Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

“Plants thrive best in a thought-free vacuum,” she says, as if she were quoting some popular Eastern philosophy.

Since her trip to China last year she has started to study Chinese, her first foreign language after Danish.

“As soon as I saw how many of them there were,” she said, “I realized I had no choice. For the future.”

She’s one big smile, sixty-eight years old and still has all her teeth. With the vestiges of a streak of lipstick across her rosy brown lips, she bursts with vitality and embraces her only daughter and the boy.

“You could have left those behind,” she says as we’re carrying in the plants, the boy holding the smallest one. “This one’s plastic and that’s a silk flower and that one’s made of tissue.”

That explains why they’ve started to go mouldy. I’ve been watering plants that aren’t even plants and shouldn’t be watered. No wonder everything felt so phoney around us, that our relationship was withering; love can’t thrive on artificial flowers. I should have caught on; lily-reddish pink and always in bloom, that’s no life.

“I’d long stopped giving Thorsteinn living plants, sure you would have just killed them all.”

My mother likes to save interesting newspaper clippings for my benefit, because she believes I never give myself the time to read the news; I’m always too busy doing other things. The dining table is covered in clippings that have been sorted according to subject matter: harmful poisonous food additives, the right way to handle raw chicken and avoid salmonella, education, childcare and bullying, the protection of children, animals and nature, reflections on various types of religion, all in double spreads and — last but not least — articles about international aid work.

“Yet another war to guarantee peace,” she says, “except that now they’ve started to calculate the estimated number of wounded and maimed with bar charts and tables divided per age group in advance to enable the pharmaceutical companies to make their projections.”

I remember how, when my brother and I were small, my mother used to plant potatoes and sow carrots in the spring, as soon as the earth began to thaw, and how she disinfected our palms and put a bandage on them after she had removed the red playground gravel, but I don’t remember her ever expressing any opinions on global issues the way she does today. My mother is a woman with a mission in life. She has found a new passion in the autumn of her years, volunteer aid work around the globe; a widow dedicated to the alleviation of suffering. She is a sponsor of Doctors Without Borders, a member of water supply associations in Africa, a fund-raiser for a hospital in Sri Lanka and she is totally immersed in land mine issues and artificial limbs. Her main interest, though, is the education of young girls in the Third World.

“Because woman is the future of man,” she likes to say.

She now has seven adoptive daughters in four continents, and has pictures of them and thank-you letters on every shelf and window sill. But she also has one boy. His fly is undone in the photo and two teeth are missing from his upper gum. He is leaning against a tree in the barren garden of some nursery with a beaming smile and oversized jeans that droop over his dark brown bare toes, despite the double turn-ups.

“I’d asked for a girl but they sent me a boy, you can’t very well return a child.”

The doctor laughed again. Did you really think you could get rid of the baby by running? Did you think it would disappear if you ran fast enough and went around enough times? Tut tut, it’s incredible what a young girl’s imagination can conjure up. It’s growing inside you, whether you like it or not. You’ve hidden it for too long. There’s nothing you can do about it. And then you’ll have to get it out when the time comes. Believe me, giving birth turns fantasies into pain.

The big patterned carpet in the living room is covered with old, second-hand sewing machines and spools of thread that need to be inside a container to India before Christmas.

“Over there they will lay the foundations that will enable many girls to be financially independent,” she explains to me, for their subsistence and prospects for the future. Tumi wanders between the sewing machines, bewitched.

“Yes, it’s amazing how many useful things people keep locked away in their attics.”

I had forewarned her of our visit and she has fried some fish balls and insists on us taking the leftovers.

“But we’re going on a trip.”

She pats the boy on the cheek and then me.

“How is he, the poor little thing? They probably would have abandoned him anywhere else.”

“Mom, he is a perfectly lucid and intelligent child, he’s just hearing-impaired and wears glasses.”

“Doesn’t he take any calcium tablets, he looks so pale?”

The boy carries the pot of fish balls out to the car and places it beside the goldfish. Mom is going to be taking care of Auður’s home-brew, because she’s the type of woman who can carry out any task she is entrusted with. If I’d given her a poisonous plant and live lizard, she would have looked after both with the exact same zeal and care. The plant would have sprouted poisonous yellow flowers and the lizard would have multiplied fivefold.

“You can return the pot to me when you come back. Don’t travel too far east and make sure you don’t. .” she suddenly lowers her voice, staring at the ground, “start digging up any old stuff. No point in stirring old memories, you can’t change them now.”

Thinking back on it afterwards, I’m not sure she said all those things. But one thing I’m sure she did say was:

“Do you have a handkerchief to clean the boy’s glasses?”

My happiness could almost be complete. I don’t even have to see all that clearly, I just switch on the windscreen wipers, turn on the heating full blast and, bit by bit, the mist vanishes from the windows. There’s a great freedom in not knowing exactly where you are heading, to surrender to the security of the Ring Road, where one point leads to another, and you always effortlessly end up back at square one again, almost without realizing it.

Since we’re travelling companions, the boy sits in the front seat beside me, barely reaching the dashboard, looking manly with an open packet of raisins on his lap. His seat belt is a bit high, though, even though I’ve slipped a cushion under him. At the Raudavatn Lake I’m stopped by the police, who check my lights and seat belts and give me some advice.

“There aren’t many people out travelling today,” says the uniformed officer out in the lashing rain.

The boy willingly climbs into the back seat while I burrow through the bundles of thousand-krónur notes in the glove compartment to find my driving licence. For a moment, I wonder if I should behave as if I were in a B movie and slip the officer a folded wad of cash and then, without a word, drive off into the withered lupin fields ahead of us, vanishing into the mist and darkness, which is eating its way into the day with each kilometre.

Now that the passenger seat to my right has been freed, I use the opportunity to unfold a road map of the island.

“Dog,” says the boy quite distinctly, pointing at the map.

It’s true, the compressed island looks like a poor vagrant wet puppy dragging its paws. I’m heading towards the tummy, that’s the point where my journey begins — our journey — where the lupin fields end.

“We’re on our way now.”

That’s what Dad used to say every time we drove east at the beginning of the summer and had been driving for a while, at least an hour from home and way out of town. I’m inclined to think it was once he’d passed the lupin fields. Then he and Mom would exchange a brief glance and smile, and he would gently pat her hand with a contented air.