Butterflies in November

by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

  “You’re just on time,” he says. “Food is ready.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  As I’m posting my latest translation, I take the opportunity to give Mom a call. I realize it’s not very sensible to have no phone, with Tumi in my care. What if he had an ear infection and I had to call a doctor? He wouldn’t know how to cope if something happened to me. He might run up the moor on his own instead of finding his way down to the village. I’ll buy a phone and immediately write down the emergency number for him on a piece of paper this evening and stick it on the wall beside Hercules.

  “What kind of a man is he?”

  “What man?”

  “I wasn’t born yesterday, you haven’t phoned for two weeks, we were getting really worried.”

  “He’s divorced, has two kids.”

  “Does he still talk about his ex-wife?”

  “Hardly ever, he showed me a picture of her, though.”

  “He showed you a picture? He isn’t over her yet.”

  “She was standing between their two daughters in the photo, he couldn’t have cut her out.”

  “I’ve collected some clippings for you.”

  “Mom, I’m still in Iceland, they get all the papers here too, you know.”

  “You don’t read them.”

  “They speak Icelandic here, if it weren’t for the flooding I could be at your place for coffee this evening.”

  “I’ve given up coffee; I’ve made some changes in my life.”

  “Anyway, I’ve got plenty to read and do with Tumi. He’s learning how to dance and embroider.”

  “Is that what you’re teaching that fatherless boy? To dance and embroider? I’ve no recollection of ever seeing you embroider, neither as a child nor an adult.”

  “It’s just simple cross-stitching. I let him try whatever he feels like. We bought a pattern with the picture of a horse; he wanted to embroider a blind horse.”

  “A blind horse?

  “Yes, we altered the pattern slightly and closed the horse’s eyes with the same colour as the crest, we’ve only changed it by four stitches altogether.”

  I don’t tell her that he also swaps the colours, that he’s made its tail bright red and used the green yarn that was supposed to be applied to the grass on the mane, and that he then wanders with the yarn between different parts of the horse’s body, jumping from the unfinished head to the withers to do some stitching there and then skips to its flanks, which he chooses to stitch in sun-yellow.

  “We’re mainly learning ballroom dancing and free style.”

  “Don’t you need some food?”

  “They have shops here just like anywhere else on the island, we get plenty.”

  There is a long silence at the other end of the line. Tumi is getting restless in the play corner of the post office, having assembled the twelve remaining building cubes in every possible combination and being eager to move on to the promised visit to the bakery next door, where there are round tables and chairs and they serve hot bagels with cream cheese and cocoa.

  “Anyway, Mom, I’ll talk to you again soon. Tumi is waving at you as we speak, we’re at the post office, I’m at a payphone.”

  There’s a silence at the other end of the line. Finally, she speaks again:

  “I heard from Thorsteinn yesterday, he was pretty down and didn’t look too good. He’s not a happy man.”

  “I thought you said you’d heard from him, not that you’d seen him.”

  “Well, he just popped by. We’re worried about you, you just vanished.”

  “I’ve stopped thinking about Thorsteinn; right now I’m just thinking about me and Tumi.”

  “He’s stuck in a predicament he has no say in. That woman seems to have him under her thumb.”

  FIFTY-TWO

  The boy wants to learn how to knit to be able to make socks for his unborn sisters. I’ve found a woman who can teach him garter stitching. She lives in the house next door to my sign language teacher’s, is eighty-six years old and every month delivers a hand-knit Icelandic woollen sweater with a reindeer pattern to the co-op. But I still feel I need to get Auður’s approval before buying the yarn and number three knitting needles. She thinks it’s the best plan she’s heard in a long time.

  “I think he’s growing and getting taller,” I tell her, “the clothes I bought for him last month are getting too small; I think he’s stretched by about two centimetres.”

  “New clothes often shrink in the wash. And what about you,” she asks, “have you met some fun people? Have you revived any old memories, done any long-line fishing on the pier?”

  “I’m not sure I want to be taken care of,” I say.

  “What do you mean taken care of?”

  “The men here are so considerate; they want to fuss over me.”

  The boy chooses a yellow ball of wool and a green one. So that the babies won’t be confused with each other when they lie side by side on the bed, he explains to me in sign language.

  The old woman receives us in a spotted dralon apron and hunched back. She’s quite a lady, her neighbour tells me, a well of knowledge on premonitions and guiding spirits. We walk into a roasting living room; all the radiators have clearly been turned up to the hilt and the windows are closed. There are four woollen rugs on the floor. On the dining table there is a pile of thick-buttered skonsur pancakes with pâté and a plate of cookies. She’s done her Christmas baking, and I recognize some of Granny’s specialties: spesíur cookies, half-moons, vanilla rings, Jewish pastries and raisin buns. There are also marble cakes and twisted kleinur doughnuts, as well as bottles of soft malt and orange. Our contribution is a large box of chocolates with a picture of the Dettifoss waterfall on the lid. She takes it and says there was no need, before swiftly slipping it into a cupboard. I seem to catch a glimpse of other Dettifoss waterfalls beside the neatly folded bedclothes.

  The boy knows how to behave and immediately sits at the laid table, after greeting the old lady, and spreads the napkin on his lap. The woman sits opposite him with the knitting needles and a ball of light green wool. They’re both wearing hearing aids and glasses. It transpires that she’s recently had a hip replacement, feels totally reborn, and has enrolled for a country line-dancing course. She asks me if we’re cold and if we can feel the draught; she’s had problems with her heating, apparently. By the time I leave them to go into the next house for my sign language class, Tumi is placing his third slice of cake on his plate and has downed half a bottle of malt, while the old lady has already knitted the first row of a light green sock.

  The neighbour’s quilt smells of mild laundry detergent; I think he’s only been able to sleep there once since the bedclothes were last changed.

  FIFTY-THREE

  A balloon flies into the air, as a child releases the piercing shriek of a throttled pig. I think those are rabbit ears I see gliding over the highlands.

  “The Winter Festival is held during Advent, and we organize all kinds of happenings and events around it that are designed to encourage those who have left to return,” explains a woman as she wraps cotton candy around a stick for the boy.

  A giant crane that has been set up to deepen and enlarge the harbour is going to be used for bungee-jumping. It’s ten degrees and drizzly, which doesn’t stop the girls from wearing open high-heeled shoes, heavy make-up and their best clothes. They move in invincible groups of six or seven, giggling wildly. The neon lights of the classroom have been covered with crepe paper and the blackboard has been adorned with a multi-coloured chalk drawing of Mary, Joseph, a cow and several sheep with short tails, but no sign of Jesus. Tumi wants to play an angel, like the girls, and to pluck a cardboard harp. Baked ginger cookie fingers lie waiting on paper plates on the table. The local dentist will be livening up the ball on his synthesizer this evening.

 
The guests of honour of the festival will have to travel here by sea or air. The ministers for industry and the environment were both supposed to be coming to visit the freezing-plant and examine the new candling table that is being used for spotting ringworm, and take a day trip up to the lagoon, where there are plans to store amphibious boats in the future. But the Minister for Industry has a nasty bout of flu and the Minister for the Environment never takes domestic flights—too much turbulence in the air, according to the local paper, too much claustrophobia. According to other sources, though, he’s on holiday in the Canary Islands, and it is precisely these contradictory alibis that awakened the locals’ suspicions. The leading parliamentary representative of the constituency has agreed to come in his place, however. After all, his grandmother originally came from this region, a detail that has won him some precious votes and a seat in parliament.

  Legs wide apart, the MP has planted himself in front of the entrance to the tent where the Women’s Association has set up camp with a huge pot of Swiss Miss cocoa. He claims to get no peace in his own home; his two adolescent children are kicking up such a fuss about the reservoir. He just hopes that they’ll be so absorbed in their computer games when he comes home that they’ll forget to come down for dinner.

  The MP insists on being the first man to be lifted up in the air on the crane, but when the time comes he’s too drunk, and the new challenge becomes finding a suitable place to put him down. He nevertheless continues to greet people as best he can, old colleagues, relatives on his mother’s side of the family and fellow party members. In his place, it is the mayor’s secretary who is hoisted into the air by the crane in a harness, the first inhabitant to launch himself into the void and to bounce in the air several times, the tip of his nose almost touching the surface of the water.

  I find myself in the middle of a small but compact group at the harbour staring into the air. I quite like being in the middle of a crowd, in the heart of a scrum of strangers pressed against me in the rain, listening to the racket of a brass band, and yet I’m not a particularly gregarious person. Nevertheless, I can see the advantages of not straying from the centre: for one, you don’t need an umbrella, but still don’t get wet, thanks to the shelter provided by those of others. The best thing about being in the middle, though, is that one can become invisible. I slept in the middle of the big mattress on the floor sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that I have to be a middle woman for the rest of my life. Although I normally prefer to be chosen than have to choose myself, I still know how to take a risk. In fact, I’m continuously getting better at it and might even be getting to like it.

  I watch the mayor’s secretary dive head first from the crane, plummeting to the multi-coloured circles of oil and fish mucus on the surface of the water, and then bounce back up and down again at the end of the elastic until he is pulled to safety on his wobbly legs. Meanwhile, the next man is hoisted up in the basket. Bungee-jumping is one of the things that terrifies me the most and the last thing I would want to try. It’s about as un-me as you can get, in fact—first because of my fear of heights and, second, because of the jump itself, that head-first leap into the void, the idea of hanging in mid-air from the gallows, swinging to and fro, like a wreck. Mind you . . .

  “This is your big chance to take on the insurmountable and challenge all those paradoxes inside you,” says a deep voice beside me.

  He’s absolutely right. Maybe this is the moment to conquer my vertigo and put myself to the test, even if it means bursting the blood vessels of my eyeballs. I smile at the man beside me, ask him to hold onto the boy’s hand and register my name on the list, putting down my mother’s name as next of kin.

  The seventy-metre ascent above sea level is petrifying. I’m scared shitless, I will confess.

  The surface of the ocean is infinitely distant below me, and is being circled by seagulls the size of insects. A young man is busy strapping me into a harness behind my back and finally hooks an attachment to my ankles; I hear the sound of metallic clicks. I’m not feeling too good and have started to tremble in the rain. There’s more life in the withered grass of the moors than there is in me right now. Those who knew me well will say that it was unlike me to come to such an end, having just embarked on this new life, and now about to leave it abruptly. And yet almost all of the best women and men of this world have taken this path well ahead of me—there’s nothing particularly original or significant about dying.

  Right now it’s a bit difficult to evaluate how many people might be moved by my passing, I’ve been away for such a long time; maybe enough to fill eleven pews in the church once everyone has been counted. Then some deeply distraught stranger that no one in the family has ever seen before will appear dressed in black; the unexpected can always happen, even in death.

  I have to admit that my ex-husband would show more originality at organizing my funeral reception than my mother would. He’d go for sushi, whereas she’d have a four-tiered sandwich cake cemented with mayonnaise, the whole thing crowned by a thickly spread layer, adorned with four thin slices of boiled egg with light reddish yolks sunk deep into the dressing.

  From this critical viewpoint, I have a bird’s eye vision of it all. Could any woman have asked for a more ideal setting and luxurious view for her departure?

  No, I think not.

  I pan the horizon, starting with the chalet with no curtains that is visible on the edge of the village, my mobile home complete with deck, grill, fire extinguisher and smoke alarm, and then move to the mouth of the river and the sandy embankments that will fill with violet flowers in the spring when I’m no longer here. Even from a height like this, I can distinguish the colour of the flowers, my eyes skim over the soggy, mossy lava fields which stretch and lose themselves in the mist, fusing with the hues of the dark ocean, and in the distance the tongue of the glacier, woolly grey and cracked and, beyond that again, the enormous reservoir. The only things linking me to my former life now are these attachments fastened to my ankles, the only thread that can lead me to the meeting with my new self, if all goes well.

  The young man standing on the gallows pats me reassuringly on the shoulder. He is wearing a blue woollen hat and a polo neck under his leather jacket.

  “Most people prefer not to think about what they’re about to do and just step over the edge.”

  I ask him how old he is and then, to delay the moment even further, when his birthday is. Since I’m showing no sign of wanting to jump off, he offers me a cigarette.

  “Would you like me to push you?” he says after I’ve taken my first drag, “some people don’t have the guts to jump on their own.”

  People are clearly growing restless below. We stand together on the gallows, my executioner and I, and he’s about to kick the stool from under the woman who is to be hanged.

  “Would you like me to push you?” he repeats. “This is the opportunity of a lifetime to throw yourself into the air, don’t be scared, you’ll bounce right back up again. Don’t you want to experience what it’s like to hang in loose air? Are you scared of that freedom?”

  I finally compress all my experiences into a single memory that goes something like this:

  I was seven years old and tending to chickens in the country, where I soon realized that the richest chickweed grew on the mounds of manure by the shed. If I managed not to sink through the outer layer and, moving swiftly, not to break the crust, I could clip a nice big cluster of green herbs with the big rusty pair of scissors. Two days later, the hens would lay eggs with orangey-red yolks, and not yellow ones like those sold in the supermarket. That is where I learnt how to take risks, to push myself to the very edge. On the other hand, there was always the risk that I would crack through the crust and sink into the cow shit up to my neck. Since then, I’ve very often pierced through the crust and ended up in excrement up to my chin. And yet flowers can still grow out of manure. Chickweed produces b
eautiful flowers, has a sweet taste and is good in salads.

  In fact I could barely be happier because I am beginning to know who I am, I am beginning to be someone else, beginning to be me. The last thing I see before I jump is the boy below, with his big ears and gaping mouth releasing a silent scream. That’s the last thing I remember.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  “You’re incredibly unlucky,” the doctor tells me, “it’s almost incomprehensible. You seem to have jumped to the side and somehow managed to do the impossible, to bang your hand against the edge of the Guðfinna Kristjánsdóttir capelin ship.”

  He looks like a doctor out of a novel, a handsome man who inspires confidence. He has small hands, though, hands are rarely mentioned in books that feature doctors.

  “We’ve gone over all the security measures and couldn’t find any faults there. Eleven people jumped off ahead of you, no side winds or anything like that, you don’t have any suicidal tendencies, do you? Luckily, it was the contraction of the elastic that saved you and made you bounce back up when you landed; the radius of your right wrist is broken, you got off quite lightly, all things considered.”