Butterflies in November Read online

  THREE

  Although no woman can ever fully map out her life, there is, nonetheless, a 99.9 percent chance that I will end this day at home in bed with my husband. And yet, to my surprise and precisely when I’m in a hurry to get back home, I find myself reversing my four-year-old manual car, with some difficulty, into a parking space close to my old house on the street I lived on two years ago. The curtains look unfamiliar to me and I suddenly remember I no longer have a key to this front door, that I’ve moved twice since I lived here, without, however, moving very far. As I’m about to drive away from the house, I see they’ve hung a crib mobile in the room that once hosted my computer. To be absolutely sure of it, I wait until I see a man walk past the window with a little baby on his shoulders. At least I know it’s not my husband, nor my child. Because I don’t have a child.

  I’m still in the car when the phone rings. It’s the music teacher and pianist, my friend, Auður. She is a single mother, and has a four-year-old deaf son and is now six months pregnant again. In the evenings she sits up on her bed playing her accordion and rarely says no to a glass of brandy, if the opportunity presents itself.

  She tells me she can’t talk long, because she’s busy dealing with a difficult pupil and an even more difficult parent, but it so happens, she adds, almost lowering her voice to a whisper in the receiver, that she has booked but can’t go to an appointment with a fortune-teller, although not exactly a fortune-teller, she says, more of a medium, and would I like to go instead of her? I hear someone crying behind her, but can’t make out whether it’s a child or an adult.

  She stumbled on this medium on a whim two years ago and since then has been firmly entangled in the web of her own destiny; nothing that happens to her catches her unprepared any more. At least the child came as no surprise.

  I’m still waiting for the baby to disappear. I don’t think about it. That’s how I make it disappear, by not thinking about it. Until it stops existing. I can’t say I never think of it, though. I’ve looked it up in a book and know that it is no longer a 2.5-centimetre creature with webbed feet and that it has started to take on a human form, that it has developed toes. Soon I won’t be able to fit into my flower-embroidered jeans. I hide it under my woollen cardigan with brass buttons so that no one will notice it, so that no one will know. Soon I will be going out into the world. When I’ve finished school. It’s all still purely imaginary.

  Auður knows my scepticism regarding fate.

  “What do you mean you’d rather not? There’s a two-year waiting list,” she blabs on, as if she were trying to firmly and rationally deal with a capricious child. “They say she’s the absolute best in the northern hemisphere, they’ve been doing tests on her in America with brain scans and electrodes and stuff and they just can’t figure it out, can’t find any pattern, no thread, you’ve got to be there in twenty minutes on the dot, so you need to get going right now. It’ll cost you 3,500 krónur, no credit cards, no receipts. If you let an opportunity like this slip by, you’ll never get a chance again.”

  She has to stop talking now, but will call me later to hear how it went, she whispers in a hoarse voice, before hanging up.

  FOUR

  Twenty minutes later, here I am out in the middle of a new estate on the outskirts of the city, once more on my way to the house of a stranger. The neighbourhood is in mid-construction and stretches out flatly in all directions under a high sky, with patches of marshland here and there, and little to shelter the houses. It takes me a good while to find the half-finished house. The streets are barely discernible and devoid of lamp-posts, house numbers or names, chaos seems to reign with all the randomness of the first day. But at least construction seems to have started on a church. What finally draws my attention to the right house is a pile of small pieces of wood in the driveway, tidily arranged to form a bizarre pattern, some kind of broken spider’s web that must have required some thought. Scaffolding still covers the façade and the lawn is strewn with stones and, no doubt, berries in the summer.

  She is nothing like the image I’ve built up of a fortune-teller and reminds me of an Italian sex bomb from the sixties. It’s Gina Lollobrigida in the flesh who greets me at the door, without me remembering having knocked, looking stunning and of an indeterminate age, wearing a close-cut dress and high heels. What distinguishes her from the common fold, though, are her piercing eyes and tiny pupils, pinheads in an ocean of shimmering blue.

  Inside, the house is almost empty. Naked light bulbs dangle here and there, a few plastic flowers, an image of Christ with pretty curly locks and big blue eyes welling with tears. On one wall there is a pencil drawing of a tall Icelandic turf house with four gables. Despite the mounting darkness outside, the house seems full of light. The woman’s voice is as charming as she is:

  “I was expecting you earlier,” is the first thing she says to me, “months ago.”

  Her spell works on me and my thoughts immediately become transparent. Pinned to the sofa, I feel the muscles relaxing around my neck. I rest my head on the embroidered cushion and ask whether she minds if I lie down, instead of sitting opposite her at the table.

  She constantly shuffles an old deck of cards and arranges them on the table, counting and pairing numbers and suits, my past and future. She can obviously read me like an open book. I find it quite uncomfortable to be browsed through in that way. But she makes no mention of adultery or the dead goose in my trunk, and doesn’t talk about what must be written all over my forehead, that I’m still carrying alien liquid inside me that I fear could leak onto the velvet sofa.

  Instead she focuses on my childhood and other things I’ve no memory of and know nothing about. She mentions mounds of manure and the broken elastic of some skin-coloured breeches, and keeps on coming back to the torn thread, they could be underpants, she says, cream-coloured, or they could be a pyjama bottom. I don’t know where she’s going with this.

  “I’m just telling you what the cards show me, hang on to it.”

  Then, in the same breath, she turns to my future.

  “It’s all threes here,” she says, “three men in your life over a distance of 300 kilometres, three dead animals, three minor accidents or mishaps, although you aren’t necessarily directly involved in them, animals will be maimed, but the men and women will survive. However, it is clear that three animals will die before you meet the man of your life.”

  I wearily try to point out from the depths of the sofa that I am a married woman and, by way of proof, feebly raise my right arm to stroke the simple wedding ring between my thumb and index. She pays no heed to this information, I’m not even sure she heard what I said.

  “Things that no one will be expecting will happen, people will experience a lot of wetness, short-sightedness, greed, isolation, more wetness.”

  “How do you mean wetness?”

  “It’ll wet more than your ankles, that’s all I can say, impossible to know anything more than that today. I do, however, see a large marine mammal on dry land.”

  She pauses briefly, there is a dead stillness in the room.

  “There is a triple conception,” she continues, “one of them may be a trinity.”

  What does the woman mean?

  “My brother had test-tube triplets, they’re two years old now,” I awkwardly interject.

  “I’m not talking about them,” the woman snaps, “I’m talking about three pregnant women, three babies on the way, three women who will give birth to babies over the coming months.”

  “Well, there’s my friend Auður . . .”

  Fortunately, she clearly has no interest in my input and shuts me up with a dismissive wave of the hand, as if I were an irksome teenager interrupting her private dialogue with some invisible being.

  “And then there’s a big boy here, an adolescent, a narrow fjord, black sand, dwarf fireweed, the mouth of a river, seals nearb
y.”

  Another one of her pauses.

  “There’s a lottery prize here, money and a journey. I see a circular road, and I also see another ring that will fit on a finger, later. You’ll never be the same again, but when it’s all done, you’ll be standing with the light in your arms.”

  Those were her words, to the letter, “with the light in my arms”, whatever that was supposed to mean.

  “To summarize it all,” she concludes in the manner of an experienced lecturer, “there is a journey here, money and love, even though you can expect some odd twists along the way. But I can’t see which of these three men it will be.”

  When I finally stand up, I notice that she has placed all the cards on the table and arranged them in a strange pattern that is not unlike the one formed by the pile of wood outside, some kind of spider’s web with broken threads.

  I suddenly feel the urge to ask:

  “Did you make that wooden structure outside?”

  She fixes her gaze on me, her pupils piercing through an ocean of shimmering blue:

  “Keep an eye on the patterns, but don’t allow them to distort your vision, it takes a while to develop a good eye for patterns. Nevertheless, if I were in your shoes, I wouldn’t allow myself to be led into marshland in the fog. Remember that not everything is what it seems.”

  As I’m about to hold out my hand to say goodbye, she suddenly embraces me and says:

  “It wouldn’t be a bad idea to buy a lottery ticket.”

  Her two adolescent sons offer to escort me back to the car, which I’ve forgotten where I parked, seemingly quite far away. Marching on either side of me, they look on with determined airs, as if they’d taken on a mission that had to be accomplished at all costs. We walk for what seems like a very long time, I even get the impression we’re travelling in circles and can’t remember ever coming this way. Then, just as I’m beginning to feel totally lost, the car materializes in front of me, close to a sea wall, in a place I don’t remember leaving it. It is unlocked, as usual, but all the papers are in their proper place, although I couldn’t vouch that every single sheet is in its pile. I see no point in checking on the goose in the trunk. As I say goodbye, I realize for the first time that the brothers are twins and notice how they both always seem to shift their weight to their right legs as they walk. There is something odd in their gazes, pupils like black pins in an ocean of shimmering blue. As soon as I turn the key in the ignition and am about to wave them goodbye, I realize they’ve evaporated into thin air.

  FIVE

  He’s home. I linger on the frozen lawn before entering, looking in at the light of my own home, and shilly-shally by the redcurrant bush with the goose in my hands, wondering whether he can see it on me, whether he’s noticed. From here I can see him wandering from room to room for no apparent reason, shifting random objects and alternately flicking light switches on and off. I move from window to window around the illuminated home, as if it were a doll’s house with no façade, trying to piece together the fragments of my husband’s life.

  Then he has suddenly emptied the washing machine and is standing in the bedroom with all the laundry in his arms, something he doesn’t normally do. He’s not much of a handyman either, but for some odd reason he seems to have changed the bulb under the porch and fixed a cupboard door in the kitchen. All of a sudden he is staring out the window into the darkness and I feel as if he were looking straight at me, scrutinizing me at length, as if he were pondering on how we might be connected or whether I’m going to come in or remain in the garden. He is naked above the waist, which must be quite chilly for him with that wet laundry in his arms, unless he is insulated by his body hair. When he bends over the bed, for a brief moment, I get the feeling there is someone lying on the bed, below my line of vision, and that he is about to lie down beside the person, but then he suddenly springs up again with my light blue damp panties in his hands, which he carefully stretches and presses in his big hands. He hangs them on the drying rack he has set up by the bed. I now see four pegs tugging at the extremities of my underwear. He may not spend much time at home and we may not talk much, but I have a good husband and I know I’m the one to blame, I never went to the shops.

  SIX

  He has obviously cleared up the kitchen and left a plate on the table for me, complete with knife, fork, glass and napkin. He has put on a shirt and tie, as if he were on his way out to an urgent meeting, and slips on the thick blue oven gloves, before stooping over the stove to pull out the lasagne.

  He doesn’t sit with me, but tells me that he needs to talk, that we need to talk, that it’s vital, which is why he is pacing the chequered kitchen floor, in straight lines from the table to the refrigerator and then from the refrigerator to the stove, without any discernible purpose. His hands are burrowed in his pockets and he doesn’t look at me. I sink onto the kitchen stool, with my back upright, still wearing my scarf.

  “This can’t go on.”

  “What can’t go on?”

  “I mean you’ve had your past abroad, which I’m not a part of. Initially, I found all the mystery that surrounds you exciting, but now it just gets on my nerves, I feel I can’t reach you properly, you’re so lost in your own world, always thinking about something other than me. It’s all right to hold some things to yourself, maybe fifteen percent, but I get the strong feeling you’re holding on to seventy-five percent. Living with you is like being stuck in a misty swamp. All I can do is grope forward, without ever knowing what’s going to come next. And what do I know about those nine years you spent abroad? You never talk about your life prior to me and therefore I don’t feel a part of it.”

  I note that he refers to a swamp and mist, just like the medium had.

  “You never asked.”

  “I never get to know anything about you. You’re like a closed book.”

  I feel nauseous.

  When I was seven years old, I was sent on a bus to the countryside in the east on my own for the first time, with a picnic, a thirteen-hour drive along a road full of holes and dust, which the passengers ground between their teeth, in the coldness of the early June sun. The novelty that summer was that the bus companies had started to employ bus hostesses for the first time. There was a great demand for these jobs because the girls got to dress almost like air hostesses, in suits, nylon stockings and round hats fastened under their chins. The main function of the hostesses, apart from sitting prettily on a nicely upholstered cushion over the gearbox and chatting to the driver, was to distribute sick-bags to the passengers. When I had finished vomiting into the brown paper bag, I put up my hand the way I did in school whenever I needed to sharpen my pencil, and then the hostess came, sealed the bag and took it away. I saw the pedal on the floor right beside the entrance that she pressed with the tip of her high-heeled shoe to open the doors, which released a sound like the steam press in the laundry room, and how, with an elegant swing of the arm, she slowly cast the paper bag into an Icelandic ditch. The driver kept driving at fifty-five kilometres an hour and seemed relieved to be able to carry on chatting to the lady on the cushion once the problem had been solved. Looking back on it, I think it more likely that the hostess was not wearing a hat but a scarf. I’d assumed they were a couple and engaged, she and the driver, but now realize she must have been two years out of the Commercial College whereas he had been driving the bus for decades.

  He paces the floor again and loosens his new green tie, as if the stale air of the muggy late-summer heat were smothering him. He has also just had a haircut and he is wearing a shirt I’ve never seen before.

  “Let’s take the way you dress, for example.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The guys all tell me their wives buy their lingerie at Chez toi et moi.”

  “I’m just me and you’re you and we are us, I’m not the guys’ wives and you’re not the guys.”
/>   “That’s exactly what I mean, the way you twist everything, I can never talk to you.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Men are more attentive to these things than you think. We mightn’t say everything, but we think it.”

  “I can well imagine.”

  He looks offended.

  “And there’s something else. All you’ve got to do is touch a light switch and the bulb blows. It’s not natural to be pushing a cart-load of light bulbs every time I go shopping, minced meat and light bulbs, lamb and light bulbs, now I’m known as the man with the bulbs at the checkout.”

  “Maybe we need to have the electricity checked.”

  He paces the floor again.

  “It’s as if you just didn’t want to grow up, behaving like a child, even though you’re thirty-three years old, doing your weird and careless things, taking short cuts over the gardens and fences of perfect strangers or clambering over their bushes. Whenever we’re invited somewhere, you enter through the back door or even the balcony, like you did that time at Sverrir’s; it would be excusable if you were at least drunk.”

  “The balcony door opened onto the garden and half the guests were outside.”

  “You’re always forgetting things, arriving the last at every­thing, you don’t wear a watch. And to top it all, you always seem to choose the longest routes everywhere.”

  “I don’t get where you’re going with this.”

  “Like that time you climbed halfway up that flagpole with the Icelandic flag in your arms . . .”

  “Big deal, we were at a party, there was a knot in the rope, everyone looked helpless and the flag was drooping pathetically at half mast, like a bad omen for the asthma attack Sverrir was about to have later on, on the evening of his own birthday.”