Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “It’s just a ligament,” she says as we peer at the abnormally big swelling on her left ankle.

  I’m filled with a deep sense of guilt and, for some peculiar reason, think of last night’s dream. I hear myself telling her that it will be OK and ask her if she can walk. She can’t touch the ground with her foot. I try to help her up, but she collapses again with a smothered groan, so I rush inside to call an ambulance.

  They’ve already loaded her onto a stretcher in a woollen blanket, and fastened the straps around her big round tummy, which has suddenly inflated to the size of a huge balloon under the cover, when she turns her head towards a brown paper bag on the steps:

  “Sorry, I just brought some takeaways,” she says. I promise to cook next. A shot of pain crosses her face as they carry the stretcher away. I follow her to the ambulance and she squeezes my hand as we say goodbye.

  “Can you collect Tumi from the kindergarten for me and keep him over the weekend, I don’t want to involve Mom in any of this, not yet at least, her blood pressure is far too high. The only thing you need to watch out for is his sleepwalking, he’s been known to open doors and vanish behind corners, and even to put himself in danger. Once I found him down by the lake. Just make sure you don’t startle him when he’s in that state.”

  “OK,” I say.

  “He also likes to feel a lock of hair brushing across his face when he’s falling asleep. I find it also reduces the likelihood of him sleepwalking,” says my friend with the long ponytail.

  “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  “Hakúna matata!” she cries out to me. That’s Swahili for “don’t worry”, by the way, from The Lion King, his favourite movie. She waves me goodbye, beaming from ear to ear.

  I’m left standing in the unsalted slush, in the pale grey light of noon, with a bag containing brown rice, an organic vegetarian dish and apricot mousse in little paper boxes. For the sake of making some token gesture, I sprinkle the steps with salt.

  TWENTY

  Although I wouldn’t want to add to Auður’s worries in her current state, it’s got to be said: I haven’t a clue when it comes to children. There were no younger siblings in my house. The neighbourhood I grew up in as a kid was mainly populated by old people. No one ever came to pick me up to babysit a little cousin and, in the countryside in the east, all the other kids were around my age, and there were no smaller children to interfere with our plans in the attic of the barn.

  I walk off to collect him, with the sky above me and, hopefully, the Almighty himself. An entire weekend is a very long time to have to spend alone with a child, a non-stop forty-eight-hour watch to be exact, under my constant responsibility. That makes at least eight meals, four of which would have to be hot, and brushing his teeth five to six times. In fact, the only way to plan this is from one half-hour to the next. Children’s games last for about five minutes, after which you’ve already got to think of something new. It must slow everything down; one would have to put everything else on hold, I imagine.

  Gnome House certainly lives up to its name; its low multi-coloured wooden structure, wedged between higher buildings, seems oddly incongruous in this district. Inside everything has been dwarfed down to scale in a nannified universe. As you step in, you turn into a Gulliver in Lilliput and have to watch you don’t tread on any of the small folk that live their minuscule lives here from eight to five, five days a week.

  I spot him immediately. He stands out in the crowd, with his unusually big head for such a short trunk, slightly drooping shoulder blades and a rather old-fashioned hearing aid for such a young child. His big ears protrude through his hair. His mother had told me he wants to keep his hair long, to cover those ears. Having been premature by two and a half months, he is considerably smaller than his peers. His torso also seems oddly proportioned, an old man locked in the body of a child.

  “I normally buy clothes for him that are twice or three times below the size of his age, mostly French children’s sizes,” Auður told me.

  What’s more, the boy wears glasses that are attached by springs to the hearing aid behind his ears and his eyes seem to almost completely fill the lenses. He has a look that often attracts attention, frequently evoking pity, Auður says, particularly from old women, who sometimes pull sweets out of their pockets.

  He instantly recognizes me and seems visibly happy to see me. Wrapping his arms around my waist for a brief moment, he looks up at me intently as he speaks and then patiently waits for me to give him some sign of understanding and recognition. Because I don’t know sign language, he strives to speak as clearly as possible, exaggerating his lip movements and equally stressing every syllable as he forms the sounds that he himself can only barely hear. Nevertheless, his voice sounds strange and I have problems grasping what he is saying. I squat so that we can at least look each other in the eye when he’s talking.

  “We had a special mushroom day today, the kindergarten teacher interprets,” although I’m convinced he was trying to say something else to me. “Few of the kids wanted to eat the mushrooms we were offering, one of them retched and threw up on the table. This week we’re focusing on the sense of taste,” she continues to explain, “in connection with the globalization theme and in collaboration with the Intercultural Centre.”

  “We offer a mixture of national and international foods, now that all the borders are opening up to investment. We had a buffet with all kinds of delicacies on toothpicks for these little fingers to taste: black olives, fermented whale, mozzarella, feta cheese, French goat’s cheese, blood pudding, dried fish and mushrooms.”

  The boy dutifully hands over several drawings of mushrooms, sketched both from the side and above, as if to illustrate the woman’s speech. In addition to this, he is holding in a plastic bag two mushrooms, which have been dissected in half to examine their interior.

  Questions requiring immediate answers spring to mind. Are two mushrooms enough for the dinner of a four-year-old? Should I put him into his overalls or will he be offended? Does he want to do it himself? Is what he wants also what is best for him? Do the two go hand in hand? If not, how am I to distinguish between the two?

  Auður has phoned the school in advance and the woman decides to spell it out for me:

  “The guiding principle we work under here at Dwarf House is that each individual is unique and different,” says the kindergarten teacher. We believe in the strength of those who are weak and have had to overcome obstacles and are therefore, in a certain way, stronger than the others. If one sense is defective, another sense will often compensate by becoming super-sensitive, like the hearing of the blind, for example, or the sight of the deaf.”

  I resist the temptation to mention Tumi’s glasses and hearing aid in the same breath.

  “If a person is different, that can also make them a little bit special,” interjects some proper little madam who is slipping into some woollen socks.

  “Exactly, Geirthrúdur,” says the kindergarten teacher emphatically, “that’s what we’re focusing on in our group work.”

  “I’ve got freckles and my grandad has cancer,” the little girl continues.

  “Exactly, that’s the idea.”

  The child is then given a sign to let her know that her contribution to the conversation must now end and the woman turns back to me.

  “We have a child here with a Senegalese father, obviously Tumi, who has serious hearing difficulties, hyperactive and development-impaired children, children way over the ideal weight, children with same-sex parents . . .”

  I finally pluck up the courage to dress Tumi in his blue winter overalls and to put on the balaclava he hands me, at least I can do that much. Temperatures have risen by eight degrees since yesterday.

  “If the weather forecast is anything to go by, it’ll be puddle gear after the weekend,” says the woman, “we love our puddles, don’t
we, Tumi?” Then she turns back to me again and says in a warm confidential tone:

  “Some hate fighting, others love splashing. To be honest, we’re concerned about how little communication he has with the other children. Above all, he prefers to be left alone or to play with the girls in the doll corner. We’re trying to build up his self-esteem, but he categorically refuses to fight, there’s no hunting instinct in him, no conquering. He always stands at the back of the group, avoiding conflict. If he were a sea lion he’d be the first one to be slaughtered by the males and he’d never get to reproduce. Aggression needs a healthy outlet if it is to be channelled into creativity and we’ve tried different methods to toughen him up. Even though we don’t allow weapons, we turn a blind eye to the kids that use sticks as guns. Tumi, on the other hand, engages the sticks in a sign language conversation, one as granny and the other as grandad.”

  “Bang, I’m dead,” the teacher exclaims to the boy as she falls to the ground, or rather feigns to, crouching down on her knees but then deciding to go no further. Then she swiftly springs to her feet again, dusting her knees and smiles warmly:

  “The kids like playing cops and robbers.”

  The boy slips behind me.

  “Not Elísabeta and me.”

  “Not you and Elísabeta,” she interprets for me, “isn’t that right?” She looks me straight in the eye as she speaks to the boy. “But Illuga Már, he likes being shot, doesn’t he? He likes playing dead, isn’t that right?”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Auður phones as we are on our way to the store for a basic weekend shop, stocking up for the kid. She tells me she is undergoing some tests and that they’ve put a pressure bandage on her foot and are now examining other parts of her body, the mid-section, for example, which is actually the job of another department and belongs to another area of expertise. She can’t talk long, she says, but just wants to know if the boy is OK.

  “And another thing,” she says, lowering her voice. “Could you buy me a bottle of red wine? The only beverage they offer with your meal in ward 22b is milk.”

  One can spot the weekend dads a mile away. Even though they haven’t bought any food for dinner yet, at 7:30 on a Friday night, and they’ve yet to go home to cook for their exhausted children, they still find the time to ogle me and cast meaningful glances over the stacks of paper towel rolls. I’ve got my eyes on them too, but purely for practical reasons, to see what they buy and how they go about it—which is why I pick one out of the herd and decide to follow him, some guy with two timid children sitting in his cart in overalls. I study the manner in which he arranges items in the cart, how he first chucks them to the sides of the children and then piles the merchandise under their knees: whey, Superman yogurt, bananas, hopping sausages, children’s cheese, Little Rascal bread, milk, kindergarten pâté, alphabet pasta and Cutie cookies. He wedges some packets of cold cuts between the children, and stacks paper towel rolls over their boots.

  When I try to recall what it was like to be a child, nothing significant comes to mind. It does, however, occur to me to buy some oats, since Dad always used to make porridge for my brother and me in the mornings; it was about the only thing he could cook. I then add some roasted chicken drumsticks, simply because the boy indicates to me that he wants them. Then he points at a jar of olives, he wants olives with the chicken. Once we’re in line for the checkout, I add a Ken doll in a swimsuit with a child in his arms, because I notice Tumi staring at it at length. If memory serves, childhood was all about yearning for the things one couldn’t have. I’m not about to let that happen to my protégé for just one weekend. It’s not nearly as complicated as I imagined, shopping for a child. I simply buy the things the kid wants; he either shakes his head or nods.

  On the way home, I pop into the video store around the corner. I was lucky I got to keep the DVD player, Nína Lind has a new one of her own. While I’m torn between two films, which the transvestite working behind the counter emphatically recommends—both for singles or divorcees, he says—the boy is quick to choose his own.

  I step into the adjacent shop where a young man with a lot of gel in his hair, shaped into a cone, sells me a lottery ticket. Tumi chooses the numbers. I hoist him up to the height of the counter where he skilfully ticks five boxes with a badly sharpened pencil.

  “We’ll go fifty-fifty on the winnings,” I tell him, “you’ll get your half,” but he’s too busy concentrating on his writing and doesn’t even seem to realize that I’m talking to him.

  “The winnings are sevenfold this week and a chance is always a chance, no matter how slim it may be,” says the young man behind the counter, who seems to be more mature than his pimples might suggest. We walk out with The Lion King and La Pianiste, the sadomasochistic masterpiece that isn’t suitable for sensitive viewers, but will remain indelibly imprinted on the minds of those who are not, according to the blurb on the case.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I take the boy out of his shoes. He seems content and, in almost no time at all, finds two hiding places in the minute apartment, one in the shower and one inside the cupboard. His focus immediately shifts to the boxes and I give him a signal to let him know he’s welcome to take a look inside. Then he suddenly appears in front of me, clutching with both hands a glass of water that is full to the brim, and puts it down on the table. He vacillates and strokes his earlobe before sliding his hand up the sleeve of my sweater, searching for my elbow, and finally caressing my hair with the palm of his little hand. Vanishing for a moment, he swiftly returns with a comb and pair of scissors, standing motionless in front of me with a questioning air. I understand this much.

  “You can comb my hair,” I say, “but not cut it. I’m letting it grow.”

  So far our communication has greatly exceeded all expectations. I sense a growing communion and understanding between us. Strictly speaking, a woman with a child requires no other company.

  After watching The Lion King one and a half times, I place him on the couch, which I can’t be bothered to pull out into a double bed. We share the same quilt. He chews on a corner of the pillow and sucks on the duvet cover. Once he has fallen asleep, I leave the room to double-lock the front door to ensure he doesn’t escape on me. The books from the boxes have been stacked into tall twin towers on the floor.

  It’s raining and windy. A window someone seems to have forgotten to shut is banging somewhere. It occurs to me that the owner might be off working on a night shift. My balcony, which under normal circumstances can just about hold a kitchen stool and a book, is inundated. The drainpipe is cluttered and the electricity flickers. It’s a huge responsibility, being with a child. After checking that he is still asleep, I slip outside to try to free the balcony of some of the slush and ice to prevent my temporary home from flooding. A woman armed with a dustpan is attempting a similar kind of operation in a building across the way. On every floor, in fact, some sleepless woman seems to be wrestling against the elements and potential flooding.

  The child is restless and kicks the duvet off every time I try to tuck him in. I’m worried he’ll catch cold, which is why I stay awake and pace the floor, monitoring his sleep. His breathing is making me anxious; it seems to have slowed down, abnormally, as if he were holding his breath or simply not breathing at all. I gauge his breathing in relation to the normal rhythm of my own, there’s no comparison. But then, just as I’m about to intervene, the boy suddenly sucks in a very deep breath and his chest begins to heave. I gently pull the duvet back, ever so slightly, to be able to follow the contractions of my protégé’s ribcage, although I can detect no breathing from his nostrils and mouth. It takes me half the night to become acquainted with the child’s breathing patterns, until I finally fall asleep with a cushion and chequered woollen blanket on the floor.

  When I wake up again I feel I only dozed off for a moment, but the dark morning has dawned outside and I’m still in charge of thi
s unrelated child. I get up and brush my teeth, without turning on the light, and unscrew the tap under the shower. Finally, I fetch the sleeping child and pull him out of his pyjamas. He shivers, naked on the cold floor, even after I swiftly throw my sweater over him. Then I take the pale child under the shower with me and soap him from head to toe. After some initial protest, he soon wakes up and starts to stamp his feet in the water, clapping his hand. Then I lift him onto the stool and wipe the mist off the mirror so that he can see me parting and combing his hair. Water trickles down my throat. I clearly know nothing about kids, but try to execute the task I’ve been entrusted with as efficiently as possible. It’s the same with my mother and cats. Being allergic to them, you couldn’t exactly call her cat-friendly, but she’d never be bad to one, and always pats and strokes the ones that happen to rub up against her and serves them creamy milk on the doorstep.

  “He seemed to be in such a bad way, poor thing,” she would say, plucking off the cat’s hairs.

  Abandoning his wet towel on the floor, I fetch his clothes and draw the sign of the Cross over him, even though I’d never try to invoke a divine blessing of this kind on myself. After rubbing cream into him, I dab the back of his ears with a drop from the bottle of male cologne that has been left in my possession. Then I dress him in stockings and a sweater and sit him in front of me in the narrow corner of the kitchen.

  Winter mornings are dark and silent. The weather has grown calmer, as if a kind of numbness had descended on mankind, bringing all activity to a halt, after the sharp depression that had swept its way across the island, as if everyone had fallen under some sleeping beauty spell. I make some porridge and coffee. The boy is shoving the fourth spoonful into his mouth when he points at the clock above the fridge, showing me four fingers with his left hand and then three with his right hand and then one with his left hand again. Finally, he holds up both thumbs and vigorously shakes his head towards the clock. There are no two ways about it: the kitchen clock reads four zero seven and it is still indisputably night outside.