The heat and humidity are rising, the men have slipped their jackets onto the backs of their chairs, people are starting to touch, collide, rub against each other and step on each other’s toes—the pairing off for the night has begun.
The owner of the falcon suddenly reappears again and sits down beside me in the corner.
“Hi again,” he says, “did I miss much?”
“Loads, how did the caesarean go?”
“Well, it was a white calf with red spots, just like its mother.”
“Was that your son?”
“No, he’s the son of some friends; he was helping me out today so I invited him here for a meal at the Pizzeria Space.”
He has booked a night for himself and the bird in room thirteen, which is just opposite ours in the corridor. When we get upstairs, the door is open and the boy has vanished from his bed. The box is still on the table. We run up and down the full length of the corridor, up and down the stairs, and rush to warn the staff at the reception desk that a child has disappeared from his bed. I’m so irresponsible and careless. There’s no one at the reception desk. I think I hear a gunshot outside the hotel. A drunken guest reports seeing a dwarf in elephant pyjamas somewhere backstage. And that’s where we find him, wide awake, holding the kitten in his arms, beside the striptease artist, who has almost completely changed back into her civilian clothing again.
The man from the bridge carries the boy upstairs, as I hold the kitten. The bird needs to be moved into the other room, but as soon as we approach room ten we notice something odd: the door is ajar, the window wide open and the fluttering curtains are more perforated than I remember. The box is still on the table but there’s no sign of life inside. The bird is dead inside the cage—heart attack, says the expert, his plumage is still intact at any rate. We all move into room thirteen and leave the box in number ten until morning.
The girl at the reception desk can offer no explanation for how the lead pellets got through the open window. The male choir is sitting at the breakfast table with sombre faces.
“Well there might have been some shooting last night,” she finally concedes with some reluctance, “the guests from the dam might have been trying to shoot some snow buntings to throw on the grill, the way they do back in their home countries.”
FORTY
I settle the whole business over the phone and get the car dealer to take the old car back and send the box of chocolates that is included in the offer to my friend in maternity ward 22b.
We wait for the brand-new car to arrive across the desert before the evening, before setting off with some hot cocoa in the thermos. I get a thirty-five per cent discount off the hotel bill because of the pellet holes in the curtains, an extra fifteen per cent because of the noise caused by the ball during the night and another fifteen per cent because there were no staff available to enable me to change rooms, thus forcing me to move into the vet’s room for the night.
“Not that it would have changed much,” says the girl at the reception desk, “we were fully booked.” She then offers to wash and dry one load of clothes while we are waiting. The hotel manager hasn’t resurfaced yet, even though we’re well into the afternoon.
The boy shows considerable interest in the jeep when it arrives and gloats on it with the other men, kicking its wheels, as I transfer our things from one car to the other. He has slipped both hands into the pockets of his overalls. The hotel staff are very impressed by this exchange of vehicles out in the middle of nowhere. We don’t have much further to travel now; tonight we’ll be sleeping in the newly planted bungalow on the edge of a ravine.
“Thanks for last night,” a voice close to my ear says, “it was nice to meet you, are you leaving then?”
They all say the same thing, “Thank you for your stay.”
“Sorry about the bird,” I say.
“And the pellet shots,” he adds.
“Yeah.”
“The rest wasn’t so bad.”
“No, the rest wasn’t so bad.”
We formally say goodbye to each other by the car. The hotel staff form a semicircle at the bottom of the steps, like the servants of a manor bidding farewell to a distinguished guest. The boy stands beside me and stares up at us, looking from face to face. He seems anxious:
“Can animals be handicapped?”
Being his personal sworn interpreter, I translate the expert’s answers for my protégé:
“More often than not, they die shortly after birth. If not, they’re normally put down fairly soon. Some of them are stuffed and end up in a natural history museum. A lot of people are fascinated by the sight of two-headed Siamese lambs and five-legged pigs.”
I loosely interpret for him.
“What about deaf horses, are they stuffed too?”
“No, I don’t ever remember coming across that in my work. But some friends of mine have two handicapped dogs that they are very fond of, a mother who is blind and a female puppy who’s a dwarf. Their son is that boy who was with me yesterday.”
“Is he an adopted son?” I think I might have then asked him, but I probably didn’t, because I hear the vet asking me when we can meet again.
“I’m not sure that would be very sensible,” I answer. “I was thinking of spending a month on my own. Alone with Tumi,” I add.
“Well, if you happen to change your mind, I’d be delighted, my wife spends a lot of time away because of her work.”
Before saying goodbye he leans over my shoulder, as if he were peering at the sand desert ahead of us, and murmurs into my ear:
“I know what you’re looking for, but I wouldn’t stir anything up, if I were you. The past should be left in the past. But I can tell you that he has a gift for languages and is scared of heights. He hopes to study abroad one day.”
FORTY-ONE
The boy is asleep in the back seat under two down sleeping bags. Unusually, the kitten is awake and restless; maybe it’s carsick or the tuna fish sandwich, which had passed its expiry date, from the hotel didn’t go down too well in its stomach. As for me, I’m quite content with my lot, my glistening new car, the darkness and the heater that is working full blast.
I slip a disc into the brand-new CD player: a pantomime ballet by Béla Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin. I shove the receipt I’ve folded into eight into the pocket of my flowery trousers.
Apart from the flowery trousers, I mostly dressed as a boy.
“Yes, you were one of the boys,” says Granny. “You cut your hair like them, dressed like them and wore the same chequered brown sweater over your shirt all summer.” I can’t remember whether it was washed in the autumn when I got back to town or thrown away.
In stores I was addressed as a male. There was a constant stream of guests at my gran and grandad’s place. And plenty of room, no matter how much of a squeeze it was. They even lent their own conjugal bed, if the need arose. People weren’t supposed to stay in hotels; that was for foreigners. In August, all the kids from the area would gather, all the children that had been sent to the neighbouring farms in the name of good health and getting in touch with our rural roots, and we would spend the last week of our stay in the east in my granny’s blue house down by the shore. That is where I would pass my time with my cousins, who weren’t necessarily really my cousins, but also the grandchildren of some of Granny’s old friends. No one actually knew exactly how we were supposed to be related to each other. Nevertheless, I called them cousins and they called me cousin too, although most of them were clearly unrelated to me. As the number of people increased in the house, we squeezed in tighter together and moved between bedrooms, as required, or up into the attic, with our synthetic quilts or blankets folded under our arms. Children under the age of fifteen slept without a down quilt. There were often fights for space that stretched long into the night. The main goal was to tightly
wrap one’s self in the synthetic duvet without the slightest draught.
I’d promised to get up first in the morning and heat up the cocoa and butter the scones. This meant that I had to stand up in the middle of the mattress and grope my way forward, balancing my arms like a tightrope artist, to avoid stumbling on the crowded mattress and get out of there without stepping on any calves, knees or, worse still, entire bodies.
As soon as I stand up with my hands in the air, I realize that the waistband on my pyjama bottom has snapped and the waist cord has slipped back into the furbelow during the night. I’m wearing nothing underneath because Granny is washing all my clothes. I clutch the waistband in the hope of saving myself any embarrassment and try to avoid waking up my cousins, but then realize that they are both awake and lying stiffly, on either side of the bed, watching my every move with new adult eyes.
I slow down, barely going over forty tonight. The mountain pass road twists and turns. Suddenly there is yet another pile of rubble ahead of us, a landslip that has crumbled from the side of the mountain, which stretches into the sea below. The car skids and adrenaline shoots through my body. There is no mistake about it; a mudslide has fallen onto the road in front of us, forming a pile of stones and sludge. Not a soul in sight and no way of turning back, a sleeping child in the back and a wakeful kitten in the front. There’s a shovel in the trunk, I noticed it when I was packing the car. As soon as I clear away some of those rocks and push all that mud to one side, I should be able to get past. If the kitten and I were to slip, at least I would have someone to hold onto for eternity; but the thought of the fate of my passenger in the back seat is just too overwhelming, the responsibility is paralysing.
I can’t really boast of any clairvoyant powers, but suddenly a man springs out of the darkness and fog—the third man on my road to the east—seemingly materializing out of nowhere. Standing before me, he hurls himself into the beams of my headlights, like the sheep, except that this time the car isn’t moving. He is so real, in fact, that it seems perfectly natural when he grabs the shovel from me and spares me the trouble of having to clear the mud away.
That’s how far a woman’s imagination can take her. His voice is clearly too deep for a man of this world.
“Are you travelling east?” it asks. It’s painfully obvious that I’m heading east, since the road runs from west to east, like a coffin on the floor of a church.
“Could you take me some of the way?” he asks, “I’m stranded here.”
He pulls out a silver flask and offers it to me first, as a token gesture, before taking a sip. As I drive, he tells me tales about country folk, most of them containing some supernatural element, stories of departed souls, guardian spirits, premonitions, shipwrecks. In between stories he praises my driving and tells me that, when he was a boy, he intended to grow up to be something other than what he is today.
“Are you a fisherman?” I ask.
“I don’t practise my casting in the winter or make my own flies, if that’s what you mean. Blood and entrails aren’t really my thing, although I can gut a fish and stuff a bird. They’d probably put me in telecommunications if we were at war, or directing operations from some safe shelter away from headquarters. No, I was just helping a friend of mine who’s cultivating a patch of land up there by the dam. We were planting dwarf apple trees under the cover of night.”
As he’s sitting there beside me, for a brief moment I feel a peculiar familiarity between us, as if he were closely connected to me, and my mind was trying to recall what my body clearly remembered. Once we’ve passed the mudslide, I know what he’s going to say:
“Come with me, I want to show you something,” he says in a very persuasive voice.
I stop the car. The boy is asleep in the back seat and will sleep until dawn. The headlights illuminate a stretch of path through the lava field. The glistening blue pumice squelches under the soles of his hiking boots as he walks. A woman in high heels would have a hard job keeping up with him.
I follow him blindly through the lava field, as naturally as one would follow a clerk to the screw and bolts section of a hardware store, without, however, ever taking my eyes off the car on the side of the road.
He is wearing a red shirt under his coat. The weather has cleared, with puffs of vapour hovering over cavities here and there, and tips of lava rock piercing through the moss. The moon follows us like a balloon, bouncing from the rim of one crater to the next, rebounding against our heels, rolling over the undulating igneous rock and swelling with every change of direction, like the pupil of an eye, with the golden glow of its sclera reflecting on our necks.
Suddenly, the moon vanishes behind a cloud and the world plummets into darkness again.
“I can’t be long, seven minutes at the most; I can’t stay away from the boy for too long.”
“We’re almost there.” He scans the rocks to find a spot where he can relieve himself, since he has been drinking on the way.
We forge on, step by step, with about fifty metres behind us now. I would never have believed that darkness could be this black. It’s as if I were walking across that creaking wooden beam back in my old gym, and were trying to hold my balance at its centre with both arms, the other girls watching me in silence. This is how far a woman’s feelings can lead her.
I can no longer see anything, nothing but the hot vapour of my own breath in front of me. I grope forward, but my hands grasp nothing but a vacuum, the pitch darkness ahead of me is a thick wall that can’t be followed because it delineates nothing, protects nothing, there is no way of distinguishing the outline of the world or its edges, the rugged lava field gives off no scent. Nevertheless I sense there is something extraordinary just a few arm lengths away from us, but what?
“What do you want to show me?”
“This,” he says.
“This what?”
“The darkness.”
“The darkness?”
“Yes, you’re a city girl aren’t you?”
I sense a colossal human construction in the middle of the darkness, and try to conjure up an image in mind. What kind of picture is it, though? A gothic cathedral that suddenly rises to the heavens in some old red-light district abroad, suddenly standing there, sky-high, at the end of a narrow paved road with dark, smelly corners. I’m standing on the edge of the imaginary, on the edge of the fear of darkness. The only thing one can do is grope for another human being. Suddenly I feel it is perfectly natural for him to slip his arm around me and for me to lay my head on his shoulder.
He has started to undress me in the drizzle, with swiftness and skill, ankles and wrists, zippers and tight necklines are no challenge to him. He spends the most time wrestling with my panties, which become entangled in his hands. It’s a little cold, but he throws a coat under me and rolls me over back and forth. A lava bed may seem like an odd mattress, but in his own way this man has created a secure shelter for me, with the heavens above us and the earth below, and the two of us sandwiched in between—could one ask for more security?
Afterwards we linger a moment, sitting in the middle of the lava field. He rests his head on my shoulder and I kiss him, as if he were a child about to doze off. When he stands up he hands me a little stone containing the bright shape of a horseshoe in its centre.
“Next time, it’ll be a silver belt or crock of gold.” He smiles at me.
“I can take care of myself from here on,” he says to me, once we’ve retraced our steps. “But I’ll come looking for you later,” he adds, “you’re the best thing that’s happened to me today by far.”
FORTY-TWO
Many consequential events can occur in a woman’s life in the space of less than twenty-four hours. Most mistakes are made in a fraction of a moment and can be measured in seconds: taking a wrong turn, stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake, saying a yes instead of a no o
r a maybe. Mistakes are rarely the outcome of a logical sequence of decisions. A woman can be on the brink of total surrender to love, for instance, without even pondering on it for so much as a minute.
The black desert is no longer ahead but behind us, and the summer bungalow isn’t far off now, just one more little fjord and a heath. As I’m driving through yet another low-hanging cloud, all the way down to the lava rocks, it suddenly dawns on me that I am midway between the beginning and the end. I can’t quite decide whether to measure the distance in years or kilometres. There certainly seems to be enough space ahead of me and plenty of time, and ample time behind me too. By not following the movement of the hands on my divorce watch, and by circling the island anti-clockwise, I have not only gained a head start over time, but also managed to constantly surprise and even, ultimately, catch up with myself.
If one were to summarize my experiences so far on this journey, one could say that I have caused the death of four animals (five if the city goose is to be included) and that I have successfully crossed forty single-lane bridges, tackled some difficult slopes and become intimately acquainted with three men over a stretch of little more than 300 kilometres, most of which was unpaved and literally wedged between the mountains and the coastline. Even though the first 100 kilometres were fairly uneventful in this regard and I expect no major surprises in the last 100-kilometre stretch, it was nevertheless almost equal in intensity to the past ten years of my life combined. The fact that I couldn’t tell you how many churches we passed on our journey may be indicative of my moral standing. I would have bought the souvenir glued to my dashboard no matter what it was, even a carved wooden model of a police station or a bank.
Butterflies in November Page 16