Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “You hit me?”

  “Sorry, there was a fly on your upper lip so I killed it.”

  “A fly, at the end of October?”

  He looks at me incredulously, with a wavering and unfathomable expression, but still relaxed and soft, his facial features still unformed, a little boy with no pyjamas and a hairy chest. He is already getting over it, lies down and quickly drifts into sleep again. Then I carefully lie over his warm body, flat out, stretching all over him, trying to cover him in his entirety as he lies there; but no matter how hard I try, parts of him seem to protrude from everywhere. He doesn’t stir, but breathes deeply and regularly. Then a part of him suddenly wakes up, I feel a movement against my tummy, his breathing halts a moment and I hold my breath with him. Nothing happens until he locks his arms around me.

  Once he has fallen asleep again, I audaciously set the time on the second dial—the free one that can be set according to my own conscience. It has got to be said to my conscience’s credit, though, that on this October night it is proving to be more steadfast than my heart, which is why I set the same time on both dials and they both read seventeen minutes past three, as I lay down in the hollow of my husband’s elbow, nestling into him as if nothing had happened, with one arm over his chest, which heaves and sinks, causing the alarm clock on the bedside table to flash in and out of view. Then, as usual, I tire of the twisted position of my shoulder and slip my arm away as I turn from him and he follows my movement with a heavy arm.

  All things considered, you can’t really say that he ever treated me badly.

  TEN

  I wake up beside the close body of a stranger and move cautiously in the bed, groping through the ominous crack of dawn. I had almost forgotten under the quilt that we are no longer lovers. His eyes are open and for the next three-quarters of an hour he too looks as if he has forgotten. By the time I wriggle myself out of bed, he has drifted back to sleep again. I stretch my hand out to my new watch and see that the dial indicates my conscience’s time stopped at 7:05. Which is the exact time of my birth, some thirty-three years and three weeks ago to the day. I stare at my watch, as if it were the heart of the goose that had ceased to beat.

  There is a time for everything, a time for sleeping, a time for loving, a time for breaking up, for running—everything has its time. Abandoning the warmth of the conjugal bed, I tiptoe to open the door out into the cold darkness of dawn, holding my sneakers until I reach the steps. My neighbour from the basement is standing in the driveway, holding a child in one arm and a boiled kettle in the other. I see her pouring water over the lock of the car and windscreen to melt a porthole that is just about big enough for her to be able to peer through on her way to the kindergarten. The hot steam from the kettle oozes into the darkness in breathy puffs that colour the air in a milky grey hue that then fuses with it.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking when I locked the car in the driveway,” she says, waving at me. The kettle is now resting on the hood of the car.

  “They’re forecasting rising temperatures and rain,” I say, trying to restore my neighbour’s faith in a better future.

  As soon as I step onto the pavement, the dog from the floor above gives me a warm welcome. Brandishing the handle of a leash in his mouth, he thrusts it at me and is so beside himself with excitement and joy that he barely seems to know which leg to stand on. I pat him, but don’t touch the leash—this time I’ll run alone. He whines after me and runs in confused circles by the garden gate.

  I start to jog along the traffic island that separates the opposing lanes of traffic. Mute and weary faces populate the cars. The blinking of their red indicators is reflected in the thin film of frost that covers the traffic bollards at the crossroads.

  I jog past eleven stationary cars in a row at the traffic lights and no one is kissing in the frozen air, not even those who kept their cars parked in their heated garages overnight. Nevertheless people are, generally speaking, well disposed to the world when they wake up and start off on their journeys, their eyes still glistening with dreams. So few of them would have the energy to start quarrelling or two-timing their partners before eight in the morning, I would imagine, or at least not until they’ve had a child together. Most people are travelling by car, but those who are on foot drag their feet along the ice, all round-shouldered, without lifting their heels or the tips of their shoes, as if they were wearing tiny cross-country skis, sliding forward by three to six centimetres with each thrust.

  The front gate is closed, but I don’t bother looking for any other entrances. Even though the wall carries a CCTV surveillance sign, it’s a piece of cake to climb over it, as I always do, and sneak into the garden of the dead. I land close to the grave of the City Council Treasurer and his widow. This is something my ex would never do; he isn’t the kind of guy who climbs over walls. I have the whole graveyard to myself; I’m at peace and safe in here, in good company, many of these people must have been feeling lonely. Taking a closer look at the tombstone of the couple, I calculate that she had been a widow for sixty years. I would guess that must have left them with four years of married life and three children.

  Everything is veiled by a thin coat of snow, but I still feel a good grip under the soles of my shoes and start running on the gravel path, under the beam of the spotlights, like a convict taking his daily jog around a guarded yard, surrounded by insurmountable walls topped with barbed wire, and I picture guards brandishing machine guns on the multi-coloured corrugated iron rooftops. The city centre is still sunk in darkness, but a faint violet glow is beginning to spread across the sky.

  Whenever I give directions to foreigners who happen to be standing by the cemetery, unfolding maps and scanning the horizon for some sign of a city centre, and spotting neither souvenir shops nor cafés, nor the faintest hint of an urban axis as they are being blasted by the rust-brown northern wind, I say: “Yes, if you want to go to the centre of the town, you’ve got to go through the cemetery first. Then you go to the lake. Everybody has to go through a cemetery in life. Yes, you turn to the right and then to the right again and then you turn to the left—but only after you’ve passed the cemetery. Yes, that’s right. This is Reykjavík. You need a cemetery to go through life.”

  Then the foreigners carry on their way and, as I watch them, I see that they all bypass the graveyard, without exception, as if they had no interest in death but were content enough to simply peer through those little slits for their eyes and nostrils in the hoods of their parkas, looking in all directions, over the heads of the rest of us who live below, as if they thought there was something worth seeing up there.

  I can cover a few hundred metres in a straight line down the path if I run over one or two overgrown graves that have long fallen into a state of disrepair. I then turn around on the edge of a tiny freshly dug grave between the resting places of two elderly brothers. A premature baby was buried there during the week beside his great grand-uncles. I zigzag back between the trees, and then pace a stretch over my footprints, running back and forth sixteen times, without pausing, faster and faster each time, until I can barely catch my breath any more, the path has been completely trampled and I feel my heartbeat pounding in my head and ears. Then I truly feel like a living being in the middle of this garden of the dead, I’m most definitely alive in here.

  I sense I’m no longer alone; there is a crunching sound in the snow behind me and a twig snaps with still no sign of daylight. I feel heavy excited breathing close by, first right behind me and then beside me, we run side by side, he and I. A moment later his hot and muscular body is rubbing against me, his wet tongue in the palm of my hand. In his eagerness and passion he fawns all over me, pressing me against a granite pillar under which a mother and son repose.

  It’s my friend from the top floor, Max the mastiff, a mongrel between innocent Icelandic gullibility and foreign rigour, neither a sheepdog nor a watchdog.

>   He has taken the dog with him and set him loose on me, while he himself snugly rests his back against the statue of our national poet. The tip of his cigarette is glowing.

  “Stop a second, I need to talk to you.”

  My ex is wearing a yellow-patterned Mickey Mouse tie. I speed up; what could he possibly want here among the dead?

  “Just one more lap.”

  He grabs the sleeve of my sweater as I come running out of the darkness.

  My breathing is swift and hot and there is a taste of blood in my mouth and blood in the slime I spit out between the impeccably polished shoes of the man who is standing there.

  I bend over in front of the national poet, allowing my arms to dangle, as my dark hair almost touches the white earth. Then I straighten and stretch up to touch his forehead with the flat palm of my hand, running my fingers down his wet face in the morning frost, over his nose down to his chin, passing his chest, feeling his knee, thigh, and stroking him all the way down. He is wearing a long coat that is open at the front and pressed trousers. The features of his face are sharply sculpted and a faint smile chiselled on the edge of his lips seems to lose itself in the cheek. Finally I knock on him to see what stuff he is made of. It’s bronze; our national poet is hollow on the inside, cold and stiff. Could this poet really have loved his sweetheart as warmly as he swore in the complex internal rhymes of those quatrains?

  Then my husband stretches out his hand as if to caress my cheek and I recoil.

  “You seem to wake up with a blank face that doesn’t take on any fixed expression until lunchtime, sometimes not until the afternoon. In some ways it’s quite charming to live with a woman like that.”

  “But? . . .”

  “On the other hand there are too many uncertain factors for an ordinary man like me.”

  I don’t say anything, but gaze at the dawn spreading over the rooftops.

  “I forgot to ask you, is it OK if I take the mattress and the bed frame with me? Because of my back.”

  “That’s OK.”

  “I’ll confess to adultery, that should speed up the divorce proceedings.”

  “OK,” I say, dropping onto the white cracking grass. Big decisions are made swiftly, whereas in about five years of married life we never managed to decide on the colour of the walls in the hallway.

  “I’ll put the apartment on sale.”

  “OK.”

  He shilly-shallies on the snow-sprinkled gravel.

  “Don’t suppose you could take my coat to the dry-cleaner’s, it’s hanging in the hall?”

  ELEVEN

  My ex-lover phones me in the middle of the night to tell me he’s heard the news and wants to come over to give me his personal support.

  “What news?”

  “About the divorce.”

  “So you probably heard it before I did then, like everyone else?”

  He calls me three times on his mobile. The third time he tells me he’s pressing my bell with his elbow and wants to know if I intend to leave him locked outside. I point out that I haven’t locked him out and remind him that he was the one who told me that it was all over between us a week ago. In any case I wasn’t going to open the door to him. If he wanted to meet me, it would have to be sober and in broad daylight. On skates on the lake, for example, I say rashly, without quite knowing where the idea came from. Probably because of the skates my mother had mentioned over the phone. It’s our last chance to go skating, because they’re forecasting a big thaw after the weekend. A lot of things will undoubtedly change after that. I actually bought myself some new skates ages ago, keep them at work, and sometimes go down to the lake for a spin when I can’t think of a word in a translation.

  And then to make matters worse I say:

  “I’ll be there tomorrow at 17:00 hours.”

  “I’d do anything for you,” he says, even go skating stone sober, you know I love you.”

  “You can tell me that tomorrow then, sober as a judge, in front of the islet.”

  When my mother delivered the skates to me, she included a pair of folded old trousers with a flowery strip embroidered at the bottom that belonged to me when I was fourteen.

  I haven’t told her about the split-up yet. She’s right, though, when she says I don’t have the build to be a mother, I still fit into the trousers I wore when I was fourteen years old.

  “I went skating the night before I gave birth to you,” she tells me, “took three or four rounds with a friend, arm in arm. I was in a red woollen coat with my hair pinned up.”

  She is probably confusing it with the ball they went to a few months earlier, but I don’t say anything.

  “Then I had this sudden pang of hunger, because I’d only had rice pudding for dinner. By the end of the fourth round, my hunger had turned into me feeling totally famished so I decided to walk home alone to eat some yogurt and drink a glass of milk. If I’d decided to take an extra three rounds, you would have been born on the frozen lake bang in the middle of town.”

  Chatting with my mom, I seem to vanish from the burden of the present and travel back to my origins. I feel squashed in amniotic fluid and my eyes are swollen.

  “I suffered terribly when I gave birth to you, thirty-six hours of labour, five giving birth to your brother. Took me four months to recover, just physically I mean, after having you. I have to admit, in some ways I feel closer to your brother, he also calls me more often.”

  TWELVE

  In five minutes’ time I will have written him off, not that I ever really thought he would actually come. There’s no one on the ice in the mounting thaw; the kids have all gone to the indoor ice rink and are listening to FM 97.7, licking green and violet ice pops. The circle in which the ducks are squabbling is growing larger and with every round I take I’m drawn slightly closer to the water.

  There I am standing on the glistening ice, with the steel dents of the skates pressed into the surface to steady myself, when I see the man nonchalantly walking towards me in his long woollen coat and a pair of skates slung over his shoulder, like some image from a century-old Alpine postcard. Complete with a red and white striped fringe scarf. Under his coat he is in a suit and tie. Darkness has long descended on the islet in the middle of the lake, but the lamp-posts from the surrounding residential streets shed some light on the area. He has left the engine of his car running on the edge of the lake to allow the headlights to illuminate his path on the ice, because he intends to be brief, just a moment. He simply wants to collect me and take me home to console me.

  He isn’t very tall, seen from a distance, in his socks just a few feet from his car. He now sits on the wall by the lake to put on his skates. Then he advances cautiously on the ice. He is not as ill-experienced as I imagined, or he is skilled enough to be able to follow me at any rate, although the skates are clearly as new as his blue car on the edge of the lake.

  I wasn’t prepared for this. The perseverance and determination my ex-lover displays on the ice triggers mixed feelings in me. I’m not sure I can cope with anything at the moment. When all is said and done, this is my first experience as a woman on the brink of a divorce. But if people mean well and show some masculine and persuasive sensitivity, it won’t be easy for me to remain indifferent.

  The ice in front of us is silvery blue and I’m about to launch myself into a figure, drawing intricate patterns under the beams of the car headlights. That should give me some technical one-upmanship, although I feel him coming eerily close to my back, like a waxing moon over a frozen sea.

  He is trying to sidle up to me; I can sense he is out of breath and feel him panting in the dark, but can’t really think of anything to say to him. I don’t know if I’ll go home with him or not yet, because I don’t know if I love my ex-husband, so I just try to keep a step ahead. If I had it all written down on a sheet of paper, my op
tions I mean, in a manuscript, in front of me in black and white, I could simply cross out one of the possibilities.

  When I glance over my shoulder, scanning over the white-streaked ice, I see that I’m drawing a pattern that looks like the intersection of the lifeline and fate line in the palm of my hand. I could probably carry on writing important messages with my skates, or even perform a pirouette and allow myself to glide towards him, etching the shape of a curved heart in the cold grey ice.

  Instead I dash towards the hole in the ice, with headphones pressed to my ears and the volume pumped up high. The circle steadily grows bigger as I near its edge. He is trying to phone me now; I can feel my mobile vibrating in the lower side pocket of my trousers.

  Personally, I can easily avoid that hole in the lake. The question is whether I might not be putting him in peril by coming so dangerously close, creating unnecessary suspense just to buy some time, simply because I don’t know what to say to him yet. Despite my mastery of many languages, I’ve never been particularly apt with words, at least not eye to eye, woman to man. Even though I know a regular sentence will require a subject, object and verb and, if it is to achieve any level of complexity, at least three prepositions, my power over words doesn’t stretch that far. I’m not particularly good at conjuring up words, the right words I mean, or saying them, what really counts. I can’t even spurt out the most important bits like “be warned” and “I love you”. In that order.

  Now that there is nothing in front of us but the black hole and a decision urgently needs to be made, I can suddenly clearly see the difference between me and my ex-lover. I slow down and prepare to sway to the side, drawing a semicircle close to the edge, while he skids to a halt in a straight line, almost crashing into me, but I manage to swing away, taking a long curve that almost takes me to the bridge.