Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

At that I saw an opportunity to take one step forward, saying that I particularly enjoyed The Dwarf , for obvious reasons. Dietrich snapped out of his sentimental coma, looked down, all the way into my eyes, and smiled a wide, mischievous smile. I saw instantly that if I put everything into motion, it would be fairly predictable where I would get with Dietrich.

Consequently, I thought: What does an Icelandic assistant nurse with questionable paternity need a German baritone for?

I couldn’t answer my question at that moment and took two steps backward, allowing Heiður to continue at full steam. Even today I still regret this, as does Ditti, I can tell, the rare times that we see each other. But Heiður doesn’t notice anything. Sometimes she says, unsuspectingly: Dietrich often asks about you — how you’re doing, how it’s going with Edda.

The dear man, fonder of me than he knows. I see it in the tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth when he looks at me. I can feel it in his grip when his big hand encloses mine like a living glove and pauses a few seconds longer than necessary. But he doesn’t know what he feels. Men are often that way, and I find it beautiful.

Heiður managed, by crafty means, the precise details of which I’ve forgotten, to pretend to have some business with Dietrich Bacon. She handed him her business card with golden letters, and the snowball started rolling.

On the way home I did what I could to cast a shadow over the important singer in the eyes of my friend, and even asked her in for sherry from the single bottle I owned and had been saving for better times that never came.

He sings okay, I said. But he has absolutely no sex appeal.

What nonsense, said Heiður. German baritones are the most virile men in the world.

To me he sometimes sounds as if he’s overeaten and has food in his throat. You know, sort of bl-huh.

Oh, come on now, Harpa. His voice is pure gold.

I know, I’m just an assistant nurse, can’t even have an opinion about singing.

The man in the cape with the little hat is for Harpa, said the prophetic Bettý of Útheimar. And Heiður rushed from the tent in a huff.

Two swans in a hayfield rest on their bellies and crop the grass, their necks curved.

A tall, slender, and supple lighthouse sits at the mouth of a fjord.

The fattest valley in the Eastfjords is sun-drenched in a mist of fog, the sloping mountains on the verge of tipping over.

Many paths are mysterious, but none like the paths of the Eastfjords fog, which passes by and doesn’t pass by. The fog is a king’s daughter under a spell, they say. I’m a little assistant nurse under a spell. I might be released from it tonight.

Little Harpa Eir, who stirred in the stone kingdom to the east and made up stories about rocks that were men, women, and children. When they spoke, some of them mixed up their vowels like Grandma Una. The couple Jakob and Ester, bottle-green and ochre-yellow jasper boulders, stood proudly in the Andey farmyard the last time I was there, and they haven’t aged, and the same is true of their crowd of children, ten large stones with sparkling fillings.

IN THE STONE KINGDOM EVERYTHING STANDS STILL.

IN THE STONE KINGDOM THERE’S ENOUGH TO BE HAD.

The stone kingdom, where everything stands, still looks good alongside the kingdom of trees, where every inch of growth is a huge effort. The plants in the Icelandic tree kingdom have a harder time than other trees on the planet. They have to endure the gales all year round. Even the sun doesn’t bless all the trees in Iceland. The evergreens can be badly burned by it in March and April. Never to recover.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE EAST, THERE WAS AN EXTRAORDINARY KINGDOM OF STONES.

The valleys are half-full of spar, jasper, zeolites, rock crystals, fossils. When the sun shines on such a valley, where twenty-one streams skip between crags, digging many a rhombus into the land, before flowing classically, jazzily, pop-ily through the valley, where the birch smells sweet, the dwarf willow fattens, and the chicks become fledged. The mortal assistant nurse does not ask for more.

I can’t wait to get to Andey, says Heiður. I’m looking forward to it like a child.

You’ve been infected by how much joy I have in my heart right now.

How could I not have visited your fjord?

When we were little, it wasn’t possible to drive here without taking the Ring Road the other direction.

We’ve been big for a long time now.

Things were easier when we were kids. Then the world swallowed us. The vortex of time sucked us in. Since when did we have time for anything, you and I?

I pestered my parents to let me sail with you, but they didn’t listen. Everything I said was dispensed with as whining and nagging. It would have been so easy. We could have sailed together. I could have stopped for a week in Andey, and then gone back by myself. For me, being able to sail east seemed perfect, the epitome of prestige and bliss. I cried myself to sleep over never getting to go anywhere by ship except on that jog-trotting Akraborg over to Akranes.

You were the one who got to fly to other countries. I cried myself to sleep over having penniless riffraff for parents and never getting to see a foreign land.

I found flying to be shit compared to the idea of going alone on a round-trip to the east aboard the coastal ship Hekla or Esja . I always listened to the radio when you were on your trips to find out Hekla ’s location. It would arrive in the Westmann Islands at seven in the morning, and I would think about what you were doing at that moment, hero of the sea. I imagined you to be a part of the ship’s crew, not just a passenger. Preferably the captain, with a peaked cap, or else a ship’s maid, with a little lace-bordered apron. A fairy-tale character.

Me? A fairy-tale character in other people’s eyes?

Out-of-this-world beautiful.

I was like an immigrant before immigrants came into the picture. If I’d been born ten years later, I wouldn’t have stood out so much.

You’re exaggerating a bit.

Let’s not dwell on my appearance.

You’ve somehow got to deal with all of this, Harpa.

I know. I’ll deal with it tonight.

Dýrfinna will send me to see a shrink when I pluck up and ask her the identity of my real father. After all, aren’t strange ducklings born everywhere? Aunt Bettý doesn’t resemble anyone I’ve seen in the family or even farther afield, and I’d never given that any thought, not until Heiður pointed it out to me. If I were in my right mind, I’d seek help and check to see whether there was a psychoactive drug that could eradicate obsessions and delusions and change Hernandez-daughters into Axel-daughters.

I knew your valley by heart, says Heiður. I took it all in like a foreign dreamland; I had no place of my own except for Laugardalur and Dock Wood. In my mind’s eye I saw steep, rocky slopes beneath cliffs, where you found the stones that you brought me. Harpa Eir like a mountain goat up on top of everything, so high that no one could see her from the plain below.

You remember the agate that I gave you?

Do I remember? It hasn’t moved from my window at Mom and Dad’s house. It was the epitome of all heroic deeds, that you, so small and tender, managed to drag it down from Strýtuhlíð Slope wrapped in a blanket. How clever you were to see that there was something precious inside that grayish-brown stone.

I saw it in the light-colored spew oozing out through a crack on it. I was quite sure there was something in it and was terrifically proud after it was sawed in two and this delightful water-blue stone came to light.

The white house with the green butterfly roof comes into view, a solitary, sheltered house deep within the valley. Mountains on three sides, leaping waterfalls, and then Andey, at the farthest end of the valley, with two colorful jasper rocks in the farmyard. A dream place lying low beneath the sloping roof of white fog. As I know it, the foggy roof is lowest and densest at the mouth of the fjord and grows thinner the farther up the valley you go. Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to see to the middle of the Andey slope and the whole of Grandma’s Grove.