Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

Why did you stick out your tongue at my friend? I’m fucking ashamed of you.

Your mo-hom has never stuck out her to-hongue at anyone, says Heiður in between bursts of laughter, distracted from steering the car out onto the highway. That friend of yours has had a little too much of something.

It isn’t funny, you snobby cunt, says Edda, in a choked-up voice.

Hey, what kind of language is that? exclaims Heiður.

I can call you flute pussy if you like it better.

My rude daughter sounds as if she’s on the verge of tears over my behavior toward Gerti. Interesting that it should bother her so much. Inwardly, I’m dying of laughter, but I mustn’t laugh when my child is so foul-mouthed toward her benefactor.

I prepare for a long silence in the car, maybe even all the way to Vík in Mýrdalur. I don’t feel like talking, anyway.

What a Sunday jaunt. I don’t understand what Gerti Chicken is doing out here. Gerti’s so stupid that the idea of following us couldn’t occur to his shaved, ponytailed head. No, he must be on more important business, picking up moonshine from some distillery, for example.

I look over my shoulder, just as Edda’s head is turning back after having looked over her own, and she grimaces as we catch each other in the act. We’re both looking for the yellow van, which isn’t in sight.

I glance askance at Heiður. Her expression is formidable, as might be expected after the last exchange with her hopeless passengers. HOPELESS PASSENGERS wouldn’t be a bad title for one chapter in little Harpa’s biography, or as a subtitle for the book.

The road cuts across a moor, and cars travel it in wavelike motions, making passengers’ stomachs gurgle as the tall grass stands nearly unmoving at the roadside. For now, think deeply, focusing on the silo silhouetted against Mount Hekla. Then surge along the undulating moor road, listen to the inner gurgling, become one with it and the rising feeling of nausea as the sun warms the light-yellow blades and reddish ears of the autumn grass between the wire fence and the road.

THE DAYS HAVE COME.

The days have come when you say, I find no pleasure in them.

The day has come when I travel east out of necessity. The day is today. The paradise of childhood is transformed into a prison yard. I who could always flee east when all other doors were shut. Now it’s the place that’s shutting me in.

Where shall I flee when my blessed Andey has become a lair for a viper that I’ve suckled at my breast? For what shall I be homesick?

Almost every spring until Edda was born I came east to the glittering springs that foreign businessmen see as potential, to Grandma in her garden where the trees grow tall and straight: birch, rowan, aspen, silver fir, red spruce, pitch pine, hackberry. Where the flowers spread: meadowsweet, harebell, Icelandic burnet rose, pyramidal saxifrage.

The dreamland where everything grows, where even my soul took root. Apparently my mother’s soul was there as well. This came to light when she told me of the fairy-tale fjord that in the spring transformed into a floating tent city. She spoke at normal speed as she recalled the fishing boats in the shape of majestic migratory birds, and her voice warmed as she told of Martin the Frenchman, the doctor on the hospital ship Lodestar who saved her life by removing her appendix, and, when he returned the following summer, gave her the imperishable doll, Cosette.

Edda was also homesick for the dreamland when she was little. When it was too bitterly and grimly cold to play outside, she said she wanted to go to Addey to dab , meaning “build little dams.” I’ll never forget her in Grandma’s Grove, her first summer there when she was two years old, calling out mommappa to her mommy, Harpa, under the pitch pine that grows just inside the garden wall and leans out over it to reflect in the pool at Andá River when the weather’s calm. Her wretched little mother was just eighteen then.

I mustn’t lose sight of Edda as she was those summers, a plump-faced girl with freckles, wearing firecracker-red shorts, her gleaming copper hair in braids, chasing speedy blowflies and the tails of cats, showing her mom the remains of an old farm, a bleached-out leg bone that she found beneath a rock, or a fragment of a shiny shell. I mustn’t forget that the child and I existed a long time in a world in which we could clearly see our hands in front of our eyes, before the sorcerous fog descended.

I mustn’t forget that in the darkness I still have people who try to light my way. My relatives to the east who shelter Edda and me. The friend who’s driving us east in her dad’s pickup, and the good spirits who gave me good advice, above all Jói and Dýrfinna.

But I should have listened to Dýrfinna sooner. Mom jokingly called her Prescient Finna, without realizing that she’d hit the nail on the head. Aunt Dýrfinna is one of those people who can see farther than the tips of their noses, not because she’s in contact with another world, but because she thinks clearly.

Before anyone else, Dýrfinna saw signs of where Edda was headed, though she didn’t say it outright. The summer that Edda was thirteen, Dýrfinna said that Ingólfur and Margrét wanted to have Edda stay on with them in Andey that winter. The girl was up for it. But I felt that the only acceptable thing was for me to take care of this child of mine. I was no invalid, damn it, though I might be a wimp. Other single mothers had toiled away in poverty and brought their children to adulthood. How could I justify to myself putting her in the hands of others? I who had sacrificed everything in order not to be dependent on others, ahem, to no one but the dwarf I lived with at the time, who was really not the best choice.

If I’d recognized the signs of the imminent tragedy, I would have taken Dýrfinna’s advice. Then it all hit that winter. My child, the changeling, was exchanged before I could say so much as “Damn it,” and I found myself with a little bag lady instead. Of course she wouldn’t hear of going to the Eastfjords the summer after; instead she wanted to stay in the broken glass in the park at Arnarhóll, like others of her kind. But what Aunt Dýrfinna saw, what signs she noticed that indicated Edda would be heading straight off the map, I still don’t know today, not even in hindsight. I saw nothing until it was right before my eyes.

Now the child is finally on her way east, where she should have been the entire time, on a late, special trip, with her mother and Heiður and the doll Cosette, which was named after the character in Les Misérables .

If I’d had any backbone, I would have taken the opportunity given to me by moving and slaughtered old Cosette or sold it. It’s probably a valuable antique. But what did I do? I packed it securely into my best suitcase, the precious treasure from Gabriel Axel. It was even the first thing that I packed.

Cosette could have represented any one of the many unfulfilled dreams in Mom’s unsuccessful life. The boat trips that were never taken, discourses on everything and nothing, the infidelity that led to my birth. She kept that foreign doll in a locked glass cabinet where nothing else was allowed to be, a little idol that I wasn’t allowed to touch unless Mom was watching. A symbol of her chaotic dreams that weighed so heavily upon us and threatened to suffocate us alive. What a grudge I bore against the totem doll in the cabinet where Mom stood with her hands clasped, poised as if worshipping. Once when she wasn’t at home, I stole the key and took out Cosette. I started caressing her extremely hypocritically, acting as if I didn’t know what I was up to, then produced a long darning needle and stuck it in the doll’s rump.