Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  I can’t say she’s wrong and hang up too.

  Naked there on the draining board, the bird reveals its vulnerable nature more than ever before. Because I don’t have any proper tools, like a welding or a primus blowtorch, I assemble my entire collection of candlesticks, aligning and lighting all the candles on the table—gilded, red, tea light and scented candles—and start the operation.

  The butterfly doesn’t stir on the wall, not even as the match approaches, not a single twitch, its wings still calmly folded.

  I could also surprise him and invite some other people. I draw up a guest list in my mind. I randomly include two of his colleagues from work, who on second thought, however, wouldn’t really be appropriate for this occasion, a female equestrian friend of his and a Middle East expert, who happens to be a childhood friend of mine, then another one of his acquaintances, an actress, who is currently between men, and my trusted friend, Auður, a pianist. Neither of the widows, i.e. neither my mother nor his, since this isn’t a bonding exercise, but a last supper, at which both women would only be backing and defending their thirty-something offspring.

  The neck dangles over the table. This is no ordinary goose, having been felled in this very special manner, slightly maimed perhaps, certainly with a dislocated shoulder, but not blatantly battered, or at least no worse than if it had been machine-gunned with pellets. You won’t lose any fillings eating this bird, there is no lead in this flesh, which will be exceptionally tender, since it didn’t have to flee a vast distance from snipers, felt no adrenaline rush when I hit the brakes, couldn’t have known what was coming.

  Whatever is lacking can be compensated for by the stuffing, good stuffing can always save you, nice and spicy, so long as you don’t go over the top, something few men understand. I don’t go over the limit, although I may come pretty close to it. I’m hardly going to poison my husband, turn an unborn child into an orphan, am I? No, a child needs a father, a boy needs a dad.

  The doctor laughed. No father, eh? So it happened all by itself, did it? Just like the Virgin Mary in the olden days? You’re such a smart girl, you’ll turn into an incredibly attractive woman given a few years. If you could only stay still a moment, instead of wriggling like a worm all the time.

  It’s at this moment, however, that I ask myself: does my husband have good taste when it comes to flesh? Was it a man of taste who chose me?

  One of the principal advantages of being married to a man who is often abroad on business is that there’s always plenty of booze in the wine cupboard to fix a slightly dodgy dish or save a sauce, liqueur aperitifs to blunt the guests’ sense of judgement and boost the confidence of the chef, although I probably shouldn’t drink too many more glasses of this yellow lemony liquid.

  The goose has not been hung for long enough, that’s clear. I scan its skin in search of any brown blotches that might indicate the animal had been ill. Not that it could actually kill either of us—at worst give us a nasty stomach bug.

  On second thoughts, it’s probably best to cut the breasts off and make a thick, creamy wild sauce to camouflage the tread marks of the tires. But later, when he scrapes the sauce slightly off the bare meat, he is bound to see the imprint of the wheels, like finding the hidden almond in the Christmas rice pudding. Then I’ll grab his attention and get him to look up, not necessarily into my eyes, and I’ll say:

  “Well then, Happy New Year in advance and thanks for the four years of marriage, plus the 285 days and seven hours.”

  I finally break her open and rip out her bleeding heart, surprised by the appearance of the creature’s innermost entrails. The heart is so small it would fit into the palm of the hand of a newborn child.

  I kiss the small bleeding palm and his hand, smearing my lips in red. That’s what my classmate Bergsveinn was like in the eighth grade, with blood-red lips. I, on the other hand, had long brown hair with bangs. Our religion teacher once told him that he had kissable lips. Bergsveinn blushed, increasing the blood flow to his lips even more. But the religion teacher was a married man, so it was clear that he was teasing him for the sake of us girls in the class. After that, all we girls in the class learnt that not all lips are equally suited to all tasks. This is how a woman can suddenly learn what she can expect from life.

  Detach the tiny fingers protruding from the heart, by pulling them out one by one, like a midwife retrieving the bloody newborn child from the arms of a fifteen-year-old girl to deliver it for adoption. There is no way of discerning from the cry, as it is being carried away, whether it is a boy or a girl. Some say the cry of a boy is more delicate, fragile and feeble than the cry of a girl, boys who have no natural fluff on their heads and wear light blue hoods. He, however, has a big mass of dark hair. The woman is from the east of the country, not very young. I only catch a brief glimpse of her and say nothing, buried under the pillow. I’m not sure the crying can be heard for long because the corridor stretches far away, the coffee percolator is brewing and the singing of the plover that has recently returned from the southern hemisphere can be heard through the window. Because it is spring, one can smell the perfume of the woman who is driven away with the baby in the car. She is sitting in the back with the child enveloped in a small down quilt, her husband alone in the front.

  I could, of course, delve into all kinds of regional variations of chicken, pigeon or duck recipes, marinated goose, sautéed in butter and sprinkled with ground pepper and thyme or roasted very slowly for a long time in the oven, while I nip off for a swim and steam bath in the meantime and pop into the bookshop to see if my order has arrived. I also consider following an Irish recipe, which consists in letting the bird simmer in a pot for four hours with onion and stuffing, while the evidence erodes away, and then fry it. The solution comes to me in a flash; I try to merge several recipes, mixing unrelated flavours in an unexpected way.

  In fact, the major challenge and biggest obstacle I have to face in any of my cooking is the cutting of the onion. My vulnerability to the onion isn’t comparable to my vulnerability to any other aspect of my life. It is standing unpeeled on the table and I’ve already started to cry. I take off my wedding ring and place it at the top of the draining board, behind the bird’s gutted entrails. I brandish a knife and my eyes immediately well with tears. I can’t see a thing, but nevertheless blindly stick to the task at hand, groping for the second onion and then the third and have ceased being able to see the book ages ago. I fumble and zigzag into the dining room, searching for the balcony door where the chives are still steadily growing in their pot, even though we’re in October.

  “You’re far too sensitive for this world,” my neighbour from downstairs said to me once, when she saw my violent reaction to onions one day as I was staggering outside to try to focus on the world again. These are the kind of things women say to other women. Even women who sleep with your husbands. After some time they phone you and say: “He isn’t exactly the way I thought he’d be, sorry,” and they even want to meet up with you in a café and form a book club.

  EIGHT

  When my husband opens the door with yet another new tie around his neck, I’ve already opened both of the bottles of wine that were being kept for the next special occasion. He immediately mentions the peculiar smell in the apartment, which the well-seasoned bird in the oven fails to mask. It’s true that there are some feathers in the kitchen and bathroom, and even one feather on the bed, as I discover later that evening, as well as several bloodstains sprinkled on the parquet.

  It had been a difficult operation.

  We normally sit face to face to feel each other’s proximity, but we now sit at the far extremities, each occupying their own end, since I’ve extended the table by two leaves, both because we’re separating and also because it gives the occasion a festive air. There is a huge gap between us, the vast distance between conciliation and separation. On the white tablecloth there are new candles in tall
brass candlesticks and six side dishes with all the things he likes: baked potato wedges, home-cooked red cabbage, French beans, carrot mousse, salad and succulent redcurrant jelly, made from berries out of Auður’s garden.

  It occurs to me that this may be my last chance to ask him about things I haven’t asked him up until now.

  “How is your mother?”

  “Fine, thanks. And yours?”

  “Good.”

  “Thanks for everything,” he says, visibly moved.

  As soon as he wants to speak, I will allow him to, because I’m a woman and know how to remain silent. He hasn’t prepared a speech.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I just want you to know that I’ll never forget you.”

  He doesn’t say that he will cherish me in the depths of the blood-red chambers of his heart, because he would never put it that way.

  “Thank you.” I refrain from replying likewise, at moments like this one doesn’t necessarily say what one is thinking.

  “I won’t say it was exactly the way Mom does it, but there was something special about it, something personal.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It was wonderful to meet you . . . I mean marry you . . . and live with you . . . but sometimes things don’t turn out the way you expected . . . but differently . . . you’ve also been quite busy lately . . . we haven’t seen much of each other . . .”

  He has stood up and I realize how tall he is, he is literally towering over the table. He hands me a parcel wrapped in gilded paper, after fishing it out of the inside pocket of his jacket. I finish the remains of two glasses before opening it, exhausting my annual ration of alcohol in a single day.

  It’s a wristwatch.

  “Thank you, you shouldn’t have, I don’t have anything for you.”

  “It has a calendar, so you’ll be able to see both the time and the date. Forewarned is forearmed,” he says with a smile.

  In addition to the calendar, the watch has two dials, a bigger one that says HOME and a smaller one that says LOCAL, the local one presumably indicating the time of the place where one happens to be at that moment. They both therefore follow their own time.

  “A bit like you,” he says with a touch of warmth.

  It is true that I didn’t actually have a watch, but I do have a compass in the car that has always enabled me to find my way, even though I may not always know the precise time in terms of minutes.

  He stands behind me at the table and loosely places his hand on my shoulder, as he explains the watch to me. I sense a creeping weakness in my body and suddenly feel that this relationship still stands a chance that entirely hinges on me being able to dissimulate the fact that I know how to read the time, that’s my trump card right now. Because I’m a woman and he’s a man.

  “So you can set whatever time you want on one dial, free time, your own personal time, whereas the home dial will show you the time we other ordinary, boring, mortals live on,” he says in a soft voice. “Do you have any plans?”

  “I’m thinking of taking a late-summer holiday and travelling,” I say, even though the thought hadn’t even crossed my mind until I heard myself say it. “At least I’ll know what time it is,” I add, flashing the golden watch.

  “I see you’ve already removed your ring.”

  He’s right, I’m not wearing the wedding ring because I took it off when I was cleaning the insides out of the bird. But I only have to glance at the glistening draining board to realize that it actually isn’t there any more; it has vanished with the innards of the goose and vegetable peels. Tomorrow, when I’m in a more lucid state, I’ll rummage through the garbage and go through the bird’s entrails again, digging for gold.

  He doesn’t seem to be taking the ring issue too personally and is already thinking of something else.

  “Shall we lie down for a bit?”

  NINE

  I follow him into the bedroom with the two-timing watch on my wrist for one final exchange of bodily fluids.

  It’s a double bed, the bed of a woman and man who were close, of a woman who has kissed his tummy and a man who has tightly wrapped himself around her and kissed her breasts and more besides. Here, as I blow fluff off his navel, I peruse the familiar territory one last time.

  I wouldn’t call it a guilty conscience, but I can’t deny that Nína Lind has briefly entered my mind. Even though this could be looked upon as a repeat performance or an action replay, my husband is nevertheless being unfaithful to the future mother of his child and I am his new mistress.

  Afterwards we spend some time chatting about our childhood scratches and mutual scars, but despite our four years and 288 days of marriage, I had never noticed that scar under his shoulder blade.

  No matter how often or cunningly I try to put the question to him, he won’t give anything away about what might have happened to him, other than:

  “Doesn’t matter now, good night.”

  “Good night.”

  He turns over on his side. I wonder if there is some way of prolonging the moment, of finding something that will grab his attention.

  “Good night.”

  “Yes, you’ve already said good night.”

  “Yeah, I just wanted to say it again, I wasn’t sure if you’d heard me.”

  “Yes, I heard you, I said good night too.”

  “Good night.”

  He is half buried under the quilt, his head under the pillow, one of his legs protruding over the end of the bed, hairy all over, except for the soles of his feet. His clothes are in a pile on the floor. His mom has started to do his laundry; I notice the pleat of the iron on his underpants. He obviously isn’t troubled by his conscience, this man lying beside me with his hairy arm draped over my stomach. Once he has drifted into sleep, I move his arm to be able to readjust my viewing position: now that we’re divorcing it’s about time I got to know my husband. I watch the way his expression dissolves and his facial features revert to their original formless state, his mouth half gaping. I scrutinize the remaining traces of the little boy in him, which are in themselves more than sufficient to satisfy any need I might have for a child. I watch his hairy chest, who knows if it is the heart of a child beating underneath it? Seems such a short while since those first sounds were stuttered, before he could master words and use them to his advantage. A little pout suddenly forms on his mouth and I sense he may be having a bad dream, although his deep breathing betrays no emotion. I try to remember what we might have done over the course of the past five years, but am unable to fill in all the little time lapses. Vague as the recollections may be, I can categorically say that he never vacuum-cleaned. And neither did I, because we don’t have any carpets, most of the memories end in the bed. A relationship to me is all about the right body and the right smell, the home is a shell for the body, not a place for exchanging existential views and having discussions. Even though you still have to load the washing machine and cook for the body.

  But I do have a flashback of him solicitously carrying me some tea, taking slow, cautious steps out of the kitchen with a bright yellow liquid in a rattling porcelain cup, his big body looming over the delicate vessel with its pattern of blue flowers, flexing his knees and hunching his shoulders, as he carefully places one foot in front of the other, as if he were carrying the egg of life in his hands, as if he were holding the slippery body of a newborn child, his entire being focused on the task at hand. Apart from that, it’s mostly mornings I recall; we’re saying goodbye to each other, then a short moment later we’re saying goodnight to each other; there are vast gaps in between, I could perhaps resuscitate some extra quarters of an hour here and there, but other than that can remember nothing else. If I were forced to, if I were to be locked up between the walls of an old classroom and compelled to produce an account of our four years and 288 days of co
habitation, I could maybe dig up enough events and words to fill a blackboard totalling thirty days. How many pages would that be in a double-spaced manuscript? The same words frequently recur over and over again. You can’t really say that conjugal life does much to advance the evolution of language.

  I gently lift the quilt, as if uncovering a newborn child in a cradle to peep at its curled-up body and baby crochet socks. I place the palm of my hand flatly on his warm stomach. He heaves a faint sigh and turns over on his back, and then on his stomach again, exhaling heavily and producing a deep, faint sound, like the foghorn of a ship as it pulls out of harbour to sail off to another land.

  And now I commit him all to memory, since he is about to leave. I scan his throat, shoulder blades, back, ribs, buttocks, thighs, the crease of his knees, calves and the soles of his feet, all unbeknown to him, without waking him, secretly shifting my gaze from place to place, studying his body like a relief map, exploring him, surveying him from vertebra to vertebra, recording everything I see, capturing him in the minutest detail, storing every single hair of his body so that I will be able to conjure them up at will again, until the day comes when I lose the longing to do so and no longer remember the feel of his skin, because he has been replaced by another body perhaps.

  A new sound has penetrated the bedroom, at first almost imperceptibly, then growing and switching tone until it turns into a distinctly intrusive buzz. There can no longer be any doubt: at least two bluebottles are hovering in the vicinity of the bed. At that same moment, I spot one of the flies landing on my husband’s face, plunging its legs into the lake of his chin and strolling around the undergrowth of his stubble. I wave it away, but it lands again on his forehead, cheek, nose, chin; I blow on it and try to dust it off his face without waking him. Then I stretch out to grab the poetry book on the bedside table: The Head of a Woman. I use it as a fan to banish the fly, ever so delicately, like a diva who has grown weary of a suitor in an operetta. The fly then doubles its efforts, so I roll up the book and strike it on my husband’s upper lip, squashing it in a single blow and turning it into a shapeless black blotch just under his nose. Thorsteinn wakes with a start, springs up and grabs his head the way air passengers are instructed to do when bracing themselves for a crash landing.