Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  It is only when I start to drown and to experience what dying is like for the first time, only when my cloth diaper and trousers have been engulfed by a mass of light green lake sediment, that I realize that I am not a duck, that I belong to another species.

  From here on in, I’m on my own and, once more, it is up to me to attract the attention of the boy who is trying to catch tadpoles in his jar; my fate as a woman lies in my brother’s hands.

  Even though my age is still only measured in months, it is at that moment that I grasp what lies at the core of the interplay of opposites in the relationship between men and women. Number one: I have to attract the fisherman’s attention; number two: win his admiration; number three: trigger the desired response. As I’m swallowing the gallons of sediment in the lake, knowing perfectly well that it is pointless to try to use the few words I have officially mastered, another key element in human communication springs to mind, and that is the abyss that lies between interest and action, that admiration can, in fact, in some cases, result in a lack of initiative and even inertia. The vain expectations of the other can end in disappointment and ultimately destruction and death. Unthinkable as it may seem today, I knew back then, barely two years old, that I was a woman in the making, a future woman.

  “He quacks like a real duck,” says the policeman who finally pulls me out of the water.

  The moment he takes me in his arms, green spew gushes out of me, all over him and his colleague.

  “He’s swallowed gallons of water, the car will be flooded.”

  And it is there, draped over his shoulder like a spineless wimp, that I realize there is a world behind the colourful rooftops of the surrounding wooden houses and that this is where my future lies; that the world is not shapeless chaos, but structured in many layers, like the rings rippling across the surface of the water, and that I am now standing very close to the innermost ring. I had yet to travel far and take many rounds.

  “That’s not a boy, it’s a girl,” says his colleague when he takes off my soaking trousers.

  He wraps me in a brown woollen blanket before escorting me to the warm inside of the police car. Meanwhile my only brother in the front gets to play with the handcuffs and baton.

  I linger there, semi-submerged, feeling little or no pain. I’ve settled all my affairs and am about to take my summer holiday in November, what more could a woman ask for?

  It is precisely at that moment, as I’m lying there with my hands planted on my foaming knees protruding from the surface, like two islets somewhere in the southern seas, and trying to think of some way of simplifying my life and making it more accessible—precisely as I’m beginning to feel that I’m finally catching my bearings out there in the open ocean—that the phone rings.

  I can’t be bothered to drag my body out of the Caribbean Sea until it rings for the eighth time; only Mom could be that persistent.

  “You could have been downstairs in the laundry room, hanging up your washing,” she would say.

  It’s not Mom but some man from the Association of the Deaf, who obviously isn’t deaf since he tells me his name and then asks if I am me.

  “We have a new policy of directly contacting the winners of our lottery,” he says. For the first time the numbers of the autumn lottery are now traceable to the people who bought them, he explains, since the ticket numbers are made up of a combination of the holders’ social security numbers, phone numbers and car registrations. He is therefore very happy to inform me that I’ve just won the first prize in the Association of the Deaf’s lottery: a ready-made mobile summer bungalow with an American kitchen, deck and grill, that was built by deaf builders and can be taken apart and transported to any part of the country. Could I collect it as soon as possible and in any case no later than the 15th of the month?

  I’m on my knees with the receiver in my hand and a trail of water that has followed me down the corridor. The telephone table vanished in the move. It’s quite possible that I have this ticket, since I buy practically every lottery ticket that is offered to me. I do this primarily for three reasons. One: the person standing on my doorstep is blue from the cold. Two: too young to be out alone in the dark. Three: he or she is in difficulty for some reason, either because he or she is blind or deaf, for example, or in a wheelchair outside a store. Then I always forget about the tickets, without ever bothering to check the winning numbers.

  The bath water is lukewarm when I climb back into it, but I can’t be bothered adding any hot water, as I try to figure out a possible location for the complete summer bungalow in my new life. Destiny isn’t something to be trifled with; in a single day I’ve lost my home and my neat little past. Instead I’ve been given a new prefabricated cottage which, for a number of obvious reasons, is more suited to a barren patch of Icelandic land or shrubbery than the tropical forests or coral reefs that featured in my future dreams.

  Despite my goose bumps, I linger in the bath tub. My happiness is sinking and my body is beginning to re-emerge through the dissolving foam. Mom is right—I’m too skinny.

  I see new possibilities opening up before me, new travel plans in my life. Maybe I should explore this island in the winter instead, make the most of the waning light, stretch out these short days, take little strolls away from the car every now and then, into the barren moors, maybe even go all the way east. It’s been seventeen years since I was there last; for some reason or another, my path has never led me back there. Nor have I done much travelling across the island’s mossy lava fields and dunes. I limited myself to two nights of camping a year with my former husband, in a double sleeping bag, in places where he felt he could stretch out by the entrance to the tent, facing the low vegetation with a bottle and cooling disposable grill in front of us, waiting for the snipes to shut up for a while in the summer nights so that we could finally catch some sleep. Thinking about it, I never venture any further from the city than the Gufunes cemetery after the beginning of November. But I can imagine how, after several hundred kilometres of driving, things might automatically start to solve themselves in my mind.

  There is nothing to disturb my plans here but my ex, who obviously still has a set of keys, since he sticks his head through the doorway while I’m still marinating in the bath.

  “I took a few pots and the wok and the mixer, but left the sandwich toaster behind.”

  “OK.”

  “See you soon then.”

  I see him walk by with the folded Santa Claus suit under his arm. He was a big hit in the role at his office’s Christmas ball last year. “Me, the only childless employee,” he grudgingly remarked as we were driving home that evening.

  “They wouldn’t have chosen you otherwise,” was the best answer I could come up with.

  “Maybe I could have a quick shower since I’m here,” he says.

  SIXTEEN

  I don’t get my ex. He’s just moved out with most of the contents of the house when he’s back again. Always forgetting something, that’s the third toothbrush he is collecting, and he even takes mine, which I’d just removed from its wrapping and used maybe once. I keep on buying new ones so that he can come and swipe them, along with a book on the mating of insects and other trifles.

  But I don’t quite get why he needs to take a shower on every visit. As he is washing himself he slips on our song, loud enough for him to be able to hear it under the jet of water.

  As if it were the most natural thing in the world, my ex strolls around the apartment with, at most, a small towel wrapped around his waist that just about covers his crotch or backside, but not both at once. As can be expected from a man in his comfortable position in life, I notice a slight accumulation of flab in the mid-section of his body.

  He opens all the cupboards in his journey around the apartment, as if he were checking them for new signs of life. The fact is that most of them are empty, because thankfully he
has removed almost everything that was in them. There is actually very little left of him, apart from the black hairs he leaves behind in the shower. By the next time he comes to pick up a toothbrush, I will have unclogged the drain. The question I am confronted with is this: for how long should deserting husbands be allowed to come back to take showers? What if he carries on like this, long into his new relationship? How would I explain these endless repeated clogs of hair in my shower to a new potential partner with perhaps a hairless chest?

  SEVENTEEN

  On the threshold of a new life, it is important to shed all the things you don’t need. Any clothes that can’t fit into one case go to a charity, as do any of the furniture or household appliances that have been allocated to me. As I make a list of my belongings, I am greatly relieved to see they only fill half the squared sheet of a copybook. I would never have imagined such a great sense of liberation. I don’t even need to call a van; the boxes all fit into my back seat over two trips down to the harbour. Just three floors up and there they are, tidily lining the wall in front of the sofa bed in my studio, until I decide to pick them up again and move once more. I’m left sitting with nothing but the bare essentials, although unfortunately I can’t find the cream whisk I was going to use to make mousse au chocolat for Auður when she pops by for a visit.

  As I’m struggling to open the front door downstairs, with a box balanced on my knees, my neighbour suddenly appears on the landing of the second floor and rushes in his black socks down the newly washed linoleum, which reeks of ammonia, to open the door for me. He then offers to help me carry the box up to the third floor. He looks like he could be in his fifties and smells of alcohol and aftershave. He gives me a brief summary of himself on our way up the stairs:

  “The boy was three when we split up, he’ll be seventeen in nineteen days’ time, then he’ll get his driving licence and the two of us are going off on a hunting trip. He’ll be driving the old banger, while his old man takes it easy in the back seat with his flask. We made a deal when I paid for his driving test that he would drive me geese-hunting. It’ll give us a chance to get to know each other better, to catch up on things, we’ve waited such a long time for this.”

  He has entered the kitchen now and taken out a measuring tape, while I arrange my things.

  “If you moved the fridge and got rid of the shower, you could get a small bathtub in here,” he says, measuring vertically and then horizontally, before pulling out a little notebook and scribbling into it with a pencil.

  “You girls are so much into bubble baths, I know your type,” he says roguishly as he expertly strokes the white-varnished doorway with the palm of his hand. If we were slightly more acquainted, he would already be at work.

  A short while later my neighbour is back knocking on the door again, with a bottle of Captain Morgan rum in one hand and a gold-framed photo in the other. It’s a picture of a drowsy-looking and acned boy with a choppy mop of hair, disproportionate limbs and a headband stretched above his eyes, which fails to fully conceal the bigness of his ears.

  I’m in no mood for talking and politely decline his offer of rum. I thank him once more for his help, impatient to see the back of him, so that I can get back to enjoying my solitude again and ponder on my immediate plans for the future.

  “Yeah, well I just wanted to reiterate what I said to you earlier, welcome to the building as a fixed resident. It’s always nice to know there’s a woman up the stairs.”

  Ten minutes later he is standing in the doorway again, this time with a recipe book under his arm. I give him two eggs from my shopping bag and milk.

  On his third and final trip he appears with pancakes and a sugar bowl. I put my papers down to accept the rolled pancakes. He is not going to invite himself in, however, because he is wearing a parka and on his way to the video store to return a DVD which he pulls out of his pocket to show me.

  “Can’t say I liked it much,” he says, holding up No Man’s Land.

  The film rings a bell, all about a war without winners.

  “You just didn’t know who to root for, there were no good guys or bad guys. You couldn’t even tell who the main actor was,” he says, pointing at a list of names on the case by way of proof.

  Then he sticks the DVD back into his pocket and cracks his knuckles.

  “Right then, better get this film back.” When I’m on my own I normally just make traditional Icelandic pancakes with rice pudding leftovers.

  EIGHTEEN

  My current abode is thirty-six square metres and has two walls of a yellow that is not dissimilar to the yellow of I can’t remember which South American flag. The other two walls are violet. I didn’t change the colours when I originally moved in. The window in the bigger room, where there is a kitchen and my computer and desk, faces the harbour, while in the other room there is a sofa bed, table, mirror and a sixteen-inch black and white Blaupunkt TV that once belonged to Mum. I kind of like it here.

  He phones three or four times, until I finally answer. He tells me he has recovered from the skating incident and has started cooking, roast beef with potato salad, opened a bottle and set the table for two. I tell him that I’m recovering and need more time on my own to figure out where I’m at in my life, explaining that I’ll be quite busy over the next few days and, actually, right up until I leave for an indeterminate time, since there are a number of projects I need to wind up first. I don’t tell him that I’m thinking of changing my travel plans. It is then that he asks if he can bring me over some of the food.

  After hanging up, I turn back to more serious matters and stretch out for the TV schedule.

  Kathleen is pursued by a man. She reverses the roles and starts to follow him. This leads to an accident, which results in him following her again. Meanwhile, she gets into a quarrel with her ex-husband.

  I turn the TV off and pull out the sofa bed.

  One of the fundamental elements in any woman’s life is sleep. I haven’t washed the bedclothes; if I sink my nose into them I can still pick up the scent of my old home, the conjugal bed. I don’t allow myself to get nostalgic about a piece of furniture and change the duvet cover. Then I shake the pillow and slide it under my cheek. I’ve got eight hours of freedom in front of me and a pile of translation work in my direct line of vision.

  My first night of sleep here is good, considering the lack of blinds and the flickering light of the lamp-post outside. There is nothing familiar about the sounds that travel through the open window. Nothing but the intimate smell of my office.

  Some people are chatting three floors below and seem so close that they could be whispering in my ear. One of them is a man, but I can’t quite decide whether the other is male or female. The voices hover in the air.

  “Like I said, he’s probably scared.”

  “Are you sure you won’t come in for tea?”

  “No way, thanks.”

  “I have some Christmas cake to go with it.”

  I furtively peep out of the window, maybe leaning out too far, balancing like a gymnast on a beam, but see nothing. I can’t sleep, so I fetch a nineteenth-century novel, a family drama that spans the lives of three generations and stretches all the way south to the Pyrenees. I finish the first half at half three and wander into the other room to make some tea and toast. I’ll buy Christmas cake in the bakery in the morning.

  When I finally doze off, I have one of those totally meaningless dreams, in which I’m speaking Gaelic and muttering good morning out of the corner of my mouth to a neighbour on the landing of the stairs. Then I’m suddenly holding an empty glass bottle of Coke I want to sell, but I’m stuck out in some marshland in the middle of nowhere.

  I’m suddenly wide awake again, as the first batch of buns come out of the ovens of the bakery below.

  NINETEEN

  Auður is on the phone.

  In celebration of t
he news that genetic research has now demonstrated that woman played a larger role in the development of humanity than man, she wants to come over and cook me lunch tomorrow. To consecrate the stove in my studio apartment, she is going to bring some holy water from the baptismal bowl in the church she plays the organ in and sprinkle my home. This is also because, she says, people are always inviting freshly divorced men around to dinner, pampering them and volunteering to scrub their floors for them. Men have such a vast support network behind them: mothers, sisters, friends, friends’ wives, ex-wives, the friends of ex-wives, ex-mothers-in-law, sisters of former mothers-in-law. They’re told not to think twice about bringing over their dirty laundry, which can be chucked into one or two machines while they’re enjoying their meals. What’s more, their children get to stay over if their dads are having a night out on the town with their buddies. Auður tends to talk a lot, with each clause crammed with multiple digressions and interjections, but apart from that, she’s great.

  It has started to rain, making the ice treacherously slippery outside, and I rush out before my friend arrives to buy some coffee and Christmas cake. I decide to buy some rock salt to sprinkle over the icy steps, at least for the benefit of the postman with the red hairband, who rings the bell when documents are too big to squeeze through the mailslot in the door and likes to chat about his favourite hobby, pole-vaulting.

  As I’m walking up the path with the bag in my arms I see my lovely musical friend is sitting somehow to the side of one of my unswept and unsalted steps, clutching one leg. She has fallen on a patch of ice and her left leg looks unnaturally twisted under her. She nevertheless waves at me with a strained smile. Crouching beside her, my first thought is to fulfil my civic duty and take out the rock salt in my bag to sprinkle it all around her, to mark her territory. Like those chalk lines they draw around corpses in that Scottish crime series I now officially subtitle, I trace a white outline around the six-month-pregnant woman on the path in front of my temporary new home.