Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

The space in Mom’s attic is worry-free, says Ingólfur.

We two cousins grin. The company at the table looks away. No one understands me and Ingólfur but us. We’ve known each other forever. Ingólfur is my big bro.

NO ONE IS WHO HE IS. Cousins are brothers, aunts are mothers. Mothers are ogresses, children are beasts. As for me, I’m not me, but someone else in my paternal line. I’m at the point in life where no one is who he is.

Except for best friends. They’re always friends, even now, or at least for the moment.

Heiður has put on her shoes impatiently and is expressing her thanks with nods.

She’s made great improvements during our trip. If we were to travel the entire Ring Road around Iceland, she’d end up perfect. She doesn’t interrupt as much and has almost entirely stopped abruptly ending conversations and situations. Long hours spent in a car with a delinquent teenager have taught my friend manners. The road to good manners is mysterious indeed.

In the yard at Andey, air cushions expand beneath my shoes. I teeter, like the drugged woman I was on New Year’s Eve in the emergency room, with springs for legs.

The difference is that then, there was insecurity beneath my soles. Now I’m teetering on security.

Teetering on security in uncertainty. Uncertainty about the fate of Edda Sólveig, uncertainty about myself. A person with a stone baby in her stomach. A key question unasked.

It would be just like this person to forget what the question was when she finally reaches her destination. To forget that there’d ever been a question to ask.

Free of all concerns, we head for the sea.

No sunstone pointing the way, but rather a hazy star.

FREE OF ALL CONCERNS.

I wave at cheerful Ingólfur, gentle Margrét, dejected Rósa.

The fog-girls, Guðrún and Edda, ride Spói and Dreki out of the mist. When they emerge, we’ll be gone.

From the penultimate destination, just a short distance to the terminus.

Might I then doze the final stretch, above rumbling wheels on a gravel road? Fall into the acute sleep of Sleeping Beauty and snore for a hundred years? Of course she may sleep, she who has cast her sins behind her and loses sight of them for the time being, perhaps forever.

The delinquent child behind her, under a sound roof

in a valley attached to a fjord where everything is horizontal.

The village lies lengthwise on a slope, beneath long ribbed mountains.

Even the fog lies horizontally.

Harpa wants to go beddy-bye. Because Harpa’s so tired.

What nonsense. She doesn’t want to waste time sleeping. Life is waiting, has waited a long time, and now she’s finally come to where it is. As soon as the pickup turns away from Andey and heads toward the fjord, I grab my own tail. Finally, I’m here, right now — not yesterday or the day before yesterday or tomorrow or the day after — and I roll down the window for further confirmation of that fact. I see what’s to see here and now, hear the splashing of stream after stream, the rush of the river, how it all echoes in my valley deep on a tranquil evening, the first of September.

On the way out of my private valley, the sea looks like a little lake, and shining through the haze above it is an inflated Elysian moon. Yes, the sea itself is a homey lake where I could fish from a little red boat, and lucky fish would take the bait and kick about in a sparkling heap at my toes.

My sorrows aren’t as heavy as lead. They dwell light as feathers in stuffed linen bags in the stern of a rowboat. I stand up and swing the bag over my shoulder, and see? — it’s child’s play. I put down the bag and rest my head on it, and the boat rocks me like an infant in a cradle.

Some morning at Dýrfinna’s, preferably tomorrow, I’ll open the bag by the water’s edge and watch the feathers fly out upon the calm sea on a soft breeze. My sorrows won’t disappear, but now they’re feather-light, fluff from the quilt of the queen of the valley. They’ll remain sorrows, but they can be left alone on their extended flight through my private sky.

Pink woolen cloud columns tower over the mouth of the fjord.

Between them dawdle violet islands of down.

What a relief to be free of the girl! exclaims Heiður. I swear to you, Harpa, she’s like a phantom that’s been conjured up against you.

It would be easier to deal with a phantom than a living child.

This trip will be good for you — I feel it in my bones. I’m absolutely positive.

Was there something wrong? On a night like tonight, I can hardly remember.

Your Edda couldn’t be in better hands. Your kinfolk at Andey are more akin to angels than humans.

How can Mom come from this family?

You know what, Harpa? It’s time for you to make peace with her now, though earlier would have been better. I’ll admit that I never had anything against your mom. She was really funny.

Either Mom was crazy, or she was a poet. For a time I was certain she was off her rocker, but I later came to think of poor Mom as just a poet who never wrote anything down. She was left alone with her original thoughts and associations, which no one wanted to hear. Dad’s too down-to-earth to understand such a woman.

We’re more or less miracles.

Mainly you, Heiður.

Though not like you.

I guess Mom would have done better with a man who was slightly nuts. Then she could have tossed some of her insanity over to him. Dad’s so normal that it’s impossible to foist madness on him.

He was always so patient, says Heiður. He never raised his voice, and he was constantly making mobiles and model airplanes with you and Sibbi. He built bookshelves for your rooms, while my books had to be stowed in the wardrobe.

As far as your dad goes, I say, there was nothing at all to complain about. He was always so amiable, offering us boxes of foreign candy as if we were little princesses.

Oh, Dad and Mom were fine. Their minds were just elsewhere.

That’s the right way to say it about my mom, as well. Her mind was elsewhere.

What’s so funny? asks Heiður.

Nothing, I say. Nothing’s funny.

Yet I continue to smile, unexpectedly. It’s as if my mouth is incapable of holding back from a full smile, which continues to broaden as we drive past the fish racks in the innermost fjord at the bridge where horses graze between light-green tussocks. A black bank of clouds spreads out over the darkening sky, which is reflected on the level sea of the day that’s passing and has been doing so since this morning on our winding road to the east.

As we turn onto the village’s main road, where as a little girl I stepped onto land from my sea voyages in the spring, we’re met with a strange sound from an avant-garde trumpet, like the purring bass of a giant cat. Or something from a noisy duck. Bagpipe-quackquack blues.

God, I can’t believe it. A crumhorn, says Heiður.

What?

A crumhorn. It’s a medieval instrument, and not so common. If you make an effort, you might be able to hook yourself an Albanian crumhorn player.

I don’t need one.

No, probably not.

It sounds like a parody of a musical instrument.

The instrument that’s going to be rocking you to sleep this winter is damned invigorating. I recommend quality earplugs.

What family is it in?

It’s related to an oboe, and looks like a walking stick.

Blowing on a walking stick. Well, I never.

This place is glorious.

You’re telling me that?

I am.

This is nothing. Wait until you come to the most wonderful gingerbread house, right by the sea. With a boathouse and everything.

This place has so much atmosphere that I’m starting to feel like I want to spend the winter in Dýrfinna’s attic. Want to trade?