Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

“He seemed to be in such a bad way, poor thing,” she would say, plucking off the cat’s hairs.

Abandoning his wet towel on the floor, I fetch his clothes and draw the sign of the Cross over him, even though I’d never try to invoke a divine blessing of this kind on myself. After rubbing cream into him, I dab the back of his ears with a drop from the bottle of male cologne that has been left in my possession. Then I dress him in stockings and a sweater and sit him in front of me in the narrow corner of the kitchen.

Winter mornings are dark and silent. The weather has grown calmer, as if a kind of numbness had descended on mankind, bringing all activity to a halt, after the sharp depression that had swept its way across the island, as if everyone had fallen under some sleeping beauty spell. I make some porridge and coffee. The boy is shoving the fourth spoonful into his mouth when he points at the clock above the fridge, showing me four fingers with his left hand and then three with his right hand and then one with his left hand again. Finally, he holds up both thumbs and vigorously shakes his head towards the clock. There are no two ways about it: the kitchen clock reads four zero seven and it is still indisputably night outside.

I take him under the duvet with me in his stockings. There is no point lying there awake, so I turn on the TV and slip the DVD into the machine. The lottery ticket is in the same bag as the disc. Sometime later, I freeze the drama in mid-action, precisely at the point when the heroine is about to slash her wrists with a razor blade on the edge of the bathtub, because it occurs to me to dial the number on the back of the lottery ticket. I get an answering machine.

“Only one person got all the numbers right and is therefore entitled to the full undivided prize,” chirps an air hostess voice at the other end of the line, “44,000,523 krónur.” I draw a circle around the third row of numbers on my ticket and redial. I get the same voice as before and the same numbers. I feel an urge to check that all the slush has disappeared from the balcony, to tidy up the kitchen, drink a glass of milk, see if any lights have come on in the surrounding houses and finally settle down to watch the end of the DVD. This time the person, who bought the ticket just five minutes before closing time and hit the biggest jackpot in the history of the Icelandic lottery, isn’t some father of five on disability benefit who’d gone bankrupt after underwriting a loan taken out by his ex-brother-in-law, nor is it some good-hearted old granny from Selfoss with eleven grandchildren, who are mostly just starting off on their own in life and need a helping hand, but instead it is a relatively young woman who will be pocketing the whole prize — she and her fellow in good fortune, a deaf four-year-old clairvoyant boy with poor eyesight and one leg three centimetres shorter than the other, which makes him limp when he is only wearing his socks. One can’t really say that this woman is hard off in the strictest sense of the term, even though she has just become single again, nor that she particularly needed to win a prize of this kind.

Looking purely at the laws of probability, it can be assumed that, since it is possible to be unlucky twice in a row, it must be possible to be lucky twice in a row as well. Bad luck can trigger a chain of bad luck in the same way that good luck can trigger good luck, luck brings luck.

“The chances of a woman, who masters eleven languages, several of which are Slavonic, winning two lotteries simultaneously are nevertheless pretty remote,” says my friend Auður, and about as likely as you meeting an elf on a rockslide on the national Ring Road. But, she adds, under certain circumstances and for the chosen few, a remote possibility can become a concrete reality.

My guilty conscience hasn’t been appeased by the time I drive to visit her in hospital, which is why there is a huge bouquet of white roses in the front seat from the boy, along with a drawing he’s done for her, of a trumpet. It turns out, however, as Auður herself is quick to point out, that the spraining of her ankle on my doorstep was a stroke of luck. If she hadn’t, they would never have realized she has a deformed pelvis, as well as contraction pains, the beginning of a cervical dilation, and far too high blood pressure. The bottom line is she won’t be leaving the hospital any time soon.

She vacillates in the doorway, wearing some kind of garment that is clearly marked as State Hospital property, and I see that she has put on a thick sweater under her white gown, as if she were going off on a weekend trip to a summer bungalow. She is wearing a thick woollen sock on her right foot and bandages on the other. Judging by her behaviour, you would think she was being pursued by a gang of merciless thugs, on the run in some American mob movie. She’s keen on me playing a role in this getaway drama with her and wants me to skid off with the door open before she is even fully inside the car. It takes a good while to get her into a comfortable position. Spreading her knees wide apart like an old sailor, her navel protrudes through her hand-knit sweater and the pattern stretches over her inflated belly, which seems to reach the dashboard, even though she is still only six months pregnant. This is the best way for her to sit in the car, she feels, with her belly drooping between her legs, between her knees.

“There are two of them,” she bluntly spurts out before swallowing. “It’s like having a belly full of kittens. I can’t lie on my stomach any more or wrap my arms around the pillow.”

I try to work out what consequences this new information will have on the fate of my friend and my protégé of three nights. Meanwhile, I try to ask some sensible questions:

“Did you get their permission to come out?”

“Nobody will notice if I vanish for a short while, did you bring the bottle?”

I drive on, while my friend tells me where to turn next. By the time we have passed the church for the fourth time and are moving down Skólavörðustígur, she is already halfway through the bottle of red wine. I justify this in my mind by reasoning that for centuries women in France and Italy have given birth to perfectly healthy babies, probably without suffering from anemia as much as Nordic women.

Tumi sits still in the back seat with a box of chocolate raisins, watching his mother knock back the wine. The accordion she requested lies on the seat beside him.

“I want to ask you a big favour.”

I already know what it is. I have experience in these matters, like that time she went off on a five-week music course to Amsterdam. She’s about to ask me to pay the bills that lie on the shelf in her hall, to fetch all kinds of creams and things from her apartment, to water her plants, the yucca in the corner by the TV, two full cups, and to then let it dry completely for a whole week before watering it again. The plants on the living room window sill are another story, she’ll tell me, they have to be watered daily, half a cup each, mustn’t be too moist or too dry, otherwise the one in the middle won’t produce its purple flowers in February. Last but not least, she will ask me to bring over her Discman and CDs, and not to forget Clara Haskil, who has the same interpretive sensitivity she has, although she doesn’t actually say that.

“I wanted to ask you to watch Tumi for me while I’m in the hospital.”

This catches me totally unprepared and I can think of nothing better to do than turn into Bergthórugata.

“But that’s another three months.”

“Maybe and maybe not. I’ve got a hunch it won’t be that long, two and a half months at the most. He’ll be in the kindergarten while you’re at work.”