Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

You’re alive, you little wretch? I ask again. Awoof, he answers, which I take to mean yes. He’s of the opinion that he’s alive.

Come on, then, I say as I open the gate.

Lubbi plods happily into the good garden, where he and Mom and Edda and I had seen better days. Isn’t that why one lives? To have seen better days.

Not here , Mom. No way.

Where do you want me to be, then?

Nowhere, Mom. Just stay in your place. I have other things to bother about than to carry your millstone.

Be sweet to me, Harpa baby. Do you remember when we spent entire days here together, rooting in the dirt? You helped me pull weeds and do the watering when you were just a chubby little thing.

Yeah, yeah.

You always were such a good girl.

Then why didn’t you love me if I was so good?

I do love you, but I guess I’m bad at showing it.

Leave me alone. Let me think in peace.

You can’t refuse to take a little stroll with your mother on old familiar paths.

I sit down on a rock beneath a birch tree, whose hanging branches protect me from the drizzle. Mom hovers over me with a hand on her hip. She’s wearing checkered wool trousers and has an old backpack on her back.

Mom, why don’t you help me, instead of just following me around? I can’t go on. I don’t want to exist, small and ugly as I am. I don’t know how to live. I wish I’d never been born, and you won’t let me be. How can you be so awful?

Be careful what you say, little Harpa. You yourself are awful. You never show me any sympathy. Poor me, who died before my time.

It’s been ten years, Mom, a whole decade. Of course it was a shock for you, I admit that, but isn’t it time that you pull yourself together and try to get over it?

A shock for me to die? You’re funny, dear.

Okay, a turning point.

You should start writing obituaries for people. Mom laughs drily and has a coughing fit.

Did you forget your cigarettes? I say. Why don’t you blow smoke in my face like you’re used to doing on this jaunt of yours around Iceland? I bet it’s illegal for you to be here. Do you have a passport?

Mom looks at me in surprise, stopping in midcough.

You know what, Mom? After only a few hours everything will be out in the open. I’m on my way to ask Dýrfinna who my father is. Then you and your promiscuity will be exposed.

You’re one to talk. You’ve already slept with more men than I’ll ever manage. What, for example, were you doing last night?

I’m free as a bird. I don’t have to explain my actions.

My word.

Mom, let’s make peace, even if it’s too late. I think we would have become friends if time had allowed. Things might have been decent between us now if you hadn’t died. But you see how it is. You get in my way, and we’re still fighting.

Mom fishes a tattered green-checkered thermos flask from her backpack and pours coffee into a plastic cup. I take a sip but it’s the same old bad Braga Coffee. I don’t want to insult her by criticizing it, though, so I use the cup to warm my hands.

All of a sudden, Lubbi is at my side, barking softly.

Isn’t that our Lubbi? says Mom.

Woof, he says.

Alone in Grandma’s Grove with a decrepit dog and a stone-dead mother. Is it possible to be more bereft than this?

A tear rolls down my cheek. Down my left cheek, just like my friend Gabriel Axel in Perpignan.

What saves us is oftentimes the same thing that casts us into ruin, says Mom.

Should I write that down?

I stop looking at her as she hovers over me in her old traveling clothes. She appears to me to have grown younger, but I say nothing about it and look down, at the black boots I’m wearing in the wet grass, the boots of a child yet too big for me. They’re becoming a part of nature, covered with ears of couch-grass blades. If I sit long enough, the soles of my shoes will become glued to the grass, moss will grow over me from top to bottom, my bottom will fuse with the rock, and a thousand years later children will come and say: There’s the ogress who turned to stone, and the rock next to her is her old dog. She was talking to her mother, who was a ghost, and didn’t watch out for the dawn, but her mom just vanished into thin air, because she no longer existed, anyway.

The children will sit in my lap, I who was once a person and an assistant nurse. They won’t know what my name was: Harpa Hernandezdóttir Eir. Or that I had a daughter very young, and that it wasn’t known what would happen to this daughter, but at least an attempt was made to rescue her from bad company and take her to the Eastfjords. And that it was precisely on that trip that the woman turned to stone, and she was very glad, because there was nothing ahead of her but damned hardship, but no one knew this except for her, while she lived.

How lucky the rock is that gets to be seen, though it doesn’t know of its own existence. The lifeless rock attracts life that grows within it, lichen and moss, and maybe a little fern after a long time, if it should crumble in places, leaving gaps for growth. The rock might even be lucky enough not to be stuck in the same place all the time. It can travel if it rains a lot and there’s a landslide, or if there’s an earthquake, or if it’s cloven by frost and is freed from itself and becomes two independent rocks.

OH, HOW I WISH I WERE TURNED TO STONE. It would have to happen quickly, however. I can’t wait for the dawn. Back at the house is a situation I can’t deal with, that I can’t return to. I won’t walk into the white paradise farmhouse that my delinquent daughter will be wrecking this winter. I’ll lie low here, in Grandma’s garden and Mom’s garden and my garden, until Old Man Winter or some other ogre comes and grabs me here in this garden that waited, waited until I deigned to show up. No signs of autumn are on the trees here, and a pyramidal saxifrage blossoms contrary to the laws of the months. After roaming in the garden of fog, I sit on my rock and become it, beneath trees that Mom left behind, a slim birch and needly pitch pine.

Come here, Grandma Sól. I’ve found berries. A small, good Edda on a spring day long past. My mother went to her, ate the berries noisily, and said: Yum, yum.

How has it all gone like this? What’s happened to the three of us since that good day?

Time has gnawed away at us. That’s what has happened.

From the grove I see all the trees that I saw only partially from the farmhouse. The farmhouse can’t be seen from here, fortunately. I don’t want to see the place where Edda is. The Eastfjords fog is her best keeper. The daughter of a walking changeling, the Icelandic mulatto who doesn’t know who her father is.

I have a seat on a rock by the Andá River, beneath the biggest pitch pine that Mom planted, a straight tree shaggy with needles. When the weather permits, it reflects in the pool, creating two trees fused at the roots. Now nothing is reflected anywhere; everything is dull. That’s fine. It’s enough today to have a little of something dull, as I myself am in spirit and in truth, an assistant nurse from Reykjavík with a wet behind. Completely dull. Thoroughly lackluster.

Something or other wails in the shrouded landscape. I thought I knew each and every sound, each and every bird, but I don’t recognize this one. A bird, one that’s tried to set course out of the fog, flies into an elastic window that gives in endlessly, wailing in fear of getting nowhere, that it will never winter in a warmer land, that it will be stuck here forever in this slimy fog in the season when any sort of weather can be expected.

Stuck in this stuff that covers the world and blocks the senses, but that doesn’t debilitate my breathing, unfortunately. I’m forced to keep breathing. Breathe, breathe, breathe, one two, one two. When Dad is dead, I can stop breathing, and then I can finally do what I please. While he’s alive, it’s unfitting for me to quit breathing. Out of the question to take my own life with a good conscience. Remember that. Don’t play with thoughts that will lead to nothing. When Dad is dead, I can reconsider the matter.