Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

“You asked me to.”

“It’s our progeny that makes us immortal.”

She steps out of the car in front of the hospital with a white woollen sock on one foot, a bandage on the other and an accordion in her arms, and sticks her head back into the car again:

“One more thing. I forgot to tell you I picked tons of crowberries this autumn and have them fermenting in two casks. You’re welcome to them, you just have to shake them every now and then and take care of them a bit. The hooch should be ready soon. If you handle it right, it should taste a bit like a 2002 Montagne Saint Emilion .

We’re standing side by side over the little stove, making thick rice pudding, when she calls from a payphone in the ward. She spends the first ten minutes apologizing and the next ten thanking me and telling me that I’m the best person she’s ever met, since she had omitted to mention this before. I try to pour the milk into the pot and stir it, with the receiver stuck to my ear, as Tumi sprinkles the pudding with raisins from a bag.

“Loads of raisins,” I hear him say.

He helps me mix the cinnamon and sugar, which screeches in the glass and echoes down the phone.

“And then blow on it.”

“There’s just one other thing,” she yells into the phone, because she feels there is a poor connection at her end of the line; “I promised Tumi a family pet as a consolation prize, nothing too big, but at least furry; it could be a hamster, guinea pig or even a mouse, although personally I’m not too fond of mice.”

I’m frank and tell her that, as things are now, I wouldn’t be able to face any hairy creature smaller than a man, even temporarily. She tells me that there’s a long story behind this, that she and her son have been through the entire process together:

“At first, the animal had to be furry and big enough to be able to pat or even sit on the back of and comb. Then, bit by bit, he mellowed his demands, but it still had to be furry, with hairs that would stick to the green sofa and our clothes.” She tells me this isn’t the case with hamsters and mice, and that you can even buy hairless mice now, the only problem being that they can easily vanish behind washing machines, never to be seen again. They had negotiated for weeks, reviewing every single furry creature, big or small, under the sun.

“I’d be extremely grateful if you’d take him to a pet shop to buy him something you can easily take on your travels with you.”

She apologizes even more.

Once we’ve finished eating the rice and liver pudding bought from the store, I explain to Tumi that we’re going on a journey, speaking to him with slow, clear, exaggerated lip movements, and tell him that we can’t take a hamster with us because he would get lost at the first petrol station. I draw a mouse, put it in a traffic sign and draw a line across it: not possible.

He responds by drawing a picture of a four-footed animal that could be a dog, but has the tail of a horse and fills up the whole page.

“We can go horse-riding on our trip,” I suggest, “there are bound to be horse-riding farms on the way,” but I’m not sure he’s understood me correctly. The next two and a half hours are spent drawing animals, alternately presenting our offers to each other, like two hagglers at a market in Marrakesh. His drawings are more or less variations of the same quadruped in various colours, patterns, spots, stripes and waves. He spends considerably more time on his creations and is reluctant to deliver any unfinished sketch.

We reach the store half an hour before closing time. I go through the motions of examining a series of miserable-looking hairy animals with him and then point at an aquarium, trying to turn the boy’s focus to the scaly creatures swimming inside them, but he pulls me elsewhere, encouraged by the shopkeepers.

The turtle is currently seven centimetres long but can grow to one metre and seventy kilos with the right treatment, temperature, compresses, diet and, above all, a lot of time, the shopkeeper explains conscientiously.

He’s quite hairy himself, as it happens; not only does he have hair sprouting out of his collar and between the buttons of his shirt and beyond his sleeves, but also out of his nose and ears.

“For the whole of a woman’s life,” I interject.

Long after the child has grown up, the turtle will still be lying in its mother’s bathtub.

“People are increasingly discovering the soothing qualities of turtles as family pets. Another advantage is that you can keep it in your fridge for up to three weeks when you go away on holiday — while it’s still small. Families can rarely stand being together for longer periods than that.”

“We’ll be away for longer than that,” I say. Besides, it is not, as yet, clear whether there will be a fridge in the summer bungalow, let alone electricity.

“With every purchase of two guinea pigs we give away some blow bubbles, and every purchase of two hamsters comes with a voucher for a McDonald’s kid’s Happy Meal box. With a dog you get two free hamburgers and two tickets for a dinosaur movie that’s for over-tens only. If you buy a dog, two hamsters and two guinea pigs, we’ll throw in a balloon-making machine, tickets to the dinosaur movie and two free alcoholic drinks in town.”

I point out to the boy that the store is about to close and, once more, in a gentle but determined manner, direct his focus to the aquariums. Compromises are often humiliating for both parties and rarely live up to either’s expectations. The man in the fish department has small and extraordinarily round aquamarine eyes, with virtually no eyelids.

The fish don’t come with any extras.

“Choose,” I say, lifting the boy up to offer him a view of the submarine life in the aquarium on the top shelf. “That means you can have any fish you like, we’ll put a lid on the aquarium and take it on our journey. There’s guppy fish, discus fish, vacuum cleaner fish who eat all the others, electric pumps, fluorescent lighting, plants, treasure chests, stones, sand and fish toys. We’ll fill the aquariums with submarine caves to give the fish some seclusion and family life, and allow them to spawn in peace and bring up their offspring. Instead of just one animal, there’ll be loads and we’ll buy ourselves some hamburgers and go to see the dinosaur movie afterwards.”

I could have added that we won’t need a babysitter for the fish while we’re at the movie, but instead I say something else:

“We can look into the possibility of a puppy later on.”

We walk out of the shop with three goldfish in a plastic bag, an aquarium without a lid, sand, three artificial plants and a box of fish food. The man with the fish eyes slips me a voucher at the door.

“This voucher entitles you to a free drink at the bar” is printed on one side of it, and “Meet me tonight if you want” has been handwritten in ornate cursive blue letters on the other.

The following day, I phone the kindergarten to inform them that the boy will be away for an indeterminate length of time. Auður has already informed them that I am her next of kin and that I’ll be taking care of Tumi.

You bid your husband farewell forever with a vigorous handshake and then meet him the next morning buying sesame seed bread rolls in the local bakery, queuing in the bank at lunchtime, swimming in the pool in the afternoon, or at the registry office later in the week, and then, the weekend after that, at the theatre with his new significant other — always inevitably bumping into each other.

We haven’t completely renewed our wardrobes yet. Generally speaking, it’s underwear that people renew first after a divorce, both the person who leaves and the person who is left behind. Of course, I don’t know how far his imagination can stretch and whether it can reach under my clothes, but he can see that my hair has grown over my ears; pretty soon it’ll be longer than his. We’ve indulged ourselves a bit, both the one who left and the one who was left behind. It’s a gross misconception to assume that the one who is left behind doesn’t binge on food any more than the other, eating out in restaurants, savouring an entire fillet of lamb on a Monday, drinking cognac straight out of a bottle and downing half a kilo of vanilla ice cream with hot chocolate sauce, sprinkled with a packet of almond flakes.