Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  Thinking back on it afterwards, I’m not sure she said all those things. But one thing I’m sure she did say was:

  “Do you have a handkerchief to clean the boy’s glasses?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  My happiness could almost be complete. I don’t even have to see all that clearly, I just switch on the windscreen wipers, turn on the heating full blast and, bit by bit, the mist vanishes from the windows. There’s a great freedom in not knowing exactly where you are heading, to surrender to the security of the Ring Road, where one point leads to another, and you always effortlessly end up back at square one again, almost without realizing it.

  Since we’re travelling companions, the boy sits in the front seat beside me, barely reaching the dashboard, looking manly with an open packet of raisins on his lap. His seat belt is a bit high, though, even though I’ve slipped a cushion under him. At the Raudavatn Lake I’m stopped by the police, who check my lights and seat belts and give me some advice.

  “There aren’t many people out travelling today,” says the uniformed officer out in the lashing rain.

  The boy willingly climbs into the back seat while I burrow through the bundles of thousand-krónur notes in the glove compartment to find my driving licence. For a moment, I wonder if I should behave as if I were in a B movie and slip the officer a folded wad of cash and then, without a word, drive off into the withered lupin fields ahead of us, vanishing into the mist and darkness, which is eating its way into the day with each kilometre.

  Now that the passenger seat to my right has been freed, I use the opportunity to unfold a road map of the island.

  “Dog,” says the boy quite distinctly, pointing at the map.

  It’s true, the compressed island looks like a poor vagrant wet puppy dragging its paws. I’m heading towards the tummy, that’s the point where my journey begins—our journey—where the lupin fields end.

  “We’re on our way now.”

  That’s what Dad used to say every time we drove east at the beginning of the summer and had been driving for a while, at least an hour from home and way out of town. I’m inclined to think it was once he’d passed the lupin fields. Then he and Mom would exchange a brief glance and smile, and he would gently pat her hand with a contented air.

  As soon as it starts to rain, the outline of the world begins to blur and the horizon is supplanted by vague landmarks. Everything more or less turns to wasteland as soon as you travel beyond the road grid of the city, vast expanses of black sand and black lava fields, with the black ocean not far beyond and the black sky above. At times like this it’s good to have objectives. At the moment, mine consist in keeping my foot pressed moderately hard on the pedal, sticking to the right-hand side of the road, and not straying beyond the striped lines dividing my lane to the right and left. No need to make any decisions about what comes next, I just have to stick to the legal speed limit and move into the future that advances towards us as naturally as the next petrol station, as naturally as finding one’s future husband leaning nonchalantly against the railings of a bridge—these things happen. It is no small feat for a woman to have to stick to the right-hand side of the road; that’s where reason reigns, not the heart.

  For the moment, my focus is fixed on the reflecting posts on the side of the road and the glow of the red rear lights of the old jeep towing a horse trailer in front of me, without, however, driving too close, in case some splashes of mud mar my vision. We seem to be the only two vehicles on National Highway One and that creates a kind of solidarity between us. If, for example, we were to continue heading further east and fire were to finally break through the surface of the glacier, and the sandy plains were to be flooded with water, would I and the boy and the man in the jeep, whom I don’t know from Adam, end up sharing the half-packet of oat biscuits I brought along on the same floating iceberg? Other people don’t take their summer holidays in November. At this time of the year, normal people have other things to do than renew their bond with the darkness of the land. I switch on the radio, it’s the last song before the weather forecast: If there is a road, there is a way.

  The boy is totally silent in the back seat and refuses to take his hood off, despite the heat in the car. But I can see through the mirror that he is, nevertheless, alert and staring out at the road into the darkness. I mustn’t forget that mute children don’t attract attention to themselves the same way other kids do and require another kind of care.

  The jeep unexpectedly skids to a halt in front of me and the trailer swerves on the drenched pavement, leaving me no choice but to do the same, to avoid a collision, so I too pull up on the side of the road and kill the engine.

  The man leaps out of his jeep. After checking something under his car and giving his horse trailer a kick, I’m not surprised to see him knocking on my streaming window. It’s only once his face is right up against the glass and I can see the water trickling down his neckline from his hair that I realize it’s the guy from the pet shop, the man in the fish section, who gave me the handwritten note in cursive blue letters.

  “No, there’s nothing wrong,” I tell him, “I didn’t mean to be following you, I just like to know there’s a car in front of me, I’m following the rear red lights.”

  I tell him that, even though I know from experience that I’ll soon be able to see the lights of the greenhouses in the village on the other side of the mountain, I find it reassuring to know there is someone else on the road, with a comfortable gap between us, provided he has no objections.

  “I don’t mean to pry or anything,” I repeat.

  I feel an urge to speak to him further, to ask him something important, but the best I can come up with is to ask him for the time: what time is it? Absurd as it may seem, I suddenly felt in this precise spot, with no visible landmarks in sight, that I needed to know the time. In the rush of the moment I forget that I have a dual-time watch on the wrist of the hand holding the steering wheel. My divorce watch is blatantly visible to the man looking through the window. He turns back to his jeep without deigning to answer me, slams his door closed and drives off. The time is most definitely a quarter past five.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Visibility is practically zero and it is precisely here, at the peak of the mountain road, that my travelling companion decides he needs to pee.

  He is unwilling to step out into the rain and wind, but doesn’t want to wait either. Judging by the map spread out over my lap, there are another twenty-five kilometres of lava fields and sand before we hit the next petrol station, where there will be a toilet. After that we can buy some hot dogs that have been simmering in the boiler since last weekend.

  There’s no point in me raising my voice, he can’t hear me, so every time we need to talk I turn on the indicator and pull into the side of the road, stop the car and turn in my seat to allow him to see the words my lips are forming, my mouth opening and closing. I think about whether I should try to convey the information in units of distance or time.

  “Hold it in, it’s another twenty-five kilometres to the next petrol station, or a fifteen-minute drive in these poor conditions.”

  But what if he asks me how long twenty-five kilometres is? Or how long it takes for fifteen minutes to pass? Twenty-five kilometres is a long distance to travel with a carsick child, longer than if I were driving a weary old lady to have a hip operation, who would be grateful for the fact that she didn’t have to walk to the regional hospital over swampy fields and barbed-wire fences in a skirt and, instead, be able to sit perfectly upright in the passenger seat beside the driver, her bony knuckles wrapped around the handle of a handbag containing the bare essentials: her blood pressure medication, a box of red Opal pastilles and lipstick.

  A post-coital silence can seem interminable if the woman no longer loves the man and the man no longer the woman. Time can pass just as slowly if you’re travelling with a carsick child. Sile
nces also seem endless when you’re fourteen years old in a mixed class of thirty and you’ve been instructed to observe three minutes of silence in commiseration for some horrific event that has occurred on the other side of the ocean—that’s an unbearably long time.

  But when you’re sitting beside your loved one in the car, twenty kilometres are like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings on the wall, the buzz of a fly, the fraction of a moment, no time at all.

  I was twenty-nine years old and had been abroad for nine years.

  First I stroked his hair, then my hand slid down his shirt.

  We hadn’t known each other for long. In fact, I think it would have taken very little for me to love some other man instead. But he was giving me a lift down south and I felt good beside him in the car. Then he suddenly said:

  “Will you marry me?”

  Just like in the movies and without slowing down. I was going to switch topic or say thanks, but unfortunately I couldn’t. Maybe it would have been clearest just to say no thanks, but thank you for asking anyway; but the autumn sun was shining in my eyes and blinding my thoughts for a moment, so instead I unhesitatingly said yes. He looked like he was on cloud nine because he’d chanced upon those three minutes in my life in which I actually wanted to get married, and he had obviously expected me to say: “Thank you for asking anyway.”

  When we drove away again, he had one hand on the steering wheel and the other wrapped tightly around my shoulder. He had to decelerate to forty to be able to kiss me properly, but with his eyes open, since there were cars coming in both directions and here and there dogs that leapt out at us barking and chasing the wheels. At one point we almost drove into a ditch. With the jagged coastline on my right and him at the wheel on the left, I couldn’t have been happier with my lot in life. We drove all evening and into the night, and then stopped at a petrol station in the fjord. When I stepped out of the car into the darkness, freshly engaged, and caught the whiff of a pile of dung in the yard in front of a neighbouring shed and faced the fluorescent lights and smell of mustard inside the store, my mood immediately started to change.

  Two weeks later the accountant and amateur pilot came to collect me with all my papers and computer and, shortly afterwards, I signed the marriage certificate. It is impossible for me to pinpoint exactly when my opinion of him began to change. It was probably not until our divorce that it occurred to me that I should have got to know my husband a bit better.

  The boy shakes his head.

  “No,” he says.

  “No, what?”

  I don’t understand him and he doesn’t understand me, so I get out of the car, open the back door and apprehensively lead him a few yards away from the edge of the road into the mist and help him unzip his fly. The car engine is still running and the lights, windscreen wipers and radio are all on. The weather forecast is being read: the outlook is for ongoing mild temperatures and rain. This is now the rainiest November ever recorded on this island, says a familiar voice that resonates across the barren heath. At a distance of a few yards, the voice already begins to sound more flirtatious.

  “No, sweetie, there are no lions on the road.” He’s beside himself with fear and can’t handle the situation, so I hold his skinny penis to prevent him from sprinkling his new velvet trousers, and a hair-thin, almost transparent silver thread spurts into the mist and darkness. This is the first time I’ve helped a male to pee. The question now is whether I can pee in front of him as well.

  I think I discern a cairn a short distance away, in the mist. It seems the ideal place for me to squat like some aboriginal woman giving birth in the depths of the forest. Can I leave him behind in the car with his seat belt tightly fastened? What if I stepped into a hole and got stuck there and never came back? Can one never let a child out of sight? Never take a few minutes’ break? I would be immediately out of view and he’d be left alone with his huge hearing aids, so terrified that he’d pee in his pants, if he hadn’t just relieved himself. He’d cry and produce weird sounds. I imagine he’d try to call out for his mother or grandad. Not that he wouldn’t soon be found. The second next truck driver would hoist him into his cabin.

  It occurs to me that he might just as easily wander onto the national highway against the traffic, with no balaclava on, and risk getting hit by a car, because no driver expects to see a child wandering alone in the fog at the top of a mountain road, no mother would ever abandon her child to run in the mist and dark like that. But would a woman who is not related to the child be capable of such a thing? In the end I decide to take him with me and hold his hand, while the car engine is still running on the side of the road. Wrestling against the cold rain, I drag the little man with me onto the moor, moving swiftly in my leather boots, which sink into the soggy earth. After some initial effort to keep up with me he starts to drag his feet and falter, tripping over rocks, as I tow him over clusters of heather that scratch his calves, and stumbling against something every few metres, because the pile of stones that we are heading towards on this forsaken path always seems to remain at the same distance, at least another hundred years away.

  The moor is still patched in white, despite the rain, but we manage to avoid the deepest snow-filled hollows. Tinges of November green moss give the surroundings a phosphorescent glow that hovers about half a metre over the ground, like artificial light in a film studio. I’m not at all cold. I can’t feel the icy rain running down my neck.

  The child’s trust in me is beginning to falter, he doesn’t understand where we’re going. Neither do I. He starts to whine, but nevertheless tries to hold back his tears. If he were like other children he would scream, throw himself on the ground and refuse to go any further, want to turn around and go home. And he’d cry and say that he missed his mommy, until he was heeded. But he’s not like other children. As if by intuition, it occurs to me to stop trying to walk in a straight line towards my target, but to move in zigzags, like a fox in danger.

  And there it is, suddenly standing before us, the beast, dangling its drooling tongue. In the same instant, gunshots resound all around us. Men in green guerrilla overalls spring out of the moss brandishing shotguns. The only animals that kill their own kind stand there pointing their rifles at us; we’re completely surrounded.

  For a moment I consider putting my hands up over my head, but the boy is so petrified with fear that I take him into my arms and swivel away from the gunmen, like a Jewish mother turning her back on the muzzle of a German lieutenant’s revolver, alone out in a field, with a four-year-old child in shorts. I notice some red-pinkish splatters in the snow close to where we are standing, halfway between the cairn and the car, hardly squashed berries—no, it’s the blood dripping from the birds hanging on their belts.

  The men suddenly lower their weapons and wave us out of the fog, having perhaps mistaken me for a reindeer. We’re greeted by a chorus of sombre but friendly voices. Thermos flasks are suddenly produced, cups of boiling, heavily sugared coffee are poured, and we are offered rye bread with pâté straight out of picnic boxes and other goodies that are being unwrapped from foil. I accept the cup of coffee, but say no to the other beverage that is being passed around in a silver flask. The men line up, side by side, and politely introduce themselves, one after another, with a handshake, like a well-groomed football team, or soldiers standing to attention to be reviewed by their head of state on a courtesy visit. I evaluate them each in turn in relation to my ex-husband, starting with their height and build. Wasn’t he one metre eighty-three? All of a sudden, I feel I can no longer remember the colour of his hair; it’s certainly brown, but was it mossy brown, seaweed-brown, heather-brown or cinnamon-brown? Is the mist on this moor thick enough to veil my former life from me? As I’m finishing the slice of bread I complete the rough comparison in my mind, comparing all the men in view, both with each other and then, broadly speaking, with the other men I’ve encountered in my life, limit
ing myself, however, to the past five years. It doesn’t take long.

  Finally, I notice a ginger-haired boy in the group, hardly over fifteen years old, with big splatters of freckles on his face under his cap.

  “He wasn’t very big when he killed his first goose,” says a man with the same gene of hair that might have been ginger too once, slapping a hand on the lad’s shoulder.

  “Can’t have been more than seven years old, on the garden lawn at home; the bird was wounded and limping, so my boy just grabbed a shovel and rake, but it was his resourcefulness that mattered the most,” says the father proudly.

  “Soon after that he graduated to clay pigeons and was up to 131 clay pigeons by the time he was fourteen, so it won’t be long before your little lad starts showing his mom what he’s made of,” he says, patting the hooded head of my protégé and winking at me at the same time.

  The men escort us back down to the highway, rifles wobbling to and fro on their shoulders like those sticks geography teachers use to point at world maps over blackboards, hopping from Haiti to Palestine and Iraq with the greatest of ease. They’re chirpy and content. The boy’s cheeks are red after the picnic and he is holding two extra twisted doughnuts in his hands. He hasn’t fully recovered from the ordeal, though, and looks pensive and tired.

  The feeling I was beginning to get while driving on the mountain road, of the car being somehow unsteady and slightly off-kilter, turned out to be well founded, since it is now blatantly clear that I have a flat front-left tire.

  My escort livens up again. There’s a job to be done and there’s no need for me to worry, they say. I should just sit the boy inside the warmth of the car, while they happily take care of this for me.

  “You can admire us in the meantime,” says one of them, jestingly.