Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

My ex is wearing a yellow-patterned Mickey Mouse tie. I speed up; what could he possibly want here among the dead?

“Just one more lap.”

He grabs the sleeve of my sweater as I come running out of the darkness.

My breathing is swift and hot and there is a taste of blood in my mouth and blood in the slime I spit out between the impeccably polished shoes of the man who is standing there.

I bend over in front of the national poet, allowing my arms to dangle, as my dark hair almost touches the white earth. Then I straighten and stretch up to touch his forehead with the flat palm of my hand, running my fingers down his wet face in the morning frost, over his nose down to his chin, passing his chest, feeling his knee, thigh, and stroking him all the way down. He is wearing a long coat that is open at the front and pressed trousers. The features of his face are sharply sculpted and a faint smile chiselled on the edge of his lips seems to lose itself in the cheek. Finally I knock on him to see what stuff he is made of. It’s bronze; our national poet is hollow on the inside, cold and stiff. Could this poet really have loved his sweetheart as warmly as he swore in the complex internal rhymes of those quatrains?

Then my husband stretches out his hand as if to caress my cheek and I recoil.

“You seem to wake up with a blank face that doesn’t take on any fixed expression until lunchtime, sometimes not until the afternoon. In some ways it’s quite charming to live with a woman like that.”

“But?. .”

“On the other hand there are too many uncertain factors for an ordinary man like me.”

I don’t say anything, but gaze at the dawn spreading over the rooftops.

“I forgot to ask you, is it OK if I take the mattress and the bed frame with me? Because of my back.”

“That’s OK.”

“I’ll confess to adultery, that should speed up the divorce proceedings.”

“OK,” I say, dropping onto the white cracking grass. Big decisions are made swiftly, whereas in about five years of married life we never managed to decide on the colour of the walls in the hallway.

“I’ll put the apartment on sale.”

“OK.”

He shilly-shallies on the snow-sprinkled gravel.

“Don’t suppose you could take my coat to the dry-cleaner’s, it’s hanging in the hall?”

My ex-lover phones me in the middle of the night to tell me he’s heard the news and wants to come over to give me his personal support.

“What news?”

“About the divorce.”

“So you probably heard it before I did then, like everyone else?”

He calls me three times on his mobile. The third time he tells me he’s pressing my bell with his elbow and wants to know if I intend to leave him locked outside. I point out that I haven’t locked him out and remind him that he was the one who told me that it was all over between us a week ago. In any case I wasn’t going to open the door to him. If he wanted to meet me, it would have to be sober and in broad daylight. On skates on the lake, for example, I say rashly, without quite knowing where the idea came from. Probably because of the skates my mother had mentioned over the phone. It’s our last chance to go skating, because they’re forecasting a big thaw after the weekend. A lot of things will undoubtedly change after that. I actually bought myself some new skates ages ago, keep them at work, and sometimes go down to the lake for a spin when I can’t think of a word in a translation.

And then to make matters worse I say:

“I’ll be there tomorrow at 17:00 hours.”

“I’d do anything for you,” he says, even go skating stone sober, you know I love you.”

“You can tell me that tomorrow then, sober as a judge, in front of the islet.”

When my mother delivered the skates to me, she included a pair of folded old trousers with a flowery strip embroidered at the bottom that belonged to me when I was fourteen.

I haven’t told her about the split-up yet. She’s right, though, when she says I don’t have the build to be a mother, I still fit into the trousers I wore when I was fourteen years old.

“I went skating the night before I gave birth to you,” she tells me, “took three or four rounds with a friend, arm in arm. I was in a red woollen coat with my hair pinned up.”

She is probably confusing it with the ball they went to a few months earlier, but I don’t say anything.

“Then I had this sudden pang of hunger, because I’d only had rice pudding for dinner. By the end of the fourth round, my hunger had turned into me feeling totally famished so I decided to walk home alone to eat some yogurt and drink a glass of milk. If I’d decided to take an extra three rounds, you would have been born on the frozen lake bang in the middle of town.”

Chatting with my mom, I seem to vanish from the burden of the present and travel back to my origins. I feel squashed in amniotic fluid and my eyes are swollen.

“I suffered terribly when I gave birth to you, thirty-six hours of labour, five giving birth to your brother. Took me four months to recover, just physically I mean, after having you. I have to admit, in some ways I feel closer to your brother, he also calls me more often.”

In five minutes’ time I will have written him off, not that I ever really thought he would actually come. There’s no one on the ice in the mounting thaw; the kids have all gone to the indoor ice rink and are listening to FM 97.7, licking green and violet ice pops. The circle in which the ducks are squabbling is growing larger and with every round I take I’m drawn slightly closer to the water.

There I am standing on the glistening ice, with the steel dents of the skates pressed into the surface to steady myself, when I see the man nonchalantly walking towards me in his long woollen coat and a pair of skates slung over his shoulder, like some image from a century-old Alpine postcard. Complete with a red and white striped fringe scarf. Under his coat he is in a suit and tie. Darkness has long descended on the islet in the middle of the lake, but the lamp-posts from the surrounding residential streets shed some light on the area. He has left the engine of his car running on the edge of the lake to allow the headlights to illuminate his path on the ice, because he intends to be brief, just a moment. He simply wants to collect me and take me home to console me.

He isn’t very tall, seen from a distance, in his socks just a few feet from his car. He now sits on the wall by the lake to put on his skates. Then he advances cautiously on the ice. He is not as ill-experienced as I imagined, or he is skilled enough to be able to follow me at any rate, although the skates are clearly as new as his blue car on the edge of the lake.

I wasn’t prepared for this. The perseverance and determination my ex-lover displays on the ice triggers mixed feelings in me. I’m not sure I can cope with anything at the moment. When all is said and done, this is my first experience as a woman on the brink of a divorce. But if people mean well and show some masculine and persuasive sensitivity, it won’t be easy for me to remain indifferent.

The ice in front of us is silvery blue and I’m about to launch myself into a figure, drawing intricate patterns under the beams of the car headlights. That should give me some technical one-upmanship, although I feel him coming eerily close to my back, like a waxing moon over a frozen sea.

He is trying to sidle up to me; I can sense he is out of breath and feel him panting in the dark, but can’t really think of anything to say to him. I don’t know if I’ll go home with him or not yet, because I don’t know if I love my ex-husband, so I just try to keep a step ahead. If I had it all written down on a sheet of paper, my options I mean, in a manuscript, in front of me in black and white, I could simply cross out one of the possibilities.