Auður Ólafsdóttir - Butterflies in November

Then he asks me if I intend to divorce him.

“No, that hasn’t entered my mind,” I say.

Because I probably love my husband. But I don’t say that. Then he bluntly tells me that this will be the last time.

“The last time that what?”

“That we sleep together. It’s too painful saying goodbye to you every time, I feel like I’m standing on the edge of a cliff and I’m scared of heights.”

It has grown eerily dark by the time I dash down the stairs of the apartment block for the third time in as many weeks. This time I’m gone for good and I will never again do what I’ve just done, I’m in a hurry to get home. Even if it is unlikely that anyone is waiting for me there. Driving, I listen to Mendelssohn’s “Summer Song” on the car radio. It’s an old crackly recording, but the presenter doesn’t seem to notice, not that I’m really listening to it.

Although no woman can ever fully map out her life, there is, nonetheless, a 99.9 percent chance that I will end this day at home in bed with my husband. And yet, to my surprise and precisely when I’m in a hurry to get back home, I find myself reversing my four-year-old manual car, with some difficulty, into a parking space close to my old house on the street I lived on two years ago. The curtains look unfamiliar to me and I suddenly remember I no longer have a key to this front door, that I’ve moved twice since I lived here, without, however, moving very far. As I’m about to drive away from the house, I see they’ve hung a crib mobile in the room that once hosted my computer. To be absolutely sure of it, I wait until I see a man walk past the window with a little baby on his shoulders. At least I know it’s not my husband, nor my child. Because I don’t have a child.

I’m still in the car when the phone rings. It’s the music teacher and pianist, my friend, Auður. She is a single mother, and has a four-year-old deaf son and is now six months pregnant again. In the evenings she sits up on her bed playing her accordion and rarely says no to a glass of brandy, if the opportunity presents itself.

She tells me she can’t talk long, because she’s busy dealing with a difficult pupil and an even more difficult parent, but it so happens, she adds, almost lowering her voice to a whisper in the receiver, that she has booked but can’t go to an appointment with a fortune-teller, although not exactly a fortune-teller, she says, more of a medium, and would I like to go instead of her? I hear someone crying behind her, but can’t make out whether it’s a child or an adult.

She stumbled on this medium on a whim two years ago and since then has been firmly entangled in the web of her own destiny; nothing that happens to her catches her unprepared any more. At least the child came as no surprise.

I’m still waiting for the baby to disappear. I don’t think about it. That’s how I make it disappear, by not thinking about it. Until it stops existing. I can’t say I never think of it, though. I’ve looked it up in a book and know that it is no longer a 2.5-centimetre creature with webbed feet and that it has started to take on a human form, that it has developed toes. Soon I won’t be able to fit into my flower-embroidered jeans. I hide it under my woollen cardigan with brass buttons so that no one will notice it, so that no one will know. Soon I will be going out into the world. When I’ve finished school. It’s all still purely imaginary.

Auður knows my scepticism regarding fate.

“What do you mean you’d rather not? There’s a two-year waiting list,” she blabs on, as if she were trying to firmly and rationally deal with a capricious child. “They say she’s the absolute best in the northern hemisphere, they’ve been doing tests on her in America with brain scans and electrodes and stuff and they just can’t figure it out, can’t find any pattern, no thread, you’ve got to be there in twenty minutes on the dot, so you need to get going right now. It’ll cost you 3,500 krónur, no credit cards, no receipts. If you let an opportunity like this slip by, you’ll never get a chance again.”

She has to stop talking now, but will call me later to hear how it went, she whispers in a hoarse voice, before hanging up.

Twenty minutes later, here I am out in the middle of a new estate on the outskirts of the city, once more on my way to the house of a stranger. The neighbourhood is in mid-construction and stretches out flatly in all directions under a high sky, with patches of marshland here and there, and little to shelter the houses. It takes me a good while to find the half-finished house. The streets are barely discernible and devoid of lamp-posts, house numbers or names, chaos seems to reign with all the randomness of the first day. But at least construction seems to have started on a church. What finally draws my attention to the right house is a pile of small pieces of wood in the driveway, tidily arranged to form a bizarre pattern, some kind of broken spider’s web that must have required some thought. Scaffolding still covers the façade and the lawn is strewn with stones and, no doubt, berries in the summer.

She is nothing like the image I’ve built up of a fortune-teller and reminds me of an Italian sex bomb from the sixties. It’s Gina Lollobrigida in the flesh who greets me at the door, without me remembering having knocked, looking stunning and of an indeterminate age, wearing a close-cut dress and high heels. What distinguishes her from the common fold, though, are her piercing eyes and tiny pupils, pinheads in an ocean of shimmering blue.

Inside, the house is almost empty. Naked light bulbs dangle here and there, a few plastic flowers, an image of Christ with pretty curly locks and big blue eyes welling with tears. On one wall there is a pencil drawing of a tall Icelandic turf house with four gables. Despite the mounting darkness outside, the house seems full of light. The woman’s voice is as charming as she is:

“I was expecting you earlier,” is the first thing she says to me, “months ago.”

Her spell works on me and my thoughts immediately become transparent. Pinned to the sofa, I feel the muscles relaxing around my neck. I rest my head on the embroidered cushion and ask whether she minds if I lie down, instead of sitting opposite her at the table.

She constantly shuffles an old deck of cards and arranges them on the table, counting and pairing numbers and suits, my past and future. She can obviously read me like an open book. I find it quite uncomfortable to be browsed through in that way. But she makes no mention of adultery or the dead goose in my trunk, and doesn’t talk about what must be written all over my forehead, that I’m still carrying alien liquid inside me that I fear could leak onto the velvet sofa.

Instead she focuses on my childhood and other things I’ve no memory of and know nothing about. She mentions mounds of manure and the broken elastic of some skin-coloured breeches, and keeps on coming back to the torn thread, they could be underpants, she says, cream-coloured, or they could be a pyjama bottom. I don’t know where she’s going with this.

“I’m just telling you what the cards show me, hang on to it.”

Then, in the same breath, she turns to my future.

“It’s all threes here,” she says, “three men in your life over a distance of 300 kilometres, three dead animals, three minor accidents or mishaps, although you aren’t necessarily directly involved in them, animals will be maimed, but the men and women will survive. However, it is clear that three animals will die before you meet the man of your life.”

I wearily try to point out from the depths of the sofa that I am a married woman and, by way of proof, feebly raise my right arm to stroke the simple wedding ring between my thumb and index. She pays no heed to this information, I’m not even sure she heard what I said.