Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I used to call your fjord SWALLOW FJORD because I was so fascinated by the poor foreign birds that came to Iceland by accident, having intended to go to a warmer place. How they dashed low and fast and turned so sharply over the tussocks, like fighter planes performing aerobatics, in their hunt for flies to eat. And could hardly stand on their feeble little legs.

Remember, continues Heiður, when we both cried over stories of swallows that got caught in snowstorms just as they set off on their long autumn journeys to other lands? They would turn back and find their nests, then stay and freeze to death. Children who found them thought they were hibernating with their beaks beneath their wings.

Once a swallow flew in through a window in Andey, I say, settled on a cross-stitched pillow in the living room, and died. I never buried any bird with as much ceremony. I sacrificed a beautiful box I’d been using for my collection of napkins, whittled a cross, and carved on it

Little Swallow

Born

?

Died

August 31, 1969

I wonder if my lot will be the same as the swallow’s. Freezing to death in my nest or expiring on a pillow after this attempt to escape.

You won’t freeze to death, Heiður replies. You’ll get a boyfriend and he’ll keep you warm.

Boyfriend, I say. There are none to choose from. They’re all married sailors and truck drivers.

Sometimes desperate strangers can be found in fishing villages. They can be first-class musicians, from Eastern Europe, for example, playing the lute or trombone, maybe. So many things can happen. You just can’t believe it until they do, like the fairy tale of Ditti and me.

Oh, shut up, Heiður. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s boyfriends.

Now I sit in the purring car, with my eyes closed in the limited visibility.

I open one eye a crack. Everything’s in its place.

The islands at the mouth of the fjord both in their entirety. One of them unbelievably green, from the bird shit of the ages and the absence of men, the high crown of a bird-cliff that wanted to be a mountain. The other akin to a skerry, slanting and bare.

Everything is as it should be and more, because the generous sun inclines its rays over the shoulders of the mountain, under the wall of fog, illuminating the splendid pastures, warming geese on the home field, and setting in motion little horizontal fireworks displays for swimming birds on the surface of the fjord. The sea in this deep fjord is no longer of saltwater; it’s a viscous molten pool of silk, the softest cradle in the world for ducklings tired in the evenings.

A sharp pinnacle rising up from a peak, a stony colossus high up the slope.

The mountain that blasted everything off itself, eternal sand seeping down its slopes.

Strips of fog hanging down to the middle of the slopes across the fjord, shrouding half the cemetery by the sea where my mom rests. Not exactly in peace.

They should tear these down, says Heiður.

The mountains?

No, these shacks.

I hope they’ll leave them alone. It’s been like this since I can remember. I could see them from the sea when I was a kid. You don’t think it adds to the atmosphere?

It’s ghostly, says Heiður.

The ghost houses scattered about the mouth of the fjord look as if dead souls had gone about trying to build a village but quit. They’re stately dwelling places of stone-gray concrete with gaping windows that are just right for dead souls to look through. I’m going to move into one of these houses when I’m dead, like those souls, and do nothing else but look out at my fjord and conjure up fifty smacks under sails that resemble the wings of a flock of migratory birds. All in the hope that I’ll find the good company of a brown-eyed Frenchman who’s known his way around these parts of mine since the time of my grandma. Together we’ll gaze at the stately farms across the fjord and the cemetery where this Frenchman rests, and my mom close-by.

She who spent half her days gazing at the fishing smacks on the fjord was given a place with a view over the fjord for eternity.

The village is hanging on the hillside across the fjord, as if its houses had dropped down from the fog and stopped, luckily, just before the sea took over. In the house standing nearest the water’s edge stays the runaway, me, and every morning when she goes out, two spruce trees the height of three people are the first things she sees. They shouldn’t be able to exist, not in this place.

Bands of summer snow remain on the slopes, snow that won’t melt now that it’s not melted, a harbinger of snow, more snow this winter and even more snow.

The mountains are reflected in the tidal flats flashing their white drifts from last year.

Look, Heiður, just by the fish-processing plant lot, all the way down by the water’s edge, there’s Dýrfinna’s house.

I won’t believe that Dýrfinna and her house really exist until I see them right in front of me.

They do, I swear.

Does she live alone?

She lost her husband fifteen years ago. Asgeir was a marvelous man who cracked jokes until the day he died. Poor Dýrfinna. She’s helped so many people and never lost a woman or child during her career as a midwife, but she lost her own little son and her husband so early.

I remember the photos of Unnar on your wardrobe.

That was one of Mom’s whims. She had three enlarged photos of him on her home altar, the wardrobe where she kept Cosette, but his own mom had just one little photo of him on her chest of drawers.

Mom made a huge deal of this deceased nephew, but the mother who lost him never spoke of him. Mom acted as if she herself had lost a child and blathered on in disgustingly piteous tones about how her poor sister Dýrfinna would never be the same again. Unnar and I played together when we were little and were great pals, but Mom even managed to ruin my memory of him.

I’ll be damned.

She praised him so highly that Sibbi and I became allergic to him. Typical Mom. She had a way of sneaking embarrassing thoughts into our heads, thoughts that you wouldn’t ever want to be associated with.

We concluded from what Mom said that it had been an ugly twist of fate that it wasn’t either Sibbi or I who disappeared in place of Unnar. He was the most beautiful, most noble child that had ever been born in Iceland, a champion, sage, and clairvoyant, a son of Gunnar and Njál.

Your mother was colorful, that’s true, says Heiður, laughing at me. But I don’t always recognize her from your descriptions of her.

You know her better, of course.

Steady now.

A fiery-yellow buttercup slope. Untiring horses grazing down by the sea. A horse with a two-tone tail.

The village has become a city of toy blocks. If only it were toys, and not the destination for my winter sojourn, where the months of February and March will have to be endured. Half my life has gone into finding ways to survive. But this winter will be hard on the imagination. To find new paths in heavy snow far out in the countryside. Now the magician will be put to the test, Houdini of the mind, a person fleeing from the prison of the head, from the securely built cells of circumstance. I want out. To slip between the bars in a slippery box with folded wings that spread as soon as they have enough air to soar on.

I WANT TO LEAVE / IN A BOX WITH WINGS.

The dream place sifts in through the eyelids.

We cross the bridge at the foot of the fjord, bumping over the potholes at the tail end.

We take the turnout to Andey.

THE INNERMOST FARM IN A VALLEY. IT’S MY FARM.

From it branch additional valleys, with lush birch thickets, rich waters, and the distant sound of a stately waterfall that can’t be seen until you arrive at its base.