Butterflies in November Read online

  I omit to tell them that I have a perfectly good little manual in the car with diagrams and that it would take me as long to learn how to change a tire as it would to learn how to give my hair a colour rinse; both operations are conducted in four phases, according to the diagrams. I see no reason to memorize knowledge that might never serve me, to prepare for an eventuality that may never happen. We will all most certainly die, and yet there are plenty of people who get through this life without ever having to change a tire. I therefore strive to focus my preparations with that in mind.

  The nine gunmen change the wheel like a well-trained team of surgeons and nurses. Without a word being spoken, they split into those who pass the tools and those who perform the operation on the four-year-old manual patient, who has recently been oiled and sprayed with anti-rust. They find the right monkey wrench, take it in turns to loosen the bolts, effortlessly jack up the car, swiftly pull the spare wheel out of its hidden compartment, without even having to ask me where it is, and then put everything back into its place, professionally, seamlessly.

  One of the men even places a comforting hand on the hood, as his colleagues wind up the operation. Performing their tasks with warmth and care, they fondle the car with gentle slaps and caresses.

  “You poor little thing, you punctured yourself.”

  “Did you bump into a hole or a stone, old man, is that what you did?”

  “All over now, all taken care of, little man.”

  THIRTY

  Here I am, wandering through the rain and darkness with an unrelated child, three pets in a jar, a small pile of documents barely worth mentioning and last, but not least, a glove compartment crammed with cash, perfect. I’ve deliberately left my mobile behind; my sole link to my immediate environment at this moment in time is the weather woman on the car radio, who is saying that the eye of a depression is now pressing all its weight on the centre of another depression.

  Who I am is intrinsically linked to where I am and whom I’m with. Right now all my efforts are centred on making the most out of the fading light, while my travelling companion sleeps in his balaclava, tilted against the window in the back. The only decision that needs to be made now is whether we stop or not and, if so, where. The highway seems almost uninhabited; where are the natives of this island? Apart from the boy and the hunters, the only company we encounter on our way are the shopkeepers inside the petrol stations that punctuate our journey, the woman reading the weather forecast on the radio and, at this very moment, the velvet voice of the host of an afternoon culture show, whose words seem to be streaming into an echo chamber without punctuation.

  A giant Pepsi sign shines through the darkness.

  Yuletide lights have been hung over the petrol pump; only five weeks to Christmas. We’re the only customers and a scrawny, weary-looking girl with big eyes and a dyed ponytail comes running out of the house next door to serve us some petrol. I imagine that must be her brother who comes following her, a little bit younger, taking slow steps, as if he were tackling the strong current of a river. His spotty face and swollen eyelids suggest he’s just woken up from a long summer sleep, with a knitted hat pulled over his eyes. He replaces his sister at the pump, petrol is obviously his job. She tells us there was little traffic over the weekend, but that they ran out of hot dogs on Sunday, unfortunately, and they don’t have the ice cream machine turned on in the winter. Instead, Tumi gets to choose from a range of multi-coloured gumdrops and sweets from last year, displayed in boxes under the glass counter.

  Elísabet Marilyn turns out to be a worldly-wise girl, who informs us that she recently came second in a beauty contest at a ball, that she likes reading good books and going to good parties where there is something other to drink than home-brews, that she is currently pregnant, but that she hasn’t decided on whether she is going to keep the baby or enter more beauty competitions, and that she has been invited to compete in the Golden Blonde of the World Award. The competition is only open to blondes, she says, because up until now judges have shown a strong bias for brunettes, who always score higher, like the recent Miss India and Miss Brazil, for example; and this is unethical, professionally speaking, particularly since the members of the jury often give the opposite impression in their one-to-one interviews with blonde contestants in the preparatory rounds.

  I buy a knitted sweater for the boy with a hood and a jigsaw of two puffins rubbing each other’s beaks, as well as a souvenir for myself, a miniature hand-made painted church about the size of my palm, skilfully crafted in wood by a cousin at the farm. I’ll put it up on the dashboard. E. Marilyn hands me some glue to ensure it withstands the country’s network of notoriously bumpy roads. I wonder whether I should buy the knitted yellow baby trousers on display in the craft corner. That way I could set up a meeting with my ex in some neutral café and, when he sat down at the table in front of me with a wriggling baby in striped stockings in his arms, I could pull out the parcel and hand it to him over the cups of hot chocolate and say:

  “Well then, congratulations on the baby.”

  “Thank you very much, this is the baby we should have had together,” he’d say, stroking the light down on the crown of the head of the baby, who would look like neither of us.

  But instead I buy two knitted trousers for Auður’s unborn twins.

  The boy doesn’t want me close to him while he’s choosing his candy, because he’s his own boss in this and is quite proud to be able to buy it on his own. He seems to have a slight crush on the girl in the pink T-shirt and stares at her intently to be able to capture the words being shaped by her pink lips. It’s not easy for a deaf boy to decipher the syllables coming out of a mouth that is masticating gum.

  I see from the boy’s lips that he is doing his best to enunciate his words as clearly as possible, trying to produce sounds that he himself can only barely hear. But she doesn’t understand him and looks at him, bewildered, several times before glancing over at me. He suddenly starts to fiddle with his hearing aid, trying to reset it. I can see that he’s deeply offended, and by the time he’s outside on the gravel by the shop wall again, he’s holding in a green cellophane bag something completely different to what he wanted. I walk up to him and tell him he can buy some chocolate as well, but he is unable to choose between the three types that are on display on the glass counter, unable to decide because he’s already been distracted once, it’s thrown him off-kilter and he’s scared of making a dreadful mistake. So I end up buying all three types of chocolate for him—pleasing a child doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

  As we’re leaving, the owner and father of the girl steps out into the yard to corroborate all of the main points of his daughter’s story about her second place in the beauty contest and her pregnancy, which explains why the girl looks so sickly, poor thing, she can no longer bear the smell of petrol. Recently she even threw up all over a family of four who were sitting in their car.

  “But on the other hand, no one understands what she sees in that silly wimp at the pig farm, the guy even plucks his eyebrows,” says the father.

  Tumi has forgiven Elísabet Marilyn. I think he’s in love; he runs around us in circles playing a bird with huge flapping wings to say goodbye. When he’s in the car he eats one of his gumdrops out of the bag, but then puts them down and doesn’t touch them any more. He stores the chocolate in a box with his collection of shells and it’s still there under his bed four weeks later.

  THIRTY-ONE

  One of the advantages of the Ring Road is there is very little danger of losing one’s self, even in the drizzle. But it’s another matter when it comes to finding things in the dark, like a sign, for example, indicating the turn-off to a farm guest house. We drive back and forth a few times around the spot indicated in the travel guide, moving a few centimetres to the east and a few centimetres to the west of the map. It’s difficult to gauge distances in the dark; there
are no landmarks here. If there were anyone else around I’d ask for directions. I can see through the rear-view mirror that Tumi is tired and feel such an overwhelming responsibility, it’s worse than being alone—I’m responsible for another person’s happiness. The area is incredibly black. No echo of life disturbs the silence of this wilderness. I kill the engine of the car in the pitch darkness to look up my farm guest house guide again, and then make out the sound of a bird.

  It suddenly dawns on me that no one will be travelling this way before the end of winter. The sun won’t rise here until the spring, when once more people will be able to make out the outlines of shapeless things, hear sounds and meet their fellow beings.

  I know from experience, though, that there is a landscape out there in the dark, behind those multiple layers of clouds, which the guide commends for its beauty and extraordinarily bright summer days and nights. To conjure up a lava field and valley, I have to summon my imagination, old patriotic poems and memories of foaming streams meandering down the sandy desert. Tomorrow morning I’ll wake up and find myself at the foot of a steep mountain, with a slope that descends directly into my bedroom window, so close to the building that I’ll have to lean my head back to see the summit between the curtains.

  It’s the Christmas lights that save me.

  On the sign there is a painting of two smiling cucumbers wearing caps and shaking hands over the farm’s slogan, which reads “Cucumbers in unexpected places”. We walk into the steam of a plate of meat-stuffed cabbage rolls and melted butter in a sauce-boat.

  The woman welcomes us and smiles at the boy with a warm and natural air. Maybe she has a disabled relative. She tells me they discovered thermal water in the Hái-Hamar district two summers ago, which is why a small greenhouse has been built to grow cucumbers, their speciality, pride and joy. It’s become popular among overnight guests to buy some cucumbers before they set off on their travels again. They can even have them inscribed with names, messages or declarations of love. One of their guests, an accountant from the city, handed his fiancée a cucumber over the breakfast table that said “Will you . . .” Those were the only two words he managed to carve on it, not that anyone had any problems working out the rest of the sentence. They even got applauded by a group of foreign investors on a team-bonding trip, who happened to be in the room having their breakfast.

  “Foreigners seem to like the shadow that hovers over the farm all day and the rain. This is the rainiest place on the island,” says the woman. “Because of the shadow from the cliffs we only get to see the sun, when it’s around that is, for two hours a day, and then the shadow comes back over the farm again, although it’s brighter over in the sheep shelter in the fields facing south, and the sheep can sometimes bask in the sunlight well into the afternoon.

  “So far this year it’s rained on 295 days out of 320. Not bad, eh? We even wrote it in our brochure; sure, no one comes to Iceland to sunbathe.”

  We’re lucky. One bedroom less and we would have had to sleep in the sheepcote, which they’re actually planning on converting into rooms to accommodate thirty more guests. A male choir from Estonia that is touring the country singing German Christmas carols seems to have taken over the entire establishment. It turns out that the guest house has run out of linen to make our beds, so we’re given a sleeping bag room instead. The lady insists on us having dinner; they’ve made meat-stuffed cabbage rolls, potato purée and red cabbage. She’s just cleared up, but there’s plenty left. I watch the child shovelling one meat ball down after another. He hasn’t eaten much over the past three days, just a few morsels, like a small bird. But now, on the fourth day, he’s eating like a fully grown man or a sailor on a trawler. As we’re chatting, he downs three to four glasses of milk with his food.

  The woman tells me the sheep keep on getting stuck on the rocks on the cliff and that milk production subsidies have dwindled to a pittance. The summer home for problem kids from Reykjavík has gone up in smoke after two cases of arson, and none of it insured, because the insurance man had only started to appraise the wallpaper and no premium had been decided yet.

  “In fact,” says the woman, “we’d come full circle and tried the whole lot: traditional farming, breeding poultry, mink, foxes, pisciculture, rearing sea bass, rabbits, and apiculture. We had to keep the beehives warm all winter, only one bee survived the cold and the rain. We’re still waiting for an answer to our ostrich-breeding application. That’s why we went into the guest farmhouse business. If we get the ostriches we’ll just add them to the foreigners.”

  The food is good, but the coffee is undrinkable, no matter how much I try to sweeten and stir it. For an instant I think I catch a glimpse of the back of a familiar figure in the yard through the window, a mere flash. The imagination runs wild in this drizzle. The farmer’s wife offers me a slice of a freshly baked cake called “Conjugal bliss” to go with the coffee. A heavy cloud of rain weighs over everything, but the woman seems content enough.

  I dash outside to fetch the sleeping bags in the trunk. The pot of fish balls is still firmly in its place, although the same can’t be said of the three goldfish. The jar has been knocked over and the lid has come off. Its orange contents are scattered around the trunk. Two of the fish lie dead on a dry patch and one of the sleeping bags is drenched. A small puddle has formed in a hollow by the spare wheel, where the third goldfish is still showing some sign of life, judging by the twitching of its tail. After several attempts, I manage to grab him and slip him through the neck of a half-empty bottle of water, but even when I seal the top of the bottle with my thumb and shake it, the fish shows little sign of perking up.

  Tumi goes out into the yard after dinner to skip with the little girl of the house, who is around his age, but a head taller. When I come back to fetch him for bed, they’re busy saving some worms from drowning in a puddle. I don’t mention the fish yet.

  On my way up to the bedroom I meet my ex-lover on the staircase and halt at a distance of five, six steps.

  “Nice trousers, like the floral pattern, they suit you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He looks at the boy, who is in a hurry to get past us.

  “I didn’t know you had a child.”

  “No, I’m minding him for a friend.”

  He smiles and we both move one step closer to be able to shake hands.

  He hesitates, reluctant to release his grip.

  “I knew you’d left town, but I didn’t know where to, this is an incredible coincidence.”

  “Yes, really incredible.” He’s still holding my hand.

  “I’m not following you, even though I would have wanted to, I arrived here last night,” he says. “Ahead of you then.”

  I offer him a smile.

  “Business trip,” he adds by way of explanation.

  “Actually I’m on the point of leaving. I’m planning to get back to town tonight. Mission accomplished.”

  Then he strokes me gently on the cheek.

  “Unless you need company?”

  “I don’t know,” I say nodding towards the kid, who is standing there perfectly still, watching our lips.

  “You’re certainly one hell of a skater.”

  “Thanks, you too.”

  The boy gets the dry sleeping bag and I a blanket, but as soon as I come across a co-op I intend to buy two new eiderdown quilts, adult size. The boy pours the sand and pebble out of his shoes into the sleeping bag. There are multi-coloured fleece rugs on the floor.

  “It smells old in here,” he says. Or maybe he’s saying that I smell good. He must be already missing kindergarten and his mommy and grandad, who sometimes comes to collect him, but at least he thinks I’m nice and that I still smell good, even though I know I must smell of rain and all the people we’ve encountered on our journey. After slipping into his sleeping bag he tries to speak in a low voice and wan
ts to whisper something to me in confidence, but his voice comes out as loud and resonant, despite his utmost efforts.

  His hand is too small to enclose all the signs of the world in words. But I have three books in the car to teach me how to understand a deaf child; I just need to make time to read them.

  Having kicked and tossed under the duvet every night since I collected him from kindergarten over ten days ago, the boy sleeps to dawn without stirring.

  I’m also tired. A deep depression looms over the country and I am lying in its eye, while the outside world remains enveloped in a mist.

  There is some movement in the corridor; I even think I hear a faint knock on the door. A drowsy numbness starts to spread across my forehead and then descends to my cheeks. Bit by bit, I feel the day fading, odours and sounds evaporate. I sense the world withdrawing behind a thick woollen blanket with brown squares, as the flow of honey-sweetened hot milk trickles through my veins. Someone is holding me tightly. I have a vivid feminine dream and feel the mountain towering over me. When I wake up later to see if the little, dead still body beside me is still breathing, I feel as if someone were quietly closing the bedroom door behind me, but I’m too exhausted to tear myself away from my dream and get out of bed. Although I feel no need to lock the car at night, I do distinctly remember having locked the bedroom door. Granny never locked the little blue house on the seashore when she went south, not even when she spent five months recovering in the geriatric ward of the local clinic one winter. I don’t even remember there ever having been a key to the house. It was open to anyone, always full of all kinds of guests, ministers, men out of jail or stone-collectors from around the globe—they sat all together at the kitchen table eating layered tart with jam.

  Once, during my last summer in the east, I was kissed on the guest mattress in the attic, without knowing by what cousin. It was almost as if nothing had happened. I barely felt it, but nevertheless knew that it was inappropriate. The following morning I wasn’t quite sure and couldn’t remember which of the two brothers had slept on the left side. I felt no change except that, for the first time, I asked Grandad to serve me coffee and Icelandic pancakes instead of porridge. After that Granny decided out of the blue that we were too big for the guests’ mattress. On the first night I slept alone in the living room, I dreamt I was wearing a half-knit white woollen cardigan with brass buttons.