Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

“I’m not following you, even though I would have wanted to, I arrived here last night,” he says. “Ahead of you then.”

I offer him a smile.

“Business trip,” he adds by way of explanation.

“Actually I’m on the point of leaving. I’m planning to get back to town tonight. Mission accomplished.”

Then he strokes me gently on the cheek.

“Unless you need company?”

“I don’t know,” I say nodding towards the kid, who is standing there perfectly still, watching our lips.

“You’re certainly one hell of a skater.”

“Thanks, you too.”

The boy gets the dry sleeping bag and I a blanket, but as soon as I come across a co-op I intend to buy two new eiderdown quilts, adult size. The boy pours the sand and pebble out of his shoes into the sleeping bag. There are multi-coloured fleece rugs on the floor.

“It smells old in here,” he says. Or maybe he’s saying that I smell good. He must be already missing kindergarten and his mommy and grandad, who sometimes comes to collect him, but at least he thinks I’m nice and that I still smell good, even though I know I must smell of rain and all the people we’ve encountered on our journey. After slipping into his sleeping bag he tries to speak in a low voice and wants to whisper something to me in confidence, but his voice comes out as loud and resonant, despite his utmost efforts.

His hand is too small to enclose all the signs of the world in words. But I have three books in the car to teach me how to understand a deaf child; I just need to make time to read them.

Having kicked and tossed under the duvet every night since I collected him from kindergarten over ten days ago, the boy sleeps to dawn without stirring.

I’m also tired. A deep depression looms over the country and I am lying in its eye, while the outside world remains enveloped in a mist.

There is some movement in the corridor; I even think I hear a faint knock on the door. A drowsy numbness starts to spread across my forehead and then descends to my cheeks. Bit by bit, I feel the day fading, odours and sounds evaporate. I sense the world withdrawing behind a thick woollen blanket with brown squares, as the flow of honey-sweetened hot milk trickles through my veins. Someone is holding me tightly. I have a vivid feminine dream and feel the mountain towering over me. When I wake up later to see if the little, dead still body beside me is still breathing, I feel as if someone were quietly closing the bedroom door behind me, but I’m too exhausted to tear myself away from my dream and get out of bed. Although I feel no need to lock the car at night, I do distinctly remember having locked the bedroom door. Granny never locked the little blue house on the seashore when she went south, not even when she spent five months recovering in the geriatric ward of the local clinic one winter. I don’t even remember there ever having been a key to the house. It was open to anyone, always full of all kinds of guests, ministers, men out of jail or stone-collectors from around the globe — they sat all together at the kitchen table eating layered tart with jam.

Once, during my last summer in the east, I was kissed on the guest mattress in the attic, without knowing by what cousin. It was almost as if nothing had happened. I barely felt it, but nevertheless knew that it was inappropriate. The following morning I wasn’t quite sure and couldn’t remember which of the two brothers had slept on the left side. I felt no change except that, for the first time, I asked Grandad to serve me coffee and Icelandic pancakes instead of porridge. After that Granny decided out of the blue that we were too big for the guests’ mattress. On the first night I slept alone in the living room, I dreamt I was wearing a half-knit white woollen cardigan with brass buttons.

I wrote this down in my diary: last summer in the east. At the beginning of October I turned fifteen.

When the boy wakes me up the next morning, I’m covered in a thick duvet in a blue cover. The blanket has been folded neatly at my feet.

We have breakfast with the family in the kitchen. The male choir is warming up in the dining hall with a light medley of Estonian melodies. I imagine the lyrics must sound quite exotic to other ears than mine. The woman places a bouquet of red tulips on the table in front of me.

“He asked me to send his regards and hopes to see you again soon.”

The tulips obviously grow in the greenhouse between the cucumbers; I should count myself lucky that he didn’t send me an autographed one.

Tumi picks the cucumber rings out of the pâté on his bread. Everyone stares at him, children and parents, as he systematically pulls them off, one by one, and places them on the side of his plate, without showing the slightest interest in his audience.

“He’s the spitting image of you,” says the woman.

“Yeah, definitely a chip off the old block,” says the husband.

“Are you travelling alone?” the woman asks.

“Are you going far?” asks the husband.

At the end of the table there is a boy I’m guessing is about sixteen or seventeen years old, stooped over a bowl of Cheerios. His limbs seem strangely disproportionate, as if each body part had grown separately. He has puffy, sleepy eyes and big ears that his hat doesn’t quite manage to cover. There can no longer be any doubt as to whom the size 44 sneakers in the hall belong to. He obviously gets his looks from his mother, who is a pretty woman with fine features. I gaze at him intently, until he finally looks up with his shimmering aquamarine eyes.

“He grew fourteen centimetres last summer,” his mother tells me, “barely climbed out of bed in July and August, slept eighteen hours a day and just woke up to eat. He’s certainly our prodigal son; we practically had to slaughter a lamb for every meal. He was of little use to us that summer, couldn’t even drive the combine harvester he’s been driving since the age of eight.

“He was so sluggish in his movements that we thought he’d never get from the sofa to his bed; it was as if he was up to his arms in water.”

They talk about their son as if he weren’t there and the young man shows no reaction, focusing all his efforts on fishing cereal out of his milk. His father joins in:

“We were on our way home after a ball; everyone was on the bus, which had its engine running and was about to leave. While some people were staring into the dark or kissing, I hopped out to look for my future wife’s friend, who I’d been flirting with a little. They both had the same ponytail and I had a few drinks in me.”

“We sometimes say that our relationship is based on a case of mistaken ponytails,” the woman interjects with a smile. They laugh and I get the feeling that it’s a story that’s been polished over the years, until it gained its final form.

“Not that he’d ever mistake the tails of two horses.”

“She was throwing up behind a building, it was the first time she ever got hammered, and while I was wiping her face you could say that the wheels of our first-born were set in motion. The best thing of all is that no one on the bus even realized I was absent during those few minutes.”

“Yeah, doesn’t take Stebbi very long,” she says, and they burst into laughter. “We’ve been inseparable ever since,” she adds.

“Yes, you can say that again. I felt I’d reached heaven when I got to know her,” says the husband.

His wife’s dress has a zip at the waist and she wriggles inside it, like an eel in floral slippers.

The man has dropped out of the conversation and is now staring at the shape of the body that fills out the dress. He peers longingly into her eyes as she’s talking, until she finally walks over to him. Could they be completely oblivious to the presence of their morning guests?