I wrote this down in my diary: last summer in the east. At the beginning of October I turned fifteen.
When the boy wakes me up the next morning, I’m covered in a thick duvet in a blue cover. The blanket has been folded neatly at my feet.
THIRTY-TWO
We have breakfast with the family in the kitchen. The male choir is warming up in the dining hall with a light medley of Estonian melodies. I imagine the lyrics must sound quite exotic to other ears than mine. The woman places a bouquet of red tulips on the table in front of me.
“He asked me to send his regards and hopes to see you again soon.”
The tulips obviously grow in the greenhouse between the cucumbers; I should count myself lucky that he didn’t send me an autographed one.
Tumi picks the cucumber rings out of the pâté on his bread. Everyone stares at him, children and parents, as he systematically pulls them off, one by one, and places them on the side of his plate, without showing the slightest interest in his audience.
“He’s the spitting image of you,” says the woman.
“Yeah, definitely a chip off the old block,” says the husband.
“Are you travelling alone?” the woman asks.
“Are you going far?” asks the husband.
At the end of the table there is a boy I’m guessing is about sixteen or seventeen years old, stooped over a bowl of Cheerios. His limbs seem strangely disproportionate, as if each body part had grown separately. He has puffy, sleepy eyes and big ears that his hat doesn’t quite manage to cover. There can no longer be any doubt as to whom the size 44 sneakers in the hall belong to. He obviously gets his looks from his mother, who is a pretty woman with fine features. I gaze at him intently, until he finally looks up with his shimmering aquamarine eyes.
“He grew fourteen centimetres last summer,” his mother tells me, “barely climbed out of bed in July and August, slept eighteen hours a day and just woke up to eat. He’s certainly our prodigal son; we practically had to slaughter a lamb for every meal. He was of little use to us that summer, couldn’t even drive the combine harvester he’s been driving since the age of eight.
“He was so sluggish in his movements that we thought he’d never get from the sofa to his bed; it was as if he was up to his arms in water.”
They talk about their son as if he weren’t there and the young man shows no reaction, focusing all his efforts on fishing cereal out of his milk. His father joins in:
“We were on our way home after a ball; everyone was on the bus, which had its engine running and was about to leave. While some people were staring into the dark or kissing, I hopped out to look for my future wife’s friend, who I’d been flirting with a little. They both had the same ponytail and I had a few drinks in me.”
“We sometimes say that our relationship is based on a case of mistaken ponytails,” the woman interjects with a smile. They laugh and I get the feeling that it’s a story that’s been polished over the years, until it gained its final form.
“Not that he’d ever mistake the tails of two horses.”
“She was throwing up behind a building, it was the first time she ever got hammered, and while I was wiping her face you could say that the wheels of our first-born were set in motion. The best thing of all is that no one on the bus even realized I was absent during those few minutes.”
“Yeah, doesn’t take Stebbi very long,” she says, and they burst into laughter. “We’ve been inseparable ever since,” she adds.
“Yes, you can say that again. I felt I’d reached heaven when I got to know her,” says the husband.
His wife’s dress has a zip at the waist and she wriggles inside it, like an eel in floral slippers.
The man has dropped out of the conversation and is now staring at the shape of the body that fills out the dress. He peers longingly into her eyes as she’s talking, until she finally walks over to him. Could they be completely oblivious to the presence of their morning guests?
Suddenly the door swings open and a little being totters into the room with a bulging diaper swaying behind it, after the night’s sleep. The woman turns away from the man and bends over to embrace the child. She picks her up and kisses her and then passes her to her husband while she leaves the room a moment. An instant later she returns with some buttermilk yogurt in a bowl.
“Sugar,” says the child, clapping her hands.
“One spoon for the emperor in China,” says the woman, “one for Queen Margrethe Thorhild of Denmark, one for King Kristjan the Ninth, who gave us a constitution, one for Ingibjörg, the wife of our national hero Jón Sigurdsson, one for Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, and one for Dorrit Moussaieff.”
“Imagine,” says the woman, as she is saying goodbye to me with the infant in her arms, “some people in this world have never driven in the rain.”
She looks up at the steep hill in her damp sweater. As I’m driving along the back road, it occurs to me that I might have misheard her, that my hearing might be getting worse, and that what she might have actually said was: “Imagine, there are people in this world who’ve never heard the sound of rain.”
And then she pricked up her ears to the sky, her sweater by now drenched.
THIRTY-THREE
We travel at a leisurely pace, slowly crossing the landscape, because we’re on holiday and have all the time in the world. Every now and then we stop for a snack and sometimes slip into our rain gear to pick up treasures off the side of the road, precious wet stones, and gradually fill the car with our spoils, pebbles, wet clothes, anoraks, socks, new sleeping bags, hats, gloves, crumbs and tufts of moss. The boy has started to draw pictures and various symbols on his fogged-up window with his index finger. When the weather occasionally clears, we see the landscape suddenly flashing before us through the window in magnificent spectacular waves. We park the car to find a moderately sized crater, close enough to the road, so that we can peer into it and marvel at the chaos of soggy nature. Then we lie down on the moss to see how fast the clouds glide by. The light has a delicate transparent essence that envelops me and the child, like a thin cotton veil.
“Where’s left?” he asks in a very clear voice when we’re back on the Ring Road again.
To be able to explain what the left is, I have to stop the car again. It is then a good idea to sit on separate wet tussocks. We’re close to a stone sheep pen and I wait for a red van to pass us before opening the door.
“Left is city language, but in the country there aren’t two but four directions to choose from. There’s north, south, east and west. So left is north, that’s out of my window, straight ahead is east, your window is south and the stuff that’s behind us and done with is west.”
I try to manage as best I can, creating images and signs with my hands, some of which I invent and others which I’ve seen him use. I talk about before and after, and also what is ahead of us and behind us, what has yet to come and what has already passed. He understands me better than I understand myself.
“In the city there are as many directions as we have hands, here in the country there are as many as the legs of an animal, four.”
“Chickens,” he says.
“OK, chickens are an exception.”
“Back mirror,” he says.
“That’s right, rear-view mirror.”
“Dad lives in the west.”
I’m pretty sure that’s what he said. Where does the child get these ideas from? Instead of talking about his father, whom, as far as I know, the child has only met a few times, I explain to him what it means to lose one’s bearings. The worst thing is to be stuck in a fog out in marshes or in a snowstorm on the moors, I say. Some people never lose themselves in nature, only in cities, and others only abroad. But still, most big cities are built in the same way. Some people get lost no matter where they are, and remain more or less lost for t
he whole of their lives. I’m speaking the language of the hearing, knowing perfectly well that he doesn’t understand it, until he starts crying. Then I stop and take off my divorce watch and hand it to him, saying:
“You can keep it.”
“Wet,” he says.
I fasten the watch around his wrist.
“We’ll stop soon and buy an ice cream and a postcard to send to your mommy in hospital.”
“Fly,” the boy says distinctly from the back seat as we’re about to drive off.
He’s right; something is fluttering in the car, not a fly as it happens but a butterfly, in late November. Could this butterfly have travelled with us all the way from the city and might it even be the same insect I touched with the tip of my fingers three weeks ago in my old kitchen? Like a stowaway it finally decides to give itself up and come out of its hiding place, because the ship is too far out at sea by now to be able to turn back.
A red blinking sign suddenly appears in the middle of the sand desert to inform us of our next stop. Hot dog and hamburger joints line the Ring Road at twenty-five-kilometre intervals. When I open the back door for Tumi to unfasten his seat belt, I notice he’s written two words on the misty glass: wet fly.
A bus is parked in the car park and we order hamburgers, after which I push Tumi ahead of me in the queue for the ladies’ toilet, undo the buttons on his overalls and he is ready to go. The women accompanying the Estonian choir stand in a single row in knitted sweaters, brandishing hairbrushes in the air and eyeing us through the mirrors, without breaking up the queue.
As soon as he’s done, I tell him to wait for me, not to budge, stay by the door.
When I come out, the boy is gone. The bus has driven off and, in state of panic, I ask the waitresses if they’ve seen a four-year-old hearing-impaired boy in blue overalls. They look at each other in silence. I run all over the place, thinking of him not being able to express himself, imagining him being taken away in a stranger’s car. Finally, I find him behind a shed in the yard where empty petrol tanks are stored. He’s holding the hand of a middle-aged man with a red face. They both look happy and timid. I drag the boy away from the man and give him a piece of my mind, telling him that I’ll report him for I don’t know what. The man hops into his red van and drives off.
“Daddy,” says the boy.
That wasn’t the boy’s father, that’s for sure. Both of the fathers of Auður’s children are young, handsome, sensitive men, but totally irresponsible.
In my hysteria I fail to catch his number plate.
The boy doesn’t want to talk to me and hides under a sleeping bag in the back seat. I rush back in to buy the postcard, my eyes firmly glued to the car and the kid inside. They only sell two postcards and they’re both of a waterfall I’m told is somewhere close by. The photos were taken so close to the waterfall that pearls of water can be seen on the lens. When I get back to the vehicle, the boy’s head re-emerges from under the sleeping bag. But no matter how hard we look, we can’t find the butterfly. It’s vanished into thin air.
THIRTY-FOUR
The road suddenly narrows, the pavement ends and gravel takes over. Visibility is down to about three metres through the windscreen wipers and movie songs are being played on the radio before the death notices and commercials. I pump up the volume when a woman starts to sing about suffering and love. Piensa en mi cuando sufras, think of me when you suffer.
There is a river behind us and another one ahead; that makes two single-lane bridges and, as if it were possible, the road is growing even narrower. The number of holes multiplies and cavities deepen. The road meanders on, with a slope and curve ahead of us. Fully focused, I navigate my way between road signs, first warning me of a blind rise and curve ahead and then of a single-lane bridge—that’s National Highway One for you.
As far as I can make out, there is no one else out on this Tuesday morning, apart from the sheep, of course. Normally, by this time of the year, the sheep would all already be indoors, being fed on fodder, but because the weather has been so unusually mild they’re still rubbing up against the sides of the roads and bridge posts. Sometimes they stand in the middle of the road and stare into the headlights of approaching cars with their bloodshot eyes, looking straight at you without so much as flinching. Family clusters usually spread themselves on either side of the road, with the mother and granny sheep on one side and the smaller ones on the other. But when a car approaches they feel an irresistible urge to reunite, and leap off tussocks, the edges of bridges or other hiding places like foreign soldiers, armed to the teeth, waiting to ambush women and children on their way home from church or the bakery. The same pattern repeats itself forty times a day: sheep dash across the road and I screech to a halt. Then, on the forty-first time, the inevitable happens: the animal catches me off guard, appears out of nowhere in the fog and is hurled up against the hood of the car.
When I brake, the animal slides off the hood onto the road, into the mud. The windscreen cracks into thin threads, spreading like crocheted lacework or a spider’s web, spun by a woman. And then shatters. The windscreen wipers continue to swing to and fro, and the small church, which was only glued to the dashboard with craft glue, stands intact.
It is precisely at that moment that it first dawns on me that I am a woman caught in a finely interwoven pattern of feelings and time, that there are many things going on simultaneously that have a significance to my life, that events don’t just simply occur in a linear sequence, but on several planes of thought, dreams and feelings at the same time, that there is a moment at the heart of every moment. It is only much later that a thread through the turmoil that has occurred will emerge. It is precisely in this manner that the destinies of a woman and a beast can intersect. The woman is listening to a Spanish love lament and glances through the rear-view mirror to see how her deaf travelling companion is dealing with his chocolate milk and banana when, at that very same moment, a sheep decides to step onto the road in front of the car, or suddenly panics—how should I know what goes through the mind of a thoroughbred Icelandic sheep? Time is a movie in slow motion.
Maybe I’m ten minutes behind schedule because I lingered under the shower for too long or maybe I’m ten minutes ahead? In any case, if it hadn’t occurred to me to take a summer vacation in November, if I hadn’t won a prefabricated summer bungalow in the Deaf Association’s lottery, if I hadn’t met my ex at the time I did, if I hadn’t been sent east into the country every summer until I was fourteen years old, and if I hadn’t had cultured milk with my muesli for breakfast, I wouldn’t be here right now, but somewhere else, I’d be someone else. I’d probably still be on my leather sofa in the old living room, sitting beside my ex, watching a live war somewhere in the world on TV. That precise moment in time—17:11—at which I ran over that sheep on the Ring Road is intrinsically linked to my entire existence, the incidents, decisions I’ve made, my taste in food, sleeping habits. Because it’s impossible to say many words at once, things seem to happen one after another, events get divided into categories of words, which take on the form of horizontal lines in my narrative when I phone Auður to tell her the news. In practice, though, the connection between words and incidents is of a completely different nature. I don’t say any of this to her over the phone, however. She’s got enough to deal with as it is. No, no one was hurt, except for the sheep that is, who is no longer of this world. Yes, it’s true what she’s saying: at least I slaughtered the sheep faster than the nomadic shepherds in Siberia do; they shove their arm into the beast and grope inside it until they find its aorta and rip it out. Moreover, it’s a skill that commands respect. She’s worried about Tumi—but not because he is in my care—and worried about me, worried about her mom and worried about her unborn children, the health system, her students, and the bad roads on the island, worried about the wars and greed of the world, worried that she’s not allowed to play the accordion—her
only outlet in all this waiting—in the bed of the room she shares with four women. Instead, she’s forced to listen to the Bible on tapes. In fact, she’d reached the Book of Job 14:7 when I call.
“So I’m getting my fair share of suffering here,” she says.
I scan the horizon, not a car in sight; the road is deserted, the whole area is deserted, the island seems uninhabited. It figures; I’m driving through a constituency that distinguished itself in the last local elections for its exceptionally good turnout at the polls. Ninety-seven per cent of the electorate, both men and women, voted, that is to say thirty-three individuals. I picked up that tidbit from the local newspaper.
I leap out of the car and first check the trunk. It’s full, so I drag the beast into the passenger seat. It’s a lot heavier than the child. The boy has thrown up and his vomit is quivering on the dashboard. The whole car is in a mess, might as well sell it and buy a new one, as soon as I get a chance.
Black with white rings around its eyes, it makes an odd-looking sheep. It almost looks like a unicorn, since it only has one fully formed horn and the other is little more than a stump. Her extended family bleats in protest before dispersing in the November rain. The bloody carcass rattles in the passenger seat, but I have no choice but to drive it to the next farm, and slip a CD into the player: O mio babbino caro, an aria by Puccini. It’s getting dark again. I open two gates and drive towards a cluster of houses at the foot of the mountain, with wet soiled fingers.
Butterflies in November Page 13