Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  I take him under the duvet with me in his stockings. There is no point lying there awake, so I turn on the TV and slip the DVD into the machine. The lottery ticket is in the same bag as the disc. Sometime later, I freeze the drama in mid-action, precisely at the point when the heroine is about to slash her wrists with a razor blade on the edge of the bathtub, because it occurs to me to dial the number on the back of the lottery ticket. I get an answering machine.

  “Only one person got all the numbers right and is therefore entitled to the full undivided prize,” chirps an air hostess voice at the other end of the line, “44,000,523 krónur.” I draw a circle around the third row of numbers on my ticket and redial. I get the same voice as before and the same numbers. I feel an urge to check that all the slush has disappeared from the balcony, to tidy up the kitchen, drink a glass of milk, see if any lights have come on in the surrounding houses and finally settle down to watch the end of the DVD. This time the person, who bought the ticket just five minutes before closing time and hit the biggest jackpot in the history of the Icelandic lottery, isn’t some father of five on disability benefit who’d gone bankrupt after underwriting a loan taken out by his ex-brother-in-law, nor is it some good-hearted old granny from Selfoss with eleven grandchildren, who are mostly just starting off on their own in life and need a helping hand, but instead it is a relatively young woman who will be pocketing the whole prize—she and her fellow in good fortune, a deaf four-year-old clairvoyant boy with poor eyesight and one leg three centimetres shorter than the other, which makes him limp when he is only wearing his socks. One can’t really say that this woman is hard off in the strictest sense of the term, even though she has just become single again, nor that she particularly needed to win a prize of this kind.

  Looking purely at the laws of probability, it can be assumed that, since it is possible to be unlucky twice in a row, it must be possible to be lucky twice in a row as well. Bad luck can trigger a chain of bad luck in the same way that good luck can trigger good luck, luck brings luck.

  “The chances of a woman, who masters eleven languages, several of which are Slavonic, winning two lotteries simultaneously are nevertheless pretty remote,” says my friend Auður, and about as likely as you meeting an elf on a rockslide on the national Ring Road. But, she adds, under certain circumstances and for the chosen few, a remote possibility can become a concrete reality.

  TWENTY-THREE

  My guilty conscience hasn’t been appeased by the time I drive to visit her in hospital, which is why there is a huge bouquet of white roses in the front seat from the boy, along with a drawing he’s done for her, of a trumpet. It turns out, however, as Auður herself is quick to point out, that the spraining of her ankle on my doorstep was a stroke of luck. If she hadn’t, they would never have realized she has a deformed pelvis, as well as contraction pains, the beginning of a cervical dilation, and far too high blood pressure. The bottom line is she won’t be leaving the hospital any time soon.

  She vacillates in the doorway, wearing some kind of garment that is clearly marked as State Hospital property, and I see that she has put on a thick sweater under her white gown, as if she were going off on a weekend trip to a summer bungalow. She is wearing a thick woollen sock on her right foot and bandages on the other. Judging by her behaviour, you would think she was being pursued by a gang of merciless thugs, on the run in some American mob movie. She’s keen on me playing a role in this getaway drama with her and wants me to skid off with the door open before she is even fully inside the car. It takes a good while to get her into a comfortable position. Spreading her knees wide apart like an old sailor, her navel protrudes through her hand-knit sweater and the pattern stretches over her inflated belly, which seems to reach the dashboard, even though she is still only six months pregnant. This is the best way for her to sit in the car, she feels, with her belly drooping between her legs, between her knees.

  “There are two of them,” she bluntly spurts out before swallowing. “It’s like having a belly full of kittens. I can’t lie on my stomach any more or wrap my arms around the pillow.”

  I try to work out what consequences this new information will have on the fate of my friend and my protégé of three nights. Meanwhile, I try to ask some sensible questions:

  “Did you get their permission to come out?”

  “Nobody will notice if I vanish for a short while, did you bring the bottle?”

  I drive on, while my friend tells me where to turn next. By the time we have passed the church for the fourth time and are moving down Skólavörðustígur, she is already halfway through the bottle of red wine. I justify this in my mind by reasoning that for centuries women in France and Italy have given birth to perfectly healthy babies, probably without suffering from anemia as much as Nordic women.

  Tumi sits still in the back seat with a box of chocolate raisins, watching his mother knock back the wine. The accordion she requested lies on the seat beside him.

  “I want to ask you a big favour.”

  I already know what it is. I have experience in these matters, like that time she went off on a five-week music course to Amsterdam. She’s about to ask me to pay the bills that lie on the shelf in her hall, to fetch all kinds of creams and things from her apartment, to water her plants, the yucca in the corner by the TV, two full cups, and to then let it dry completely for a whole week before watering it again. The plants on the living room window sill are another story, she’ll tell me, they have to be watered daily, half a cup each, mustn’t be too moist or too dry, otherwise the one in the middle won’t produce its purple flowers in February. Last but not least, she will ask me to bring over her Discman and CDs, and not to forget Clara Haskil, who has the same inter­pretive sensitivity she has, although she doesn’t actually say that.

  “I wanted to ask you to watch Tumi for me while I’m in the hospital.”

  This catches me totally unprepared and I can think of nothing better to do than turn into Bergthórugata.

  “But that’s another three months.”

  “Maybe and maybe not. I’ve got a hunch it won’t be that long, two and a half months at the most. He’ll be in the kindergarten while you’re at work.”

  “I can’t handle children, you know me, I haven’t a clue about kids.”

  “You were a child once. Isn’t your ex always saying you’re still a wretched child?”

  I clutch at every thought that springs to mind and spurt it all out. He could die in my arms, I even end up saying. Auður glances at the windows of the fashion boutiques as we crawl down Laugavegur.

  “I just don’t have that maternal gene, I’ve never considered having kids. I don’t even look like a mother.”

  “The only thing mothers have in common with each other is the fact that they slept with a man while they were ovulating without the appropriate protection. They don’t even have to repeat the deed. Not with the same man at any rate.”

  “I’d neglect him, he wouldn’t get enough to eat, enough sleep, I’m in the middle of a divorce right now and moving.”

  “Being a mother is about waking up and doing one’s best and then going to bed again and hoping for the best. I heard that in an American movie once.”

  “But what about his dad?”

  “Last I heard he’d moved to Hveragerði.”

  “Besides, I’m about to go off on a trip—on a long holiday—and I’ll be away for at least six weeks, maybe even for Christmas. I’m going to try to find a spot for the chalet in the east. In fact, they’re about to load it onto the truck as we speak—all disassembled,” I say to add weight and credibility to my information. I’m trying to think as fast as I can, although it sounds false to tell her I need to be on my own, that I’m preparing this voyage into the unknown precisely to find myself again.

  “You can just take him with you, he’s the easiest kid in the world, he doesn’t need any en
tertaining. He just sits in the back seat, you’ll barely notice him, he won’t nag or pester you, doesn’t even sing the way other kids do, all you’ve got to do is give him something to drink every now and then, hand him a banana every hundred kilometres or so, and stick a straw into his chocolate milk.”

  “I don’t know sign language.”

  “He hears a bit, lip-reads, and gesticulates when he speaks to people who don’t understand sign language. He’s a linguistic genius, just like you, four years old and he speaks three languages. You’ll just have to learn his language, add another one to your collection. Seriously, you could understand a camel.”

  I don’t bother telling her I sometimes have enough problems trying to express myself to people with perfectly good hearing and speech. Maybe it’ll be no worse with a hearing-impaired child with a speech impediment.

  “Hasn’t the time come for the linguistic expert to examine the appearance and shape of words? To see what concepts look like in three dimensions and learn how to make words with your body, without your voice?”

  At least I have a weekend’s experience of what it’s like to have a child in one’s care; it’s quite similar to being alone with one’s self. You don’t even have to cook, just buy something ready-made and split it in two. He has no idea of when regular mealtimes are, has nothing to say about their preparation and eats what he’s given, pretty much like a monkey at the zoo.

  By this stage of the conversation, my friend has moved closer to me and is almost sitting on the handbrake with her arm around my shoulders.

  “But what about you? Don’t you think you’d miss him?” I ask.

  “I have enough on my plate, I wouldn’t be able to take good care of him, it’ll be another two and a half months before the twins are born and I’m supposed to lie still until then. Otherwise, there’s the danger of Tumi’s history repeating itself—­respirators, oxygen tents, kidney problems and all that. He didn’t cry until he was six weeks old, and even then it was more like the meowing of a kitten.”

  “But what about him? Can he be without you for that long?”

  “The only thing I’m allowed to do in the ward is watch American soaps and wildlife documentaries until I’m driven mad. And kill everyone around me because I get so depressed when I can’t play. I’ve nothing to give the child.”

  By now she has drunk over half the bottle.

  “It’ll do you good to have some company. Mark my words, he’ll change you.”

  “In what way then?”

  She chooses to ignore the question.

  “Besides, he likes your smell.”

  “Huh?”

  “He’s told me he wants to be like you when he grows up; he’s very fond of you.”

  Guilt isn’t an easy thing to swallow, which is why a woman ceases to think rationally and starts to see only one side of the issue: Auður is a close friend of mine, who has chosen an unconventional lifestyle, a single mom with two more fatherless children on the way, highly educated, a music teacher with a fondness for wine, who slipped on the unsalted steps of my house one lunchtime, with a vegetarian Indian takeout with rice for two in her bag, a broken ankle and six months pregnant.

  She was the one who had come over to comfort me. I could, of course, turn this on its head, the same way Auður did, and say that it was a stroke of luck that she fell on my steps and got a thorough medical examination. “If one looks at the big picture,” as the article I’m currently proof-reading keeps on repeating (and I don’t know whether I should edit it or not), “If one looks at the big picture,” all of these factors will help to ensure that my friend has children just like any others, and not children for whose survival she will have to struggle and who will then have to prove that they were worth struggling for, even though they might just be the way they are. It therefore falls directly on me, the friend she was coming to comfort when she slipped on my steps, to take care of the boy who loves my smell. Females can tend to each other’s offspring, just like those ducks do at the lake.

  I glance over my shoulder; he seems apprehensive. All he can see is the backs of our heads and he doesn’t realize we are deciding his fate. I probably have no other choice but to take the child with me on the trip.

  “You’re my best friend, the best person I’ve ever met.”

  “Do you really think you should drink any more?”

  “I won’t get many other chances over the next months, it’s good for the blood.”

  I give it one more shot:

  “I won’t even be able to sleep with anyone.”

  “Join the club. It’s no big deal in my experience. You don’t have to have him in bed with you. Besides, I thought you were divorcing and going off on a trip to have a change, to be alone, into the Christmas darkness of the east, however refreshing that may be.”

  I make no comment, but that is precisely what’s on my mind. Who knows if there’s a man waiting for me on the Ring Road? Who knows if he won’t suddenly appear, somewhere within my grasp, by a waterfall or a mound of fallen rocks on the side of a mountain that plunges straight into the sea, or perhaps I’ll find him leaning nonchalantly on the fragment of an iceberg in the middle of the black sand, a man one could talk to. He would suddenly appear, freshly divorced, a responsible father of two who wants no more children, dressed in full hunting gear with a rifle slung over his shoulder. But instead of blasting the meat with lead, over his hunting companions’ heads, or shooting himself in the foot, he would look straight at the goose and shoot it right between the eyes. A good part of the excitement would lie in tracking such a man down.

  “Did you let Thorsteinn take everything?”

  “No, just the things he wanted, some stuff.”

  She is obviously drunk. The boy is growing restless in the back seat, despite the strawberry ice cream I bought in the petrol station on the way.

  “You’re my best friend, the only person who doesn’t try to change me. No one else would have brought me a bottle.”

  “You asked me to.”

  “It’s our progeny that makes us immortal.”

  She steps out of the car in front of the hospital with a white woollen sock on one foot, a bandage on the other and an accordion in her arms, and sticks her head back into the car again:

  “One more thing. I forgot to tell you I picked tons of crowberries this autumn and have them fermenting in two casks. You’re welcome to them, you just have to shake them every now and then and take care of them a bit. The hooch should be ready soon. If you handle it right, it should taste a bit like a 2002 Montagne Saint Emilion.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  We’re standing side by side over the little stove, making thick rice pudding, when she calls from a payphone in the ward. She spends the first ten minutes apologizing and the next ten thanking me and telling me that I’m the best person she’s ever met, since she had omitted to mention this before. I try to pour the milk into the pot and stir it, with the receiver stuck to my ear, as Tumi sprinkles the pudding with raisins from a bag.

  “Loads of raisins,” I hear him say.

  He helps me mix the cinnamon and sugar, which screeches in the glass and echoes down the phone.

  “And then blow on it.”

  “There’s just one other thing,” she yells into the phone, because she feels there is a poor connection at her end of the line; “I promised Tumi a family pet as a consolation prize, nothing too big, but at least furry; it could be a hamster, guinea pig or even a mouse, although personally I’m not too fond of mice.”

  I’m frank and tell her that, as things are now, I wouldn’t be able to face any hairy creature smaller than a man, even temporarily. She tells me that there’s a long story behind this, that she and her son have been through the entire process together:

  “At first, the animal had to be furry and big enough to be able to pat
or even sit on the back of and comb. Then, bit by bit, he mellowed his demands, but it still had to be furry, with hairs that would stick to the green sofa and our clothes.” She tells me this isn’t the case with hamsters and mice, and that you can even buy hairless mice now, the only problem being that they can easily vanish behind washing machines, never to be seen again. They had negotiated for weeks, reviewing every single furry creature, big or small, under the sun.

  “I’d be extremely grateful if you’d take him to a pet shop to buy him something you can easily take on your travels with you.”

  She apologizes even more.

  Once we’ve finished eating the rice and liver pudding bought from the store, I explain to Tumi that we’re going on a journey, speaking to him with slow, clear, exaggerated lip movements, and tell him that we can’t take a hamster with us because he would get lost at the first petrol station. I draw a mouse, put it in a traffic sign and draw a line across it: not possible.

  He responds by drawing a picture of a four-footed animal that could be a dog, but has the tail of a horse and fills up the whole page.

  “We can go horse-riding on our trip,” I suggest, “there are bound to be horse-riding farms on the way,” but I’m not sure he’s understood me correctly. The next two and a half hours are spent drawing animals, alternately presenting our offers to each other, like two hagglers at a market in Marrakesh. His drawings are more or less variations of the same quadruped in various colours, patterns, spots, stripes and waves. He spends considerably more time on his creations and is reluctant to deliver any unfinished sketch.

  We reach the store half an hour before closing time. I go through the motions of examining a series of miserable-looking hairy animals with him and then point at an aquarium, trying to turn the boy’s focus to the scaly creatures swimming inside them, but he pulls me elsewhere, encouraged by the shopkeepers.