Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  The turtle is currently seven centimetres long but can grow to one metre and seventy kilos with the right treatment, temperature, compresses, diet and, above all, a lot of time, the shopkeeper explains conscientiously.

  He’s quite hairy himself, as it happens; not only does he have hair sprouting out of his collar and between the buttons of his shirt and beyond his sleeves, but also out of his nose and ears.

  “For the whole of a woman’s life,” I interject.

  Long after the child has grown up, the turtle will still be lying in its mother’s bathtub.

  “People are increasingly discovering the soothing qualities of turtles as family pets. Another advantage is that you can keep it in your fridge for up to three weeks when you go away on holiday—while it’s still small. Families can rarely stand being together for longer periods than that.”

  “We’ll be away for longer than that,” I say. Besides, it is not, as yet, clear whether there will be a fridge in the summer bungalow, let alone electricity.

  “With every purchase of two guinea pigs we give away some blow bubbles, and every purchase of two hamsters comes with a voucher for a McDonald’s kid’s Happy Meal box. With a dog you get two free hamburgers and two tickets for a dinosaur movie that’s for over-tens only. If you buy a dog, two hamsters and two guinea pigs, we’ll throw in a balloon-making machine, tickets to the dinosaur movie and two free alcoholic drinks in town.”

  I point out to the boy that the store is about to close and, once more, in a gentle but determined manner, direct his focus to the aquariums. Compromises are often humiliating for both parties and rarely live up to either’s expectations. The man in the fish department has small and extraordinarily round aquamarine eyes, with virtually no eyelids.

  The fish don’t come with any extras.

  “Choose,” I say, lifting the boy up to offer him a view of the submarine life in the aquarium on the top shelf. “That means you can have any fish you like, we’ll put a lid on the aquarium and take it on our journey. There’s guppy fish, discus fish, vacuum cleaner fish who eat all the others, electric pumps, fluorescent lighting, plants, treasure chests, stones, sand and fish toys. We’ll fill the aquariums with submarine caves to give the fish some seclusion and family life, and allow them to spawn in peace and bring up their offspring. Instead of just one animal, there’ll be loads and we’ll buy ourselves some hamburgers and go to see the dinosaur movie afterwards.”

  I could have added that we won’t need a babysitter for the fish while we’re at the movie, but instead I say something else:

  “We can look into the possibility of a puppy later on.”

  We walk out of the shop with three goldfish in a plastic bag, an aquarium without a lid, sand, three artificial plants and a box of fish food. The man with the fish eyes slips me a voucher at the door.

  “This voucher entitles you to a free drink at the bar” is printed on one side of it, and “Meet me tonight if you want” has been handwritten in ornate cursive blue letters on the other.

  The following day, I phone the kindergarten to inform them that the boy will be away for an indeterminate length of time. Auður has already informed them that I am her next of kin and that I’ll be taking care of Tumi.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  You bid your husband farewell forever with a vigorous handshake and then meet him the next morning buying sesame seed bread rolls in the local bakery, queuing in the bank at lunchtime, swimming in the pool in the afternoon, or at the registry office later in the week, and then, the weekend after that, at the theatre with his new significant other—always inevitably bumping into each other.

  We haven’t completely renewed our wardrobes yet. Generally speaking, it’s underwear that people renew first after a divorce, both the person who leaves and the person who is left behind. Of course, I don’t know how far his imagination can stretch and whether it can reach under my clothes, but he can see that my hair has grown over my ears; pretty soon it’ll be longer than his. We’ve indulged ourselves a bit, both the one who left and the one who was left behind. It’s a gross misconception to assume that the one who is left behind doesn’t binge on food any more than the other, eating out in restaurants, savouring an entire fillet of lamb on a Monday, drinking cognac straight out of a bottle and downing half a kilo of vanilla ice cream with hot chocolate sauce, sprinkled with a packet of almond flakes.

  While we are queuing in the bank, he examines me for any external signs of change. Even though everything may seem identical on the surface, I am no longer the person he knew and once owned, and pretty soon I’ll be even more different and newer, so new and transformed, in fact, that it may even take me some time to get used to the new me staring back in the mirror. He is looking extremely well, it seems to me, rested, energetic. He’s put on a kilo and a half, by the look of him. I can see now what a good couple we made. We exchange mutual questions about each mother’s health.

  “Hi, how’s your mom?”

  “Hi, fine, thanks, and how’s your mom?”

  “Fine, last I heard. Are you paying bills?”

  I can’t tell him that I’m opening two new accounts to deposit my millions and those of my child in care, 22,261,000 krónur each, so I just say:

  “No, buying some currency.”

  “Are you going on a trip?”

  “Yes, you could say that, taking a late summer holiday.”

  “Where to?”

  I suddenly feel an irrepressible urge to conceal the bungalow from him, the fact that I now have a summer house all to myself, in the same way that he has a woman all to himself. They seem to be of equal value to me at that moment.

  In the line in front of me there is a small Asian woman with shiny jet-black hair, holding the hand of a little mixed-race girl.

  “South-east Asia probably, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore.”

  “Wow, will you be gone long?”

  “At least six weeks, maybe longer, six months, maybe longer.”

  “Wow . . .”

  To be able to settle my business in peace, I allow a few people to skip me in the queue until he has left the building, climbed into his car and turned the key in the ignition. He looks tired to me now, stressed. He seems to have lost weight. He has bags under his eyes, as if he weren’t sleeping properly. I see now what a poor match we made.

  Cashier no. 4 looks at me with a puzzled air when I place the check on the counter in front of her and ask her to split it, by depositing it into two separate bank accounts: 44,523,622 krónur. Then I ask for two million in cash, preferably in thousand-krónur notes. I see no need to leave a trail. Her colleagues at the neighbouring desks slow down their counting.

  “That would be 2,000 thousand-krónur notes,” she says reluctantly, twenty wads.

  “Yes,” I say, without bothering to recalculate, “that’s right.”

  “Just one moment,” she says, because she has to leave her desk, probably to nip into the coffee room at the back to discuss this with her colleagues, after which she’ll have to nip down to the basement to get the wads of cash from the safe. Four of her co-workers check me out with surreptitious glances during her absence.

  “It’s best to keep large amounts of cash in nondescript plastic bags, not in a Gucci handbag at any rate,” says the cashier when she returns. “It’ll draw less attention, a used supermarket bag, for example, or library bag,” she says.

  As she passes me the bag stuffed with bills through the hole in the glass, she says:

  “The branch manager sends you his regards and apologizes for the breadcrumbs, he kept his lunch in that bag.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  I’m not taking much with me. The main thing is to hold onto as little of the old clutter as possible. It’s not that I’m fleeing anything, just exploring my most intimate and uncharted territories in a que
st for fresh feelings in a new prefabricated summer cottage planted on the edge of a muddy ravine with my hearing and sight-impaired four-year-old travelling companion. The most important thing is to never look back, to only ever sleep once in the same bed and to solely use the rear-view mirror out of technical necessity and not to gaze into one’s own reflection. Then, when I eventually return, I will have become a new and changed person, by which time my hair will have grown down to my shoulders.

  I chuck my things into a bag, but can’t show the same casualness when it comes to packing the boy’s outfits and clothes. Even though I may not be an expert in children or their clothing, I can see quite clearly that he is outgrowing his winter overalls. I buy him a two-piece winter outfit instead, the dearest money can buy, and two pairs of trousers, as well as two new blue eiderdown sleeping bags, one for me and one for my travelling companion. I fetch my flower-embroidered jeans and slip into them.

  There’s no point in cramming the car with things; we’ll take a picnic, two bottles of water, some books, two favourite fluffy animals, two favourite pairs of pyjamas and some toys that we choose together, as well as optimism, enthusiasm for travel, several CDs and—last but not least—a glove compartment stuffed with thousand-krónur banknotes. This is the best way to travel without leaving any trail behind us. I guess you could call it a trip without promises, but not without cash—there’s more than plenty of that.

  But first I’ve got to return the aftershave to my ex, along with the wedding ring and the sandwich toaster he forgot.

  I park my car beside Nína Lind’s Subaru and ring the bell. Their names are already engraved on a plaque beside the bell, his on top of hers, which is more than we ever achieved in our four years, 288 days of marriage.

  The boy’s spectacles glisten from the back seat and he watches me intently as I stand on the porch steps in my sweater, holding a co-op carrier bag. It’s Sunday and almost noon when my ex-husband comes to the door in his striped pyjamas. I’d never seen him in pyjamas before. The smell of the apartment also catches me by surprise, a totally new and alien odour.

  “Thank you, there was no need to,” he says without looking into the bag, but gazing stiffly into the mid-distance towards the car. The boy’s chin doesn’t reach the window; the only thing that is visible is the top of his woollen hood and eyes.

  When I’ve reversed out of the parking space again, my ex is still standing in the doorway in his striped pyjamas watching me, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to close the door right away.

  Without having any precise idea of exactly where I’m going, I start heading east, moving towards an increasingly lower sun and shorter days, and soon find myself driving onto the National Highway No.1—the Ring Road—into the darkness and rain. I don’t even have to choose a direction because on this island there is only one you can choose: the circular road that follows the coastline. In any case, I’m not the type of person who would venture off the highway down some unpaved back road. One doesn’t come across many crossroads on the Ring Road, and even fewer stop signs.

  “Yes, of course we’re taking the fish with us.”

  You can’t break a promise you’ve made to a child.

  We place the three goldfish in the biggest jar that can be found with a lid. The orange creatures jigger nervously with every movement, darting furiously from one wall of the jar to the other, in the little space they have to move in. The sand, pebbles and two shells, which the boy had fetched from his private collection at home and which were supposed to give the jar more of a homely feel, only help to agitate the water even further.

  We helped each other lower the jar into the trunk between the two casks of crowberry schnapps and four plants, which we were going to drop off at Mom’s on our way out of town. She had given the plants as gifts to her son-in-law on various occasions, so it seems only natural that she should take care of them now. Everything that dies in my hands always seems to thrive in Mom’s. Although I’m not a bad person, as such, I’m totally inept at looking after things or cultivating them. I simply can’t find the instinct to help things grow. I either seem to water them too late or too much and always when they are on the brink of collapse, whereas in her house everything seems to flourish all around her.

  “Plants thrive best in a thought-free vacuum,” she says, as if she were quoting some popular Eastern philosophy.

  Since her trip to China last year she has started to study Chinese, her first foreign language after Danish.

  “As soon as I saw how many of them there were,” she said, “I realized I had no choice. For the future.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  She’s one big smile, sixty-eight years old and still has all her teeth. With the vestiges of a streak of lipstick across her rosy brown lips, she bursts with vitality and embraces her only daughter and the boy.

  “You could have left those behind,” she says as we’re carrying in the plants, the boy holding the smallest one. “This one’s plastic and that’s a silk flower and that one’s made of tissue.”

  That explains why they’ve started to go mouldy. I’ve been watering plants that aren’t even plants and shouldn’t be watered. No wonder everything felt so phoney around us, that our relationship was withering; love can’t thrive on artificial flowers. I should have caught on; lily-reddish pink and always in bloom, that’s no life.

  “I’d long stopped giving Thorsteinn living plants, sure you would have just killed them all.”

  My mother likes to save interesting newspaper clippings for my benefit, because she believes I never give myself the time to read the news; I’m always too busy doing other things. The dining table is covered in clippings that have been sorted according to subject matter: harmful poisonous food additives, the right way to handle raw chicken and avoid salmonella, education, childcare and bullying, the protection of children, animals and nature, reflections on various types of religion, all in double spreads and—last but not least—articles about international aid work.

  “Yet another war to guarantee peace,” she says, “except that now they’ve started to calculate the estimated number of wounded and maimed with bar charts and tables divided per age group in advance to enable the pharmaceutical companies to make their projections.”

  I remember how, when my brother and I were small, my mother used to plant potatoes and sow carrots in the spring, as soon as the earth began to thaw, and how she disinfected our palms and put a bandage on them after she had removed the red playground gravel, but I don’t remember her ever expressing any opinions on global issues the way she does today. My mother is a woman with a mission in life. She has found a new passion in the autumn of her years, volunteer aid work around the globe; a widow dedicated to the alleviation of suffering. She is a sponsor of Doctors Without Borders, a member of water supply associations in Africa, a fund-raiser for a hospital in Sri Lanka and she is totally immersed in land mine issues and artificial limbs. Her main interest, though, is the education of young girls in the Third World.

  “Because woman is the future of man,” she likes to say.

  She now has seven adoptive daughters in four continents, and has pictures of them and thank-you letters on every shelf and window sill. But she also has one boy. His fly is undone in the photo and two teeth are missing from his upper gum. He is leaning against a tree in the barren garden of some nursery with a beaming smile and oversized jeans that droop over his dark brown bare toes, despite the double turn-ups.

  “I’d asked for a girl but they sent me a boy, you can’t very well return a child.”

  The doctor laughed again. Did you really think you could get rid of the baby by running? Did you think it would disappear if you ran fast enough and went around enough times? Tut tut, it’s incredible what a young girl’s imagination can conjure up. It’s growing inside you, whether you like it or not. You’ve hidden it for too long. There’s nothing you can do a
bout it. And then you’ll have to get it out when the time comes. Believe me, giving birth turns fantasies into pain.

  The big patterned carpet in the living room is covered with old, second-hand sewing machines and spools of thread that need to be inside a container to India before Christmas.

  “Over there they will lay the foundations that will enable many girls to be financially independent,” she explains to me, for their subsistence and prospects for the future. Tumi wanders between the sewing machines, bewitched.

  “Yes, it’s amazing how many useful things people keep locked away in their attics.”

  I had forewarned her of our visit and she has fried some fish balls and insists on us taking the leftovers.

  “But we’re going on a trip.”

  She pats the boy on the cheek and then me.

  “How is he, the poor little thing? They probably would have abandoned him anywhere else.”

  “Mom, he is a perfectly lucid and intelligent child, he’s just hearing-impaired and wears glasses.”

  “Doesn’t he take any calcium tablets, he looks so pale?”

  The boy carries the pot of fish balls out to the car and places it beside the goldfish. Mom is going to be taking care of Auður’s home-brew, because she’s the type of woman who can carry out any task she is entrusted with. If I’d given her a poisonous plant and live lizard, she would have looked after both with the exact same zeal and care. The plant would have sprouted poisonous yellow flowers and the lizard would have multiplied fivefold.

  “You can return the pot to me when you come back. Don’t travel too far east and make sure you don’t . . .” she suddenly lowers her voice, staring at the ground, “start digging up any old stuff. No point in stirring old memories, you can’t change them now.”