Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  Some of the countries further south are now experiencing temperatures of minus thirty degrees, the anchor continues, while just 200 kilometres from the Arctic Circle thermometers are hitting plus eleven degrees. Such is the unpredictability of nature, which will always take man by surprise.

  Since I’m travelling under my own steam and, what’s more, with an unrelated child, I don’t have the courage to tackle the dark brown mass of water on the other side of the sand in my car and therefore have to find somewhere for us to spend the night in the black desert in the middle of this dark winter day.

  I scan the map that lies open on the passenger seat beside me, first to see how long this sandy desert extends for and roughly count the number of blue lines, and then to look for the red points that represent made beds and breakfast buffets with orange wedges, muesli and teabags. It’s mainly on the narrow green strip along the coast that we have some hope of finding accommodation.

  Ten minutes before reaching it, we can already start to hear the mounting rumble of the glacial torrent—dark grey, full of sand, stones and debris. We stop the car by the bridge to look into the water.

  Tumi walks beside me, waving his arms about like a fearless man. Impossible to look at anything but the fury of the grey maelstrom, no firm point on which to fix our gaze. Drenched, we freeze a moment on the edge of the bridge, watching the enormous mass of muddy brown water run by.

  By the time we get back to the car, it’s as if an entire hour’s worth of river had passed. I turn on the heater full blast and the boy writes two words on the foggy windows. Like an ancient Greek metaphysician: Water runs.

  I take the warning sign, which the water-measuring experts have put up in the sand, seriously and don’t venture out on any unnecessarily risky explorations. The question, though, is whether we should cross the next bridge and then be trapped on that side or carry on along this side of the river and then be forced to turn around. The first option seems slightly better; at some point one has to stop brooding over the past. Besides, we need to stop for the night soon. A luxury hotel has recently been opened nearby, complete with solarium, jacuzzi and bar. The area that seemed utterly deserted earlier is now suddenly busy with traffic. “Allow yourself to be yourself,” the hotel’s slogan reads.

  As I’m about to cross the last river in the sand desert, I suddenly come up against a white car in the middle of a single-lane bridge and slam on the brakes, as does the man in the car opposite me. We both step out.

  “I thought you were going to stop,” he says. “I didn’t realize you were driving over until it was too late.”

  “I somehow thought you were stopping as well,” I say, still blinded by his headlights. The engines of both cars are running.

  “I’ll reverse then,” he says, “I was actually thinking of turning back to spend the night in the hotel anyway.”

  “I can reverse too.”

  “Are you driving east?”

  “Yeah, I’m having a summer bungalow moved there.”

  “Over Christmas?”

  “Yes, over Christmas, are you going west then?”

  “Yes, but I’ll be back soon, maybe we’ll meet again then.”

  His glasses are all misty, which makes it difficult for me to make out the eyes concealed behind them. I rub the sleeve of his jacket, which is an odd response to a complete stranger. He’s dark and has such short hair that all his childhood scars are visible, both on his scalp and designer stubble.

  “Are you a hunter?” I hear myself asking him.

  “No, I’m no hunter. I came across some ptarmigan chicks on the road this summer and my car capsized when I slammed on the brakes. I’ve got a sick falcon in the car that I need to take to town. He needs some expert care, in the worst-case scenario he’ll end up being stuffed. You’ve got to keep quiet about rare birds that stop off here for just a few hours before heading on to America, or someone will try to stuff them. They want to have everything stuffed in the south, causes them the least hassle.”

  When I’m back in the car, I realize I haven’t given the child anything to eat for much of our drive across the sand desert, so I stick a straw into a carton of milk and hand it to him. He stares at the floor as he clutches the carton with both hands, sucking its contents dry. I bite the peel of a banana, feeling its bitter taste in my mouth, and hand it to him, without taking my eyes off the road, without slowing down, without breaking our continuity.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Hotel Sand stands in the middle of the desert, a brand-new blockhouse building with minibars, a satellite dish and loosely woven brown curtains in the rooms that don’t fully cover the windows. We’re surrounded by water, although the road men have started fixing the bridges on the eastern side of the desert.

  “It’s wonderful to pass through here,” a foreigner confides to me in the lobby, “but I wouldn’t like to be stuck here. It’s different for you people who are used to sand deserts and darkness,” he adds, “because you were born and brought up in this. Of course, it would be different if the sand weren’t black but golden, and the temperature was about ten degrees higher, to be able to adapt I mean.”

  We book ourselves into the hotel, having been preceded by the Estonian male choir, which we seem to bump into everywhere it goes on its tour around the country. They’ve already stayed here one night and have another two to go. This evening they will be giving a concert, followed by a surprise number, which is already attracting guests from the dam construction site. The hotel was built in record time, I’m told, in true Wild West style, and apparently is an exact replica of a hotel in west Texas, the only difference being that the original model is 300 rooms bigger.

  “We expect to be enlarging the hotel over the coming years,” says the hotel manager in the lobby, “the growth potential is limitless.”

  The restaurant on the ground floor has small carved wooden doors that swing in both directions, just like in old Westerns or those changing cubicles in fashion boutiques. At the top of the dining hall there is a varnished wooden stage, equipped with microphones, and a dance floor in front of it with mirrors.

  We throw ourselves on the bed with the kitten between us and watch the evening TV news. Maps appear with circles around the areas where rivers have overflowed and reservoirs seem to be on the brink of bursting. The presenter briefly mentions the Estonian male choir and its accompanying troupe of young “artistic dancers” with a slightly smug air, before passing the ball to the sports reporters.

  We zap through the foreign channels. Tumi is holding the remote and is therefore the master.

  A naked snow-white woman crouches down on a golden beach to lean her head against a giant bottle of perfume, gently caressing its neck with the tip of her fingers and then rising towards the lid, stroking that as well, without, however, unscrewing it, before finally dropping her head and closing her eyes. The bottle is the size of a man, but the woman is small, fine and fragile. This bottle seems to be the only thing she has in the world to lean on.

  We sit, stroking the cat and watching the woman in the commercial, mesmerized. It’s on a French channel. A woman is an island, a velvety male voice says in the distance. This is followed by a moment’s silence.

  “Beautiful lady,” says the boy, clearly and distinctly.

  “Yes, beautiful lady,” I say, laughing.

  “Beautiful lady,” he repeats before placing the palm of his hand on my belly.

  “We’re only allowed to serve alcohol with the food, if you buy more than chips,” says a teenage waitress in the dining room.

  Quivering bottles of soda and beer are being carried into the room in crates and technicians are testing the microphones. There is a sense of anticipation in the air, but for now everything remains relatively quiet and the hotel manager gives himself time to chat to us in the hall.

  “Things will be livening up late
r on; we’re expecting a group of foreigners from the dam construction this evening.”

  Adopting a mysterious air, he then lowers his voice as he leans over the counter between two palm plants:

  “We’re in an odd situation here. The cancellations due to the construction work on the dam have actually been far less than the number of bookings from the contractors above. We only get the odd ecological tourist who comes here to experience the desert. What’s more they like to keep to themselves, hardly buy a single souvenir and bring very little currency into the country.”

  He has straightened up again now and raises his voice: “One has to look at the big picture.”

  We both slip into silence, the hotel manager and I. I’m waiting for the restaurant to open. The boy wants boiled fish with potatoes and butter, just like at his grandad’s, if I’ve understood correctly. The kitten also wants fish. The hotel manager leans over the counter again.

  “And then, of course, there’s the commercials. We get quite a few film crews around here shooting their ads. Mainly for mobile phones. They’re starting to bring in some currency. A foreigner recently said to me that he felt like he was living inside a mobile phone commercial here, nothing but sand and rocks, total freedom. Of course, some people are quite keen to track down these places with nothing around them. There isn’t a single blade of grass growing here at the moment, although we’re planning on planting a small oasis of pine trees in the sheltered area behind the building. We’ve been in touch with the Forestry Service and they’ve given us the green light. Unless we go for some mountain ash instead.”

  The boy’s lips silently move, as he reads a sign on the wall in six languages. Once more the manager lowers his voice and turns on that mysterious air:

  “And then, of course, there’s a fair bit of local traffic from people in the area if there’s something going on, people like to come here for a change of atmosphere and to give themselves a treat, gawk at the foreigners and have a drink.”

  There’s a TV in the dining room so we watch a programme on some foreign channel while we’re waiting for our food to arrive. A man from a small Alpine village in Austria, who keeps goldfish the size of trout in his garden, is being interviewed. He’s taught them to play football, he claims, and to stick their heads out of the water to kiss him. His wife complains about how her husband spends all his free time kissing and fondling the fish and confesses that she is jealous. She invites the reporters in for dinner and chats to them, as she fries some brown trout. She is wearing a stained apron and seems to be quite chuffed by all the attention she is receiving from the cameras.

  “We’re out of fish,” says the waitress, “it’s mainly Italian dishes we have. Pizzas are the most popular. That includes soup of the day, mushroom.”

  I order milk for the boy and water for me.

  “Is skimmed milk OK?” the girl asks. “People never order milk with their food here.”

  Tumi can only handle two morsels before the cheese seems to get stuck in his throat and he can’t breathe and coughs into his glass of milk. Finally, he spits out the food into a green napkin I hold up to his mouth.

  When I come back to the table, after washing his face, our plates have been taken away and clean sets of cutlery have been wrapped in green napkins on the table. The girl tells me that the kitchen staff agree that the Margarita and calzone weren’t quite up to scratch and they would like to offer us hamburgers and chips on the house instead.

  “All hotel guests are entitled to one free drink and a discount on two further drinks at the concert tonight.”

  Once the boy and cat have fallen asleep under the same duvet, I take a shower and finish reading Gli Indifferenti by Moravia. Feeling a slight chill after all my travels, I slip on a thick white sweater and return to sit in the dining hall. The place is steadily filling up with guests, who group into tables, according to their level of acquaintanceship and family ties. Many of them bear a striking resemblance to each other, with their red faces and freckles.

  Two foreigners in anoraks by the entrance cast their dark eyes on me over their pints of beer. One of them has a rolled-up cigarette poised between his fingers. Scanning the room with my eyes, I notice a teenager, sitting slightly apart, about seventeen years old I would guess, with a bottle of coke and a glass full of ice cubes in front of him. He sips on the bottle, but doesn’t touch the glass. There’s something oddly familiar about him. He has a sensitive air and pale complexion, and I imagine he has started to harmonize the proportions of the various parts of his body and that he is no longer as lethargic as he was. He has dark, undulating hair, which he has clearly tried to wet and comb down.

  I sidle up to his table and ask him if I can take a seat. When he looks up I see that he has beautiful green eyes and that he probably suffered from bad skin that has now started to heal. I order the same thing he’s having and, before I know it, have leant over slightly towards him to ask him when his birthday is. His gaze shiftily darts in all directions, like the deserter of an enemy army who is on the point of disclosing information that could put him in peril of his life.

  “At the end of May,” he says, but without any hostility, pulling the hood off his head. A dark lock of hair dangles over his forehead.

  “Are you from here?” I ask him bluntly, sipping on my soda. The youngster whitens and glances nervously over his shoulder, as if he were expecting someone.

  “I see that you two have already introduced yourselves,” says a man taking a seat at the table beside the youngster.

  He slips a hand around the boy’s shoulder, as if to tell him he’s got nothing to fear, and smiles at me. It’s the man from the bridge.

  “Hi, and thanks for your help earlier.”

  “Same to you.”

  “We came to listen to the singing, but he’ll have to wait a few years before we can watch the act that follows the choir,” he says.

  After chatting with them for a while, I tell him I have to go and check on Tumi. As I get up, he asks if I could do him a favour. He has to take the boy home before the show begins and he wants to know if I can watch the sick falcon for him while he’s away, it’s in a box.

  “He’s already been fed, so you won’t have any worries. It’ll just be for a few hours or until tomorrow morning at the latest. There’s one place I have to stop off at on the way, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be back at the hotel tonight.”

  Far be it from my mind to weigh the prospect of the company of a feathered predator against that of a naked man, I can clearly see that I will be given no choice about which of the two I would like to sleep or wake up with.

  He follows me to room ten, walking behind me up the stairs with the box in his arms, and places it on the bedside table. The bird gives us a hostile glare through the two little holes in the box. The kitten immediately arches its back and hisses at the feathered guest, fluffing its hair up in all directions. Before we know it, he’s leapt out into the corridor and vanished around the corner on two paws, as if he had been swallowed up by the earth. The man from the bridge promises to help me find the kitten when he gets back, and tells me he is extremely grateful for the favour.

  I notice how he rapidly glances around the room as he’s leaving, and picks up the duvet, which the boy has kicked off onto the floor, and spreads it back over him again, showing the same care to all creatures great and small, just like those ptarmigan chicks.

  “I’m a vet,” he says. “I have to pop over to a farm to perform a caesarean on a calving cow.”

  I pull out a book, the posthumous publication of an early work by a French author, and read a story about a father and son who perished as the father was trying to save his ten-year-old son from drowning. The boy was then buried in his father’s arms in the churchyard on the island, which they had planned to visit before returning on the ferry that evening. I’m having problems concentrating on my read
ing under the menacing stare of our overnight guest; not even the death of the hero manages to hold my attention. I decide not to sleep, but to wait for the return of the falcon’s owner. The choir resounds from the floor below. They are being applauded now and will no doubt give an encore. I seem to have dozed off for a moment, because when I come to, I remember fragments of a dream: I’m lying on the grass under an apple tree and, as I’m looking up at these succulent red apples, I hear myself saying: “Opportunities will soon fall on you.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  By the time I return to the hall, the lights have been dimmed and a rotating multi-coloured mirror ball has been lowered into the middle of the dance floor. An exotic bird is about to launch herself around the central pillar. She has travelled from far across the desert, considerably further than the choir even, judging by the colour of her caramel toes and violet nail polish. Her eyelids droop heavily as she holds one leg suspended in mid-air, displaying a foot in a laced shoe with a thick sole and high heel. A heavy burden seems to weigh on her as she slowly allows herself to sink to the floor, until her black fringe touches the newly laid oak parquet. Despite the heavily dimmed lights, the scars are clearly visible under her breasts. The lights revolve, blinking green, red and violet. Huddled together up against the stage, the men form a protective wall around the exotic bird who has come from afar. Several of them are talking into their mobile phones in various languages, probably to the wives they haven’t seen for such a long time. But the star of the male choir’s secret surprise number is clearly having problems hoisting herself off the floor again, and eventually solves the problem by squatting and parting her knees to the audience.

  After this, many guests join in the karaoke. The hotel manager and a group of foreigners burst into a rendition of O sole mio, and are followed by three men singing the song about the man who sailed home again across the sea, I Am Sailing. The last singer is a man with a long torso and greenish-blue tie whose bulging dry lips almost kiss the microphone as he stretches his long neck, while the rest of his body remains on the stage. He moistens his lips and tilts the microphone stand forward, as if it were a woman in a tango. The tune hiccups around the hall until the voice is suddenly isolated on stage with no accompaniment and the man eventually realizes that the playback has broken down. He stands by the mike, silently mouthing the words with his lips, as some men rush across the hall. Then the room erupts into whistles and applause, and the singer awkwardly adjusts his tie.