A shadow-cat, probably Mr. Björn, shoots past the arched window, on a silent trip through the snow-crusted backyards of Norðurmýri.

There’s no traffic, everyone’s sleeping, pooped after the gluttony of the holiday. Even the cars are napping, and the noisemakers above me go to bed early. For one night at least I’m granted the mercy of not hearing them snore. I can’t bring myself to break the silence with Jacques Brel, not even with Vivaldi’s Concerto per viola d’amore . I’m alone in the world, in the mighty limbo of my Norðurmýri basement, and I ask for no more, not tonight. Instead, I’m going to breathe in indoor tranquility on a good sofa. I light two pink candles in the bronze candlestick from the estate of Grandma and Great-grandma, jetsam from the last century. A good haul was what people of the southern sands called it. The farms couldn’t keep going without jetsam.

On the coffee table is a bouquet from Heiður, meant to cheer me up after the previous night, pink roses and delicate white flowers in bunches. The white flowers are waxy; I don’t know what they’re called. It looks dreadfully like a bridal bouquet or a bouquet for new parents. Accompanying it is a sympathetic message on a reassuring card, with an old photograph of a mother and her little daughter, exceptionally elegant women in frilly dresses and laced leather boots, promenading by the Pond downtown.

Heiður’s going abroad in the morning to claim her fame. She gets to sit next to Dietrich on the plane. Lean her head on his shoulder. Then they’ll go their separate ways, she to play in Italy and England, he to sing in Hamburg and Paris. Afterward they’ll take a vacation together in Thailand. God, how I envy these people. And I’ll have to endure the next few months Heiður-less.

Heiður is everywhere around me. The flowers from her are on the coffee table, which comes from her house of plenitude. My oval mahogany table from the garage on Laugarásvegur Road is the successor to the triangular glass table that I broke accidentally with a hot coffeepot when a certain man came to visit, which I haven’t yet begun to forget for real. If I had the guts, I’d admit that his farewell kiss was still burning on my forehead eight months later. I hope the kiss will start to fade after one more month, the length of an entire pregnancy. You might expect that the exhausted single-mother-of-a-problem-child that I am wouldn’t have terribly much to think about. One fucking forehead kiss , the kind given to deceased people and children. Is that really fuel for reflection?

I visit the fridge for cold apple juice that I bought in a fit of extravagance. Usually juice is never bought in my household. There’s no need for it since the blessed water from the well of Guðmundur the Good runs from the taps. The first thing Heiður does when she returns from abroad is take a big gulp of pure Icelandic tap water. I understand her perfectly. I only wish that I got to return as often from abroad as she does in order to quaff the water at home.

I can understand how she has the heart to spend so much time away from Iceland, but I don’t understand how she has the heart to be separated from her golden boyfriend for such long periods. I’m not certain that I would want that. Anyone with such a boyfriend must surely be willing to sacrifice a lot for the chance to hug him as often as possible and rest in his blissful embrace, to let her ears be stirred by his breezy baritone.

I’m lucky enough to possess an entire cassette with him singing, permitting me to remember how he looked at me as he sang on New Year’s Eve. His voice is the only thing that’s allowed to disturb the silence of mine this night. Leise flehen.

I can’t bring myself to go to bed though I’m sleepy and I’ve put on my ivory-colored silk nightgown that I bought for a bargain at a flea market in Perpignan, in a little alley just off what I called Cherry Square. I can’t bring myself to sleep even though I’m tired, because I want to think, in a blissful moment of peace. On one of the relatively rare nights when I know where Edda’s resting.

In a hospital bed.

I was hoping to get her into therapy directly after her hospital stay, but she went berserk when I mentioned it. I was astounded to see such an animated response from such a sickly girl.

How far down does she have to go in order to change direction?

All the way?

To a place where there are no roads.

At this sweet moment, I shouldn’t be thinking about it.

SWEET MOMENT.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He comforts my soul.

Here he sat, just before Easter, the man who drove me home from the supermarket, comforted my soul, and smiled a single smile that filled the room, adding light-years of memories to my life by doing nothing and saying nothing special.

I imagine putting my mouth to his mouth, getting to stroke the back of his hand, falling asleep with his breath on my cheek. Having a name for me when we were children— the foreign girl —must have been something akin to love, at least something that didn’t disappear completely, whatever it was, and made its presence known when the foreign girl from the swimming lessons showed up again at the bar in Esja after all those years, still a girl, yet now the mother of a teenager.