Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  I see the familiar figure of a man standing outside in the car park, holding a big bag. It’s my friend from the landslide. The rainbow-coloured reflections of the Christmas lights shimmer in the puddles. Tumi is standing right up close to him, holding onto his exclusive outdoors jacket, and once more I hear him say Daddy in a resonant voice. The man doesn’t budge, but stands there as naturally as if he’d been waiting for his son and wife, who rushes out after her child. I see him stroking the boy’s head and then back-stepping slightly to crouch down and speak to him in sign language. The boy is taken aback; he is more used to talking to people who don’t know sign language, but suddenly has something to say with his hands, face and whole body. Who would have thought that so many images could have fitted into such a small, pale body?

  “Hi, how are you, did you think I was an elf?”

  “The thought had crossed my mind.”

  “I wouldn’t mind experiencing more of those tales with you.”

  At that same moment, the clerk emerges from the store room with the bicycle, carrying it over to the car. He has finished screwing the training wheels to it. My friend and I stand in silence, side by side, and watch the boy clamber onto the seat of the bike and cycle between the puddles in the midday twilight, like proud and slightly apprehensive parents releasing their offspring into the world for the very first time.

  When I’ve loaded everything into the jeep and am about to drive off, he says:

  “I can teach you sign language if you like, give you some private tuition, I have a deaf sister. The boy can play with my dog in the meantime, she’s very gentle, tolerant and child-friendly. She’s about to have puppies soon so she’s a bit sensitive and not in the mood for too much horseplay right now.”

  With the hint of a smile, he opens his bag slightly to allow me to peep inside. There can be no possible doubt: red, white, black, a coat, beard, belt, furry lining—yet another Santa costume.

  “I was just collecting it from the dry-cleaner’s, the season is about to begin. This is the second time I’ve been appointed as a Santa Claus, obviously because I’m not a local. Children get suspicious when they meet their fathers in disguise and die of shame when they see them making fools of themselves in public. Families have plenty of other problems to be dealing with,” he says with his alluring smile. “Besides, makes a nice break from my routine, getting to be someone else. This’ll be my last Christmas here; then I will have had the change I needed in my life.” He combs his hand through his thick, unruly hair and looks up towards the mountain road, as if he were trying to find his escape route.

  As we say goodbye, he tells me he’ll come and visit us one night, when the boy is in bed in his pyjamas and about to drift into his dreams.

  “Then I’ll knock on your window and sing a song or tell you a story. Unlike many of my fellow Santas, I have the advantage of being able to play the accordion. If nothing else I can slip a little gift into his shoe.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  There are two bedrooms in the chalet and we sleep in one of them with two gas heaters. Tumi is responsible, and we help each other to clear up and make things cosy in the newly planted chalet that smells of Norwegian wood. Water runs out of the tap when it is turned. Through the window, there is a view of the Ring Road.

  We play outside in the ten-degree heatwave, sheltered from the rain by the edge of the roof, which stretches over the deck.

  He adroitly cycles in clean ellipses and by now has mastered the skill of taking sharp turns on the training wheels. He rings his bell every time he passes the deckchair I’m lying in, studying the conjugation of sign language verbs. He can hear the bell too. I wave at him and sip on some hot tea.

  It’s important to address the verb to the right person, the book tells me; that seems pretty logical to me.

  Tumi nods his head to indicate that he’s understood me, that I’m making progress, he’s a good teacher. He just doesn’t have the time to talk to me at the moment, we can’t always be yakking together, because he needs to use his hands for something else. He has started to draw.

  I suggest we go off on a reconnaissance mission and fill the thermos with cocoa. We take an extra cup with us.

  The murderer who slaughtered his brother is now ageing in the Geriatric Health Centre. He chisels pieces of wood and makes children’s toys to keep himself busy and kill time until he goes to meet his brother. We are escorted down a corridor to his bedroom, which faces the mountain road. An odd odour hovers in the air, a mixture of strong detergents and weary personal objects that have been removed from their original setting: a chest of drawers, chair, kitchen clock and old family photos in silver frames. A large portrait of his departed brother hangs over his bed. He receives us in chequered slippers.

  The table in the bedroom is crowded with little carved figures, skinny, elongated beings with no ears. Their eyes are the heads of nails that have been hammered into them and sometimes pierce their necks. Garments have been painted onto their carved bodies in red, blue and green. On the bedside table, two porcelain hands intertwine to form a ceramic flame. I was later to discover more lamps of this kind around the village. I unscrew the lid of the thermos and pour cocoa into the two men’s cups. They sit side by side close to the bed. There’s eighty years between them.

  “I remember your granny very well, she was so gentle and shy, your granny was, when she was a young girl. We used to pop in there sometimes, me and my brother, to drink some coffee with a sugar cube and jam cake.”

  He cautiously sips the cocoa from his cup, sinking into a long silence.

  “She was a warm lady with a serene mind, your granny was, never judged anyone. That was an accident with my brother Dagfinnur. And the woman who took the child was good too. Your granny was a bit upset by the whole business. That it all should have happened while the girl was staying with her.”

  He takes another sip from the cup and shuts up; he’s got nothing more to add.

  I tell him I’ve come to take a look at the toys. He doesn’t have that many at the moment, but he pulls out a truck with a red cabin and rubber wheels—beside his chamber pot.

  “These aren’t obligatory,” he says, “but I can’t be bothered getting up five times every night. Some of my mates have sinks in their rooms that they can piss into, not me.”

  No such thing as privacy in here, everything is public knowledge. He ties some string to the truck with his trembling hands so that the boy can tow it down the linoleum floor in the corridor.

  FORTY-SIX

  An almost imperceptible high-pitched sound awakens me in the total darkness of the night. I sit up to locate its source. No doubt about it, the boy is humming in his sleep in a different voice to the one he uses during the day. His duvet is on the floor. As soon as I pull it back over him, the sound seems to be cut off. He sits up, awake.

  “I’m blind.”

  He gropes through the air, searching for his thick-lensed glasses, and I turn on the light so that he can see me talking to him.

  “It’s night time,” I tell him, “it’s dark. I can’t see anything either. There are no pictures at night. Shall I tell you a story? Shall we invent a story together?” I try to create a story for him, speaking slowly and clearly, using the sign language I have learnt.

  “No,” he says, “not like that.”

  Every time I try to pick up the narrative thread again, he protests. He wants the story to be different. Finally he buries his head under the pillow, he doesn’t want a story. He just wants me to go away. I lift the pillow.

  “Don’t you want to know how it ends?”

  “No.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Maybe,” he says unenthusiastically.

  “Do you want to sleep in my bed? Do you want to climb in with me?” This is the permission he was waiting for. He swiftly bolts up again and drops
his feet to the floor.

  He takes his pillow with him and plonks it right beside mine. Then he fetches three fluffy animals, which he carefully lines up on the bed, side by side, with the smallest one wedged between the other two. I grab his duvet.

  “Tomorrow we’ll go down the ravine with the truck and the shovel and we’ll build a dam in the stream,” I say, moving over in the bed to give him and his animals more space.

  “Then we’ll make pancakes and go for a swim.”

  When I wake up in the morning, the boy has disappeared and is nowhere to be seen. His duvet is still warm. I search for him everywhere and then rush outside calling his name, but naturally he can’t hear me. I run around everywhere in my boots and the white woollen sweater I’ve thrown over my silk nightdress, and then clamber down the ravine. Finally I see him silhouetted against the faint twilight, in his bare feet and Superman pyjamas, standing on a rock by the stream. He doesn’t budge, even after I’ve walked right up to him.

  When I phone Auður, she confesses to me that Tumi’s quest for his father started one day when she collected him from kindergarten. That was when he’d asked who his father was and why he didn’t come to collect him.

  “‘It’s a long story, I’ll tell you it when you’re five,’ I told him. That’s next autumn, so at least I have a year’s respite. Then, a few days later, as I was standing in a bookshop in town, the boy threw himself at a man who was a few places ahead of us in the line, wrapping his arms around one of his legs and endlessly repeating Dad Dad Dad. It was pretty embarrassing, not least because it was that sports presenter on TV, the one who always gets on my nerves. After that, he played the same trick on several other men, all very different from each other. It’s totally unpredictable, like his sleepwalking.”

  We say no more on the matter and she asks me to help her find a word, an adjective to qualify something that falls on mankind, although not necessarily something of a meteorological nature, like rain, but a word associated with the apocalypse of the human soul and heart, but not in any direct way, more indirectly, like rain in the soul and nature oozing tears, she explains to me. Something like the smell of a birch tree in the rain, just one word. The obstetrician claims that no word could encompass that much, no single word could ever be that big.

  “Could you think about it and give me a call tomorrow and maybe look up the ancient Greeks for me, if you get a chance, when Tumi falls asleep tonight?” The connection is rather poor and Auður’s voice sounds like she’s 5,000 miles away, although I can hear that she’s on a high, happy with her life and the weather.

  “I’ve ripped off my clothes here,” she goes on, “and I’m about to go out into the rain in nothing but my socks to roll myself in the grass, just for the sake of breaking up the monotonous view patients have of the lawn. Too bad if the people in this ward have never seen a happy future single mother of three before. I recommend you do the same,” she adds. “They’re all at a meeting right now, trying to work out whether I should stay in the maternity ward or be transferred to the psychiatric one, just because I’m happy. If I die tonight I’ll die happy. Then there’s always a chance I’ll die giving birth to my twins.”

  The voice has almost faded down the line. She has started to cry:

  “I’m so scared of him sleepwalking, of him wandering into the water. I want to ask you not to sleep anywhere too close to the sea. Don’t go anywhere near water or snow with him.”

  Then, switching topics, she adds: “Did you know that in the Bible there are 153 references to the past, but only fifteen to the future?”

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Darkness looms over the pool and butter-coloured vapours dissolve into the sombre misty November sky above, as faces vanish and materialize, the diving board only half visible in the haze.

  The best way to establish any real intimacy with the inhabitants of this village is in the hot tub, the best way to meet one’s fellow man is in this natural primeval state, where each person is as vulnerable as the next. Huddled together in a tight jacuzzi with my knees pressed against my chest, I can feel the burning warmth of strangers’ bodies in the sulphurous mist. This is pretty much the state God created me in thirty-three years ago, if one adds the swimsuit, sexual longings, life experience and obsessive memories.

  People have just got off work and are tired. The summer colours have been drained from their bodies, and they’ve grown all pale and flabby again. Everyone reeks of the same blend of chlorine, this is about as equal as people can get. Most of them are with packs of small children who putter about in the baby pool, mostly unsupervised. The majority of the infants, who wear diapers on dry land, have clearly learnt how to float a good while ago. Next summer they plan to enlarge the pool and build a slide for the children and their fathers.

  As Tumi is putting on his new swimming trunks under the shower, he says he wants to be like me. Be like me, I get that much.

  “What do you mean like me?”

  I think he says woman.

  I slip two armbands onto him to make sure he always returns to the surface.

  “I want you to stay put right here,” I say, trying to improvise the appropriate sign language with my hands.

  “Stay put, only play in the splashing pool.”

  He jumps up and down into the shallowest part of the pool, releasing all kinds of joyous shrieks, which he himself can’t hear. He is utterly transformed without his glasses and hearing aids, and looks even smaller and skinnier. His facial features seem to lose the sharpness his spectacle frames give them and blur into each other. I remind myself to pop into a store on the way home to buy some protein powder to stir into his cocoa.

  I’ve never seen him this lively. He spatters and splashes and makes the jet of the fountain arch over the other children, who huddle together at the other end, following his moves with mute gaping mouths, wondering whether they should get their own back by pushing him under the surface or emptying a bucket of water over his head. At any rate, this seems to be the only kind of communication Tumi is interested in.

  I’m taken aback by the number of tattoos in the tubs, both on the women and men. Virtually all the women have intricate motifs around their arms, and many of the men sport tattooed outlines of reindeer horns in the same area. There were also plenty of tattoos in the swimming pool on the other side of the sand desert, 150 kilometres from here, but the patterns are different over there, mainly of animals and roses.

  “If we’re heading for a reversal of the poles,” says a man in the tub, “we’ll have to refigure what’s north and what’s south again, compasses won’t be reliable any more.”

  “I can bring you the recipe tomorrow, if you like,” says another woman. “Instead of using ordinary crème fraîche, you can use bacon flavouring.”

  “You’ll never have any fun in this life, if you’re never willing to try something new,” an elderly man interjects.

  “But you don’t necessarily always have fun, just because you’re trying something new,” chips in another woman.

  “No, I’m not saying that one always has to be trying something new,” says the man.

  “But it’s also true that you’ll never see anything new if you never go anywhere,” says the woman.

  “Exactly, one has to go somewhere to see something new,” says the man.

  “Yes, to meet new kindred spirits,” says the woman.

  “Exactly.”

  As I shift towards the massaging jet of the jacuzzi, I accidentally brush against the hairs of a man’s thighs. This earns me a stern look from one of the ladies; she’s not happy. I’m on the point of telling her that I didn’t do it on purpose.

  There are clearly several specimens of the opposite sex in here. Not that I’m shopping for men. It’s not as if I were eyeing them, in search of potential candidates, as that woman’s censorious glare seemed to imply. It’s not
as if I’m looking for anything special in this village. All I want is a break and a change. To take a long-overdue summer holiday in November.

  The furthest I go is to loosely compare the men in my direct line of vision in the tub with my ex-husband, but only very roughly, glancing at their outlines. He’s starting to fade. I really have to concentrate to summon him up in my mind.

  There must have been problems interpreting the sign in the locker room that says in five languages that all patrons are required to shower nude before entering the pool, because five explosive experts from the dam construction site have just appeared at the edge of the pool, stark naked. The lifeguard chases them vigorously with his whistle as they climb the ladder in a single file to the diving board. This brings the conversation in the tub to an abrupt halt, as all eyes turn to the men’s fronts and behinds.

  “They need to have that sign in forty languages, since they’ve started work on that dam,” says a woman wearily. She’s no longer staring at me.

  I close my eyes.

  When I open them again, a new crowd has entered the tub.

  Another man is sitting opposite me in the mist. I glance at him, unable to distinguish his face, and have to squint through my wet lock of hair for some time before I realize that it’s him again—the man from the landslide. The elf looks back at me with a teasing air, as if he’d been waiting for me to discover him and manifest my surprise. He seems a bit tense, though, slightly awkward, even a bit shy perhaps. I smile at him and shift, as a fresh jet of hot water spurts out from a pipe on the wall.

  He returns the smile, but then starts talking to a woman who has been waiting for the opportunity to say something important to him. I close my eyes again and stretch back in the water, allowing my head to rest on the edge of the tub. I’m beginning to be able to picture myself living in this dark place, even if the mountain road is impassable and nothing seems to happen here.