The woman who was talking to him has stepped out of the tub, leaving only six of us behind.
“I was hoping you two would visit me,” he says finally. “I would have cooked something nice for us, I rarely feel like cooking just for myself.”
He has a peculiar round tattoo on his shoulder which looks a bit like a labyrinth, but could also be a spider’s web.
Apart from our conversation, a highlands silence has fallen on the tub, people have stopped exchanging recipes. He sidles up to me and we sit together, side by side. The others have shifted and withdrawn to the other side, as far as they can from us in this circular tub, and the four of them, two men and two women, sit there mutely, trying to remain as inconspicuous as they can, by veiling themselves in the mist and sinking into the water up to their chins. The steps are on our side of the tub and no one has the courage to draw attention to themselves by climbing out at such a delicate point in our conversation. He floods me with options:
“Anyway,” he continues, “I’d be willing to see you again. We could find things to do.”
Then, leaning forward, as if he were about to climb out of the tub, he stoops over me:
“My private tuition offer still stands,” he says, gently brushing against my shoulder.
He stands up and water pours off his body. The others quickly follow his example and exit after him, like a mass walkout at a trade union assembly. The water level drops considerably and I’m left there, sitting alone.
I suddenly catch a glimpse of a woman in the corner of my eye who seems familiar to me as she rises from the depths of the pool, swimming towards me.
It was on the same evening I’d taken the flower out of my hair, but kept my curly locks. It was Holy Thursday and all the shops were closed. I combed out my curly locks as best I could and tied my ponytail in a yellow band. I was wearing a new jacket and everything was new and strange in my head and I wanted to get away. But instead I went for a swim with my best female friend. My hair was much heavier than normal and stuck together. It was like carrying a new living organ on my back that I couldn’t free myself of. It must have been the hairspray or stuff that had been mixed into it out of so many bottles.
I hear the sound of someone diving close by and the ripples of water travelling all the way over to me. Someone swims below the surface to the bottom at the deep end of the pool. I suddenly feel a wave breaking against my thighs and a hand grabbing my leg and pulling me down. Then my other leg is tugged and I sink and feel the need to cough.
I shoot up and try to cough, but my friend is still holding my leg and tugs it away from the edge again, laughing. I try to break free and kick her, but she obviously feels it’s all part of the game and tightens her grip. I swallow more chlorinated water and feel it freely invading my lungs. My vision begins to blur; I’m losing the game, without ever having travelled abroad. My friend still doesn’t get it when I suddenly free myself and manage to grab onto the edge of the pool. I cough and cough, tears streaming down my cheeks, and try to spit the blood-tinted slime into the side gutter, but miss, and see how it spews out of me and floats straight towards my smiling friend.
When we got home she insisted on reading my fortune so I pulled a few cards out of the deck and placed them on the table. She reckoned I would be about thirty-three years old, but made no mention of a man or children. I was thirteen back then so it seemed like a reasonably ripe age, since I didn’t know that her granny had just spoken about the death of a thirty-three-year-old woman and my friend probably just wanted to sound like a credible fortune-teller.
FORTY-EIGHT
The boy doesn’t want to play with other children or the ball I bought him. He prefers to stick close to me, and sit outside on the deck under the porch, watching me read or looking up the myths of ancient Greek gods. He also likes to lie on the floor by the fireplace, writing words and drawing pictures. One of them is of a little child holding the hands of two women, one of whom has a swollen tummy. After that he draws thirty pictures of Hercules in a row.
“So, you see, his macho-ness may not be buried as deep as you think,” I say to the music teacher and mother of this deaf child.
“Are you afraid of the other children? Are you afraid of what’s outside? I don’t ask him these questions; they’re not the sort of questions one asks a child.”
Sometimes the child sits totally still for long periods, as if he were somewhere far away. Or he rocks to and fro like an old man. But in between, he’s like just any other kid, always agitated, like the sea. He reminds me of one of those deadpan actors from the days of silent movies or a professional mime artist from the south, whose facial expressions can switch hundreds of times in the space of a few moments. His hands create images that I can understand, although not all of them yet.
Someone knocks at the door at ten-forty one morning, a potential friend for him of about his age, holding a DVD for over-twelves in his hands. It’s his father who has brought him here. Tumi’s eyes light up with hope as he stands beside me, eager with anticipation.
“I saw you at the co-op and it occurred to me that they might get on,” he says, pushing his boy in and trying to close the door, which is suddenly blocked by his son, who sticks his foot through the gap.
“Don’t you have a DVD player? Or even a TV?”
The man quickly sizes up our home, which we’ve decorated with the model of the church, the portrait of the sheep, the foggy window words Tumi has copied onto paper, and thirty drawings of Hercules on the wall. Then the man walks one circle around the living room, knocking on the walls, as his son follows right behind him.
“Well then,” says the father, “this obviously won’t work out then.”
He tugs on the sleeve of his son, who seems to be quite interested in the flames in the fireplace, and drags him back towards the entrance where he shilly-shallies at the door.
“I remember your grandmother very well,” he says finally. “I used to stay in the blue house sometimes when I was a kid. I used to play a bit of guitar back then and compose. I still write a bit of lyrics.” Then he suddenly shuts up, as if he’d suddenly remembered something more important:
“Are you here to protest against the dam and stuff?”
I hear him say goodbye as he quietly closes the door behind him. I can’t quite make out whether that’s a look of regret I see on Tumi’s face, as we melt a whole bar of chocolate into two cups of cocoa and spread butter and jam on some bread.
FORTY-NINE
The sun sets over the harbour in the mid-afternoon, as the boats unload their catch. There isn’t much to see, travellers passing through here would say. But they’d be greatly mistaken, because they don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.
I’m beginning to be able to picture myself living here with my boy and to be able to imagine that, in fact, I’ve been living here for the past thirty-three years and that, even though I may have gone away for brief spells every now and then, my life is rooted here. This creates a new feeling in me that grows in these surroundings.
Bare-footed in my plimsolls, I await my fisherman on the pier. I spot his blue sailor’s sweater in the wheelhouse of the boat heading for the harbour. The yellow fish glisten, yes, that’s right, the fish and sea water are soaked in oil. He stands at the bow, as the boat pulls into land, coming home, smudged in fishy scales and slime.
The men look at me in wonderment. The other women are at home preparing dinner and getting the children ready for bed. I don’t have to prepare my child for bed, he’s big enough now and rehearsing with his band, I think.
“You’re lucky to have a man like him,” says another sailor’s wife to me, “when mine’s not at sea, he spends most of his time down on the shore.”
That’s how I picture it all.
A man walks off the boat and crosses the gangway in two steps. He reeks of fish and his fingertip
s are salty when he slips them into my mouth, one after another, to make me lick them. A slightly odd ritual to an outsider’s eye, but that’s how it goes.
Afterwards we draw the curtains his mother made for the windows. The teenager is still practising on his bass guitar in the garage, I imagine, which is why we allow ourselves to draw the curtains.
“Are you going to eat bare-chested?” I ask the man of my life, once we’re seated at the table with the freshly pan-fried catfish.
“Hang on, does it matter? It’s just the two of us, you and me, right?” He’s forgotten the teenager, just like I have.
“Yes, but I was brought up to expect people to come fully clothed and combed to the table and to talk together. Dad often told me, my mother and brother stories at the table and we’d also take it in turns to tell each other how our days went. One day Dad told us the story of an unemployed pianist, who often lay awake at night. On one of his sleepless nights he invented a special screw for the propeller of an airplane, or a bolt or something simple like that, that made him filthy rich. And not just him, but three generations of the Jack Wilson family.”
“You don’t have to tell me all the stories in the world just to get me to put a shirt on.”
“And Mum used to doll herself up before he came home for dinner, put on lipstick. Then she’d put me in front of her so that I’d run over to him. She always let my brother be. I sometimes felt it was a bit unnecessary to be pulled out of a game and to be appointed as my father’s welcoming committee. It wasn’t that my joy was faked, since my days were pretty uneventful anyway, and it was always better to get a visit from Dad in the evening and night than nothing at all.”
“Would you like a little house reading maybe, to read from the Bible?”
First row. It’s the conflict of opposites that keeps life going. I admit that I find it difficult to get the adolescent to help out at dinner time. Nevertheless, I clear the plates and keep the food warm, in case he re-emerges from the garage before we go to bed.
Afterwards, my husband empties the washing machine, stretching socks and shaking T-shirts before hanging them up on the line. We laugh a lot, though, on most evenings and sometimes into the night. Too bad if we sleep in an unmade bed at night. The boy hasn’t come back by the time we turn in. Sometimes we also have a giggle in the morning, except when we say goodbye; he’s always surprised to see how sorry I am to see him go.
We’ll be seeing each other again this evening, at seven-thirty, he says, trying to lighten the separation. The boy isn’t up yet. I’m not even sure he ever left the garage last night.
I lean back in the deckchair under the porch and put down my book. It’s four o’clock and darkness is falling again. Tumi is in view puttering about on the side of the deck in his rain gear and balaclava with four baking moulds. I’ve got the fourth pair of dry stockings ready in my hands. He smells of cold, wet clay when he comes in, the scent of stripped soil. His mouth is smudged in brown, but he shakes his head when I ask him if he’s been eating clay. He opens his mouth as evidence. There’s also sand and soil on his molars, maybe he needs iron or magnesium; I must remember that when I do my shopping tomorrow.
I’m beginning to be able to imagine that I went away for seventeen years and have now come back to settle here, that this is where my home is, that I have a life here. I’m alone and move into my sailor’s place on Monday.
Everything at his place is in shades of yellow and brown and his Sailor’s Day badge from two years ago is still pinned to the beige curtains in the kitchen, which his mom sewed for him when he moved in. On the living-room floor there’s a log of driftwood, which is used as a stand for a bottle and four glasses. Bit by bit, I discreetly begin to make changes, move things around, putting some into boxes, and use the opportunity when kids come around to collect things for a raffle to give them the Christmas gifts he received from his mom. The last article to go is the intertwined porcelain hands holding a flame. But I still don’t have the courage to move the ship in the bottle yet.
For a long period, he makes no remarks about any of this, but then one day, after three months, as we’re eating chicken in coconut milk with corn, beans and rice, because he’d rather not have fish, he says between mouthfuls:
“Feels a bit empty around here, have you changed anything?”
It has taken me four months to muster up the courage to mention the kitchen curtains, and I tread carefully.
“What’s wrong with those curtains?” he asks. “Mom made those and it was enough hassle getting them up. She went all the way to Reykjavík to buy that material and had to extend her stay by two days. My brother Daddi had to drive her all over the place until she finally found the fabric in Mjód. Then she insisted on sewing them here, so she moved in with the sewing machine and took over the entire living room. Two of her friends helped her to put them up. What’s wrong with the curtains?”
I stroke him like a cat, gently running my fingers over his tummy until he becomes totally docile. Afterwards he tells me that I can change the curtains if I want to, but that I needed to explain this to his mom, who already views me with plenty of suspicion because I’m skinny, boyish-looking and divorced and I make a living correcting papers.
“I feel there’s no need to have curtains in the kitchen,” I say. “Besides, there’s nothing but the sea in front of us. I feel I lose sight of the horizon with those frilly drapes up there.”
“So you want the place to look like a building site?” he says.
He’s gradually changing.
“What are you reading?” he asks. I tell him about the subject matter of the book as he looks back at me with an unfathomable air.
“I don’t see any point in reading a book that you’ve read before me, because then I’d be experiencing it after you, but I’d be willing to try being a woman and to see what it’s like to give birth to a child. I think it must be a totally unique experience to split into two,” says my muscular, macho sailor as he slips into a blue salt-beaten sweater that his mother knitted for him and must never be washed. He’s going off to sea.
FIFTY
The house stands below, virtually on the shore, almost unrecognizable. But it still has that same low ceiling, which a tall man could barely stand upright under. He is by the stove in a white, newly ironed shirt, holding a tray of freshly fished pink lobsters. Six boats are approaching land with their catch on the horizon, all of them with their lights on. They seem motionless, as if they were preparing a surprise attack, a raid on the village just after the evening news.
“It’s the location I fell for,” he says, nothing but the sea through the window. “It was empty when I moved here and I’d no idea it was connected to you in any way. Because I didn’t know you back then,” he says teasingly, “so I hadn’t even started to think about you.”
I walk from room to room in this both familiar and alien house, Tumi at my heels, and gently stroke the faded flowery wallpaper.
“I sandpapered and varnished the floor. Those are the original floorboards. The musty odour has gone now.”
I try lying on the bed.
“The place was empty when I bought it, apart from the bath in the basement and some boxes up in the attic, old stuff I couldn’t bring myself to throw away and that I haven’t had the time to go through yet. You’re welcome to take a look if you like.”
I speedily skim through the contents of the copybooks in Granny’s neat handwriting. It is the month of May, the rest of the date is illegible—humidity has eaten into some of the pages:
A gentle summer breeze after this morning’s rain. A boy is born at 16:40. The couple came to collect him at 18:10. The wind is shifting to the west. Everything is fine.
“I hope you’re hungry,” he says when I come down, “this is at least three kilos.”
The boy places three plates on the table and makes a fan and two r
olled telescopes out of the napkins, which he sticks into the glasses, and then goes out to play with the pregnant dog in the garden.
“I got her as part of my divorce settlement,” he says, “she’ll be having the puppies in three weeks’ time, on 24th December, they’ll be my Christmas presents this year, along with some socks from my mom and whatever my daughters make at school. Last year I got a paper mobile sculpture from my daughter and a rug and muffler for the dog from my eldest. They miss the dog, we’re one in their eyes, the bitch and I.”
A photo of two adolescent girls sits on one of the bookshelves. The eldest looks slightly anxious and resembles him. The other is blonde with a part in the middle and a pigtail, fine features and a smile akin to that of the woman in the skiing outfit in another picture, standing between her daughters with her arms around their shoulders.
“That was the last holiday before she gave up on me and vanished with a pal of mine. I’m so unbearable to live with,” he says, coming right up to me so that I can smell his aftershave. I recognize it, Yves Rocher, Nature pour homme, the essence of manhood in a bottle.
“I mostly took care of the children while their mother was having her honeymoon, and now I try to go to Reykjavík to meet them at least every second weekend. We stay at my mom’s for the moment and she washes and irons everything for us and neatly folds it all into cases, one for her granddaughters and one for her son. I didn’t start wearing ironed underpants until after my divorce.”
Or perhaps he doesn’t actually say that; in fact it’s fairly unlikely in this setting, right in the middle of cooking, that he would have said something like that and mentioned ironed underpants.
“I’m doing the house up myself; I tiled the kitchen during my summer holidays. I admit the chessboard floor is slightly audacious.”
He stoops over the stove a moment on the carved stone tiles of the chequered black and white kitchen floor. He’s on a black square and I’m on a white one, with half a chessboard between us. Once he’s lowered the heat, he swivels around and moves forward one square, from a black one to a white one, so that we are now both standing on white squares, with just one black square between us, and we just have to stretch out our hands to be able to touch each other. But I need more time to think, so I make little moves at a time, first to the side, from white to black, and then back onto a white square again, as if I might even be thinking of leaving the kitchen altogether and vanishing. But I appreciate his appreciation of me. He launches a diagonal attack on me, like a true knight. His hand slides down my back at the same time as I start to feel something wet in the palm of my hand. It is the tongue of the drenched dog, followed by the boy at the other end of the leash.
Butterflies in November Page 19
