Steinunn Sigurdardottir - Place of the Heart

I hurry down the stairs and hop to the floor from the third step, as I did when I was a little girl. I’m in good form after my hops out of the pickup truck on the way east.

Dietrich Bacon is standing on the veranda, right between spruce trees that shouldn’t be able to grow at the Icelandic seaside. He’s nearly as tall as they are, this international singer in a brown wool cape and green Tyrolean hat.

From the silence of the village, the crumhorn blows.

A crumhorn, here? These are Dietrich Bacon’s first words. He looks around in fear, as if expecting to be ambushed and set upon by the instrument.

Exactly, I say. Please come in.

Thank you, he says, with a final cautious glance. So I found the place.

There are five men following you, said Bettý. One in a cape, with a little hat.

I suppress the laughter that’s churning up inside and, in order to keep the visitor from thinking I’m making fun of him, transform it into a maiden-like smile.

He takes off his high-quality gloves, and we shake hands, a bit too long, as usual. A heavenly touch.

I was singing in Bergen, he adds apologetically.

The blue-gray clouds of his eyes scintillate with the light of his soul beneath the brim of his green hat.

I knew that, I say. Step inside, and watch your head.

Thank you. I wanted to surprise Heiður.

The prophetess at Útheimar said something else. She said: For Harpa.

What a great idea, I say, taking the man’s coat. She won’t be expecting it.

I certainly wouldn’t think so.

You made her tell you precisely where she was going, didn’t you?

He smiles that mischievous smile of his, which kindles a supernatural light in his eyes.

I was very crafty. She told me your aunt’s name and the village where she lives. The rest was easy — though I did, of course, have to get help looking her up in the phone book in order to find the address. And I’m familiar with the pickup, as you know.

Heiður has gone to sleep, Herr Bacon. How about if I warm some hot chocolate, and then we can wake the lady?

Sounds like a good idea, he says quietly.

His baritone whisper has tingled my senses.

Sounds like a good idea.

The voice is an echo of the soul.

The voice says it all. It can’t deceive. Hands and eyes and mouths can deceive. Everything can deceive but the voice.

Durch die Nacht zu dir.

Dietrich takes off his sweater. He’s a hardy one, this man. Beneath it he’s wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt, meticulously ironed.

He walks into the living room and sinks into the dark-blue sofa where I’ve sat through the years, at every age, with my mom, dad, Dýrfinna, Edda.

Why couldn’t I have covered over the night-scrape on my chin? Now that it’s my destiny to share a room with the singer before daybreak.

I light a candle in the silver chandelier, and the glow illuminates the mottled miniflag that Dýrfinna hoisted to full-staff from half-staff before she went to bed.

You took the ferry to Seyðisfjörður?

He’s come from the sea, like the others: Martin, Mom’s lifesaver; and Gabriel Axel, Harpa’s lifesaver.

It was sheer luck that I managed to book passage. There were some no-shows. It was the last trip of the season.

Autumn arrives quite early here.

Another knock comes at the door.

What’s that? asks Dietrich in surprise.

Something’s blown against the house, I say, not wanting to mention a word of the cut-off leg that lives an independent life and kicks at doors in this part of the country.

There’s no wind outside. It sounded to me like someone pounding on the door.

Strange.

The singer goes to the window, with me following, and we look at the fjord spreading out beyond the two walls, one of sparkling rock and the other of leaves.

You should take a look at Dýrfinna’s stone kingdom when you wake up tomorrow, I say. There’s a huge variety of stones, gathered over a long period of time: shiny, dull, bright, dark, light, heavy, oval, even horned. There’s also one shaped like a choice cow pie, russet and green — Edda found that one. But the treasure of treasures is the zeolite that I found. It sparkles like a snow crystal, whatever the season.

It’s a world of fantasy, this fjord, every inch of it, says Dietrich Bacon, after a silky smooth throat-clearing, as if he were going to sing. Then he clasps his beautiful hands as if to accentuate his words, and I nearly lose myself in gazing at them.

In the flickering gleam of the candlelight, we remain silent, to our pleasure.

He looks at me with divine tenderness, like the benevolent Sarastro himself, and again it seems as if notes will emerge when he opens his mouth.

What can you tell me about Edda? How’s it going with her?

We don’t know yet. We’ll have to see. Right now, I think she’ll be fine, but I’m not sure I’m seeing things in the correct light tonight.

Dietrich Bacon repeats: Tonight?

Tonight I’d actually forgotten that I have a daughter.

Is that even possible?

I have to forget her now and then in order to survive. It’s been incredibly difficult. Besides, I had her so young that I often feel as if she can hardly be my daughter.

That you can hardly be her mom, maybe.

The light of his eyes warms me, to my very bones.

Silence descends, the same as before the question came crashing down on Dýrfinna. The crumhorn makes no sound, the snoring has ceased, every single thing is silent, other than two hearts that beat, alternately light and heavy — slow down, speed up, slow down — like the footsteps of people searching along complex paths for a target that remains obscure.

Now he looks at me as he did the first night of the year, when he moved his lips to the most beautiful love song in the world, ever. Cara.

My friend. Yes, I exist. Differently now.

But what use to me is metamorphosis when I’m stuck with the most dreadful of all that is dreadful? My savior is upstairs, the snore-phantom who stole my man from me one fateful moment backstage at the Old Theater and believes that he’s hers.

For Harpa. That’s what the prophetess said.

He doesn’t know it himself.

If he learns who I am, if I tell him my secret, he’ll understand himself. If I reveal myself, a new fateful moment will arrive and everything will be turned around.

I want to say to the visitor: Please excuse me, I’m just going to think it over a bit, whether or not I should tell you something.

Please excuse me while I warm the hot chocolate.

The Atlas Crystal refrigerator welcomes me with a click and a loud hum. The fjord’s flashes of light increase in number beyond the wall of living rock, and I start in on a new hot-chocolate sorcery, stirring clockwise in the vast opening of the jam pot with Dýrfinna’s long wooden spoon, round and round.

I step onto a stool and grab a little crystal cask from a shelf, pile whipped cream into it, put it on a tray. I arrange two Sunday-best cups and two silver teaspoons, and step back up to grab white napkins with golden edges from the shelf.

I take a new position at the stove, stirring and stirring with the spoon that’s too long and bending the floating light-tracks of the sea, intoning until a whirlpool forms in the middle and sucks in all creation.

If I tell him the question I asked this evening and the answer I got, he’ll understand who he’s come to find.

If I say nothing now, my fate will be the same long love that Mom had.

I’ll be remembered for seemingly endless monologues on peculiar topics.

Damn it, I’m stamping my foot now. If I wake Heiður, this matter with the colossus in the wool cape will be finished. Forever, amen.